September 8 – Made in God’s image

Then God said, “Let us make humankind in our image, after our likeness, so they may rule…”  (Genesis 1:26  NET)

What does it mean to be made in God’s image?  Obviously, we are not God and never will be God; we are only made in His image.  This means that certain powers and characteristics that are uniquely God have been given to us also.  But if God created us in His image from the very beginning, it only makes sense for us to take a hold of these powers and characteristics and live the way He intended.  The problem is that the devil works overtime at convincing us that we can’t.  If we take a hold of this promise and live it out, the devil and his kingdom will have no power, and so evil works night and day to convince us that ruling over our problems, over our flesh, and over evil, are beyond our reach.

Verses one through twenty-five of Genesis chapter one have just finished describing God’s creation, where He created all things except man by the words that came out of His mouth.  God planned things in His mind, and then spoke them into existence. As Isaiah 14:24 says: “Surely, as I have thought, so it shall come to pass, and as I have purposed, so it shall stand.”  And so, when God speaks about making man in their own image, clearly one important characteristic of God is what has just been described.  Like Jesus said a couple thousand years later, if we speak to a mountain and order it to be thrown into the sea, it will be done if we do not doubt in our hearts and believe that what we say will happen.  And so, not only were we made with the authority and power to rule and create, the Lord Jesus commanded us to live this way.

There are many other characteristics that reflect the image of God in humanity: our social nature, the way we enjoy family and friends, our ability to communicate, our moral compass, our free-will, and the fact that we can reason and choose.  But one of the most important is this godly power to decide on something by faith, and have it turn out exactly the way we want it to.  This is what faith is all about.  This is the inverse of what Satan does 24/7, all around the world.  He speaks words of doubt and fear with the determination that they will cause death and destruction.  He is constantly creating chaos and confusion, and his only real weapon is his words.

It’s time for us to rise up and become what God intended from the very beginning.  One of the very first concepts of the Bible is that we have the power and authority of God to create, and yet an extremely small percentage of Christians practice this concept.  For many it even sounds foreign.  We cannot be like them.  We need to be people that determine things, plant our feet firmly on the Word of God, and know that what we have planned is already ours.  For us, circumstances, what we hear and see, and what happened in the past, have no effect because we believe that what we have said will happen.