The Theology of Work (Part 3): Working as the Image of God

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For all its being just a few short lines Genesis 1:27 exerts a far greater influence over the trajectory of the Bible than you would expect of its 13 simple, seemingly innocuous Hebrew words. It stands at the start of the Good Book as kind of a summary of what it means to be a human being in relationship with God, what God’s purpose was in making us in the first place, and (as we will discover when we get to Christ) what was after in sending Jesus, the Image of the Unseen God, to be our savior. It is one of the go-to verses for building a biblical understanding of what makes a human being a human being, it is one of the foundational texts for a Christian understanding of human rights and human dignity, it is one of the core themes in any robust discussion of who Christ is and what God was really doing when he became a man in him.

And it is, or should be, a key verse for developing a Christian understanding of the theology of work. What is “work,” from a theological perspective, and how should human beings think about it, biblically speaking?

Genesis 1:27 isn’t the only verse we need to answer those questions well, but we won’t be able to answer them at all unless we spend some time reflecting on it.

Because in Genesis 1:27 it says that God created human beings in his own image, male and female, he made them in his own image.

This truth has to be one of the foundation stones for building a theology of work: human beings were made in God’s image, in order that they might, in some concrete way, “image God” to the rest of the creation.

Untold gallons of ink have been spilled over this one small verse, trying to exegete and exposit what Genesis is really trying to say when it insists that humans were made in God’s image, and there’s far more to be said than we can squeeze into a short blog post here.

There is, for starters the general consensus among theologians that it is not meant physically, as though God has two arms and two legs the same as us. That said, many theologians, from the Middle Ages onwards, have argued that the Image of God has to do with ways in which the “structure” of the human being “reflects” something of the personhood of God. We are rational beings, with a spiritual life and a moral nature, and in these ways we “image” God, who is also a rational, moral, Spirit. This is sometimes called the “structural view,” or the “substantive view” of the Image of God, and although it’s fraught with problem, it is still a commonly-held understanding of the Image of God today.

Many theologians have argued that the Image of God has to do with the fact that human beings are relational creatures, made to be in relationship with God and capable of forming deep, loving relationships between each other. Christians, of course, believe that there exists a perfect, harmonious relationship within God’s-self, as the Father begets the Son and the Son does the Father’s Will, while the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son, perfecting the bond of love between them. At the same time, Genesis 1-3 clearly implies that humans were made to be in community with each other, in relationship with God. To be “the image of God,” then, we must be in relationship with him, and as we form, spiritual relationships with each other, so we reflect his likeness in the world.

A final view has to do with the fact that the New Testament repeatedly refers to Jesus Christ as the “image of God,” and argues that through faith in him, we are being shaped into his “likeness,” and so having the image of God restored in us. That’s a paraphrase of the key verses, but you can look up Colossians 1:15, 2 Corinthians 4:4, Romans 8:29 if you want the deep dive. The point here is that the Image of God has to do with Christlikeness; the life-before God that we were intended to have but lost through sin, and which God “recapitulated” for us in Jesus, who showed us what the Image of God really looks like and then, by his spirit, shapes our lives so they start to reflect his life. In this sense, it’s not so much something we have now, but something we lost and are being given back, something that will only be fully revealed on the last day, when we are fully made to be like Jesus is.

Each of these views have something helpful to add to the discussion. My personally theological predilections lean towards the last view. I understand the Image of God as Christlikeness, something that God is restoring in us as we follow Christ, shaping our lives to look like his. I sprinkle this understanding with the best of the other two as well.

But there are other approaches to this verse that are helpful. I particularly like Richard Middleton’s argument (in The Liberating Image) that in the ancient world of Genesis, it was understood that the King—whoever the King happened to be of the nation or people group in question—was the “divine image of god” on the earth—the representative of the gods, who mediated the divine blessing to the creation. In ancient near eastern culture, only the king had this mediatory role, and only the king functioned in this way, imaging the divine for the creation. In Genesis 1:27, then, we see a radical, subversive, and divinely inspired “democratization” of the image of god. It’s not just the “king” who images god, but all human beings (men and women!). The verse then underscores the fundamental, divinely granted dignity of all human beings, as mediators of the divine blessing to the creation.

This last idea brings me close to the real point of this post, because I started by claiming that Genesis 1:27, and its claim that we are made in God’s Image, has to be the starting point for developing a theological understanding of the nature of human work. It may not be self-evident how this is so, but when we reflect more deeply on how this language may have been understood in the ancient world, it stands out almost immediately.

Because the Hebrew word Genesis 1:27 uses when it says that humans are God’s image is zelem. In the ancient world a zelem was the statue of a king—his literal “image”—that he would erect in a country that he had conquered. The king would defeat his enemies, that is, and then he would set up his image—his zelem—in that region. The idea was that the zelem of the king spiritually extended and maintained the rule of the king, even though the king was not necessarily present.

It was a literal and effectual extension of the king’s reign in the land that he had conquered.

This understanding of the zelem meshes well with one of the subtexts of the Creation account of Genesis 1. In most ancient near eastern creation cosmogonies, like Genesis 1, the world begins in a state of chaos and dissolution, a primeval chaos symbolized by the sea, where water covers everything (cf. the Spirit of God hovering over the surface of the waters in Genesis 1:2). Genesis 1:1-2 imagines the world in exactly the same way, covered over by un-creation chaos. In most ancient near eastern creation stories, creation itself results from a battle that the divines fight against chaos. Usually its personified by some monster or other, like Tiamat in the Babylonian creation myth. The gods conquer the chaos-monster, and creation emerges in the wake of their conquest.

