Devotional 24: Of Creation: A child stands before a mirror and studies the face staring back

The Confession Read

After God had made all other creatures, he created man, male and female, with reasonable and immortal souls, endued with knowledge, righteousness, and true holiness, after his own image; having the law of God written in their hearts, and power to fulfill it: and yet under a possibility of transgressing, being left to the liberty of their own will, which was subject unto change. Beside this law written in their hearts, they received a command, not to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil; which while they kept, they were happy in their communion with God, and had dominion over the creatures.

— Westminster Confession of Faith, Chapter 4, Section 2

Introduction

A child stands before a mirror and studies the face staring back. She does not yet have the words for the question forming inside her, but it will follow her all her days: What does it mean to be human? Is there something that sets me apart from the dog sleeping at my feet, from the oak tree swaying outside my window, from the stars that will appear tonight when the sky darkens? Or am I merely one more arrangement of matter, more complex perhaps, but fundamentally no different from the dust from which I came and to which I shall return? Every culture in every age has answered this question, and the answer given has shaped everything that followed — laws and liberties, medicine and marriage, the treatment of the unborn and the elderly, the worth of a human life and the grounds on which it may be taken. If a man is only an animal, then ethics is only preference and justice is only power. If a man is something more, then every human being carries a dignity that no tyrant may erase and no ideology may revoke. The second section of the Confession's chapter on creation brings us to ground more intimately relevant to our lives than any we have yet covered. Section 1 taught us that God created all things — the heavens and the earth, the visible and the invisible — out of nothing, in the space of six days, and that all of it was very good. That truth establishes our relationship to the cosmos: we are creatures in a created world, not accidents in a meaningless void. But Section 2 narrows the lens. It asks not "What is the world?" but "What is man?" And its answer is so rich, so carefully layered, that every clause repays the closest attention. The Divines open with a striking phrase: "After God had made all other creatures." Man was not the first thing God made. He was the last. The oceans were poured into their basins, the mountains thrust upward, the sun kindled and the moon set in its orbit, the fish and birds and beasts each brought forth after their kind — and only then, when the stage was fully set and the house fully furnished, did God create the creature for whom the whole drama had been prepared. Man is the capstone of creation, the final movement of a symphony that had been building through five days of divine creativity. Not because man is the largest or the strongest, but because man alone was made to bear the image of his Maker. Everything else was a frame for the portrait God was about to paint. And what a portrait it is.

