Colossians 3:9-10 “since you have put off the old man with his deeds, and have put on the new man who is renewed in knowledge according to the image of Him who created him.”
I love devotional readings that drive my thinking from the natural and the creation to the complexity in life and the supernatural Creator God. Genesis 2:7 “And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living being.”Sure, man’s body is made of the same “earth” material as the animals and as the earth itself. However, human beings share the created “image of God” only with God Himself. In Genesis 1:26 God said, “Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness.”
Ever since Adam and Eve first sinned, all people have been born with a sin nature and an innate rebellion against our Maker. Ephesians 2:1-3 “And you He made alive, who were dead in trespasses and sins, in which you once walked according to the course of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air, the spirit who now works in the sons of disobedience, among whom also we all once conducted ourselves in the lusts of our flesh, fulfilling the desires of the flesh and of the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, just as the others.” The image of God in mankind has been grievously marred, and we are “dead in trespasses and sins”. However, as our Colossians text above reminds us, the image of God in man can be “renewed” through the great miracle of the born-again new creation. And this includes more than just our soul/spirit nature, for we have His gracious promise that our own resurrection bodies will be “fashioned like unto his glorious body” when the Lord Jesus comes again.
Evidently, God had all this in mind from the very beginning, when “in the likeness of God made He him”. That is, He foreknew that He would one day become man, in the person of Jesus Christ, and so He created man in the image and likeness of that body/soul/spirit complex that He Himself would eventually assume; God incarnate.
Christ Himself is, in His eternal and glorified human body, the “image of the invisible God” [fully man and fully God], and God amazingly has even predestinated us “to be conformed to the image of His Son”; Sanctification is the act of God's grace by which the affections of men are purified or alienated from sin and the world, and exalted to a supreme love to God. God hath from the beginning chosen you to salvation, and “we shall be like Him” when we finally “see Him as He is”.
Image is everything. Blessings.
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