Imago Deo aka Eikon aka Image of God

I remember when Steven Spielberg’s AI came out a several years ago. It pretty much tanked at the box office, but it was a bold effort to explore a fascination that mankind has had for years; can man recreate himself? Not procreate, but fabricate. Can he replicate emotion, thought and soul? If this is possible then the whole issue of humanity is shaken. At least that has been the controversy.

But I think man’s attempts at self genesis go deeper than that. Human efforts at trying to create artificial intelligence/life are not an expression of his humanity, but of his divinity, or at least the divinity in him.

Genesis states that man was created in the image of God. That means that we are the reflection of the almighty. Everything about us exudes our origins. And that reflection is not just in God followers, but all of mankind is Imago Deo, the image of God. In the Greek, it’s Eikon, where we get our word icon. From our physical appearance to our free will, we look like our creator. The problem is that we have lost the resemblance in the reflection.

Romans tells us that “All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” We tend to look at this as an external failure to reach the standards of Heaven, but I think it’s more than that. This is an internal falling short. We have lost the glory within; the glory of God reflected as it was meant to be reflected in His Eikons.

The more we loose the true image, the more we try ways to imitate it. Those attempts are what the Bible calls sin. Why is sin so heinous to God? Not because it is a violation of the law. Because when we sin, act contrary to our true selves, we abuse our relationship to God and we make the image of God a vessel of corruption.

The Iconoclast

Satan would love nothing more than to shatter the image of God in us. In the early 700’s, Byzentine emperor Leo III began destroying religious images in opposition to the Catholic church. Hoping to eliminate idolatry, he laid some of the seeds that were carried on through the protestant reformation. Mankind’s attempts at image making were just evidence of his lack of image bearing. And though the worship of graven icons is wrong, I think our eradication of so much symbol has proliferated our decline of divine expression and our further failure to identify the image of God in us.

Having lost the status as image bearers, we try to regain our sense of superiority by pointing out the failures of humanity. But, our job is not to call out the imperfections in society. Our job is to call out the image of God in those around us. Better yet, to restore the infusion of God into the image of God.

Jesus is the true reflection of the image of God in man. Restoration comes when we receive Christ and the image of God in us is returned. Salvation is not being saved from sin. It‘s being restored to our original condition.

Eternity in their hearts.

In Romans 1 Paul talks about man being aware of God through creation. We assume that means that he can see it around him. I think it’s not about what is around him, but what is in him. We do not have a God shaped vacuum inside us needing to be filled; we are the God shaped vacuum waiting to be indwelled. Man is the image of God that lacks the essence of God.

When people find wholeness through life in Christ, what was an imperfect, incomplete and indifferent existence becomes the epitome of creation; the man-God connection. When people live life indwelled by God then creations finds its meaning, people find their purpose and God finds His fulfillment. And when that happens, you can forget AI. What man will be capable of is nothing less than divine and yet so much more than the image of God, he will be the very expression of God on Earth.