Made in His Image

If we concede Mosaic authority, Moses wrote this as an ancient Near Eastern man living in an ancient Near Eastern culture to ancient Near Eastern peoples. If we want to really fully understand what it is that he's communicating, we've got to understand it not from our perspective, but from theirs. And that becomes a challenge. And I want us to look at it a little bit differently this morning. I want us to try to look at it through the lens of an ancient Near Eastern culture.

So I'm going to ask you to imagine with me for a moment that we're living in the ancient Near East, that we're a part of that culture, and in that culture there's just some things that everybody knows. Imagine there's a king in that culture and the king has a dream, and in that dream the king hears from a god that that king is to build that god a temple. So the king does what kings do in that culture. He organizes, he recruits, he calls his craftsmen, his architects, his laborers and they begin to build. They begin to build a temple.

Now in the ancient Near East, temples are microcosms of the cosmos. Every temple is a reflection of the earth. A temple, the outer courts represent the earth. The inner courts represent the heavens and the innermost room, the holy of holies as it were, is the place where the heavens and the earth meet. That's where the god would dwell.

When the temple's finished, it's not done because a temple without an image is just an empty room. So the king calls artisans, not just random craftsmen, but the best of the best of the best. And he commissions them to make an image, an idol. This is not a casual project. This is the most sacred work in the ancient world.

The artisans don't just pick up their tools and start carving. They fast. They pray. They perform purification rituals because what they're about to make is not just art. It's a body, a vessel, a dwelling place for the divine. So they begin to work the wood carefully, shaping for days, weeks, months, even years. They overlay it with gold. They set the eyes with the most precious stones they can find. And when it's finished, it looks like the god. It bears the god's form. It carries the god's likeness. But it's still not ready. There's one more step.

The craftsman summons the king and the priests and they gather around the idol. And the craftsmen will lay their hands upon the idol and publicly declare, "I did not make this." I'm not making this up. We have this from archaeology and history. These are the rituals that took place in Egypt and Mesopotamia and Babylonian cultures. The craftsman who has just spent weeks if not months or years building and making this idol will lay their hands on the idol and publicly declare, "I did not make this." And then they will cut off their hands, usually just symbolically.

But you see what's going on here? They're making this very public statement. My hands did not make this. See that? That this image did not originate with man. It came from the god. The god commissioned it. The god inhabits it. The god's responsible for it. The craftsman is just the instrument.

Now the craftsman is done and the priest step in and what they do is extraordinary. They perform a ritual that scholars call the “mouthwashing” or “mouth opening” ceremony. They wash the statue. They anoint it. They touch its mouth with special instruments symbolically opening it to speak, to breathe, to receive. And as they do, they would recite incantations. They will speak the name of the God over the image, transferring it into the statue.

Here's the theological claim that's being made in the moment. The God is now present in the image. The image is no longer just wood and gold. It's a living extension of the deity. It bears his name. It carries his nature. It makes him visible and accessible in the world. And then with great ceremony, music, procession, the smell of incense filling the air, the image is carried into the temple into the innermost room. And it's placed on a throne, elevated, enthroned.

From that day forward, the priest, the king, the people serve it. They bring it food. They clothe it. They sing to it. They bow before it every single day. Because the logic of the ancient world was this. The god needs a body in this world. The god needs a representative. The god needs something that looks like him, that carries his nature, that makes him present and visible to the people. That was common standard practice in the ancient Near Eastern world.

See, with all of that in mind, look at Genesis 1 again.

26 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."

Do you hear it a little bit differently now? Because when Moses writes these words and when the ancient Israelites hear them, they're not reading a philosophical statement about human dignity. They're reading a polemic against the cultural worldview they inhabit. They know exactly what an image is. They're surrounded by them. They know this understanding that man makes these bodies for gods and then the gods inhabit them and bring their nature and authority to bear.

