The Image of God

by Ken Hamrick

Of all the creatures. Man alone is a spiritual being. Man and all other creatures have bodies, but only man has a spirit. It is significant that God, inspiring His inerrant, written word, chose to call the immaterial nature in man a spirit, which is the same word He chose to describe His own nature –John 4:24, “God is Spirit, and they that worship Him must worship Him in spirit and in truth.” Every functional similarity of God in man that has been labeled as the image of God, such as man’s moral nature, his relationality, his dominion over the other creatures, and his reason and rationality, his personhood, etc., are only possible because man is a spiritual being. Without his own spirit, man could function in none of these ways. Because man is a spiritual being, he is a person. Only spiritual beings are persons. Animals without spirits can never be persons and men can never lose their personhood. Men are innately moral beings because they are spiritual beings.

There is another aspect of the image of God to be considered. There is a real sense in which what we gain in Christ we lost in Adam. We are spiritually resurrected—brought to life spiritually—when we are saved by Christ. Prior to salvation, we were spiritually dead—alienated from God and without the Spirit of God inside us. God sends the Spirit of His Son into our hearts, crying, ‘Abba! Father!’ I suggest that Adam was created not only as a spiritual being, but also in spiritual union with the Holy Spirit inside him. As he chose to sin, the Holy Spirit left him and he spiritually died. Spiritual death is disunion with the Spirit of God who is the only Source of spiritual life.

I further suggest that humans were designed and created to be vessels of the Holy Spirit, in union and communion with God in this way, and that such is definitional of human nature as intended by our Creator. In other words, part of what it means to be a man or a human being is having the Holy Spirit within you, so that in our fallen state, we are less human than we were designed to be. The Holy Spirit’s indwelling is not an addition, but it was part of God’s created intention for humanity… and that is one more aspect of what it means to be created in God’s image. Why is it that all men hunger for God so much that if they stubbornly refuse to worship Him, they are driven to worship other things? Sinners hunger for God because men are designed to be in communion with God who is in them; but since God is no longer within them, that hunger defines their lives.

This is one area where Realism can illuminate our understanding. It is not just a spiritual hunger in general, but a hunger for God—and not for a God with whom we have had no previous relationship. It is not a hunger for what we do not know, but a hunger for what we once had… when we were still in Adam. God is not new to us, even when we are first confronted with Him in our individual life. Rather, we recognize His voice as the voice of the Father from whom we came. This hunger is the manifestation of a spiritual memory of our life-giving union with the Holy Spirit when we were in Adam and prior to the fall. Just as we all participated in Adam’s sin, we also participated in Adam’s relationship with God prior to his sin.

When we come to God through faith in Christ, we are not really going to some strange new place; rather, we’re going home. As the hymn says, “Come home, come home, Ye who are weary come home; Earnestly, tenderly Jesus is calling, Calling, ‘O sinner come home.’” Those of us who have come home know it to be exactly that. We all identify with the Prodigal Son in his sin, his repentance, and his return to his father. But when did we as prodigals leave the Father, God? When did we set out on our own and end up in a far country, away from the Father’s presence? Is Jesus teaching in this parable that we all start out life in a good relationship with God and become prodigals at some later point? No; rather He is teaching that each of us rebelled and left the Father while we were in Adam—that each one of us can point to that as the culpable starting point of our own prodigal journey. As each prodigal son comes home, the Father embraces that one as if he were the very same son who rebelled in Eden.