Michael Reeves: Christ the Image of God

Friends, I'm so sorry we can't be together in person now, but we have a sovereign God and glorious, certain promises from Him we're going to see to help us stand strong in harrowing times. Now, friends, we live today in a culture where everyone desperately wants to be fulfilled, and yet we're in a culture that doesn't know what it means to be human. Witness the abortions, the racism, the objectifying of people in the sex industry.

And if we don't know what it is to be human, how can we ever know how we can be fulfilled as humans? Now, none of that should surprise us, for you cannot know what it means to be human without Christ, the image of God. And my aim now is to look together at what it means that Christ is the image of God and see what that teaches us about what it means to be human.

Now, in the first few hundred years after the apostles, "the image of God" was a theme that grabbed theologians in a way we don't really see today— theologians like Irenaeus and Athanasius. They loved this theme because they saw the story of reality as the story of the image of God. For eternity past, the Son has always been, as Hebrews 1:3 puts it, "the radiance of the glory of God, the exact imprint of His nature.

" "He is," as Paul explains in Colossians 1, "the image of the invisible God. " Not just like God, not just friendly with God, He is of the very being of the Father so that when He appears, we do not just see a faint echo of divinity. When Philip, in John 14, asks Him, "Lord, show us the Father," Jesus said to him, "Whoever has seen Me has seen the Father," for He is the very expression of the Father, the perfect image and radiance of the glory of God.

He is the image of God. But then in Genesis 1, we read about the creation of Adam, and we're told that he was created in the image of God, in Genesis 1:27, "after our likeness. " Now, there's so much to say about what it means that Adam was created in the image of God, but something Paul picks up in Romans 5 is fascinating.

Paul there describes Adam as "the pattern of the one to come" (Romans 5:14). In other words, Paul is saying the first Adam was intended to be a picture of what Christ, the last Adam, would be like. For remember, Adam was crowned by God as the ruler of all creation in Genesis 1.

God said, "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. " That's Genesis 1:28. So Adam was to look after and rule over creation as God's steward and regent, not that Adam was ever the true monarch.

Now, in the beginning, we're being shown the end of humanity. Adam was serving as an illustration of the One to whom every knee will bow, to whom every creature will submit, the last Adam, who would be crowned the everlasting king of all. But Adam is also strikingly called "the son of God" in Luke 3:37.

That's the climax of Luke's genealogy of Jesus. Do you remember? "Jesus," Luke explains, "was the son (as was supposed) of Joseph, the son of Heli, the son of," keep going a bit, "Enos, the son of Seth, the son of Adam, the son of God.

" Adam was created son of God specifically to be like the uncreated Son of God, reveling in the love and care the eternal Son had always enjoyed. Adam was made to know the love of the Father. Now, Adam undid all that he was made to be by sinning.

He listened to Satan, and when listening to Satan, he was no longer imaging God. He was doubting God's fatherly kindness to him, and so he was no longer being a faithful son. He was the prodigal son.

But even in his sin, he actually still managed to serve as a mirror image of the Son of God. Adam did not do what he was commanded, and precisely because he no longer loved the Father. And in that moment, he could not have been more perfectly opposite to the Son of God who said, in John 14:31, "I love the Father, and I do exactly what He commands.

" But more than all of that, the first Adam shows us what the last Adam is like through his marriage. The account of it in Genesis 2 certainly makes you sit up and wonder, because there in Genesis 2, remember, it's a world before all death and agony, and Adam is wounded. "The LORD caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man, and while he slept the LORD took one of his ribs and closed up its place with flesh.

" Adam falls into a deep, strange, deathlike sleep, and from his side, the Lord takes a rib and builds it into a woman. And she comes from him, and they become one—husband and wife. John Calvin, when he wrote about this, said, "In this we see a true resemblance of our union with the Son of God.

" What did he mean? Well, the biblical commentator Matthew Henry elaborates. He says, "In this, as in many other things, Adam was a figure of Him that was to come.