And God is saying through Moses in Genesis chapter 1, that's not actually the way it works. It's actually a perversion and inversion of the way it works. God is saying, "You are my image. You are the living statue I've placed in my temple. You bear my name, my nature, my presence. You are how I show up in this world. You are how I made visible to this creation."

Notice God doesn't craft. He doesn't order a commission on an artisan. God shapes the man. God breathes into the man. God speaks and it is so. What he speaks into existence is not wood and gold. It's flesh and breath. It's me. It's you.

This is what it means to be made in the image of God. Not just that you have value, which you do. Not just that you have dignity, which you do. It means that you were made not just to be an image noun but to image verb. You were made to be an imager. You were made to receive and to reflect. You were designed by God to be a living, breathing, walking representation of the God who made you.

Here's the thing about images. They always image something. Sounds like a truism, doesn't it? Images always image something. So let's dig deeper into Genesis 1 for a second because Moses doesn't just say image. He uses two words and the distinction matters. He says, "Let us make man in our image." The first Hebrew word there is ṣěʹ·lěm and it literally means a physical representation of something else. This is the word that is used throughout the Hebrew scriptures for an idol, for a physical representation of something else. So God is saying you, I'm going to make you in my image.

And then he clarifies it by saying after my likeness. This is the Hebrew word demûṯ. It's a word that does something different. It qualifies and in some sense pulls back a little bit. It's saying you're like God even though you're not God. That's an important distinction. There's a couple of things you can be sure about in life. One, there is a God. Two, you're not him. Right? That's part of the distinction. But three, you are made to reflect him. You're made to reflect him, to resemble him, but you're not him. You bear the image. You're the ṣěʹ·lěm, but you're not God. You are demûṯ. You're like him. You're the representative, not the sovereign. That's who we are.

You're to be God's statue in his temple. You bear his form, his nature, his presence, but you are not God. You're the representative, the vice regent, the one who rules under him, for him in his name. That's what it means to be the image of God.

Let's keep going in the text. Verse 27, it says:

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

Here's another incredible distinction between the biblical account and the cultural reality of the Ancient Near East. In the other ancient Near Eastern cultures, there were images of the god. They were called a king. It was always singular. Again, one king and everybody else served them. Here it says this, everybody, every human is actually created to be God's imagers.

And it's not just men, it's men and women. It's saying that the image of God is not complete in the man alone. It's not complete in the woman alone. It takes both the full range of human personhood, male and female, to bear the image of God in the world. The image, the ṣěʹ·lěm, is not a solo project. It's a community project. It's a relational reality because God himself is relational and his image in the world is meant to reflect that.

27 So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. 28 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."

Have dominion. The Hebrew word means to rule. This is the commission that comes with the image because an image without a function is just a decoration, right? An image without a function is just a decoration.

So, let me say it this way to you. God didn't make you to just be pretty, right? Like for some of us, that's a big relief. I'll let you figure out amongst yourselves whether that's good news or not. But that's actually good news for all of us. We're not here to just be pretty. We're not here to just take up space. We're certainly not the random accidental collision of atoms that happened by happenstance for no purpose to no purpose. We've been made by God for God. We've been made on purpose for a purpose.

That purpose is to rule, to have dominion, to exercise dominion as God's imagers over the earth, to subdue, to fill, to tend. Now, this kind of dominion, this kind of ruling is not exploitation. It's not domination for its own sake because the nature of the rule is determined by the one that is being imaged. We are to rule as God rules. We're to exercise dominion the way that God exercises dominion.

So God brings order out of chaos. We are to bring order out of chaos. We are to organize and structure reality so that reality thrives and produces beauty and glory and goodness because that's what God does. We're to exercise dominion as God exercises dominion. We do it as an imager. We're not the source of authority. We're the conduit. We are the living, breathing extension of God's reign into every corner of the universe.

