The Image of God but Not God

Excerpt from Polarities of Human Existence in Biblical Perspective (Revised Edition)
by Frank Stagg

Mankind’s first blunder was in confusing being in the image of God with being God. Adam and Eve were not content to be like God; they sought to be God. They saw God as a limit and as a threat. They saw God as denying their fulfillment by restricting their existence, holding back from them fruit which they wanted.

In a sense, Genesis 3 is telling us that mankind was not content with the uniqueness of his or her assigned position, in the image of God with dominion over all creation. They wanted more. They tried to set God aside and replace him with themselves. To put it colloquially, they “went for broke.” As Principal John Baillie put it in a classroom lecture at New College, Edinburgh: “Man tried to be the whole cheese.” Why be “a little less than God” if one could be one’s own God, answering to no authority above his or her own will? A faulty self-love, an ill-advised self-trust, and a woeful misunderstanding of their own identity and destiny came to tragic expression in their self-assertion against God. Refusing to find their true existence under God, they sought it in independence of God. Their idolatry was that they tried to be God. What is known as the fall of man, as Leonard Verduin puts it, “was basically a venture into autonomy,” and the venture proved to be counterproductive, yielding bondage and not freedom, ruin and not fulfillment.

Paul in his own way tells the same story as is found in Genesis (cf. Rom 1:18-32). Both accounts tell of mankind’s self-destruction in the very attempt at self-salvation. The difference is that Genesis 3 puts it in the form of a story that a child can understand unless confused by the learned theologizing of an adult mind that has lost its childhood imagination, whereas Paul writes more prosaically in the essay style of a professor. The parallels are striking; in form they differ, but in analysis of the human predicament they are together.

Frank Stagg is the author of "Polarities of Human Existence", published by Smyth & Helwys Publishing. To order, go to the online bookpage or call 1-800-747-3016.