For out of the side of Christ, the second Adam, His spouse, the church was formed when He slept the sleep, the deep sleep of death upon the cross, in order to which His side was opened, and there came out blood and water—blood to purchase His church, and water to purify it to Himself. " No wonder the Apostle Paul, reading of this first wedding in Genesis 2, saw it as a picture of the last and ultimate wedding, saying, reading from Genesis 2, "Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother, and the two shall become one flesh. " And he says, "This is a profound mystery, but I'm talking about Christ and the church.

" Ephesians 5:32: "That in Adam, we see Christ's glorious intention to give life to His bride, to be one with her. And so, Adam was created as the pattern of the one to come. And from that moment, all of history would be the story of these two men—Adam, the head of the old humanity, and Christ, the head of the new.

The fate of every person would be wrapped up in one or the other. What Adam would break, Christ would mend. So, at a tree—the tree of the knowledge of good and evil—Adam committed the mother of all sins and fell into death.

At a tree, the cross, Christ obeyed His Father to the uttermost and conquered death. Adam brought sin and death; Christ brought righteousness and life. And then, as G.

K. Chesterton wrote, "On the third day, the friends of Christ, coming at daybreak to the place, found the grave empty and the stone rolled away. In varying ways, they realized the new wonder, but even they hardly realized the world had died in the night.

What they were looking at was the first day of a new creation, with a new heaven and a new earth. In a semblance of the gardener, God walked again in the garden in the cool, not of the evening, but of the dawn. " Yes, that first Easter morning was indeed a wondrous new beginning, like a new Eden, reestablishing all that God had once declared good.

A man—yes, God—walked in the garden, ruler over all things, in perfect harmony with God. Only now, there'd be no threat of death, no danger of a serpent to wreck it all. Death had been swallowed up in victory; the serpent crushed.

And where Adam had been banished from the Lord's presence and expelled from paradise, Christ would ascend to be where man was made to be with God. A man would sit with God in perfect harmony. Adam had been told, "Fill the earth and subdue it," but Ephesians 4:10 tells us that Christ "ascended far above all the heavens, that He might fill all things.

And He gave gifts to His people" so that they, the new humanity, might fill God's new creation. In his great Christmas hymn, "Joy to the World," Isaac Watts wrote, "No more let sins and sorrows grow, nor thorns infest the ground. He comes to make His blessings flow far as the curse is found.

" Yes, Christ mended all that Adam broke; the humanity, the image and likeness of God that was broken in Adam, was mended in Christ. And more than mended, for Jesus is greater than Adam. And as there was more glory in the days of Solomon than in the days of his father David, so there will be more glory in the days of the Son of Man than ever had been in the days of the first man.

For as the last Adam is so much superior to the first, so must His reign be. And He, unlike the first man, will never fall or fail as Adam did. Thus, the rule of the Son of Man in paradise restored will never pass away.

In harrowing times, think on the Son of Man. Do you know one of the great heroes of the faith was the mighty fourth-century theologian, Athanasius? His name means "immortal," and it's quite appropriate.

Athanasius had a lovely image to help us understand how Christ is the image of God and how He restored the image of God in humanity. He said, "Adam was like a beautiful portrait painting. On him, the image of God was drawn.

What happened at the fall was that the portrait was utterly wrecked. Adam was no longer anything like God. He'd become vicious, selfish, horribly unholy.

And so, the image—the painting—was ruined. " So, how could this precious portrait be restored? The problem was that there was nobody who knew what the portrait had once looked like.

They couldn't restore it. To restore it, you had to know God; you had to know what He's like. Otherwise, you could never know what the image of God should look like.

There was only one hope: The original subject of the portrait had to come and have His likeness redrawn on the canvas of humanity. Only the One whose likeness was originally drawn on Adam could restore and renew it. And so, the image of God Himself came.

He took humanity to renew His image in it. He came and showed us the image of God in the flesh. In Christ alone could humanity be restored from what Athanasius called all this "dehumanizing of mankind.