All right. So, here's what we've got so far. You were made to bear God's image in the world. That's what you were made for. To bear God's image in the world. To carry his presence. To extend his reign. To reflect his nature in how you rule, how you relate, how you live. That is your identity. That is your purpose. That's what you were made for. That's what it means to be human. And what a glorious identity that is.

I don't think that we think about that enough. One of my favorite authors, John Eldredge, he writes at the beginning of one of his books, he says, "You know, in the church, we talk a lot about original sin. We don't talk enough about original glory." I think that's spot on. We get so stuck on the problem, but I don't think we can even understand the problem unless we understand that which it has corrupted and diminished.

It's easy to define yourself by what you're not, by what you've failed, by what's broken and bent within you. And I certainly won't deny those realities, but that's not who the Bible says God made you to be. And that's not the identity that God has for you. You were made to reflect the glory of God. That's what you were made for. And I don't know if I even understand any of that statement. It's so amazing. You were made to reflect the glory of God.

Why am I here? Here to play baseball, here to be a mom, here to be a dad, here to be an accountant, here to have fun, here to play golf. Those are all whatever they are. You were made to be God's living reflection and representative in his creation. You matter. You have purpose. We were made to reflect the glory of God.

You know, David wrestles with this in Psalm 8, and we get this beautiful psalm as he reflects on the glory attributed to man as an imager. I just want to look at the first four verses, but David says this:

1O Lord, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth! You have set your glory above the heavens. 2Out of the mouth of babies and infants, you have established strength because of your foes, to still the enemy and the avenger.

There's a lot going on. This is a Hebrew parallelism. We got earth and heavens. We got name and glory paralleling each other, building this case. This is what he's saying. David is saying God's power and presence and right to rule is universal. "How majestic is your name in all the earth. You have set your glory above the heavens." There's no place in the heavens or on earth where God doesn't have the right to rule and reign.

We represent this with our flags, right? So if you come into a land and see the American flag, then you know you operate under American authority and American law. If you go to another land and you see a different flag, then you know that you operate under that flag's authority and that law. And David is going, "Yeah, that's cute. That's cute because there's really only one flag. There's God's flag and it's for everyone everywhere." And his glory, his name, his power, his attributes, his authority cover everything.

And then we have this incredible statement in verse two: "Out of the mouth of babies and infants, you have established strength because of your foes to still the enemy and the avenger." I don't know about you, but when I think about babies, a lot of things come to mind. Strength isn't one of them, right? So he picks the weakest, most dependent, most vulnerable human that you can think of, an infant, a nursing babe. And he says that nursing baby establishes your strength just in its existence.

Even the most helpless human being because of who and what they are reflects and participates in displaying the glory of God. Everyone matters. Not because of what you contribute, not because of your strength, not because...

Use of your power, not because of your ability, not because of you matter because of the one that you image. Even a baby does that. And it's in the context because of your foes to still the enemy and the avenger. And this is something that we've got to keep in mind as we walk through this series is that we're not called to image God in neutrality. We're not imagers in peace time. We're images in a war, a cosmic conflict. And so we're called to image the goodness of God in the midst of an ongoing rebellion that has rejected the goodness of God and is just trying to establish a different kingdom.

David continues:

3 When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have set in place,

I'm sure this is something that David did as a young shepherd boy, later as a warrior running through the wilderness, hiding from Saul. No roof over his head, laying out under the stars in the darkness of the depths of night and seeing the multitude of stars, the moon, the planets making their way through the heavens. I love this. This is not abstract thinking in a classroom. This is a real life person looking up at the night sky. No modern light pollution, just the glory of the created cosmos.

And I love the detail in here. He calls it the work of his fingers. I like that. It's not the work of his hand. Hand biblically is the sign and symbol of power and authority. You'd almost expect him to say the work of your hand, but he doesn't. Says it's the work of your fingers. I love that. Like David's looking at the glory of the cosmos, right? He's like, "You wiggled your fingers and there it was."

