Image

The word "image" runs along two tracks that meet only at one point. On one side stands the prohibited image — the graven likeness, the cast god, the colossus on the plain of Dura, the head-and-superscription on Caesar's coin, the speaking image of the beast. On the other side stands the image that God himself authors — Adam shaped after God's likeness, Christ as the very image of the invisible God, and the saints transformed into that same image from glory to glory. The point where the two tracks cross is the question every image-text in scripture finally puts to its reader: whose image are you, and whose image will you worship?

The Graven Image Forbidden

The Decalogue addresses each Israelite singly: "You will not make for yourself a graven image, nor any likeness [of any thing] that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth" (Exo 20:4). The Levitical restatement uses plural-you for the people as a whole — "You⁺ will not make yourselves idols, neither will you⁺ rear yourselves up a graven image, or a pillar, neither will you⁺ place any figured stone in your⁺ land, to bow down to it: for I am Yahweh your⁺ God" (Lev 26:1). Deuteronomy frames the same prohibition as a self-protective measure: "or else you⁺ will corrupt yourselves, and make you⁺ a graven image in the form of any figure, the likeness of male or female" (Deu 4:16). In every case the danger is not aesthetic but ontological — fashioning a "likeness" of the God who has not given one.

The prophets push the polemic further by ridiculing the manufacture itself. Isaiah taunts: "To whom then will you⁺ liken God? Or what likeness will you⁺ compare to him? The image, a workman has cast [it], and the goldsmith overlays it with gold, and casts [for it] silver chains" (Isa 40:18-19). And again: "Those who fashion a graven image are all of them vanity; and the things that they delight in will not profit; and their own witnesses don't see, nor know: that they may be put to shame. Who has fashioned a god, or molten an image that is profitable for nothing?" (Isa 44:9-10). The image is exposed as a thing made — first cast, then overlaid, then chained — in a register that contrasts with the only other Maker the topic admits.

The Image of Jealousy

Ezekiel's temple vision shows what happens when the prohibition is breached at the sanctuary itself. The Spirit transports the prophet "to the door of the gate of the inner [court] that looks toward the north; where the seat of the image of jealousy was, which provokes to jealousy" (Eze 8:3). The phrase repeats a few verses later, fixing the idol's exact position: "northward of the gate of the altar this image of jealousy in the entry" (Eze 8:5). What was driven out by Sinai has been brought back into the precinct of Yahweh. The image is named for the divine response it triggers, not for the figure it depicts.

Adam in the Image of God

Against this backdrop the Genesis account does what no fashioned image can: it places a living likeness of God on the earth by God's own act. "And [the Speech of] 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 cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth. And [the Speech of] God created the man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them" (Gen 1:26-27). The doublet of "image" and "likeness" is restated when the Adam line begins: "This is the Book of the Generations of Adam. In the day that God created Adam, in the likeness of God he made him" (Gen 5:1).

After the flood the image becomes the ground of an explicit ethical claim. "Whoever sheds man's blood, by man will his blood be shed: For in the image of God he made man" (Gen 9:6). The reasoning is unusual: human bloodshed is answerable not because of the value the human places on himself but because of the image stamped on him by another. James carries the same logic into the ethics of speech: "With it we bless the Lord and Father; and with it we curse men, who are made after the likeness of God" (Jas 3:9). What Israel must not fashion in wood or gold, every neighbor already is.

Paul puts the point in a separate context but with the same vocabulary: "For a man indeed ought not to have his head veiled, since he is the image and glory of God: but the woman is the glory of the man" (1 Cor 11:7). The line is brief, but it shows the Genesis image-language still in active use as a description of the human as such.

Christ as the Image of God

The strand that began with Adam reaches its fixed point in Christ. Paul introduces the theme through a polemic about gospel obscurity: "in whom the god of this age has blinded the minds of the unbelieving, that the light of the good news of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God, should not dawn [on them]" (2 Cor 4:4). What the prophets denied to anything fashioned by hand — being a real likeness of God — Paul affirms of Christ.

Colossians sharpens the affirmation by joining it to creation: "who is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation" (Col 1:15). Hebrews adds substance-language: "who being the radiance of his glory, and the very image of his substance, and upholding all things by the word of his power, when he had made purification of sins, sat down at the right hand of the Majesty on high" (Heb 1:3). Philippians reaches for "form" rather than "image" but in the same register: "who, existing in the form of God, did not consider making full use of his equality with God" (Php 2:6).