Scripture Foundation

The doctrine of man's creation rests upon a foundation of revealed truth that no unaided philosophy could have discovered and that every philosophy, in its fallen condition, works to suppress. We turn to the Scriptures to hear what God has spoken concerning the creature He made in His own likeness. The charter text for the doctrine of the imago Dei stands near the beginning of the Bible, and its language is unlike anything that precedes it. For five days God had spoken and creation had obeyed — "Let there be light," and there was light; "Let the earth bring forth grass," and it was so. The pattern is majestic in its uniformity, the effortless sovereignty of the divine word calling reality into being. But on the sixth day the rhythm breaks. God does not say, "Let the earth bring forth man." He says, "Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth" (Genesis 1:26). The plural pronoun — "Let us" — hints at the counsel of the triune God, the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit deliberating together, as though the creation of man warranted a solemnity that the creation of stars and seas did not. And the stated purpose is without parallel: man is to be made "in our image, after our likeness." The Hebrew words are tselem and demuth. The first carries the sense of a carved statue or a sculpted representation, something hewn with intention to resemble its original. The second suggests resemblance or similitude — not identity but correspondence. Together they teach that man was made to mirror God, to reflect something of the divine character and nature in a creaturely form. The next verse sharpens the point and removes any ambiguity: "So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them" (Genesis 1:27). Three times in a single verse the word "created" — bara — is repeated, and three times the phrase "image of God" echoes like a hammer striking an anvil. The creation of man is not an afterthought. It is not an experiment. It is a deliberate, threefold act of divine artistry, and the result is a creature who, unlike the sun and the moon and the beasts of the field, bears the imprint of the Creator upon his very being. Male and female alike share this dignity. The woman is not a lesser image-bearer, an afterthought or a derivative. She is, equally with the man, made in the likeness of God — a truth that the patriarchal cultures of the ancient Near East would have found startling, and that every age since has struggled to live out. The narrative of Genesis 2 fills in the details that Genesis 1, with its cosmic sweep, passes over. There we learn that "the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul" (Genesis 2:7). The body of man is formed from the same stuff as the earth beneath his feet — he is dust, and to dust he shall return. But the breath of life comes directly from the mouth of God. There is an intimacy to this act that sets it apart from the remote, commanding word by which the rest of creation was summoned into being. God stoops. God breathes. God imparts something of Himself into the creature He has shaped from the clay. The soul of man is not a refinement of matter, an emergent property of sufficiently complex neural networks. It is a direct creation of God, breathed into the body, and for that reason it is immortal. The body will die and return to the earth, but the soul, once called into existence, will never cease to be. To the first man and woman God gave a command — a single, simple prohibition — and with it the entire moral structure of human existence was established. "And the LORD God commanded the man, saying, Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat: but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die" (Genesis 2:16-17). This command was not an arbitrary test of obedience. It was the constitution of the covenant between God and man, the terms under which Adam and his posterity would enjoy life and communion with their Creator. As long as they obeyed, they would live. If they disobeyed, they would die. The stakes could not have been higher, and the freedom to choose — genuine, uncoerced, responsible — was essential to the nature of the relationship God established. Paul, writing to the Romans, confirms that the moral law was not merely an external command given to Adam in the garden but an internal reality written upon the human heart. "For when the Gentiles, which have not the law, do by nature the things contained in the law, these, having not the law, are a law unto themselves: which show the work of the law written in their hearts, their conscience also bearing witness, and their thoughts the mean while accusing or else excusing one another" (Romans 2:14-15). The Greek word for conscience here is syneidesis — literally, a "knowing-with," a co-knowledge. The conscience is the inner witness that stands alongside every human being, testifying to the moral character of his actions. Even after the fall, even among those who have never held a copy of the Ten Commandments, the law of God echoes in the human heart. The echo is distorted now, muffled by sin and suppressed by rebellion, but it has not been entirely silenced. A pagan who has never heard the name of Moses still knows that murder is wrong, that theft is shameful, that promises ought to be kept. He may sear his conscience until it speaks more faintly, but he cannot make it stop speaking altogether. This inner law is a remnant — a scar, if you will — of the original righteousness with which man was created. The apostle Paul speaks of this original righteousness in terms that point both backward to what was lost and forward to what is restored in Christ. Writing to the Ephesians, he urges believers to "put on the new man, which after God is created in righteousness and true holiness" (Ephesians 4:24). The language is deliberate: the new man is "created" — the same verb used of Adam's creation — and the qualities with which he is endowed — righteousness and true holiness — are the very qualities that Adam possessed before the fall. Paul is not describing something unprecedented. He is describing a restoration, a renewal of what humanity once was and, by grace, may become again. To the Colossians he writes similarly: "And have put on the new man, which is renewed in knowledge after the image of him that created him" (Colossians 3:10). The image of God was defaced by sin but not destroyed; it is renewed in Christ — progressively in sanctification, perfectly in glory. The redemption accomplished by the second Adam is nothing less than the repair of what the first Adam ruined. One further text draws all these threads together and anchors them in the person of Christ Himself. Paul declares that Christ "is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of every creature" (Colossians 1:15). The Greek word is eikon — the same word the Septuagint uses for the image of God in Genesis. Christ is the perfect, exact, unblemished image of the Father, the one in whom the divine nature is fully and perfectly expressed in human form. Adam was made in the image of God; Christ is the image of God. Adam's image-bearing was derivative and losable; Christ's is essential and eternal. And the great hope of the gospel is that those who are united to Christ by faith are being conformed to the image of the Son — that the likeness lost in Adam is being restored in Christ, and that one day we shall be like Him, for we shall see Him as He is.