Last night there was this planetary alignment. My wife and I kept going out trying to look at it and I could see it really great through my app on my phone, but I couldn't quite see it in reality. But we spent a lot of good time just laying out on our deck chairs looking up at the sky at the beauty of creation. It does something to us. One of the favorite things it does to me right now in this season of life is it makes me feel small and young. Two things that I don't regularly feel.

So David looks and he sees it. He sees the size and the scope, the glory and the beauty, the power of the cosmos. And it leads him to ask the question:

4 What is man that you are mindful of him, and the son of man that you care for him?

Again, this Hebrew poetry parallelism. We don't see it in the English, but he uses two different words here for man. "What is man?" ʾěnôš. It's the word that describes our mortality, our frailty. So you can almost imagine David looking up at the glory, the grandeur, the power of the cosmos and going, "I'm so small. I'm so weak. I'm so frail. And yet you're mindful of me. You see me. You know me."

And then he continues, "And the son of man." Now he uses the more common term for man, ʾā·ḏām. bēn ʾā·ḏām, the son of Adam, the son of man, that you care for him. What is man in his insignificance that you see us? What is man in his role as imager that you care for us? David's not simply wondering about how small we are. He's marveling that in spite of how small we are, we're seen, we're known, we're intended, we're valued, and we're called and entrusted with dominion.

This is the question. And I think there's this profound connection between Psalm 8 and Genesis 1 on so many different levels. It's not just about being made as God's imager, but it's about what the function of that is. So the beginning of Psalm 8, "Oh Lord, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth" is connected to "God blessed them and said to them, multiply, fill the earth, and subdue it. Have dominion over the earth." The way in which God's dominion is to be established and spread throughout creation is through and with his imagers. That's what we're called to be and that's what we're called to do.

I've shared this quote before from one of the church fathers, St. Irenaeus. He wrote this: "The glory of God is a man fully alive, a human. The glory of God is a person fully alive." Now, Irenaeus wrote this in his book against heresies against the Gnostics. The Gnostics taught this duality, this dichotomy that everything that is physical and earthly and fleshly is evil and everything that is spiritual and heavenly is good. We still have a lot of Gnosticism in our cultural concept of a lot of things today.

And Irenaeus responds to the Gnostics with a strong emphatic no. The physical embodied fully alive human being is the glory of God. God is most glorified not when humans escape their humanity but when they fully inhabit it. The glory of God is best seen in a human being fully alive. That's because that's what we were made to be.

And that gets us to really the heart of the problem, though. The problem with idolatry, the problem with imaging is that we're made to reflect the glory of God, to image him. That's Genesis 1. But we don't live in Genesis 1. We live after Genesis 3. We live after Genesis 6. We live in a fallen and corrupted world. So, not only do we not image and reflect God's glory the way that we're meant to, it's actually worse than that. We pass on a corrupted image.

I'm going to go to Genesis 5 here. And I say this knowing that as I say it, nobody in the room goes, "Woohoo! I can't believe we're in Genesis 5. I love that text." I know that none of you did that because it's a genealogy and nobody gets excited about it. But what it says here in the beginning of Genesis 5 is super important. Says this:

1 This is the book of the generations of Adam. When God created man, he made him in the likeness of God. 2 Male and female he created them, and he blessed them and named them Man when they were created.

Very deliberate echo here of Genesis chapter 1. So it's the continuation of the story. He made him in the likeness of God. Male and female, he created them and he blessed them and named them man when they were created. So God establishes them as his imagers.

He empowers them with his rule and the mandate to rule, and then they're broken by sin and cast out of the temple, the garden, and the world is shattered.

So verse three continues. It says:

3 When Adam had lived 130 years, he fathered a son in his own likeness, after his image, and named him Seth.

Same language, same words, same grammatical construction in the Hebrew. Intentional. Adam is made in God's likeness. Seth is made in Adam's likeness—a likeness that was made to reflect the glory of God but chose to go a different way. Adam is now a distorted imager and now he begins to pass along that distorted image to his children.