The Genesis 1 creation account shares this mythic vision when it discusses creation. God is clearly overcoming chaos in Genesis 1, conquering it in such a way that creation can emerge and flourish, though with one important difference. Unlike all the other ancient near eastern creation accounts, the God of the Hebrew Bible does not subdue chaos with violence, fighting some monster or other, rather he does it simply through the creative power of his Word. “God said, ‘Let there be light,’” and the darkness of chaos was scattered.

Having pointed out that all important difference, it remains to connect all the dots. Like an ancient near eastern king conquering a country, God creates the world by defeating chaos, subduing it with the power of his word. This creation work culminates on Day 6 when the chaos is fully subdued and God creates the human creature, placing him in his newly-created world, to serve as his zelem, the image of the conquering king, victorious over chaos, to function as a literal and effectual extension of God’s reign over the chaos.

This is implicit in the actual charge God gives humans in the next verse. In Genesis 1:28, God directs his zelem to “fill the earth and ‘subdue it’ and ‘rule’ over the creatures of the earth.” This is another verse that’s spilled more than its fair share of ink, often being misinterpreted to imply that the earth “belongs” to humans and we can “use it” for our own ends, as we see fit. The language of “subdue” there does not apply to the earth generally, though. That a reference to the idea common in the ancient world, that creation itself happened when the gods “subdued chaos” so that creation could come into existence. We are being told, in Genesis 1:28, that humans have a role in extending the “chaos-subduing” work that God began when he got things started in the beginning.

As his zelem in the creation, human beings were called to extend God’s “rule” over the creation (a loving, life-giving, blessing kind of rule, not an exploitative dominion), by continuing to work to subdue chaos, and mediating both the divine blessing to the rest of the creation, and the rest of the creation’s praise back to God.

This is, in part, what it means to be made in his image and likeness.

And here is where, at last, the fact that you and I are made in the Image of God helps us understand our work. Because I argued in the last post that work existed in Paradise before the fall. We were made with a divine mandate to work.

This discussion of the Image of God tells us why. Because our purpose in the world was in part to extend and carry on the creation work that God himself had started when he made the world in six days and then rested from his work on the seventh.

Let me say what this doesn’t mean before I say what it does. It doesn’t mean that God couldn’t have got the world done without us, that he is somehow dependent on us. It also doesn’t mean that God got the universe started and is now standing back to see where we’ll take it from here. Nor does it mean that it’s up to us to keep the chaos at bay, that we’re on our own when it comes to “saving the planet.”

What it does mean is that we have a divinely-ordained role in the world, a function that God had in mind when he created us. It is, in fact, an irreplaceable function, something that, without us performing this function, the world will not be what God intended it to be. Worse, if we reject this function and deny our God-ordained purpose, the world is in all kinds of danger of sliding back into the chaos that God created it out of.

This is, in part, what Paul was hinting at when he said in Romans 8 that the whole creation is groaning, waiting in eager expectation for the children of God’s glory to be revealed. When humans are not properly imaging God in the world, the creation itself suffers the consequences.

Suddenly the theological significance of human work stands in sharp relief. Our work was intended to be expressions of our role as God’s zelem in the creation, the things we do to keep the chaos subdued and continue to extend his reign in the world. We were given this work to do so we could mediate God’s blessing to the rest of the creation, and by doing it well, the creation itself would continue to thrive, fruitfully and flourishing.

As his Image in the creation, our work was an extension, in fact, of his own creative work in the world.

I’ve written the last two paragraphs in the past tense, because I’m talking about the primeval history of Genesis 1, and sadly, the millennia of human history that have flowed under the bridge since that chapter of the Good Book was written have shown how frequently and how disastrously humans have rejected their call to Image the Creator in the world.

The consequences of this sinful rejection of our role as his zelem has caused all kinds of chaos to bubble up and sweep over God’s world, from war, to environmental exploitation, to gross economic disparity, killing, looting, hording, you name it. It’s also brought all kinds of chaos into the work we do, and the way we experience it, and what comes of it as we’re doing it.

Few nine-to-five jobs are done these days, I think, with a clear sense that by doing it, I am, in fact, Imaging the Creator, extending his creation work in the world and contributing to the ongoing subjugation of chaos in the world so that the whole of creation can flourish.

But they can be understood in this way. A tree can’t be planted unless there are well-made shovels to dig the hole, and the shovel can’t be fashioned except its steel be refined, and someone has been taught the art of shovel-making, and someone sold the tree-planter his shovel. Teaching, and child-care, mining and forestry, engineering and retail, every job, actually, if done well and with a view of mediating God’s creation blessing on the earth, can function as an expression of our identity as his image-bearers.

Of course, it may be that our work won’t fully mediate God’s blessing to the world until the Image of God is fully restored in us, and we are finally redeemed to full Christ-likeness. But even before that final day, we all have opportunities to make our work—whether it be waiting on tables or biomedical research—modest expressions of our creation purpose, extensions of the chaos-subduing work of the Creator.

The better we understand who we are as men and women made in His Divine Image, the more likely we will be to make the most of those opportunities as they arise.

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