“Made in God’s Image” — The Deeper You Look, the Stranger it Gets | Genesis 1:26 Deep Dive

“Made in God’s Image” — The Deeper You Look, the Stranger it Gets | Genesis 1:26 Deep Dive.

In 1979, archaeologists working a low mound in northeastern Syria pulled a basalt statue out of the ground. It stands a little over 5 ft tall, a king carved in stone, hands folded, standing the way a man stands when he is waiting for a verdict. His name was Hadad-yith’i, and he ruled a small kingdom called Guzana in the 9th century before Christ. What makes this statue one of the most important objects ever recovered for understanding the Bible is not the carving. It is the writing on his robe. The inscription runs in two languages, Assyrian Akkadian across the front of the tunic, Aramaic across the back. And in that Aramaic text, the king calls this statue of himself by two words. One of them is demuta, the other is selem, likeness, image. Those are the exact two words, in the same pair, that appear in the first chapter of Genesis when God says, “Let us make man in our image, according to our likeness.” So, before we talk about the pronoun that everybody argues about, hold on to this. The vocabulary God chose in Genesis 1 is not abstract philosophical language. It is not poetry about the soul. It is the language of statues men would, thousands of years later, come to place in temples. It is technical, royal, political language that every single person in the ancient Near East would have recognized instantly. And it means something very specific. Most people come to this verse with one question: Who is the us? That is a real question, and we are going to answer it carefully. But it is the smaller half of the verse. The larger half, the half that actually reshapes how you understand what a human being is, is the half nobody asks about. Not who was talking, what was said. Here is where we are going. We are going to look at the Hebrew of Genesis 1:26 and see the strange thing that happens in the grammar right at that moment. We are going to walk through every serious answer to the question of who God was speaking to, and we are going to be clear about which answers the text supports, and which ones it only allows. Then we are going to take the words image and likeness back into the world they came from, into Egypt and Assyria, and that statue in the Syrian dirt, and find out what they actually meant to the people who first heard them. And by the end, you are going to see that this sentence is not a sentence about how human beings began. It is a sentence about what human beings are for. And it is a sentence that, according to the New Testament, is still being spoken over you right now. Let us start with the text itself. Genesis chapter 1, verse 26 in the New King James version. 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.” Now, to feel what is happening here, you have to hear the rhythm of everything that came before it. All through chapter 1, the pattern is identical, and it is relentless. God said, “Let there be light.” And there was light. God said, “Let there be a firmament. Let the waters be gathered. Let the earth bring forth grass. Let there be lights in the firmament. Let the waters abound. Let the earth bring forth the living creature.” Six days of speech, and every single command is phrased the same way. Third person. Let it be. God speaks into the void, and the void obeys. There is no consultation. There is no pause. There is no deliberation. There is a voice, and there is a result. And then, on the sixth day, immediately before the creation of the human being, the pattern breaks. The Hebrew is na’aseh adam betsalmenu kidmutenu. And the verb na’aseh is not third person anymore. It is first person plural. Not let there be, let us make. God stops commanding the creation and starts speaking about himself. And he speaks in the plural. And he speaks before he acts, rather than simply acting. That break is deliberate. A writer does not sustain a rhythm for 25 verses and then fracture it by accident. Something is being signaled. Before God makes this creature, he pauses. And the pause is written into the grammar. So, who is he talking to? There are four serious answers, and they have been argued over for almost 2,000 years. Let us take them one at a time, and let us be clear about what the text actually supports. The first answer is the royal we, the plural of majesty. The idea is that God speaks the way a monarch speaks, the way a queen says, “We are not amused.” And the plural carries dignity rather than number. This is the most common answer you will hear, and it has serious defenders. Hebrew genuinely does use plural forms for singular realities in places. The word for God, Elohim, is itself plural in form, while taking singular verbs all through this chapter. There is real evidence for what grammarians call the plural of majesty in the Hebrew Bible. But, there is a problem with applying it here, and it is a grammatical one. Elsewhere, when a plural form carries singular meaning, the verbs and pronouns attached to it stay singular. That is exactly what happens with Elohim in verse 1. God, plural noun, created, singular verb. Here in verse 26, the verb itself has gone plural. Na’aseh. The pronoun suffixes have gone plural. Betzalmenu, in our image. Kidmutenu, according to our likeness. This is not a plural noun with singular grammar. The whole sentence has shifted, and documented examples of a Hebrew speaker using first-person plural verbs about himself for the sake of grandeur are very hard to produce. So, the royal we is possible. It is not impossible, but it is the weakest of the four, because it requires the grammar to do something we cannot clearly show it doing anywhere else. The second answer is that God is speaking to the earth, or to the creation itself. Some of the great Jewish commentators took this road. The reasoning is that the human body comes from the ground, as Genesis chapter 2 says plainly. So, God invites the dust into the project. Me and the earth, let us make man. The difficulty is the second half of the sentence. It does not say, let us make man