" Only He, the image of God Himself, could rehumanize us. Only in Him could we, as Paul puts it in Colossians 3:10, "put on the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge after the image of its Creator. " Friends, no wonder our society is crawling with identity issues.

With the image of God ruined in Adam, sinners don't know what they're for. So we seek to mend ourselves, but we don't know what mended looks like. Sensing our brokenness, we try to restore ourselves with morality or with authenticity, but we're fumbling in the dark, attempting to redraw a portrait when we have no idea what it should even look like.

All we can come up with are monstrous aberrations. Our only hope of wholeness is in Christ, the image of God. Humanity can be mended nowhere else.

To be out of Christ, whatever we do, whatever we try, is to remain dehumanized by the fall. But to know Christ, to be in Him, is to be humanized—to be renewed in the likeness of God—because in Christ, we see perfect humanity. We see humanity as we should be.

Now, we often use a negative word to describe Christ's life: it was, we say, "sinless," which doesn't sound immediately exciting, does it? "Sinless. " But think what it means.

That Christ was sinless means He was not selfish, heartless, cruel, abusive, twisted, petty, proud. To be sinless is beautiful, and that is what humanity should be and is destined to be. " be in Christ.

This true humanity that we see in Christ, I think, is so full of life. Just think what Jesus was like as a man as you read the Gospels. He was anything but boring and anemic.

Here was a man with towering charisma, running over with life, health, and healing, loaves and fishes. Everything abounded in His presence. So compelling did people find Him that crowds would throng around Him—men, women, children, the sick and the mad, the rich and the poor.

They found Him so magnetic. Some just wanted to touch His clothes. Kinder than summer, He befriended the rejects, and He gave hope to the hopeless.

And the dirty and the despised found they mattered to Him. His closest friends found that as the Son of Man came eating and drinking, being with Him was like being with a bridegroom at a wedding. He was generous, genial, firm, and resolute.

He was always surprising. Jesus was utterly loving, but He wasn't soppy. His insight would unsettle people, and His kindness would win them.

Indeed, you read the Gospels and you see Jesus was a man of extraordinary and extraordinarily appealing contrasts. You simply couldn't make Him up. Just try to imagine the perfect man.

If you do, you'll come up with some wooden caricature of a man, a saintly bore. But Jesus is so much more realistic, so much better than any imaginary perfect man. You see, we would make Him only one thing or the other.

But Jesus, you see, He’s red-blooded and human, but not rough. He's pure, but He's never dull. He's serious, but with sunbeams of wit.

Sharper than cut glass, He would out-argue all comers in debate but never for the sake of a mere win. He knew no failings in Himself and yet was transparently humble. He made the grandest claims for Himself and yet did so without a whiff of pomposity.

He ransacked the temple, He spoke of hellfire, He called Herod a fox, He called the Pharisees "corpses in makeup," and yet never do you doubt His love as you read His life. With a huge heart, He hated evil and felt for the needy. He loved God, and He loved people.

So you look at Him, and you have to say, "Here is a man truly alive, unwithered in any way, far more vital and vigorous, far more full and complete, far more human than any other. " And so it is for those who come to know Christ. They find themselves being re-humanized in His image, after His likeness.

A great example of this was the nineteenth-century London preacher, Charles Spurgeon. Now, a few years ago, I was doing some work on Spurgeon for a book that I was writing. I had enjoyed reading Spurgeon’s sermons for years, but the more I read about the man, the more I’d started wondering, "Is this guy for real?

" You know, he’s so full on in the pulpit and in public. And I thought, "Surely, there’s a quiet at-home Spurgeon. " I had a sneaking fear that I might find a lack of integrity.

So I found myself one day in a library in Oxford, where there is an archive of Spurgeon, bits and bobs. And there were all his private letters to his parents, completely unprotected, no gloves, no plastic covers. You could take these handwritten letters out and put them in your pocket.

Yeah, I didn’t. Don’t worry. But what struck me in reading them was how, whether he was talking about his daily life or what he was praying for, just the same passions and concerns were there in his private letters.

