"Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion..." — Genesis 1:26

I. From the One God to His Living Statue

Our journey so far has restored two foundations. First, the Shema: Yahweh our God, Yahweh is one — a single divine person, the Father, beside whom there is no other (Deut 6:4; 1 Cor 8:6). Second, his Spirit: not a separate person, but the breath of the Almighty — God's own presence and power, the very breath he exhaled into the nostrils of the first man (Gen 2:7; Job 33:4).

Now the narrative of Scripture presses a third question upon us, and it is the question of us: What is a human being for? The Bible's answer arrives in its opening chapter, at the climax of the creation week, and it is more royal, more physical, and more glorious than most of us were ever taught:

"Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth... So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. And God blessed them. And God said to them, 'Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion...'" (Gen 1:26–28)

Humanity was not created to escape the earth. Humanity was created to rule it — as the living image of the one God, his appointed vice-regents over the physical world he called "very good."

II. What Is an "Image"? The World Behind the Word

The Hebrew word for image is tselem (צֶלֶם, Strong's H6754), and its ordinary usage is strikingly concrete. Elsewhere in Scripture, tselem means a physical statue or idol: the "images of Baal" torn down in the temple purge (2 Kgs 11:18), the "figured images" of the Canaanites (Num 33:52), the golden "images" of tumors made by the Philistines (1 Sam 6:5). A tselem is a tangible representation that stands in for, and makes present, the one it represents. Paired with it is demut (דְּמוּת, H1823), "likeness" — resemblance, correspondence.

Now set this vocabulary in its ancient Near Eastern world, and the text ignites. In Egypt and Mesopotamia, two practices illuminate Genesis:

  1. Kings erected images of themselves in the far provinces of their empire. Where the statue stood, the king's rule was proclaimed. The image was the claim of sovereignty over that territory.
  2. The king himself was called the "image" of his god. Pharaoh was the "living image of Amun"; Assyrian kings were the image of their deities. To be the god's image was a royal office — the right to rule on the god's behalf.

Genesis takes this royal ideology and detonates it with grace. In the nations, only the king was the image of god. In Genesis, every human being — male and female, together — bears the office. Not one Pharaoh over the masses, but all humanity crowned. Where a Babylonian would install a statue to claim territory, Yahweh installs living images across the whole earth: "be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth." Every child born is another royal statue of the one God erected in his world, declaring: this territory belongs to Yahweh.

This is why the image cannot be reduced to an invisible faculty. It is a vocation — a commissioned office of representation and rule.

III. The Verbs of the Crown

Look at the language of the mandate itself:

  • Radah (רָדָה, H7287), "have dominion" — a royal verb. Solomon "had dominion (radah) over all the region" (1 Kgs 4:24). And in a text we will treasure later, Yahweh tells the messianic king: "Rule (radah) in the midst of your enemies!" (Ps 110:2). Humanity's original job description uses the vocabulary of kingship.
  • Kavash (כָּבַשׁ, H3533), "subdue" — to bring order, to master. The earth was good but wild, a kingdom awaiting cultivation. Eden was the capital; the mandate was to extend its order to the ends of the earth.
  • Abad and shamar (עָבַד, H5647; שָׁמַר, H8104) — in Genesis 2:15, the man is placed in the garden "to work it and keep it." These two verbs appear together again in only one setting: the duties of the priests and Levites in the sanctuary, who "serve" and "guard" the holy place (Num 3:7–8; 8:26). Eden is portrayed as a temple, and Adam as its priest-king.

So the Imago Dei is a twin office: royal (rule the earth as God's vice-regent) and priestly (mediate God's presence, guard his sacred space). Humanity was made to be the meeting point of heaven and earth — dust from the ground, breath from the Almighty (Gen 2:7), crowned to govern the soil from which we were taken.

David heard all of this and set it to music:

"What is man that you are mindful of him?... You have made him a little lower than the elohim and crowned him with glory and honor. You have given him dominion over the works of your hands; you have put all things under his feet." (Ps 8:4–6)

Glory, honor, crown, dominion, all things under his feet — this is coronation language, sung over every son of Adam and daughter of Eve.

IV. "Let Us Make Man": The Throne Room Speaks

To whom does God say "let us make man in our image"? Readers of our first study already know the landscape: Scripture presents Yahweh as the Most High presiding over a divine council — the elohim of Psalm 82, the "sons of God" who shouted for joy when he laid the earth's foundations (Job 38:7), the heavenly host among whom the nations were later apportioned (Deut 32:8–9).

The most natural reading of Genesis 1:26 is that Yahweh, in his throne room, announces his intention to his court: "Let us make man in our image" — for the heavenly beings, too, are made in the pattern of God, his representatives in the upper realm as humanity would be in the lower. It is the speech of a king to his assembly.