What the Divines Meant

The Westminster Divines lived in a century when the doctrine of man was under assault from every side, and they wrote Section 2 with the precision of men who knew exactly which errors they were excluding and exactly which truths they were guarding. First, they affirm that God created man "with reasonable and immortal souls." The adjective "reasonable" is directed against the materialism that reduces human beings to matter in motion. Man is not merely a body. He possesses a rational soul — a nous, to use the Greek term that the New Testament employs for the mind as the seat of understanding, judgment, and moral discernment. This soul is "immortal," a truth directed against the Socinians of the seventeenth century, who taught that the soul dies with the body and awaits a future resurrection before it lives again. The Divines, with the whole catholic tradition, insisted that the soul survives the death of the body and enters immediately into the presence of God — to conscious joy for the righteous, to conscious misery for the wicked. The soul's immortality is not an achievement but a gift, conferred in the act of creation and never revoked even by the fall. Second, the Divines describe the content of the divine image with three words: "knowledge, righteousness, and true holiness." These are not three separate things so much as three facets of a single, integrated perfection. The knowledge was not omniscience — Adam did not know everything — but it was a true, clear, unmixed knowledge of God, of himself, of the creation, and of his duties. The righteousness was a perfect conformity of the will to the law of God, an inward disposition that inclined toward the good without hesitation or resistance. The holiness was a purity of affection, a love for God that was wholehearted and undivided. This threefold endowment constituted what the older theologians called iustitia originalis — original righteousness — and it was not a supernatural gift added to an otherwise complete human nature, as though Adam could have been fully human without it. Original righteousness was natural to man in his unfallen state. To lose it was to become less than fully human, a creature maimed and distorted, still bearing the image but bearing it in ruins. The image of God, the Divines teach, includes the fact that man was created "having the law of God written in their hearts, and power to fulfill it." The law was not an alien code imposed from without. It expressed what Adam already was. To love God with all his heart and his neighbour as himself was not a struggle for unfallen man; it was as natural as breathing. And he had full, adequate power to obey every command God gave him. He was not wounded. He was not in need of a Saviour. He stood before God as a righteous creature, capable of rendering the perfect obedience his Creator required. And yet — and this "yet" is one of the most solemn words in the Confession — "yet under a possibility of transgressing, being left to the liberty of their own will, which was subject unto change." Here the Divines walk a narrow path between two errors. On one side stands the doctrine that Adam was created with a will that could only choose the good, incapable of sinning. But if that were the case, his obedience would not have been truly moral; it would have been mechanical, the obedience of a clock that keeps time not because it chooses to but because it cannot do otherwise. On the other side stands the error that Adam's will was neutral, poised in perfect equilibrium between good and evil, with no inclination either way. But the Confession has already taught that Adam was created in righteousness and true holiness, which means his will was positively inclined toward the good. He was not neutral. He was holy. But his holiness was mutable. It could be lost. And it was. The older theologians captured this with a pair of Latin distinctions: Adam was created posse non peccare — able not to sin. He was not created non posse peccare — unable to sin. That higher state, the inability to sin, belongs to the glorified saints in heaven and to the holy angels who kept their first estate. It is a gift of confirming grace, and it was not given to Adam in the garden. He was good, truly good, but his goodness was not yet confirmed. He could fall. And he did. The specific command not to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil was, in the Divines' understanding, a positive law — that is, a law that bound Adam not by its intrinsic moral content but solely by the authority of the Lawgiver. There is nothing inherently immoral about eating a particular fruit. The prohibition was a test, pure and simple: would Adam trust God's word and submit to God's authority, or would he seize the prerogative of determining good and evil for himself? The tree was a sacrament of the covenant, and eating from it while it was forbidden was an act of covenant treason. "Which while they kept," the Confession says, "they were happy in their communion with God, and had dominion over the creatures." Happiness, communion, and dominion — these were the blessings of the probationary state. And they hung upon a single point of obedience.