out of our materials. It says, in our image, according to our likeness. Whoever the us is, the image belongs to them, too. And the earth does not have an image for a human being to bear. The third answer is the heavenly court, and this one deserves real respect, because the pattern it appeals to is genuinely in the Bible. Scripture does describe God surrounded by a council of heavenly beings. In Job chapter 38, when God answers Job out of the whirlwind, he describes the morning stars singing together and all the sons of God shouting for joy at the foundation of the earth. In 1 Kings chapter 22, the prophet Micaiah sees the Lord sitting on his throne with all the host of heaven and standing beside him, and a conversation takes place. And this plural speech in Genesis is not isolated. It happens two more times in these early chapters. In Genesis chapter 11 verse 7, at Babel, God says, come, let us go down and there confuse their language. And in Isaiah chapter 6 verse 8, in the throne room, Isaiah hears a voice that moves between singular and plural in a single breath. Whom shall I send, and who will go for us? So, the pattern is real. God does sometimes speak in a plural that includes his court. And yet it runs into the same wall. The sentence is not only, let us make, it is in our image. If angels are included in the us, then human beings bear the image of angels as well as the image of God, and the Bible never says that anywhere, not once. Angels are servants. The Bible never calls a single angel the image of God, and it never describes humanity as sharing an angelic nature. Whatever the us is, it has to be something that owns that image, which brings us to the fourth answer, and it is the one that most careful readers across very different traditions end up at. The plural of deliberation. The plural of fullness. God is speaking within himself. This is not a committee meeting. It is not God asking permission. It is the sound of a decision being made inside the being of God. And it is written in the plural because [clears throat] there is something plural inside God. And then watch what happens in the very next verse, because this is the detail that should stop you cold. Verse 27. So, God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him. Male and female he created them. The plural is gone, completely. The verb bara, created, is singular. His own image, singular. Three times in one verse the text drives the point home, and every time it is one God acting alone. So, whatever the plural meant in verse 26, verse 27 does not let you turn it into a crowd of creators. One God made the human being. The deliberation was plural. The act was singular. Hebrew will not let you escape either half of that. Now, here is where we have to be careful, because this is the place where people overreach in both directions. If you had handed Genesis chapter 1 to an Israelite standing at the foot of Mount Sinai and asked him to explain the us, he would not have said the word Trinity. That doctrine is not sitting on the surface of this verse, and anyone who tells you it is has skipped a step. What the Hebrew gives you is a God who is one, who acts alone, and who nevertheless speaks of himself in the plural at the single most important moment in the chapter. But the Bible is not a collection of isolated books. It is one document, and later parts of it have the right to tell you what the earlier parts meant. And on the question of who was present and active when the world was made, the New Testament is not vague at all. John chapter 1 verses 1 through 3. In the beginning was the word and the word was with God and the word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through him and without him nothing was made that was made. John deliberately opens his gospel with the first three words of Genesis and then tells you there was someone there with God who was God and that creation came through him. Colossians chapter 1 verses 15 through 17. Paul writes of Christ, “He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation. For by him all things were created that are in heaven and that are on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or principalities or powers. All things were created through him and for him. And he is before all things and in him all things consist.” Read that first phrase again. He is the image of the invisible God. Paul reaches for the exact word from Genesis 1:26 and applies it to Christ. And go back to Genesis chapter 1 verse 2, the second sentence in your Bible. “The earth was without form and void and darkness was on the face of the deep and the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters.” The Hebrew verb there is rak’af and it is a rare word. It shows up again in Deuteronomy chapter 32 where Moses describes an eagle that stirs up its nest and hovers over its young. It is the posture of a parent bird over something fragile that is not finished yet. The Spirit of God is in the room before anything is made. So this is the picture the whole Bible gives you. A God who is one and within that one God a fullness that can say us. The word who would later be called the image of the invisible God was there when the word image was spoken for the first time. That is not a trick of grammar. That is the structure of the Bible. Now we come to the larger half of the verse Because even if the pronoun were settled tomorrow, you would still not know what God actually said. And what he said is the part that will change how you walk through a grocery store. The word translated image is tzelem. Go look up where else that word appears in the Hebrew Bible, and you may be surprised because it is not a spiritual word. It is a word about objects. In Numbers chapter 33, when Israel is commanded to destroy the molded images of Canaan, that is tzelem. In 2 Chronicles chapter 23, when the people tear down the images in the temple of Baal, that is tzelem. In the book of Daniel, the enormous golden statue that Nebuchadnezzar sets up on the plain of Dura and commands everyone to bow before, that is the Aramaic form of the same word. Tzelem means a statue, a physical