Genesis 1–11: God’s Design for Personhood (Pt. 2/5)
God created humanity “in his image.” The meaning of “the image of God” matters; it is our identity as human beings. Today there is a tendency in OT scholarship to confuse the purpose for being made in God’s image with the meaning of being made in God’s image. This video gets beneath the English translation and concludes that to be made in God’s image is to be like God in some ways—in terms of humanity’s God-like nature of personhood, qualities of love and justice, and abilities to communicate and create. All this is so that humanity could fulfill God’s purpose for them. Persons can think, reason and make decisions; God’s design for personhood is for humanity to think, reason and make decisions in a way not independent of God and his will. Humanity began to deviate from this design when Adam and Eve ate from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. To appreciate why in modern civilization humanity is on a path to self-destruction we need to return to what happened in the garden of Eden.