Quotations from Scripture and Other Writings on In the Image of God
Old Testament Quotes:
And God said: Let us make mankind in our image/b’tsalmeinu, as our likeness/kid’muteinu. And they will have dominion over [the animals]…․And God created humankind in His image /b’tsalmo, in God’s image/tselem 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 land and occupy it, and have dominion over the sea’s fish and the skies’ bird and every animal crawling over the land.
This is the book of Adam’s generations: On the day God created Mankind, in God’s likeness/d’mut He created him; male and female He created them, and He blessed them, and called their name Adam in the day of their being created. And Adam lived a hundred and thirty years and bore in his likeness/bid’muto like his image/k’tsalmo and called his name Seth.
One who spills the blood of man, by man his blood will be spilled, for in God’s image/tselem He made man.
To whom then will ye liken God? Or what likeness will ye compare unto him?
Apocrypha/Deuterocanonical Quotes:
for God created us for incorruption, and made us in the image of his own eternity/nature, but through the devil’s envy death entered the world, and those who belong to his company experience it.
The LORD created human beings out of earth, and makes them return to it again. He gave them a fixed number of days, but granted them authority over everything on the earth. He endowed them with strength like his own, and made them in his own image.
New Testament Quotes:
God, having in the past spoken to the fathers through the prophets at many times and in various ways, (2) has at the end of these days spoken to us by his Son, whom he appointed heir of all things, through whom also he made the worlds. (3) His Son is the radiance of his glory, the very image of his substance.
…and translated us into the Kingdom of the Son of his love; 14 in whom we have our redemption, the forgiveness of our sins; 15 who is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation.
For a man indeed ought not to cover his head, forasmuch as he is the image and glory of God: but the woman is the glory of the man.
…that the light of the Gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God, should not dawn on them. 5 For we don’t preach ourselves, but Christ Jesus as Lord, and ourselves as your servants for Jesus’ sake; 6 seeing it is God who said, “Light will shine out of darkness,” who has shone in our hearts, to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.
For what the law could not do, in that it was weak through the flesh, God sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh, and for sin, condemned sin in the flesh.
But made himself of no reputation, and took upon him the form of a servant, and was made in the likeness of men.
With it [the tongue] we bless the LORD and Father, and with it we curse those who are made in the likeness of God.
Non-scripture Quotes on “In the Image of God”
Being made in the image of God, man was the crown of creation.
For Christians, who believe they are created in the image of God, it is the Godhead, diversity in unity and the three-in-oneness of God, which we and all creation reflect.
In order to be an image of God, the spirit must turn to what is eternal, hold it in spirit, keep it in memory, and by loving it, embrace it in the will.
This perfection is the restoration of man to the state of holiness from which he fell, by creating him anew in Christ Jesus, and restoring to him that image and likeness of God which he has lost.
In Christ the original image of God is restored, by faith in this world, and by sight in the world to come.
Thank the Lord for using each person as a tool in your life to deepen your insight into His grace and conforming you to the image of His Son.
What we have in us of the image of God is the love of truth and justice.
It is the creative potential itself in human beings that is the image of God.
If God be God and man a creature made in image of the divine intelligence, his noblest function is the search for truth.
The workings of the human heart are the profoundest mystery of the universe. One moment they make us despair of our kind, and the next we see in them the reflection of the divine image.
Beauty itself is but the sensible image of the Infinite.
Man is an exception, whatever else he is. If he is not the image of God, then he is a disease of the dust. If it is not true that a divine being fell, then we can only say that one of the animals went entirely off its head.
Men always talk about the most important things to perfect strangers. In the perfect stranger we perceive man himself; the image of a God is not disguised by resemblances to an uncle or doubts of wisdom of a mustache.
True revolutionaries are like God – they create the world in their own image. Our awesome responsibility to ourselves, to our children, and to the future is to create ourselves in the image of goodness, because the future depends on the nobility of our imaginings.
Hell is an outrage on humanity. When you tell me that your deity made you in his image, I reply that he must have been very ugly.
If God created us in his own image, we have more than reciprocated.
God made man in his own image, and man returned the favor.
God created man in His own image, says the Bible; philosophers reverse the process: they create God in theirs.
Men create gods after their own image, not only with regard to their form but with regard to their mode of life.
Where likeness was greatest, mistake was least possible. Perhaps this is always so. A clever waxwork can be made so like a man that for a moment it deceives us; the great portrait which is far more deeply like him does not. Plaster images of the Holy One may before now have drawn to themselves the adoration they were meant to arouse for the reality. But here, where his living image, like him within and without, made by his own bare hands out of the depth of divine artistry, his masterpiece of self portraiture coming forth from his workshop to delight all worlds, walked and spoke, it could never be taken for more than an image. Nay, the very beauty of it lay in the certainty that it was a copy, like and not the same, a rhyme, an exquisite reverberation of untreated music prolonged in a created medium.
We are made in the image or likeness of God, and are unique from the rest of creation and from animals in that we have both a body and a soul/spirit. While God is a spirit and does not have a body, we resemble God by having a soul/spirit. We also reflect some of his characteristics in being mental, moral and relational beings. Mentally, we are both relational and volitional, able to reason and to choose. Morally, Adam was created in pure righteousness, reflecting God’s holiness, and we have a conscience able to discern right from wrong. Socially, we were designed to live in community with others, reflecting how God the Father, Son and Spirit live in interdependent community, and are made to love and be loved, as God embodies love.”
With the advent of sin, humanity has twisted this appropriate characteristic of dominion into domination of other people and of creation itself. Our world-wide environmental crisis and our deep hostilities to other people are distortions of what God intended. But the appropriate corrective to sinful domination is not irresponsibility but a loving stewardship of what God has generously given to us. We have been given the capacity to be accountable and to do things that are good. The Imago Dei calls us to that understanding and commitment.
…only for them [the human creatures], not for any of the animals, is sexuality designated as male and female. Moreover, this specific reference pertains not to procreation but to the image of God. Procreation is shared by humankind with the animal world (Gen 1:22, 28); sexuality is not.
The metaphorical language of Genesis 1:27 preserves with exceeding care the otherness of God. … God is neither male nor female, nor a combination of the two. And yet, detecting divine transcendence in human reality requires human clues. Unique among them, according to our poem [Genesis 1:27], is sexuality. God creates, in the image of God, male and female. To describe male and female, then, is to perceive the image of God; to perceive the image of God is to glimpse the transcendence of God.
One’s own image
You can safely assume that you’ve created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.
The beginning of love is to let those we love be perfectly themselves, and not to twist them to fit our own image. Otherwise we love only the reflection of ourselves we find in them.
Every man builds his world in his own image. He has the power to choose, but no power to escape the necessity of choice.
I think computer viruses should count as life. I think it says something about human nature that the only form of life we have created so far is purely destructive. We’ve created life in our own image.
