What does it mean to be made in God’s image? Many theologians and philosophers down through the ages have offered their best thinking to this question, and the question is so large that there is no pithy answer. To be made in the image of God means more than we can possible understand, given that it is impossible for any creature to fully comprehend his Creator. To be an image-bearer means many things, and Gregory of Nyssa, in his essay On the Making of Man offers this important insight: “the fact that [human nature] is the image of that Nature which rules over all means nothing else than this, that our nature was created to be royal from the first.” In other words, humans are royalty. Not just some humans, as we have seen throughout history, but all humans. Every person is cosmic royalty because every human being was created in the image of God. We were designed to be little-rulers of God’s vast creation, representing him in wisdom, courage, and humility.

That last part is the key. We must be virtuous in order to faithfully execute our royal office. In the end, it is virtue that separates us from the animals. In making us in His own image, God has, according to Gregory, marked us with the virtues of “purity, freedom from passion, blessedness, alienation from all evil, and all those attributes of the like kind which help to form in men the likeness of God: with such hues as these did the Maker of His own image mark our nature.” God created us to be like Himself, limited only by the fact that we are created beings and not Being itself. This limitation does not apply, it would seem, to goodness. While we never be The Good, we can be – and by the transformative power of the Spirit will one day be – good. We will be so good, in fact, that our desires will align perfectly with our nature (as God intended it), that sin will be impossible for us. But all of this will not happen until the resurrection, for it is impossible to achieve perfection in this life.

What we can be, however, is virtuous. In fact, the pursuit of virtue is required by our station. It is virtue that makes us human. It is virtue that makes us kings and queens. To neglect virtue – whether from laziness or the wrongheaded assumption that, since we are saved by grace there is no need to be good – is to reject the divine imaged-ness of our nature. It is to say to God, “You do all the work, and I will just sit back and wait to enjoy the eschaton.” As Jesus might say, “You wicked and lazy servant!” Is God your servant? Is the image bearer above the one whose image he bears? Again, from Gregory, “There is a great difference between that which is conceived in the archetype, and a thing which has been made in its image: for the image is properly so called if it keeps its resemblance to the prototype; but if the imitation be perverted from its subject, the thing is something else, and no longer an image of the subject.” You are the image of God; therefore, be the image of God.

To be virtuous means to be faithful to our Creator, to live in accordance with the intention for which He created us. You cannot find out who you truly are by indulging every desire, following your heart, or realizing your dreams. Undisciplined, those inevitably move us further from our truest selves. The only real path to self-realization is self-denial. As the Lord told His disciples, “Whoever wants to find his life must lose it.” If we are, in fact, created by God to be royalty, we must educate our desires in the way of Jesus. We must put on the virtues, even when it feels fake. (Honesty is a virtue, but authenticity – as we understand it – is not. It is important to learn the difference.) We cannot rule God’s creation in wisdom, courage, and humility until we learn to do those things which we know we must do even we do not want to do them. We will only become our true selves by putting on virtue, which comes only from obeying the commands of God rather than the commands of our desires.

I love that bit in the middle of this half of a sentence (yes, this is only half of the sentence): “assigning to him as his task not the acquiring of what was not there, but the enjoyment of the things which were there.” God created us to enjoy our environment, which in Eden included Himself. However, in our perpetual discontent and ambition, we seek to acquire for ourselves that which is “not there.” We bend nature to our desires and remake ourselves in the image of our longing. We recklessly pursue contentment in that which is not yet because we stubbornly refuse to receive, with gratitude and humility, that which has been given. But God has given us all things that we need; and all things that he has given us are for our enjoyment.

Above all, God has, in creation, given us Himself. The gods of other nations, who desire power above all, have crafted their creation myths in such a way as to elevate themselves, not only above the other gods, but especially above humans. Man is, for them, an instrument of their pleasure, a mass of disposable paeans whose sole purpose is to give themselves completely to their service. But these gods offer man nothing; nothing, that is, but punishment and affliction. When they deign to show their face to mankind it is violent, selfish, and capricious. But Israel’s God, though he also demands that mankind give themselves fully to Him, does so as a covenant of reciprocation, for Israel’s God has given Himself first to man, before any man or woman could give themselves to Him. God, in creation, reveals His nature to man by giving man a nature that can perceive His revelation. For God, creation is not a demonstration of His power, but of His humility, in that He condescends to reveal Himself in fellowship to His rational creatures.

