Made in God’s Image
Identity is a buzzword these days, isn’t it? Identity is a necessary human experience. Without something to identify as, we are nothing. As nothing, we are meaningless, and life becomes a string of meaningless events that lead to significant depression or self-destruction in pursuit of pleasure. We all seek meaning and alignment with some identity. For some, it’s career, family, sports, culture, gender, and the hobbies we pursue. “I am a woman, I am a therapist, I am a Toronto Maple Leafs fan (haha)”. We align with our identities and the stereotypes associated with these identities. Our entire lives are built around what we identify as, and we produce outcomes related to this (I am a Leafs fan, so I can expect an emotional playoff rollercoaster).
This is not by coincidence or by accident. It is something fundamental to being human that we identify with something in order to exist. If you don’t believe me, I encourage you to try a small experiment for a moment. Imagine, if you can, what it might be like to let go of these identities. You probably feel some sense of freedom and/or panic. The freedom is what the Buddha discovered; however, the Buddha also identified as nothing and everything, so he too did not abandon identity. The path of the Buddha is to Nirvana - peace and bliss from the letting go of all attachments to anything. But this is a huge contradiction because it is an extreme attachment to an identity with peace and bliss.
Even the Buddha cannot free us from this human condition of needing to attach ourselves to something. To be human is to have an identity. So, the question then is, who exactly are we? Are we all of these labels the world assigns us or that we choose to assign ourselves?
The creation story in the Bible offers an intriguing account that may explain the human attachment and identity issues we all experience. Genesis 1:27 says:
“So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.”
It says that the intelligent designer (God) behind human life created us to be reflections or shadows of Him. Our identity was in God Himself; He said in the verse before, “Let us make mankind in our image so they can rule …”. God made us to be like Him, but on earth 🤯🤯🤯. We are made to be the rulers of this earth and to bear the image of our Creator here. Do you realize that the Bible gives you the opportunity to BE “like” God? If you haven’t read the Bible, that means some pretty unbelievable things.
Genesis 1:28-29 also describes what we would be doing as image bearers of God on the earth:
God blessed them and said to them, “Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature that moves on the ground.” Then God said, “I give you every seed-bearing plant on the face of the whole earth and every tree that has fruit with seed in it. They will be yours for food. And to all the beasts of the earth and all the birds in the sky and all the creatures that move along the ground—everything that has the breath of life in it—I give every green plant for food.” And it was so.
He gave us this amazing universe and all the life it sustains on earth🤯🤯🤯. It’s ours, and we are supposed to be rulers of this world. But this isn’t even all of it! God was with His new human on earth, providing guidance on how this system of life worked and teaching the human how to bear the image of God. God meant for us to be with Him, to have a relationship with him. This included trusting the Designer himself to understand the rules of creation. God told the humans (He eventually made the human a “them” male and female) that they could not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, or they would die (Genesis 2:17). This implies that God also created us with a choice about how we live out this identity or image He gave us. We had (and still have) the choice to live in His identity and have life, or deny this identity (not trust Him), and choose a different one. And as many of us know, so the story went in Genesis, the only other identity to choose is now the self without God (the one where you don’t trust the identity He gave you and live in the image of something else). This is what the Bible then refers to as sin, and God told His humans that if they didn’t choose to identify with Him, they would die. And yes, we can see that what God said is true. Death has come to humans, and until our identities are reconciled to our creator, death is our destiny. For those of you who know the gospel of Jesus Christ (the one we can identify with again and receive life like God gave us in Genesis), the story doesn’t end with the sin in the garden of Eden. I will cover this part of the story towards the end of this blog.
What I want you to understand from what I am writing is that there is a wonderful, beautiful identity you can choose—one that fits better than any other—one that you were designed for—and that is to identify as a beloved creation of the God who made the universe. You ARE made in the image of God. Throughout the entire Bible, God expands on what this identity means, and it is something you can’t even fully imagine for yourself. You were made to be royalty (1 Peter 2:9), a child of the Most High God (John 1:12), to live for eternity (John 3:16)... honestly, it just doesn’t get any better than the identity God created for you as His own.
In my fallen state, during the first 20 years of my adult life, I identified with many things that were completely opposite of what God would recommend biblically. One of these was identifying with a mental illness😢. I aligned myself with being sick and lived my life solely to prevent the relapse of clinical depression (unsuccessfully). Mental illness was my core identity, and although it is completely warped to say “I am sickness,” at least I was something, which led me to pursue something I thought was meaningful like “relapse prevention.” The core problem with identifying with anything other than God is that we tend to even define ourselves by how sin afflicts us. But this isn’t the end of my story, obviously. You see, God loved me so much that He gave me a way to once again to identify with Him as my original design. He provided all of this from the very beginning— we have the freedom to choose to identify with Him. The Creator Himself came in human form to give us a very, very easy way to overcome these sinful identities and this world full of sin. If we identify with Jesus and follow Him, His death becomes our death... to sin! It is the pathway back to the identity we lost when we chose to be anything other than in Him.
I must add that if this seems like an impossibility, the spiritual explanation I have understood through studying the Bible is that God’s spirit was in Jesus and was released when He died the human death. This Holy Spirit was given to us so we, like Jesus, will live after this body dies. When you truly surrender your identity to Jesus, you will experience having the Holy Spirit within you and, once again, have open communication and a relationship with your Creator, just like the first humans in Genesis. The spirit of God comes to rest in us; therefore, we can once again identify as His creation made in his image, made to be in relationship with him, made never to be alone and always to have wise counsel on the ways of this life and of earth, and to be loved for and cared for by the Creator Himself.
If your identity is rooted in anything less than “I AM made in the image of the most high God”, then you are selling yourself short. Open your Bible and begin the journey. He created you to be part of an eternal kingdom filled with everything amazing He has to offer. If you want to choose this identity in God for yourself, it is a cornerstone of the spiritual treatment we offer at Rivers of Redemption. Reach out today and we can connect you with someone who can explore what this means for you personally.