Theological Depth

The doctrine of man's original state has attracted the sustained attention of the leading theological minds in the Reformed tradition, and from their works we may draw out the deeper implications of what the Divines confessed. Calvin, in the opening book of his Institutes, insists that the knowledge of God and the knowledge of ourselves are inseparable. We cannot know ourselves rightly unless we know God, nor God rightly unless we know ourselves. When Calvin turns to the creation of man, he locates the image of God primarily in the soul. "The proper seat of the image," he writes, is in the mind and heart, in the understanding and the will. Adam's mind was a mirror in which the wisdom of God was reflected without distortion. His will was a flame that burned toward God without smoking. His affections were a river that flowed toward his Creator without eddies or back-currents. And all of this — knowledge, righteousness, holiness — was not a superadded gift but the native equipment of unfallen humanity. Watson, in his Body of Divinity, treats the image of God under two aspects: the natural and the moral. The natural image consists of the faculties of the soul — understanding, will, affections — which distinguish man from the beasts and remain, though weakened, even after the fall. The moral image consists of the rectitude of those faculties — knowledge, righteousness, holiness — which was lost in the fall and is restored in regeneration. Watson writes with characteristic vividness: "Adam's understanding was a lamp of knowledge; his will was a copy of God's will; his affections were all tuned to the praise of his Maker." The image of God in Adam was like a portrait perfectly drawn, every line in proportion, every colour in harmony. Sin did not tear the canvas; it smeared the paint. The outline remains, but the likeness has been defaced, and only the hand of the original Artist can restore it. Hodge, commenting on this section, draws attention to the phrase "the law of God written in their hearts." He notes that this inward law is not to be confused with the mere faculty of conscience as it now exists in fallen man. The conscience of fallen man is a mixture of truth and error, of divine imprint and cultural distortion. But the law written on Adam's heart was the pure, unadulterated moral law of God, known intuitively and loved spontaneously. Adam did not need to reason his way to the conclusion that he ought to worship God alone or that he ought to speak truthfully to his wife. He knew these things as directly as we know that fire is hot and that honey is sweet. The law was not a burden but a delight, not a restraint but a freedom, because his nature and the law were perfectly aligned. The Genevan theologian Turretin, whom we have met before, treats the state of Adam with his characteristic thoroughness. He distinguishes four states of man: the state of innocence before the fall, the state of corruption after the fall, the state of grace in regeneration, and the state of glory in heaven. In the state of innocence, Adam possessed the ability to sin (posse peccare) and the ability not to sin (posse non peccare). In the state of corruption, fallen man possesses only the ability to sin (non posse non peccare — he cannot not sin). In the state of grace, the believer regains the ability not to sin (posse non peccare), though the ability to sin remains (posse peccare) as long as he dwells in the body. In the state of glory, the confirmed saint possesses only the inability to sin (non posse peccare), and his blessedness is secured forever. This fourfold scheme is not an exercise in scholastic abstraction. It is a map of the spiritual life that helps the believer understand where he has come from, where he is, and where he is going. Owen, in his work on the Holy Spirit, develops the theme of the renewal of the image. He observes that the image of God in man was not a static possession but a dynamic capacity for communion with God — Adam walked with God in the garden in the cool of the day. When Owen speaks of the Spirit's work in renewing the image in the believer, he is describing the restoration of this capacity for communion. Regeneration plants a new principle of spiritual life in the soul. Sanctification nurtures it. Glorification brings it to perfection. The Christian life is the gradual recovery of what Adam enjoyed — and more, for what Christ secures is not merely the restoration of Adam's mutable goodness but a confirmed and indefectible holiness that can never be lost. Warfield, whose careful philological work on the vocabulary of the image enriched the Reformed understanding of the doctrine, observed that tselem and demuth in the Hebrew text of Genesis are not two separate things — one the image, the other the likeness — as some earlier theologians (following Irenaeus) had supposed. The two terms are used interchangeably and reinforce each other. Warfield also noted that when Paul calls Christ "the image of the invisible God," he is deliberately echoing the creation language of Genesis. Christ is what Adam was meant to be — the perfect image of God in human form. And the redemption Christ accomplishes is the restoration of fallen image-bearers into conformity with that perfect Image.

