Genesis 1:26–27

God has finished creation as creation. Now He begins to take counsel, in the most solemn way, saying that He will make man in His image and give him rule. So the creation is complete as the setting and the scene. Then God makes man in His own image and sets him over it all. Man stands entirely alone. Everything is finished, and then he is given rule over it.

One thing set man apart from every other creature. God took counsel about him before He made him. What was coming was not a new animal. It was a moral being with wonderful gifts and possibilities.

That God should say, "Let US," is worthy of note. Elohim is, as we have said, a plural Name. The Old Testament does not reveal the three Persons in the Godhead. But now that God has revealed Them, we can see that the language of our chapter, given by God, fits that truth. In verse 26 it is "Our image". In verse 27 it is "His image". There is no clash here, because the eternal "Three in One" is the One speaking.

Think of the plural form of the word and how it goes with singular verbs. Would it not be close to the truth to say this? We cannot treat it as a revelation of the Trinity. Yet it is a way of speaking that shows the Spirit had that truth in mind. He is the third Person there, and He used words whose full force we could only grasp once that teaching had been revealed.

"Image" represents. "Likeness" resembles. An image does not have to look like the thing or person it stands for. The coin they showed the Lord Jesus in Matthew 22:20 may not have carried a "likeness" of Caesar, but it did carry an "image" of him. Man is made in the "image" of God. So God places him in this world to represent Him to the lower creatures, in rule and in blessing. That word is about man's position. "Likeness" points to his moral being. He can enter into relationships and carry responsibilities.

Scripture never says the Son is in the likeness of the invisible God. He is God. To call Him like God might suggest He is not truly God. Still, the Son is "the image of the invisible God". In His own Person He represents God in His character and moral attributes, before the whole universe.

This is man as the head of creation… He was to represent God here below. Besides that, he was to be like God. He was to have a mind, a spirit able to know God, with no evil in him at all.

God creates the man and the woman. Then He gives them rule "over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth". Move on to Genesis 3, and there Satan has come in. He has gained this headship for himself through the man who had fallen.

Man is in the image of God, now as always, fallen or not. But sin cost him the likeness of God. When the question is the guilt of taking a man's life, the reason given is that God made him in His own image. This, it is plain, was never lost; it abides, whatever man's state.

God created Adam in His own image and set him to rule over the works of His hands. Adam stood at the centre of a vast system placed under him. He was, the apostle says, a picture of the One who was to come. The rule of the Second Adam reaches much further than the rule of the first. He created all things Himself, so He is to inherit all He has created.

To be true to the image, there must be moral likeness. For us that means a new creation. So Colossians 3:10 says we "have put on the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge after the image of its creator".

God did not create man as He had done in every previous case, by a simple order from His lips. The creation of man was the subject of divine counsel. "Let us make man," etc. Notice here that man was to be, and was, made in the image and likeness of God. This is his first great difference from everything God had created before. The second is that he was to rule over all of it.

How the Bible uses the word, in both the Old and New Testaments, seems to show that "image" represents, while "likeness" resembles… In the New Testament, the coin our Lord asked for had the image and inscription of Caesar on its face. It might have been a poor likeness, but it was an unmistakable image of the Roman emperor. It expressed his authority and represented his claim.

God made man, then, to represent Him to the lower creation that He put under him. But he was also made after the likeness of God; that is, he was really like God in certain important respects. Not in all respects of course, for God is infinitely holy and man was merely innocent. Still, man was God's "offspring" (Acts 17:28-29). He is a spirit being, though dressed in a body of flesh and blood. So he has intelligence and a moral sense, and these reflect what exists on an infinite scale in God Himself.

How far this is from the brute finally evolving into man, a theory suggested by Satan to brutalise the race! Here is the simple yet wonderful truth. No one brought God down to the human level; God created man, and man alone, after a divine pattern.

Man is no longer in the likeness of God, but he is always in the image of God. For man, now as ever, fallen or not, is in the image of God; but the likeness of God was lost through sin. Seth therefore was born in Adam's own likeness, not in God's. He was like Adam fallen, not only his representative.

The fall has not cost man either the image or the likeness of God (Gen. 9:6; James 3:9).

The murderer does more than meddle with man and injure him to the worst degree. By killing a man he also defaces God's image, and God sentences him to die. Murder seizes what belongs to God, and no man has that right.

Verse 27 says that man is twofold… the few words here show us how closely Scripture ties male and female together. The word "man" covers both, and jointly they were to have the dominion.

Christ brings out God's glory in these things, and He shows how it was at the beginning. God did not make one man and two women, but "male and female he created them." So from the very forming of man, God's mind was clear.

God created man in His own image and likeness. But no one could call Christ, "who is God over all, blessed forever," the likeness of God, since He is God. But He can be the image of God, for "image" is what represents another, and Christ did this for God perfectly.

To be true to the image, there must be moral likeness. For us that means a new creation. So Col. 3:10 says the new self "is being renewed in knowledge after the image of its Creator."