The genesis of our telos, the beginning of our proper end, is to enjoy God and the world He has made. Though we are commissioned to rule God’s creation, we cannot rule it unless we first love it. Neither can we serve and obey God unless we first love Him. To love God means many things, but it cannot mean anything less than to delight in Him, to enjoy His presence as our life-giving fellowship. In the same way, we love God by delighting in His creation, overawed by the vase expanse of space, by the surging power of the ocean’s depths, by the majestic mountain landscapes that pepper every continent. Even, dare I say, by standing in awe of our fellow man; fallen though he may be, each and every one of us still bears the image of this God who delights in our delight of Him and his world.

Photo by Aniket Deole on Unsplash

Last Wednesday I spoke at the Ash Wednesday service of Heritage Christian Church. It was a bit of a “full circle” moment for me, as Heritage is where I started off in ministry after graduating from seminary. Our family has been attending there since I left the ministry last August, and it has been a good experience for all of us. You can watch the entire service here.

At the end of the sermon we stood and prayed this prayer of renunciation of appetite:

Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, you alone satisfy and fill me. Your way leads to life. My way leads to death. Place me, now, in your way.
I renounce my appetite for food beyond what I need to sustain me for your service.
I renounce my appetite for money beyond what I need to live generously.
I renounce my appetite for sex beyond the bounds of marriage.
I renounce my appetite for power not used in service of others.
I renounce my appetite for attention that brings me glory instead of you.
I renounce the indulgence of every appetite that conflicts with your righteousness.
Rescue me, Jesus, by the power of your death and resurrection, from this life of slavery to my appetites. Fill me with the Holy Spirit, that I may walk in the ways of the Father all the days of my life. Amen.

My wife, Breena, is in a Bible study at church on the book of Ephesians. The study material is written by a famous Calvinist, and Ephesians 1 is one of the key passages that Calvinists use to develop their doctrine of predestination/election. Neither of us are Calvinists, and so we interpret Ephesians 1 significantly differently from our brothers and sisters who believe that God has chosen before time began those who would be saved. Last week, I published a post in which I explained how I interpret Ephesians 1, but I got caught up in technical language, and didn’t produce an article that would be beneficial to most people. So I hope that this post will be something a bit more accessible.

Jesus and Abraham

Breena and I had a long conversation about Ephesians 1, and she found a couple of things very helpful. First of all, when New Testament authors talk about Christians being “chosen,” they aren’t inventing a new concept. The Jewish people were God’s chosen people. Christianity came out of Judaism, and almost all of the first Christians were Jewish. So when someone like Paul talked about being God’s chosen people, or how Christians are chosen in Christ, he was building on a long standing Jewish idea, using terms that were very familiar to him.

The Jews were God’s chosen people because they were the descendants of Abraham, the man that God uniquely chose to form a new nation that would bless all the nations of the earth. They weren’t chosen in the sense that God picked a bunch of individuals out of a crowd of humanity; rather, they inherited Abraham’s chosen-ness like a birthright. They were born into being chosen.

Ed. note: This post was originally intended to be much more accessible than it turned out to be. My hope was to write something that accurately reflected a good conversation that I had with my wife about Ephesians 1, but I indulged myself a bit too much, and it became more than I expected. I felt it was still worth publishing, and hopefully it will be fruitful for those who decide to read it. I will try, with my wife’s help, to write something a bit more down-to-earth on this subject in the near future.

Biblical election is a much-studied and oft-debated topic. Does God choose certain individuals for salvation? And if so, does that imply that he chooses the rest to be condemned? There are a few key Scriptures that deal with the issue of election, and one of the most important is Ephesians 1. Verses 4 and 5 are central to this discussion, and in them Paul writes: “For he [God the Father] chose us in him [Jesus Christ] before the creation of the world to be holy and blameless in his sight. In love he predestined us for adoption to sonship through Jesus Christ, in accordance with his pleasure and will.” (NIV) On the surface, this seems pretty straightforward: God chose believers before they were even born, predestining them for salvation.

I contend, however, that there are many factors in play that cause the apparently plain reading of the text to be false, and that this false interpretation has led to doctrines which teach falsehoods about God, particularly regarding both his character and nature. God does not arbitrarily choose some individuals for salvation, while leaving the rest to eternal condemnation with no opportunity of escape. This is, frankly, contrary to both the character and nature of God as revealed in Scripture, and more importantly, in his Son Jesus, whom Paul describes elsewhere as “the exact representation of [God’s] being.” But it’s not simply a contradiction of God’s revealed character that leads me to interpret Ephesians 1 in the way I will describe below. I am convinced that we haven’t dug deep enough into this text, choosing instead to rely upon the assumption that we understand perfectly well what Paul means when he uses words like choose and predestine. But if we question our assumptions and look more carefully at the text, we will see that biblical election is headship election not individual election, that it is rooted in Abraham, fulfilled in Jesus, and that it is the culmination of God’s redemptive purposes for humanity.