representation of someone. Specifically in that world, the representation of a god or a king set up in a place so that the one represented could be regarded as present and ruling there. The second word is demut, likeness. It means resemblance, something that corresponds to something else. Ezekiel uses it constantly when he is trying to describe a vision that resists description. And in Genesis chapter 5 verse 3, Moses uses both words together again in an unmistakable way. And Adam lived 130 years and begot a son in his own likeness, after his image, and named him Seth. Demut and tzelem applied to a father and his son. Seth was not a copy of Adam. He was a living continuation of him, resembling him, representing him, carrying forward what Adam was. And this is where that Syrian statue becomes so valuable. Because on the robe of King Hadad-Yith’i, in the oldest substantial Aramaic inscription we possess, both words are used for the same object. The statue is called his demuta. It is It’s called his tzelem. Scholars who have studied that inscription closely have noticed that the words lean in slightly different directions. The likeness language appears where the king stands as a worshiper before his God. The image language appears in the royal and commemorative portion where he stands as a ruler. One word for the relationship. One word for the office. Which is remarkably exactly how Genesis uses them. And the statue itself tells you how this worked in practice. A king could not be everywhere. His kingdom was larger than his body. So he had a likeness of himself carved and set up in a temple or a distant city, and that image stood in his place. It declared whose territory this was. It was not decoration. It was a claim of authority planted in the ground. Now look at Egypt. The most famous name in the ancient world is a sentence about this. Tutankhamun. He was born Tutankhaten, and that name means living image of the Aten. When the old gods were restored during his reign, the name changed to Tutankhamun, living image of Amun. The pharaoh was not just the ruler of Egypt. He was the god’s image walking around on two legs representing the deity to the land. In Mesopotamia, the same idea runs through the royal inscriptions. The king is the image of the god. Here is what I want you to feel about that. In the ancient Near East, the title image of god existed. It was a real title. It had real content, and it belonged to exactly one person per kingdom. The pharaoh, the emperor, the man on the throne. Everyone else was labor. Everyone else existed to feed the temple, build the walls, and die anonymous. In the Babylonian creation stories, humanity is made to do the work the gods got tired of doing. Then Moses writes Genesis chapter 1, and he takes that royal title, the most exclusive title in the ancient world, and he does not give it to a king. He gives it to the species. So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him. Male and female he created them. Not the Pharaoh, not the firstborn, not the priest, not the freeman, man and woman, both, together, the whole human race, carrying the title that every other culture on earth reserved for a monarch. The slave in the brickyard has it. The infant has it. The woman has it in a world that counted her as property. That verse is one of the most radical sentences ever written, and it was written in a world that had no category for it. And now the end of verse 26 snaps into place. Let us make man in our image, according to our likeness. Let them have dominion. That is not two thoughts, it is one thought. In Hebrew, the dominion clause flows directly out of the image clause. The word is rada, to rule. You are the image, therefore you rule. That is what an image does. A statue of a king in a distant province is not there to be admired. It is there to represent his authority in a place where his body is not. So, God does not carve his image out of basalt and set it up in a shrine. He makes one out of dust and breath, and he gives it a pulse, and he stands it up in the middle of a garden, and he says, “This is my province, and you are my representative in it.” If this is opening up the first page of your Bible in a way you have not seen before, take a second and send it to someone who loves digging into scripture. Subscribe so you do not miss what comes next. That is genuinely how more people find this. Now, there is a second consequence of all this, and it explains one of the 10 Commandments. Exodus chapter 20, verse 4. You shall not make for yourself a carved image, any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. Every nation around Israel made images of its gods. That was simply what religion looked like. And Israel is forbidden to do it. Ask why with Genesis 1 in your hand, and the answer arrives immediately. God already has an image on the earth. He made it himself on the sixth day. Carving another one is not just inaccurate, it is a replacement. And every image you carve will be smaller than the one that is already breathing. Which means the image of God is not an idea you believe. It is a person you are standing next to. Scripture presses this point hard. After the flood, in Genesis chapter 9 verse 6, God gives Noah a law and attaches a reason to it. “Whoever sheds man’s blood, by man his blood shall be shed, for in the image of God he made man.” The prohibition against murder is not grounded in social stability or in human sentiment. It is grounded in the image. To destroy a human being is to attack a representation of God. And notice when that is said. After the fall, after Cain, after the flood, the image survived all of it. It was defaced, not deleted. Genesis chapter 5 says it again on the other side of Eden, and Genesis chapter 9 says it again on the other side of the flood. James makes the same move in the New Testament in chapter 3 verse 9, writing about the tongue. “With it we bless our God and Father, and with it we curse men who have been made in the similitude of God.” The Greek word there corresponds directly to the Hebrew demut. James is saying that contempt for a person is a theological act, not