In the first talk we stepped back as far as we possibly could and asked the biggest question of all: whose world is it? And the answer was that the world belongs to God. He created it out of nothing, and because he made it, he owns it. Everything is from him, everything is through him, and everything is for him. That is the foundation for everything else in this series.
Now I want to move from the Creator to the creature. We are part of God’s creation, but the Bible teaches that we are the greatest part of it — the climax of the whole creation week. There is something genuinely special about human beings. And to understand our work, our wealth, and our technology — including a technology like Bitcoin — we have to understand what it means that God made us in his own image.
Made in the image of God
The decisive text comes at the end of the creation account, when God turns to make humanity:
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. And God blessed them. And God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.”
Genesis 1:26–28
There is a great deal going on here. Humanity as a whole — male and female, together in all our relationships — is God’s image bearer. There is much to unpack about what that means, but the basic idea is this: we resemble God, we reflect God, we represent God. We are pictures of God placed within his creation. It does not mean that we are God, and it does not mean that we are little gods. It means that, insofar as a creature possibly can, we reflect the Creator.
Two senses of the image
The Bible actually speaks of the image of God in two senses, and keeping them distinct clears up a great deal of confusion. There is a narrow sense of bearing God’s image, and there is a broad sense.
In the narrow sense, the image of God is something that human sin causes us to lose. To bear God’s image in this sense means that we were made to know him, that we did know him, and that we were righteous and holy. This is exactly what is lost when humanity rebels against God in Genesis 3. And it is restored only in Christ. When a person is regenerated — when, in the Bible’s language, they are born again and become a Christian — they regain the image of God in this narrow sense: this knowledge, this holiness, this righteousness. Paul describes the Christian life precisely this way:
… and have put on the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge after the image of its creator.
Colossians 3:10
And he says something very similar elsewhere:
… and to put on the new self, created after the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness.
Ephesians 4:24
This renewal has an end in view, and that end is Christ himself, who is the ultimate image of God:
For those whom he foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son, in order that he might be the firstborn among many brothers.
Romans 8:29
So that is the narrow sense — the image we lose when we rebel against God, and which is restored in redemption as we grow more and more like Christ.
But there is also a broad sense in which we are made in God’s image, and in this sense even those living in rebellion against God, even those who have never been saved, continue to retain his image. They do not have the righteousness and knowledge and holiness we were originally made with. But they still resemble and represent God. It means we have a spirit, as God is spirit. We have a will. We are personal, as God is personal. We have affections, as God does, and reason and rationality, as God does. Even our bodies are part of it: God is not bodily — he has no body and is not physical — and yet just as God works in and through his whole creation, so we, in and through our bodies, work in and through the physical world. And we bear God’s image in that we are relational. As male and female we live in relationship, and God too is relational: Father, Son, and Spirit in eternal relationship within himself.
The creation mandate
There is one more part of this broad sense that I especially want to focus on, and it is that original task God gave to Adam and Eve. Theologians call it the dominion mandate, or the creation mandate, or the cultural mandate. It is God saying to the first humans: be fruitful and multiply, fill the earth, take dominion over all the animals and every creature; increase upon the earth, go out, and work.
What is striking is that this mandate is given again after the fall. We have creation in Genesis 1 and 2, then humanity’s rebellion in Genesis 3 — and then, in Genesis 9, after the flood, God starts over with Noah and his family. This is still a world marked by sin. Noah and his sons and their wives still need God’s redemption, even though they are now part of God’s people. And yet, in language almost identical to what he first spoke to Adam and Eve, God blesses Noah as he comes off the ark and renews the very same charge:
And God blessed Noah and his sons and said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth.” … And you, be fruitful and multiply, increase greatly on the earth and multiply in it.
Genesis 9:1, 7
Does that sound familiar? It should. And it tells us something important: God’s image is not lost with sin, because this creation mandate was not lost with sin. Regardless of whether or not people know who Christ is, regardless of whether they have given up their rebellion against God, in this broad sense human beings still bear God’s image. They are still carrying out this task of spreading throughout the world and exercising dominion and stewardship over it. They are supposed to be doing it for God’s glory. And even when they do it for their own glory instead, there is a sense in which they are still carrying out God’s work in the world — even if they never recognize whose work it is.
