Man and Woman in the Image of God

Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.” So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.
Genesis 1:26-27 ESV

Scripture never explains why God created mankind, but there are some clues we can discern from the Creation narrative.

• We were created in his image, so our purpose requires being like him in some important ways.
• Our first command was to “be fruitful and multiple and fill the earth and subdue it”, so our purpose requires a large enough number of us to fill the earth and be its master. (See Be Fruitful and Multiply.)
• Adam’s first task was to inventory all the animals so that he would know he was unique and needed a helper of his own kind.
• Eve’s first task was to assist Adam in his role as the keeper of God’s garden.

Humanity’s mission as God’s stewards over the earth requires us to act as his agents in the world, to be god-like to the plants and animals, much as Moses was to be like a god to Pharaoh (Exodus 7:1). To fill that role adequately, a man needs a wife, and through that relationship, together they act in another of God’s capacities: they create more people.

God created Adam first, and he was the only man to have been created directly in God’s image through divine action rather than through procreation. Even Yeshua, who is God in the flesh, had a body built cell-by-cell within the body of a woman. All others, including Eve, are created in God’s image by being created in Adam’s image.

Moses’ was deliberate and precise in his wording of Genesis 1:27. Consider this very literal translation:

God created the man in his image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.

The man in this verse is literally “the man”, ha adam in Hebrew, not “mankind”. While Scripture sometimes refers to mankind collectively as adam, only the first man is ever called Adam as an individual. Throughout Genesis 1 and 2, when Moses referred to the individual characters, he calls the man adam and the woman ishah. (The woman isn’t called “Eve” until the end of chapter 3.)

The Hebrew words used for male and female in v27 are also illustrative. Zakar, the Hebrew for male, comes from a root that means “remembered” or “memorial”, and what is an image but an imprinted memory of something else? Nekevah, the Hebrew for female, is derived from nekev, which means “to pierce”. It might be derived from the wearing of rings, especially in the context of betrothal, or it might be a sexual reference, as crude as that seems to our Western sensibilities. It’s a more functionally oriented word and describes more of who the woman is rather than who she resembles.

Adam was created from dust and the breath of God, while Eve was created from Adam. In 1 Corinthians 11:7-9 Paul pointed out that all mankind as a whole bears the image of God, but men more specifically are that image: “…he is the image and glory of God: but the woman is the glory of the man. For the man is not of the woman; but the woman of the man. Neither was the man created for the woman; but the woman for the man.”

Despite all this, the very first task God put to Adam was to learn how incomplete he was without Ishah.

God is neither male nor female, but he has something of both the masculine and the feminine within him; else how could Eve have been created from Adam, who was created in the image of God? When the first part of the substance of Eve was extracted from Adam, both feminine and masculine traits, which he had inherited from God, were passed on to Eve, but in a very different balance. Both men and women have masculine and feminine attributes, and in this they both bear God’s image, but each in different ways and degrees

For example, Adam is the law-giver and protector (inadequate as he might have been in both of those roles) and Eve is the mother and helper. But they are only able to be fully God’s agents in Creation when they are together, not as man and man or woman and woman, but Adam and Eve. They are complements, not Lego blocks that can be swapped out for each other at will.

By God’s original design, a man is unable to be a woman and a woman is unable to be a man. They can fill in for each other in a crippled, temporary sort of way, but one will never be complete without the other. If either disregards their role for any length of time, like any well-designed machine, malfunctions will begin to accumulate in every system: physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual. A person can compensate for that damage for a time through drugs, entertainment and distractions, but that won’t stop the degeneration. It only hides it, enabling a cascade of failures until the whole person is drowning in utter misery.

Hollywood, the legacy media, the National Education Association, and Washington, D.C. are all intent on convincing the world that the only loving thing to do is to encourage injured people to go on destroying their lives. I can’t help but believe they know the damage they are causing and that they actually hate all those they claim to love.

For the commandments, “You shall not commit adultery, You shall not murder, You shall not steal, You shall not covet,” and any other commandment, are summed up in this word: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”
Romans 13:9 ESV

True love isn’t making people feel good about this moment at the expense of the rest of their lives. It’s teaching them to keep God’s commandments, including those that concern sexuality and “gender roles”. If you love your neighbor, you must support the Biblical example of marriage as male and female joined together and oppose the world’s twisted counterfeit.