merely a social one, because of what that person is. David saw all of it, and he set it to music. Psalm chapter 8 verses 4 through 6. “What is man that you are mindful of him, and the son of man that you visit him?” “For you have made him a little lower than the angels, and you have crowned him with glory and honor. You have made him to have dominion over the works of your hands. You have put all things under his feet.” Crowned. That is royal language, and David knew exactly what he was doing with it. And there is one more thing about Genesis 1:26 that almost nobody notices. It is not finished. The New Testament picks up the word image and does something startling with it. In 2 Corinthians chapter 4 verse 4, Paul speaks of the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God. In Colossians, as we saw, Christ is the image of the invisible God. And Hebrews chapter 1 verse 3 reaches for an even sharper word. Christ is the brightness of his glory and the express image of his person. The Greek word behind express image is character. And it is the word for the die that is struck into a coin and the impression it leaves. Not a resemblance, an exact imprint. So, the title that was given to Adam and defaced in Eden is held perfectly by one man. And then Paul does something that should make you sit up. Romans chapter 8 verse 29. For whom he foreknew, he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his son, that he might be the firstborn among many brethren. 2 Corinthians chapter 3 verse 18. But we all, with unveiled face, beholding as in a mirror the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from glory to glory, just as by the spirit of the Lord. And 1 Corinthians chapter 15 verse 49. And as we have borne the image of the man of dust, we shall also bear the image of the heavenly man, being transformed, present tense, ongoing, not finished. Which means the sentence God spoke on the sixth day was not a description of a completed act. It was a declaration of a project. Let us make man in our image. That work began in a garden. It was damaged almost immediately. It was carried perfectly by Christ. And according to Paul, it is being done in you right now by the same spirit who was hovering over the water before there was any light to see by. Quick word before we bring this home. Everything you are hearing represents hours of work in the original languages, the history, and the biblical text. And if this is the kind of Bible study you enjoy, maybe the kind of deeply researched studies you would like to share with your loved ones, that desire is a good one. So, we took a full year of highly researched studies built exactly like this one we just walked through and put them in one place so you would have something to go through with the lovely inquisitive people in your life and grow together. Taking a look at it is also one of the quiet ways you keep this channel going and help us keep making the studies and the illustrations you are enjoying. The link is waiting for you down in the description whenever you want to check it out. So, let us gather it up, a pattern of speech that runs unbroken for 25 verses and then stops. A plural that the next verse refuses to turn into a crowd. A word for image that meant a royal statue planted in a province to declare who rules there. A title that belonged to pharaohs and emperors handed instead to a man and a woman made of dust. A command not to carve any rival image because one is already walking around. A law protecting human life that is grounded in nothing but this. And a New Testament that takes the same word, puts it on Christ, and then says you are being remade into it. So, what does this mean for you right now? First, your value is not a verdict you earn. It is an office you were born holding. In the ancient world, the image belonged to the man with the army. In Genesis, it belongs to you because God assigned it, and nothing in your performance, your productivity, your failures, or anyone else’s opinion of you has the authority to revoke an assignment God made on the sixth day. If you have been quietly working to justify your own existence, Genesis 1 says the question was settled before you did anything at all. Second, the way you treat people is theology. Genesis chapter 9 grounds the value of human life in the image. James grounds the sin of a cutting word in the same place. Which means there is no such thing as a merely personal grudge, a merely private contempt, a person you are entitled to write off. You are never dealing only with a person. You are always dealing with a representation of God, and he notices how his image is handled. And maybe the part that stays with me most is this. The pause. Everything else in creation God simply spoke. Light, sky, ocean, stars, animals, spoken and done. Over you he stopped. He deliberated. There is a moment written into the grammar of Genesis chapter 1 where God talks about what he is about to make before he makes it. And that moment occurs exactly once, immediately before you. Whatever else is unclear about the plural in that verse, that much is in the text plainly. You were not an afterthought at the end of a long week. You were the thing he paused over. The statue in the Syrian dirt is still standing in a museum with a dead king’s claim written on his robe. It represents a kingdom that no longer exists and a man nobody remembers. The image God set up in the earth is still breathing. It was cracked in a garden. It was carried perfectly by a carpenter from Nazareth, and it is being restored in you from glory to glory right now. Let us make man in our image. He is still saying it. If this is the kind of study you find yourself wanting more of, the kind you would love to sit down and experience with the people closest to you, that full year of them is waiting down in the description for whenever you and your loved ones are ready to sit down and dig. If this opened something up for you, help us get it to someone else. Subscribe, leave a comment, even one word helps more people find this. Share it with someone who needs to hear it. And if you will, pray for us. God bless you.