If you notice, the word order is flipped. It's the same word, same construction, but it's flipped. God makes Adam in his image after his likeness. Seth is made in the likeness of Adam after his image. I think what the grammar is trying to say to us is that Seth is more like Adam than he is like God.

And the result is found in the rest of the chapter. Here's how the chapter goes, and this is why people fall asleep reading it: Adam lived this many years and then he had a son. And then he lived this many years and then he died. And Seth lived this many years. And then Seth had a son. And then Seth lived this many years. And then he died. And then his son lived this many years. And then he had a son. And then he lived this many years. And then he died. And then he died. And then he died. And then he died. And then he died.

And we get the weird one—Enoch. Then he walked with God. And then he died. And then he died. And then he died. The ones that were made to image the uncreated creator and everlasting are not walking in that life. They are dying. They're dying. The image is there. It hasn't been erased, but it's been defaced. It's been broken. I like to think of it as being bent.

My favorite way to think about this—it's not a perfect metaphor, no metaphors are perfect—is that of a mirror. We were created to be a mirror. A mirror receives an image and a mirror reflects that image. That's what we are made to be. That's what it means to be in the imago Dei, the image of God. We were made to receive that image and then reflect that image out.

And what sin does is it doesn't so much break the mirror as it bends it. So we still function as a mirror. We still reflect something. The reflection is just distorted. Ever been to a funhouse? Funhouse mirrors. You walk in and all of a sudden it's your image, but it's not. It gets warped and twisted and you get into the one with all the different hall mirrors. You don't know where you're going and you're walking into things. It's still reflecting, but what it's reflecting is distorted and bent.

One of the key points I'm trying to make in this series—I want you to understand that the way that you and I are bent is not random. We become what we behold. We are bent by what we behold. And so if you make money your idol and you worship money, you will begin to reflect the values of that. If you worship approval and you make that your idol, you'll become a performer, always acting not out of who you are, but about what you think other people think you should be. We go down the list of every idol. The idols that we serve corrupt and shape us. We bend to that which we behold. We bend to that which we worship and serve.

The reality of being made as images has unbelievable cosmic consequences. So we can either be and become more and more what we were meant to be—reflect the goodness and glory of God—or we become more and more bent and distorted. And here's the kicker to it all: even when we recognize that we've been bent, that we're not what we could be, we're not what we should be, the more we try to unbend ourselves, the more bent we become. Fixing ourselves is off the table. We simply make things worse.

The reality is we need to be rescued. We need to be restored. We need to be remade. And that's where Jesus comes in. Somebody say amen this morning.

See, Jesus comes. And I talk a lot here about a reductionist gospel. The minimalist gospel of American Christianity goes something like this: You're bad. Jesus came. He died. Believe in him. Get forgiven. When you die, you get to go to heaven. Until you die, try to be good. That's supposed to be the good news. Now, there's elements of it that are good news, but it's kind of an exercise in missing the whole point.

Now, I want you to listen to me very carefully. Let's take forgiveness. I love forgiveness, but forgiveness alone is not what we need. Forgiveness addresses the guilt of the broken image. But it doesn't unbend the mirror. You hearing me this morning? I love forgiveness. I need forgiveness. But Jesus didn't just come to forgive us and leave us bent and broken. The gospel is so much bigger and so much better than that. Jesus comes to remake us, to unbend us, to reorient us into what we were always intended to be.

Last week, I touched on Colossians chapter 1, and I said I'm going to hit this each week in this series. It's kind of the foundation touchstone of the series:

15 He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation.

Jesus is the image of the invisible God. The Greek there is eikōn. It means icon. It means image. It means representation. It's the Greek word that's used to translate ṣěʹ·lěm, the word for idol, the word for image in the Hebrew text. Paul is not picking this name randomly out of a hat. Paul is drawing a direct connection between Genesis 1 and Jesus. Jesus is the image. He is the one that perfectly and fully reflects the goodness and glory of God. It's Jesus that's the image of the invisible God. He's not carved or commissioned by a king. He's not overlaid with gold and set with precious stones. The invisible God, the one no human hand could ever capture, no temple could ever contain, no idol could ever approximate, has given himself a body. He stepped into history and became visible. The word Paul reaches for is the same word the ancient world used for the statues and the idols in the temple. Icon. Image. Jesus is what every idol has always tried to be but never could.