But watch what happens in the very next verse — because the grammar is doing careful theology:

"So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him." (Gen 1:27)

The announcement is plural; the action is singular — three times over. He created. And man is made in God's image — not the council's. The court hears the decree; the King alone performs the work, just as Isaiah insists: "Who has measured the Spirit of Yahweh, or what man shows him his counsel? Whom did he consult...?" (Isa 40:13–14). The council witnesses and rejoices (Job 38:7); it does not create. The Shema stands untouched: one God, one Creator, speaking as a King among his ministers.

V. The Abdication

Genesis 3 is usually called "the fall," and it is — but hear it through the royal lens we have recovered: it is an abdication.

Into the garden-temple comes the serpent — a creature, a shrewd adversarial being operating within the world God's court governs (Gen 3:1). Note carefully what the text does and does not say: Scripture never gives us a mythology of this adversary's origin in Eden's account, and the famous poems of Isaiah 14 and Ezekiel 28 are, by their own explicit address, taunts against the king of Babylon and the prince of Tyre — human tyrants dressed in cosmic hubris. The adversary we meet in Scripture is a created prosecutor and tempter operating by permission (as Job 1–2 will later make explicit), never a rival god. We will devote a future study to him; for now, what matters is what he does.

He persuades the vice-regents to take their orders from a subject instead of their Sovereign. The rulers of the animals obey an animal. The images of God seek to seize godhood on their own terms — "you will be like elohim" (Gen 3:5) — and in grasping for a crown they already wore, they drop it. Dust-kings return to dust (Gen 3:19). The dominion mandate is not revoked, but it is bent: thorns resist the subduer, and the whole creation is subjected to futility, groaning for "the revealing of the sons of God" (Rom 8:19–20) — waiting, that is, for true images to take the throne again.

Yet even east of Eden, the image remains. Seth is born "in Adam's likeness, after his image" (Gen 5:3) — the office passes down the generations like a family crest. After the flood, God grounds the sanctity of human life in it: "Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed, for God made man in his own image" (Gen 9:6). Fallen, fractured, and often faithless — every human being still bears the King's insignia. This is the unshakable foundation of human dignity.

VI. The Second Adam: The Image Restored

If the story ended there, it would be a tragedy: statues of the King, toppled in the dust of the territory they were meant to govern. But the whole biblical narrative from Genesis 12 onward is the one God working to raise up a faithful image — and the New Testament announces that he has done it.

The writer of Hebrews takes up Psalm 8 — humanity crowned, all things under our feet — and makes the painful observation we all feel: "At present, we do not yet see everything in subjection to him." And then:

"But we see him... namely Jesus, crowned with glory and honor because of the suffering of death." (Heb 2:8–9)

One man has taken up the abandoned vocation. Notice the argument of Hebrews 2:5: "it was not to angels that God subjected the world to come." The world to come belongs to man — to the Imago Dei — and Jesus of Nazareth, the human Messiah, is the man who claimed it. Where Adam grasped, Jesus trusted. Where Adam obeyed the serpent in a garden of abundance, Jesus obeyed the Father in a wilderness of stones. Where Adam's abdication crowned death as king, "the last Adam became a life-giving spirit" (1 Cor 15:45).

This is precisely what Paul means when he calls Jesus "the image of God" (2 Cor 4:4) and "the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation" (Col 1:15). Hear these titles Hebraically, in the vocabulary of Genesis 1 (eikōn, εἰκών, G1504, is the Septuagint's word for tselem). An image, by definition, makes visible what is itself invisible — the image is the faithful representation, not the one represented. Jesus is the true tselem: the human being in whom the invisible God is at last perfectly displayed on earth, the royal statue that never bowed to a usurper. And "firstborn" (prōtotokos) is the language of preeminent heirship, exactly as God says of David: "I will make him the firstborn, the highest of the kings of the earth" (Ps 89:27). The firstborn of all creation is creation's crown prince and heir — the Second Adam standing at the head of the renewed human family, "the firstborn among many brothers" (Rom 8:29).

VII. Engaging the Traditional View

1. The Steel Man

Two traditional readings deserve a fair and full hearing. First, on Genesis 1:26: many careful interpreters through the centuries have heard "let us make man" as deliberation within God himself — the Father addressing the Son and Spirit — noting that the plural recurs at "the man has become like one of us" (Gen 3:22) and "let us go down and confuse their language" (Gen 11:7), and reasoning that God would not consult mere creatures about his supreme creative act, since he shares his glory with no one (Isa 42:8). Second, on the image itself: the great tradition of Augustine and Aquinas located the Imago Dei in the rational soul — memory, intellect, and will — a substantive endowment that distinguishes humans from beasts. This view was motivated by a noble instinct: to ground human worth in something inalienable. And joined to Colossians 1:15, the traditional synthesis concludes that the divine Son is the eternal archetype of the image, so that "let us" and "the image of God" together whisper the Trinity from the Bible's first page. This is a venerable reading held by serious lovers of Scripture.