He was the same man in the privacy of letters to his parents that he never thought some grubby scholar would leaf through. He was just the same man as in the pulpit. And the more I got to know him, the more I saw how all round, full of life Spurgeon was.

He wasn’t just a marvelous preacher. He wasn’t simply a large presence in the pulpit. He was a great man.

He was a large presence in life. I saw he went at all of life full on. He was a big-hearted man of deep affections.

He wasn’t just passionate when preaching; he was tenderhearted in life. So he. .

. Spurgeon laughed and cried much. He read avidly.

He was intellectually curious and hungry. He was a man who felt deeply. He was a zealously industrious worker and a sociable lover of play and beauty.

In other words, he was a man who embodied the truth that to be in Christ means to be made ever more roundly human, more fully alive. Now, if you’ve ever read a sermon of his, and if you haven’t, you must. If you’ve ever read a sermon of his, you’ll know he was an unmistakably earnest man.

And yet earnestness and zeal for Spurgeon were never confused with gloominess and melancholy. It’s telling and very fitting that a whole chapter of his autobiography is entitled "Pure Fun. " A friend of his, called William Williams, once said, "What a bubbling fountain of humor Mr Spurgeon had.

. . was.

I laughed, I believe, more in his company than during all the rest of my life besides. " And few, it seems, expected to laugh quite so much in the presence of this zealous pastor. And Spurgeon knew this, and he seemed to take an almost impish delight in springing comedy on those around him.

So grandiosity, religiosity, and humbug pomposity could all expect to be pricked on his wit. But most essentially, Spurgeon’s sunny manner was a manifestation of that happiness and cheer which is found in Christ, the Light of the world. The lightheartedness he found in himself came from his clear refusal to take himself or any other sinner too seriously.

Spurgeon held that to be alive in Christ means to fight not only the habits and acts of sin but also sin’s temperamental sullenness, ingratitude, bitterness, despair. And so, to enter into Christ’s life entails entering into the joy of being fully human, of being at peace with the blessed or happy God of glory. Spurgeon knew and lived out his belief that the Christian life is not a dull, ethereal existence on.

. . Some high-up invisible plane.

It is being heavenly, and it is being more full, more human, brighter, more involved, more lively. And so, he would encourage his students. Here's what he said.

He said to his students, "Labor to be alive in all your duties. Brethren, we must have life more abundantly, each one of us, and it must flow out into all the duties of our office. Warm spiritual life must be manifest in the prayer, in the singing, in the preaching, and even in the shake of the hand and the good word after service.

Be full of life at all times," he said, "and let that life be seen in your ordinary conversation. " But here is the million-dollar question. Here's the question that can put the airport pop psychology and self-help book business out of business.

Here's the question: How did Spurgeon get to be like that? Because everyone wants to be that joy-filled, full of life person. So how was he so fully, so vividly human?

Answer? By fixing his eyes on Christ, the image of God. And how relentlessly Spurgeon did that.

And to prove that, I want to read to you the very first and very last words he ever preached in the Metropolitan Tabernacle pulpit in London. So in his very first sermon on March the 25th, 1861, his first sermon in the Tabernacle, he announced, "I would propose the subject of the ministry of this house, as long as this platform shall stand, shall be the person of Jesus Christ. " And in his thirty years of pastoring there, Spurgeon didn't stray from that theme.

So witness these: these are Spurgeon's last ever words from the pulpit. They're dated June the 7th, 1891, thirty years later. Spurgeon said his last words in the pulpit, "It is heaven to serve Jesus.

I am a recruiting sergeant, and I would find a few recruits at this moment. Every man must serve somebody. We have no choices to that fact.

Those who have no master are slaves to themselves. Depend on it, you will either serve Satan or Christ, either self or the Savior. But you will find sin, self, Satan, and the world to be hard masters.