Every idol in the ancient world, every idol in the modern world is a human attempt to make the invisible God present and visible so that we can control him. And they all failed because you cannot carve the living God. You cannot contain him in wood and gold. And you cannot speak his name over a statue and manufacture his presence. What humanity could never do, God did himself. He becomes the image. He takes on flesh, moves into the neighborhood and shows us not just what God looks like, but because he shows us what God looks like, he shows us what humanity is supposed to look like. Because humanity is made to image God.

He shows us what we're supposed to look like. The one who received the glory of the father and reflected it perfectly. Jesus shows us what a true human looks like in every conversation, every healing, every act of service, every moment of suffering, every prayer he prayed. Jesus shows us what it's like to be fully alive, fully imaging the God who made us for himself.

If you want to know what God looks like, you look at Jesus. If you want to know what a true human looks like, you look at Jesus—the way he loved people who had nothing to offer him. The way he handled power without being corrupted by it. The way he faced suffering without being destroyed by it. The way he forgave without minimizing the wound or ignoring the sin. The way he prayed, not performing for an audience, but simply talking to his father. The way that he served, not to build a platform for himself, but he served because that's what love does.

Not just God on display. This is humanity on display. Humanity the way God always intended it. The image unbroken, undistorted, fully alive. That's what we see in Jesus. He's the image of the invisible God.

Now listen to where Paul takes us in Colossians:

15 He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation. 16 For by him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities—all things were created through him and for him. 17 And he is before all things, and in him all things hold together.

Every idol that's ever been built was an attempt to find something that could hold our life together. Whether it's our money, our reputation, our relationships, our health, our control, we've been stacking things up, trying to build something stable enough to stand on, but it keeps shifting and threatening to collapse. Because finite things were never designed to hold the weight of an infinite need.

In him, all things hold together. Not just the spiritual things, not just the Sunday morning things, all things. Your marriage is held together in Jesus. Your fears are calmed and consumed in Jesus. Your identity is rooted and established in Jesus. Your future is possible because of Jesus. The thing you're most proud of and the thing you're most ashamed of, all of it finds its coherence, its stability, its meaning in him.

Jesus is not something we add on. Jesus is what we were made for. He's the true image, the true imager, the answer to every question an idol tries to answer, the reality that every false north was a counterfeit of.

I really want you to grasp this next point with me this morning. Jesus didn't just come to be the only imager. He came to be the first, the first of many. He comes to restore that which has been broken. We already read in verse 15 that he was the firstborn of all creation. It's not about origin. It's about supremacy.

18 And he is the head of the body, the church. He is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, that in everything he might be preeminent.

Jesus is the first of the new humanity. He is the first to conquer death. And Paul by saying he is the first is implying what? That there is more to come. That's me. That's you. It's exactly what Paul writes in Romans 8. Romans 8:29. It's really this whole sermon in a nutshell:

29 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.

Let that sink in. What Jesus did in his life, in his death, in his resurrection. What Jesus is even doing now in his role as great intercessor and king, establishing his kingdom as we await for his return. All of that in Jesus is what God has destined for you to be conformed to that.

This is not a verse about behavior modification. This is not a verse saying try harder to be like Jesus. This is a verse that says before you were born, before you drew your first breath, before you made your first mistake or achieved your first success, God had a destination in mind for you. And that destination is conformity to Jesus. You were made to look like Jesus, to love like Jesus, to serve like Jesus. The mirror has a blueprint. The blueprint is Jesus.