Puritan Application

The doctrine of man's original state is not a museum piece to be admired from a distance. It is a mirror in which we see ourselves as we were, as we are, and as we may yet become. Let us press it home to the heart. First, learn to see every human being as a shattered image-bearer, and treat them accordingly. The doctrine of the imago Dei is the foundation of human dignity. It is the reason that murder is not merely killing, that slander is not merely rudeness, that oppression is not merely inconvenience. When God established the death penalty for murder in the covenant with Noah, He grounded it in this very truth: "Whoso sheddeth man's blood, by man shall his blood be shed: for in the image of God made he man" (Genesis 9:6). The value of a human life is not a function of its usefulness to society, its intellectual capacity, its physical abilities, or its stage of development. It is a function of the image it bears — an image defaced but not destroyed, present in the unborn child and the elderly woman with dementia, in the brilliant scholar and the man with severe cognitive disabilities, in the citizen of your own nation and the refugee who speaks a language you do not know. The Christian who has grasped the doctrine of the imago Dei cannot be a racist, for the image of God is not distributed according to melanin. He cannot despise the poor, for the image of God is not measured by net worth. He cannot mock the disabled, for the image of God does not depend on bodily wholeness. Every human face that meets your gaze today bears the imprint of its Maker. Treat it as though you were handling a relic of inestimable worth — because you are. Second, let the original righteousness of Adam deepen your sense of what sin has cost you. We cannot understand the fall unless we understand the height from which we fell. Adam was not created as a neutral being, hovering between good and evil. He was created in positive holiness, with a will that inclined toward God as naturally as a plant inclines toward the sun. He knew God without error, loved God without reserve, and served God without reluctance. What we lost in Adam is not a minor privilege but the very health of our souls. Sin is not a surface blemish; it is a radical corruption that has twisted every faculty out of its created shape. Your mind, which was made to know God, now resists the truth about Him. Your will, which was made to choose the good, now gravitates toward evil as surely as a stone gravitates toward the earth. Your affections, which were made to delight in God, now find Him boring and the world fascinating. This is not a diagnosis that flatters, but it is a diagnosis that heals, because until you know the depth of the sickness you will never prize the Physician. The doctrine of original righteousness is the dark background against which the grace of the gospel shines most brightly. Third, listen to your conscience — but do not trust it absolutely. The law written on the heart is still there, a surviving remnant of Adam's original equipment. When your conscience accuses you after a lie, it is echoing the voice of God. When it approves you after an act of kindness, it is testifying that the law remains, however faintly. The pagan who has never read Romans knows that stealing is wrong; the atheist who scoffs at the Ten Commandments still feels the sting of shame when his secrets are exposed. This is common grace — a restraint upon evil, a witness to the reality of moral law, a preparation for the gospel. But the conscience, like every other faculty, has been corrupted by the fall. It can be seared until it feels nothing. It can be misinformed until it approves what God condemns and condemns what God approves. The man who has been taught from childhood that revenge is a duty will feel guilty for forgiving his enemy. The woman who has absorbed the sexual ethic of late modernity will feel no shame for what the Bible calls fornication. Conscience is a compass, but its needle has been bent. It needs to be recalibrated constantly by the Word of God. The question is not "Do I feel guilty?" but "What does God say?" Let Scripture be the judge of your conscience, not your conscience the judge of Scripture. Fourth, look to Christ for the restoration of what Adam lost. The image of God was defaced in the fall, but it is being renewed in Christ. Paul says that believers "have put on the new man, which is renewed in knowledge after the image of him that created him" (Colossians 3:10). The renewal is progressive. It begins at regeneration, when the Spirit plants a new principle of life in the dead soul and the believer, for the first time since Eden, begins to know God truly, to love righteousness sincerely, and to pursue holiness genuinely. It continues through sanctification, as the Spirit, by the Word and by providence, gradually conforms the believer to the likeness of Christ — a process that is often slow, often painful, often imperceptible to the one undergoing it, but real and certain. And it will be completed at glorification, when the believer, freed from the presence of sin, will see Christ face to face and will be made like Him — not a restored Adam, but something better: a glorified saint, confirmed in righteousness, incapable of falling, eternally secure in the love of God. This is the hope of the gospel. You were made in the image of God. You marred that image beyond any power of yours to repair. Christ has undertaken to restore it, and He will not fail. Fifth, wield your dominion as a steward, not a tyrant. The Confession notes that Adam and Eve, while they kept the command, "had dominion over the creatures." Dominion is a gift and a responsibility, not a license for exploitation. Adam was placed in the garden to "dress it and to keep it" (Genesis 2:15) — the verbs are those of cultivation and protection. He was a gardener, not a plunderer; a steward, not an owner. The earth belongs to the Lord and the fullness thereof; we are tenants entrusted with its care. This shapes how we treat animals, how we use natural resources, how we think about environmental stewardship, and how we understand our work. The man who clears a forest without thought for what comes after, who fouls a river because it is cheaper than treating his waste, who treats animals with casual cruelty because they are merely economic units — this man has forgotten that his dominion is delegated, not absolute, and that the Owner will one day demand an accounting. But neither should we fall into the opposite error, which treats the creation as more sacred than the image-bearers who were given charge over it. The earth was made for man, not man for the earth, and the highest use of creation is to serve the purposes of God for His image-bearing creatures — to provide for their needs, to display His glory, and to furnish the stage on which the drama of redemption is played out. Sixth, let the mutability of Adam's will drive you to Christ for perseverance. Adam was created holy, with a will that truly loved God and truly desired the good. But his will was "subject unto change." He could fall, and he did. His fall is a standing warning to every creature who trusts in his own strength. If unfallen Adam, with a will perfectly inclined toward God, could fall, what hope has any fallen son of Adam of standing in his own power? None. The only security for any soul is union with Christ. In Him, the will is not merely restored to Adam's mutable state but elevated to something higher: the state of the confirmed saints, who can no longer fall because they are kept by the power of God through faith unto salvation. Do not presume upon your own steadfastness. The man who thinks he stands should take heed lest he fall. Pray daily for the grace of perseverance. Lean not upon your own resolutions, however sincere. Cast yourself upon the One who is able to keep you from falling and to present you faultless before the presence of His glory with exceeding joy.

