So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. (Gen 1;26)
When I look inside myself and when I see the human soul, I marvel at what You have made, O Lord.
A human is an amazing creature. We have written Hamlet, composed the Canon in D, painted the Sistine Chapel, sent men to the moon, invented iphones, worshiped at temples, set up complex governments, discovered calculus, and died for doctrines. We have a moral sense. We have a spiritual sense, an awareness of the holy. We desire real purpose and are not fulfilled with mere earth. We enjoy beauty. We are highly relational. We intuitively understand that a human being has special value. We can think abstractly.
The amount of information we can store and comprehend is mind-boggling, but consider the different types of information. Beauty is not rational, but we understand it. The spiritual is not physical, but we can grasp it. Love is not an idea you reason to, yet we know what it is. Why? Why are we able to process such a wide array of nonphysical and sometimes nonrational information?
The Christian answer is that God created us in His image. Each of these human capacities corresponds to some aspect of God, and He has created us with this incredible software package so that we can enjoy Him. Our ability to reason helps us understand a rational God. Our moral nature gives us a foundation for understanding His righteousness. Our sense of purpose and inability to find ultimate meaning on earth point us beyond earth. Our sense of the holy enables us to feel the transcendent otherness of God. Our relational nature and desire for love prepares us to know a relational God who loves us. Our appreciation of beauty prepares us for the Glorious One, who is lovelier than all the lilies of the valley.
God desires us to experience Him fully and not just in a rational dimension. When any of these areas of knowledge is deficient, our knowledge of God shall also be deficient, for these different aptitudes tell us different types of things about God. A logical intellectual who has squashed any sense of the spiritual will be incapable of understanding God. He may understand doctrine, but God is much bigger than doctrine. A romantic may sense aspects of God’s beauty, but she may also allow her experiences to make her think of God any way she pleases. God becomes whatever she feels. She thinks doctrine is dead. It doesn’t show her God. She has already felt Him. A man bent on indulging his desires may damage his sense of right and wrong so badly that he can no longer recognize righteousness. Many have lived a life of sin so long that they consider it normal. They are ill-prepared to comprehend the Righteous One.
We are to enjoy God, and we cannot fully enjoy God in only one way. We glory in His beauty. We bow before His holiness. We love Him. We approach Him as our Father. Yet we revere Him as a righteous King. We marvel at the intricate works of His hand, works that our minds have discovered. He is our purpose. He is our life. He is our joy.
We relate to God in all of these ways, but the only reason we can do so is grace. God has graciously equipped us with the software to handle a multifaceted God. Consequently, as we grow in Jesus, we develop our sense of beauty, our sense of morality, our reason, our love, and all the rest, for these give us a fuller, more heartfelt knowledge of God.
Let me give you some pictures. Think of a commanding officer with his staff. Each staff officer informs the commander on a different type of information within the unit. It would be a foolish commander indeed who listened only to his operations officer or who ignored his maintenance or intelligence officers because they were not important enough. Yet such is what many people do concerning God. Some proudly claim that they listen only to their reason. Others focus on their desires or their sense of right and wrong and ignore the information that their other senses give them.
Or let’s switch the picture. Think of chess. Reason is our queen, morality a rook, our senses of purpose and of the Holy are knights and bishops, and so on. Each type of knowledge has a different ability and serves a different purpose. The chess player who leans too heavily on his queen is immature in the game; but the one who can use all the pieces (for they really ought to work together) and see the board holistically will be the tougher player to beat. No piece is a bad piece, though every piece can be moved in a bad way. Each piece contributes something different, yet some can do more than others. And every piece, including the queen, has limitations.
This is a human being, and I want you to think of a human being as a human being and not just a brain. We are God’s creation, and as we submit our minds, our hearts, our relationships, our desires, to Christ and to Scripture, we see God more holistically, and His glory grows in our eyes.
This is but a little piece of the image of God.