Let that sink in this morning. Everything that the idols in your life have promised you—whether it's significance, security, identity, glory—Jesus actually can give you. God's plan from before the foundation of the world was not just to forgive you and then leave you bent. It was to restore you to the image you were always made to bear. You be fully alive, fully human, fully reflecting the glory of the one who made you.

And this is where the gospel comes to us and demands a choice. If we become what we behold, what will we choose to behold? If we become what we behold, what will we choose to behold? What do we want to be shaped by? What do we want to look like? I don't know about you, I want to choose the one who rose from the dead. That's what we're doing in this season of Lent. We're celebrating that Jesus defeated the power of sin and Jesus defeated the power of death. I want to look like him.

So let me reiterate what I said last week. We're transformed by Jesus by exposure to Jesus, not by willpower. We have to see him. We have to know him. We have to listen to him.

Paul says in 2 Corinthians 3:18:

18 And we all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another. For this comes from the Lord who is the Spirit.

We become what we behold. This is not an abstract theological concept. It's an inescapable, unavoidable reality. And it matters. It really, really matters in your life.

That pattern in your life that you can't seem to shake, that sin that you keep going back to over and over again. The way that you keep hoping to find comfort in things that will never satisfy. You ever tried to eat your feelings? You're feeling stressed out. What do you do? You go to the freezer. You grab that Ben & Jerry's. You sit down. You start eating it. Man, it feels good for a second, doesn't it? For a minute. And then 20 minutes later, you're sitting on the couch ashamed, embarrassed about what you just did, and nothing that was stressing you out has changed at all.

The way you hide who you really are, put on a mask and perform for what you think those around you expect. See, all of these things are signs and symptoms of idolatry. It's your bentness revealing distortion. And it's our sign and our cue to look not to those things, but to the one who is the true image.

In Jesus, we find a new beginning. We find newness of life. We find freedom. Slowly, Jesus begins to unbend us. Oh, I wish it wasn't slowly or so slowly. But slowly Jesus begins to unbend us if we start looking to him.

I didn't tell you the full quote from Irenaeus earlier. The first part of the quote, "The glory of God is a human being fully alive" is just the first half. Here's what he said in entirety: "The glory of God is a human being fully alive and the life of man is the vision of God." (Irenaeus, Against Heresies)

We become what we behold. God's glory is best pictured and manifested in a human being fully alive, truly imaging. And the way we find that life is in the vision of God. We become what we behold.

So in closing, let me say this this morning. You're not a project to be improved. You're an image to be restored. And that restoration is not something that can be done by you. It's something that's already begun. Not because of anything you've done, but because the true image stepped into history and made a way possible.

Jesus didn't come just to make bad people good. He came to make broken imagers whole. And he is patient with the process, more patient than you and I are. It's slow, yes, but he doesn't give up on what he started. That's why Paul can write:

6 And I am sure of this, that he who began a good work in you will bring it to completion at the day of Jesus Christ.

So this week, I want to invite you to continue to pray and ask the Spirit to show you, to test you and see you, to reveal to you the idols that you're looking to for life that only Jesus can give you. Then again, it's not enough to just identify it. It's not enough to just reject it and repent. You've got to replace it. You've got to replace it with the perfect image of Jesus.

So, stop trying to fix yourself. Stop trying to unbend yourself through willpower and discipline and self-improvement. And instead, look to Jesus. Open the Gospels. Sit with Jesus. Watch how he moves through the world. Watch how he treats people. Watch how he prays. Watch how he suffers. You don't have to have it all figured out. You just have to look. Because the promise of Scripture is that it's those who behold his glory that are transformed by it.

We become what we behold. The glory of God is a human being fully alive. The life of man is the vision of God. That's not just a cute saying. That's an invitation. An invitation with your name on it. You were made to reflect the glory of God. You've been called by Jesus to behold his glory that you might be remade into the image of the true icon, Jesus.

May God's grace make it so. Amen.