Prayer

O Lord our Creator, who didst fashion man from the dust of the ground and breathe into his nostrils the breath of life, we stand in awe before the dignity Thou didst bestow upon our first parents. Thou didst make them in Thine own image, after Thy likeness — endued with knowledge, righteousness, and true holiness. Thou didst write Thy law upon their hearts, and they loved it. Thou didst give them dominion over the works of Thy hands, and they exercised it in glad obedience. Thou didst walk with them in the garden, and they were happy in their communion with Thee. We confess with sorrow that we have not kept what they cast away. The image we were made to bear has been defaced by our sin. The knowledge we were given to possess has been darkened by our rebellion. The righteousness with which we were clothed has been stripped from us by our transgression. The holiness we were made to love has become strange to our affections. We are fallen sons and daughters of fallen Adam, and in our flesh dwelleth no good thing. But blessed be Thy name, O God, for Thou hast not left us in our ruin. Where the first Adam failed, the second Adam has prevailed. The image we marred, Christ is restoring. In Him we see what we were meant to be. In Him we receive what we could never earn. By Thy Spirit, renew us day by day in knowledge after the image of Him who created us. Conform us to the likeness of Thy Son, until that day when we shall see Him as He is and shall be made like Him — no longer able to fall, no longer subject to change, confirmed in righteousness and holiness forever. Hasten that day, we pray. Even so, come, Lord Jesus. Amen.