But if you wear the livery of Christ, you will find Him so meek and lowly of heart, you will find rest unto your souls. He is the most magnanimous of captains. There never was His like among the choicest of princes.

He is always to be found in the thickest part of the battle. And when the wind blows cold, He always takes the bleak side of the hill. The heaviest end of the cross ever lies on His shoulders.

And if He bids us carry a burden, He carries it also. And if there is anything that is gracious, generous, kind, and tender, yea, lavish and superabundant in love, you will always find it in Him. These forty years and more have I served Him, blest be His name.

And I have had nothing but love from Him. I would be glad to continue yet another forty years in the same dear service here below if it so pleased Him. His service is life, peace, joy.

God help you to enlist under the banner of Jesus even this day. Amen. " And when he died, the olive-wood casket that held his body was drawn through the streets of south London.

And on top was a large pulpit Bible opened at Isaiah 45 verse 22, where the Lord says, "Look unto Me and be ye saved, all the ends of the earth. " Those, in fact, had been the very words that had first shown Spurgeon the way of salvation forty years earlier. "Look unto Me," says the Lord.

Spurgeon had learned that people are first saved when they look with belief on the Son of Man lifted up, as the Israelites once looked on the bronze serpent in the wilderness. But more, Spurgeon had come to understand the deep truth Paul had spoken of in 2 Corinthians 3. Do you remember Paul's argument in 2 Corinthians 3?

It's worth turning to. In 2 Corinthians 3, Paul, he was thinking of Moses who, do you remember, Moses asked to see, to look upon the glory of the Lord? And the result was, we read, "When Moses came down from Mount Sinai with the two tablets of the law in his hand, as he came down from the mountain, Moses did not know the skin of his face shone because he'd been talking with God.

" And Paul writes, commenting on that, 2 Corinthians 3:18, "And we all," like Moses, "with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another," created in the image of God that we might be like God, sharing His life, His vitality, His loving, holy character. We become what we were made to be by looking to Christ, who is the image of God. Beholding Him, we become most truly human.

And all our faculties, our minds, our hearts, our lives get aligned right, and we are transformed into His image. Friends, it matters what you fix your gaze on every day. Life, righteousness, holiness, redemption are found in Jesus and are found by those, and only those, who look to Him believingly.

And perhaps, I should be clearer. It's not that we look, get some sense of what He's like, and then go away and strain to make ourselves like Him. No, we become like Him through the very looking.

The very sight of Him is a transforming thing. And so, for now, contemplating Him by faith, we begin to be transformed into His likeness. But so potent is His glory that when we clap eyes upon Him physically at His second coming, then, 1 John 3:2, "When He appears, we shall be like Him, for we shall see Him as He is.

" That full, unveiled, physical sight of the glorified Jesus will be so majestically affecting; it will transform our very bodies around us. The sight of Him now, by the Spirit, makes us more like Him spiritually. The sight of Him then, face to face, will finally make us body and soul as He is.

Dear friends, Looking to Christ, the image of God, will do for you what no self-help books will do. Pressing in to know Him and to know the privileges we have in Him—our righteousness before God, our adoption as children of God—there is the ultimate answer to all our identity issues, to all our brokenness. When you look, when you seek to know Him ever better, that is when you find yourself humanized.

That is when you see what it means to be human, when you begin to hate all perversions of what we were made to be, when you slowly conform to His likeness, the image of God. And it means, friends, that when you see the brokenness of our society with all its piled-up wickedness, be sure no moral patches or patches of any sort will suffice as an ultimate cure. Only in Christ is the cure for humanity.

Only in Christ could there be a cure, for He is the image of God. And so, look to Him, proclaim Him the Son of Man whose glorious rule shall never pass away. Let's pray.

Our Father, we delight to confess that Your magnificent Son is Your perfect image, the bright radiance of Your glory. In Him, we see You, and in Him, we see humanity as we should be. And so we ask, fasten our eyes on Him that we might be healed, that we might be transformed into His image from one degree of glory to another.

And in His majestic and sweet name, we pray it. Amen.