Saved for good works
We have already seen that in the narrow sense the image of God is redeemed and restored in Christ — we grow in knowledge and righteousness and holiness. But the broad sense, the creation-mandate sense, is also touched by redemption. It was not lost in the fall, but it was broken and twisted by sin, and in Christ it gets healed and reworked. We hear this in one of the most famous passages in all of Paul:
For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast. For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them.
Ephesians 2:8–10
The wonderful truth in verses 8 and 9 is that God does not rescue us or redeem us because of anything we do to earn his love — only by his grace. But verse 10 keeps us from concluding that works and obedience therefore have nothing to do with the Christian life. The word translated “workmanship” is the Greek poiema — a thing that someone has made. It could be used of a piece of pottery, or even of a poem. We are God’s workmanship, the result of what he has produced — and he produced us “for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them.”
This shows us that when someone comes to Christ, God does not want them to disappear from the world. He does not want us to withdraw from culture, from technology, from the work that makes society function, from families and children and houses and jobs. All of these are part of the good works God prepared beforehand for his people. He does not save us and then say, “Now just sit around and wait until you die so you can go to heaven.” He wants us out working for him — in our jobs, in society, in technology, in culture. In Christ, the broken creation mandate is healed, and we are given new motivation and new power to do these good works throughout the world.
A task that takes centuries
Here again I want to lean on Herman Bavinck, the Dutch theologian I’ve been relying on throughout this series. In his book The Wonderful Works of God he draws out what the doctrine of the image of God actually requires of us:
All this teaches us very plainly that man was not created for idleness but for work…. Man had to go straight out into the whole wide world and to subdue it to the power of God’s word and will…. He received a rich, widely ramified task on earth, an assignment which it would cost him centuries of effort to accomplish. He was pointed to a goal incalculably far away, which he had to take in view and to pursue to the end.
Herman Bavinck, The Wonderful Works of God
See what Bavinck is saying. When God made Adam and Eve — even knowing that humanity would rebel against him — he gave them a task that would take many, many centuries to carry out, a task that stretches across the whole earth. It was never meant for Adam and Eve alone. They were to have children, and children after them, in order to do this work. The image of God is not a one-and-done affair, something you finish in a single lifetime. Taking dominion over the whole earth is unfolded across the entire story of humanity — and, in redemption, across the entire story of the church, as God gathers a people for himself and sends them out over the whole world, and even beyond. Bavinck continues:
The image of God, so to speak, had to be spread to the ends of the earth, and to be impressed on all the works of man’s hands. Man had to cultivate the earth so that it might more and more become a revelation of God’s attributes.
Herman Bavinck, The Wonderful Works of God
So humanity is given this work — to take more and more of the earth, more and more of our wealth, more and more of our technology, and bring it all into greater conformity with who God is. Remember, all our work, like all of creation, is meant to point back to God. To be made in his image (this is part of what it means, though not the whole of it) is to exercise dominion so that things more and more reflect who he is.
Bitcoin and the unfinished task
This is why we should never be content to say, “Well, I made a pretty good table once, so we’ll just stick with this table and never make tables any better.” We should never settle for never improving our architecture, never improving our art. Bavinck is pointing out that the task of bearing God’s image is progressive. It goes on and on. We are always to be looking for ways to bring things more and more into conformity with who God is.
And that extends to financial and monetary technologies like Bitcoin. We will talk much more about this later, but I’ll say it plainly here: something like Bitcoin, I believe, reflects God’s own attributes — better, in fact, than any other form of money human beings have ever devised. So we should be looking for things like Bitcoin that increasingly reflect who God is and how he operates in his world. We should not be afraid of new things, or of things that are different from what they used to be. We should be looking for ways to bring our wealth and our technology more and more into conformity with the character of God. This is part of what it means to be made in his image. This is what we are here for: to bring the world more and more into reflection of who God is.
We have seen now that God owns the world, and that he has made us in his image to fill it, to cultivate it, and to take dominion over it for his glory. Next time we will follow that thread into the ordinary places where God actually does his work — and discover that he runs his world through means, working through farmers and bakers and, as we’ll see, even through Bitcoin.