The Image of God

The proposed new statement follows the Evangelical Alliance’s Statement:

We believe in

The dignity of all people made male and female in God’s image, to be holy, to love and to care for creation, yet corrupted by sin, which incurs divine wrath and judgement.

This replaces

3.      The total depravity of human nature in consequence of the fall, and the necessity of regeneration.

Why Change it?

The old statement is not ‘wrong’; for evidence of humanity’s ‘total depravity’, we only have to look out of our windows, watch the news, or, indeed, look at our own hearts.  As Jeremiah says:

Jeremiah 17: 9

The heart is deceitful above all things, And desperately wicked.

And Paul says in a cutting indictment, quoting Psalm 14:

Romans 3: 10-12

There is none righteous, no, not one;¹¹ There is none who understands; There is none who seeks after God.¹² They have all turned aside; They have together become unprofitable; There is none who does good, no, not one.

But is this the whole truth.  What does God see when he looks at us?  If we are making a brief statement about mankind’s status before God, what is it?

We believe in

The dignity of all people made male and female in God’s image, to be holy, to love and to care for creation, yet corrupted by sin, which incurs divine wrath and judgement.

The first thing that the Bible (i.e. God) says about humankind is that we are made in his image.

Genesis 1: 26-28

Then God said, “Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness; let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.” ²⁷ So God created man in His own image; in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them. ²⁸ Then God blessed them, and God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply; fill the earth and subdue it; have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air, and over every living thing that moves on the earth.”

In the next chapter of Genesis, we see God forming man out of the substance of the earth:

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.

Subsequently, the Fall comes; the Man and the Woman are exiled from God’s presence and cursed to what is effectively a living death, which is immediately borne out in their offspring.  Cain, the first-born human murders his brother, the second-born human, and bloodshed becomes the lot of man henceforward.

So, Jeremiah, the Psalmist and Paul are writing within this experience of spiritual exile and darkness, and this is our experience too.  Life is an ongoing tragedy: Man is born to trouble, says Eliphaz, as the sparks fly upward (Job 5: 7).

But yet, God hopes for and expects better things of us.  Let’s have another look at Psalm 14.  When Paul declares that:

There is none who understands;
There is none who seeks after God.

…he is making a brutal inference as to what God will find on the earth.  We know what God will find – but what is He looking for?  Psalm 14: 2 actually says:

The Lord looks down from heaven upon the children of men,
To see if there are any who understand, who seek God.

He is searching for the righteous.

In the second half of Genesis 18, a truly remarkable passage, God, on his way to pour his righteous wrath on Sodom and Gomorrah because the outcry against Sodom and Gomorrah is great, and because their sin is very grave (v.20), decides to share His plan with Abraham.  And Abraham challenges Him: Far be it from You to do such a thing as this, to slay the righteous with the wicked, that the righteous should be as the wicked; far be it from You! Shall not the Judge of all the earth do right? (v.25).

Amazingly (and it is truly stunning), God is making Himself accountable to Abraham in a matter of His righteousness.  (This is the same Abraham who tried to pass his wife off as his sister to save his own skin.  Twice.)

So, God rescues Lot and his family before he destroys the city.

God, in His righteousness, seeks righteousness in humankind.  The fact that he (almost, Job 1: 1) never finds it doesn’t detract from this.  The history of Israel in the Old Testament is the story of God pleading for his wayward people to repent.  He delights in his people, (Zephaniah 3: 14-17) and calls on them to reciprocate his love (Isaiah 55: 1-7), and even seeks to seduce them away from their false worship (Hosea 2: 14ff).

The truth is that the corruption of sin and its inevitable death; the ‘total depravity’ that we inherit in Adam is subordinate to the image of God in which we are created.  When God looks at us, he sees His image, albeit distorted and corrupted by sin.  He longs for that image to be restored.

The testimony of Scripture from the Fall in Genesis 3 to the final judgement of the wicked in Revelation 20 is the story of this redemption.

So, a better emphasis for a Statement of Belief is on the essential dignity in humankind conferred by the image of God, which is the emphasis of the Gospel:

John 3: 16

God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life.

God loves us, seeing through our evil to bring us back to Himself.

Humankind in Creation

We believe in

The dignity of all people made male and female in God’s image, to be holy, to love and to care for creation, yet corrupted by sin, which incurs divine wrath and judgement.

God’s original commission to Adam and Eve is this:

Genesis 1: 28

Then God blessed them, and God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply; fill the earth and subdue it; have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air, and over every living thing that moves on the earth.”

In the next chapter, we see this being worked out by Adam in practice.

‘Have dominion’ sounds very direct and absolute, brutal almost.  The fact that we have his authority is reflected in our ability to drastically change our environment, to the extent of being an actual threat to its long-term viability.  But in Scripture, things are presented more benignly.  God planted a garden and put Adam in it (v.8) to tend and keep it (v.15).  God made the animals and brought them to Adam ‘to see what he would call them’.  Adam ‘gave names’ to all the various animals; we get the impression that he’s giving them more than names, maybe their characteristics too. 

Adam’s relationship with his world is beneficent; as a ruler, he lives and works in harmony with it (compared to what happens after the Fall Genesis 3: 17-19). 

So ‘total depravity’ is an accurate description of our experience; it is, indeed, the reason that Jesus died brutally on the cross.  But it is not a complete picture of humanity as presented by Scripture.  The worst of us – and God doesn’t really see ‘worst’ in the sense that we do; ‘we have altogether become corrupt’ – possess the beauty and innate dignity of the image of God.  And we reflect Him, even in our sinful state.  That’s why He loves us so much.  It’s why Jesus promised life to the dying thief and set Barabbas free.

On reflection, however, I recommend that we should change the wording of this proposed statement from, ‘to love and to care for creation’ to ‘to tend and to keep the created world, which broadly means the same thing, but is a direct quotation from Genesis 2: 15.

I believe in…

The dignity of all people made male and female in God’s image, to be holy, to tend and to keep the created world, yet corrupted by sin, which incurs divine wrath and judgement.