2. The Tension

Yet the text itself, read in its Hebraic world, places real strain on this reading at several points.

First, the grammar of Genesis 1:26–27 distinguishes the speaker from the addressees. The proposal is plural, but the execution is emphatically singular — "he created" three times — and the image is "his own image," God's alone. If the plural persons were co-creators, we would expect "so they created man in their image." Instead, the pattern matches a king announcing his decree to a court and acting by his own hand — the very throne-room scene Scripture elsewhere depicts (1 Kgs 22:19–22; Isa 6:8, "whom shall I send, and who will go for us?").

Second, Genesis 3:22 resists a Trinitarian referent: "the man has become like one of us, knowing good and evil." Within the traditional view, this would require the acquired experiential knowledge of good and evil to be the shared property of divine persons — a difficult claim; but it fits the council effortlessly, since the elohim of the heavenly court are precisely the class of beings the serpent invoked ("you will be like elohim," Gen 3:5).

Third, the sons of God were demonstrably present at creation — "when I laid the foundation of the earth... all the sons of God shouted for joy" (Job 38:7) — so an address to the court requires no consultation of counsel (Isa 40:14 stands: God announces; he does not ask).

Fourth, the substantive "rational soul" view, for all its noble intent, sits uneasily with the concrete usage of tselem (a statue, an installed representative) and with the shape of the text itself, where the image is immediately unpacked by a commission — "let them have dominion." Scripture defines the image by office, not by faculty inventory.

Fifth, reading Colossians 1:15 as a deity-claim strains the word itself: an image of the invisible God is precisely the visible representation of another — as the "firstborn" is the heir of another. Both titles are relational and Adamic; pressed into ontology, they would prove less than the tradition needs and more than the grammar allows.

3. The Resolution

The royal-functional reading resolves every strand at once. "Let us" is the one God of the Shema announcing his purpose to his heavenly household — and then creating alone, exactly as the singular verbs insist. The image is not a hidden faculty but a conferred office: humanity installed as Yahweh's living statues, priest-kings of a good physical world. The office survives the fall (Gen 9:6), grounding universal human dignity; it is fulfilled in the faithful human Messiah, the Second Adam, who is the image par excellence precisely as the perfect man, the firstborn heir who makes the invisible God visible by flawless representation. Theology Proper, the council, and Christology click into a single frame: one God, his court in heaven, his image on earth, and one Man who got it right.

VIII. The Destiny of the Image: Reigning on the Earth

Where is the story going? Not to a disembodied heaven. The Bible ends where it began — with images of God ruling a physical world — only now, gloriously, with the Second Adam enthroned at their head.

  • "Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth." (Matt 5:5)
  • "The kingdom and the dominion... shall be given to the people of the saints of the Most High." (Dan 7:27)
  • "You have made them a kingdom and priests to our God, and they shall reign on the earth." (Rev 5:10)

Priest-kings, reigning on the earth: the vocabulary of Genesis 1–2, restored word for word. And Paul promises that just as we have borne the image of the man of dust, "we shall also bear the image of the man of heaven" (1 Cor 15:49) — conformed to the image of the Son, the firstborn among many brothers (Rom 8:29). The destiny of redeemed humanity is to become what Adam was made to be, in the likeness of the Adam who never fell.

IX. Living as the Image

This doctrine walks out of the study and into Monday morning.

Your dignity is not achieved; it is conferred. Before you accomplish anything, you bear the insignia of the Most High. So does your neighbor, your enemy, the stranger, the child not yet born, the elderly saint whose memory has faded. Genesis 9:6 and James 3:9 forbid us to curse what God has crowned.

Your work is not secular. Tending soil, building cities, healing bodies, ordering data, raising children — this is radah and abad, dominion and cultivation, the ancient vocation in modern clothes. The earth is not a waiting room for heaven; it is the territory of your commission.

Your destiny is embodied. The one God who breathed into dust does not discard what he crowned. He raised the Second Adam bodily, the firstfruits of a harvest of restored images, and the meek will inherit a renewed earth under his righteous reign.

Hear, O Israel: Yahweh our God, Yahweh is one — and the one God has stamped his image on you, breathed his breath into you, and prepared a crown for you in the Kingdom of his Messiah, the Man in whose likeness you are being remade.