Return to Me

Then God said, “Let us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness; . . . Genesis 1:26 NASB

Image – We have probably explored this verse twenty times (plus a full chapter in Guardian Angel).  That might incline you to think we have plumbed its depths.  Ah, the illusion of information.  We haven’t even come close, I’m afraid.  So let’s take another look at something resident here that might not be obvious at first glance.  Let’s see how the image of God is related to teshuvah, the word for repentance.

“The concept of teshuvah is generally understood to mean a returning to God.  Teshuvah then involves not humiliation but reaffirmation of the self in God’s image, after God’s likeness.”[1]  Neusner’s remark should immediately cause us to reconsider our common notions about God’s image.  His statement implies that sin removes us from the full image of God.  Sin makes us less than human.  And in Hebrew thought, all  biological entities called homo sapiens have sinned.  With one exception, all of us are in some state of less-than-human.  Doing what I want instead of doing what God wants reduces the image of God in me, and consequently, reduces my humanity.  Of course, the world doesn’t present being human in this way.  The world suggests that being human is an ontological fact of my existence.  I am human because I am homo sapien.  But the Bible has a different point of view.  Man was formed human because Man was invited to participate in the divine image – an image that is the dynamic interplay of actions that reflect God.  Sin does not reflect God.  It reflects rebellion against God.  Therefore, sin is the antithesis of being human.  To repent, to return to the image of God, is to recapture my own humanity because unless I have an open, cooperative, obedient relationship with Him, I do not share His image.

Sin is like cubic zirconium.  It might look like a diamond, but other than similar visual properties (not identical ones, by the way, as any woman can tell you), it has none of the essential qualities that make it a diamond.  We might look like human beings, but without the qualities of god-like action, we are no different than a CZ (and worth a lot less than the real thing too).  We can learn a lot about the image of God in Man by regarding the opposite – the dominance of the yetzer ha’ra, the anti-image.

This helps us redefine evangelism.  Evangelism is not first and foremost the effort to insure someone gets to heaven.  Evangelism is about recovering my lost humanity.  Evangelism is the effort to help another become human again.  Heaven will hardly matter if I arrive as an animal.

We often think of repentance as the process whereby I give up some action in order to conform my behavior to God’s code of conduct.  This regulatory view of repentance is a bastardization of the truth.  We were originally designed as fully human, the perfect nexus between heaven and earth, endowed with the enormous task and appropriate authority to complete the ordering of the universe.  Disobedience has disrupted this awesome design.  In its wake, we have settled for a corrupted version of the original, thinking that the task before us is to manage our lives for the greatest gain.  We have abdicated the throne of “human” in order to function as something akin to the beasts, and we have settled for this sub-par existence.  Only occasionally do we realize that life at this level is finally unsatisfying, pointless and vaporous (read Ecclesiastes).  Then we might discover that teshuvah is not a return to rules.  It is a return to life on human terms.  Oh, and by the way, all of this makes you wonder how we can expect to be fully human when we abandon a good number of the human-life instructions God gave after the first time we exited the building.

Topical Index:  teshuvah, repentance, image, tselem, Genesis 1:26