These four texts function together. Christ is not a copy of God in the sense the prohibited images pretended to be; he is image as radiance is image of light — the visible bearing of an invisible source.

Conformed and Transformed

Once Christ is fixed as the image of God, regeneration acquires a definite shape. "For whom he foreknew, he also preappointed [to be] conformed to the image of his Son, that he might be the firstborn among many brothers" (Rom 8:29). The destination of the elect is not generic likeness to God but specific conformation to Christ, with Christ as eldest of a family.

The present tense of that destination is set out in Corinthians: "But all of us, with unveiled face looking as in a mirror at the glory of the Lord, are transformed into the same image from glory to glory, even as from the Lord the Spirit" (2 Cor 3:18). The transformation is gradual, glory-to-glory, and worked by the Spirit through unveiled gazing.

The Pauline letters describe the same renewal as a putting-on. "and put on the new man, that after God has been created in righteousness and holiness of truth" (Eph 4:24). "and have put on the new man, who is being renewed to knowledge after the image of him who created him" (Col 3:10). The Colossians line ties the ethical "new man" back to Genesis: the image of the Creator is the pattern, and the newness is its restoration "to knowledge."

The Old Testament root of this expectation is brief but precise. "As for me, I will see your face in righteousness; I will be satisfied, when I awake, with [seeing] your form" (Ps 17:15). The promise of beholding God's "form" sits as the OT counterpart to the NT promise of being conformed to Christ's image.

The Image We Will Bear

The completion of the regeneration arc is eschatological. "And as we have borne the image of the earthly, we will also bear the image of the heavenly" (1 Cor 15:49). The two-image contrast is total: nothing of the earthly image survives the resurrection unchanged, and nothing of the heavenly image is missing once it is borne.

John writes the same expectation in family terms. "Look at what manner of love the Father has bestowed on us, that we should be called children of God; and [such] we are. For this cause the world doesn't know us, because it did not know him. Beloved, we are now children of God, and it is not yet made manifest what we will be. We know that, if he will be manifested, we will be like him; for we will see him even as he is. And everyone who has this hope [set] on him purifies himself, even as he is pure" (1 John 3:1-3). The "what we will be" is left undescribed except in the form it will take — likeness to him, conditioned on seeing him as he is.

Nebuchadnezzar's Dream-Image

In Daniel the image takes a political turn. The first occurrence is a dream-image, shown to a king and read by a captive prophet. "You, O king, looked, and saw a great image. This image, which was mighty, and whose brightness was excellent, stood before you; and its aspect was terrible. As for this image, its head was of fine gold, its breast and its arms of silver, its belly and its thighs of bronze, its legs of iron, its feet part of iron, and part of clay. You saw until a stone was cut out without hands, which struck the image on its feet that were of iron and clay, and broke them in pieces. Then the iron, the clay, the bronze, the silver, and the gold, were broken in pieces together, and became like the chaff of the summer threshing-floors; and the wind carried them away, so that no place was found for them: and the stone that struck the image became a great mountain, and filled the whole earth" (Dan 2:31-35).

Two features of the vision matter for the umbrella. First, the image is composite — gold, silver, bronze, iron, clay — as if every metal of an idol-shop were stacked into a single statue. Second, what destroys it is "a stone … cut out without hands": an unfashioned thing, in pointed contrast to "the image, a workman has cast" (Isa 40:19) and to the goldsmith's overlay.

The Golden Image on the Plain of Dura

What Nebuchadnezzar saw in his dream he then attempts to make: "Nebuchadnezzar the king made an image of gold, whose height was threescore cubits, and its width six cubits: he set it up in the plain of Dura, in the province of Babylon" (Dan 3:1). The image's monumental size matches its monumental claim. Worship is enforced by music and threat: "that at what time you⁺ hear the sound of the cornet, flute, harp, lyre, psaltery, dulcimer, and all kinds of music, you⁺ fall down and worship the golden image that Nebuchadnezzar the king has set up; and whoever does not fall down and worship will the same hour be cast into the midst of a burning fiery furnace" (Dan 3:5-6). The plural-you marks the address as comprehensive — every people and tongue named in the chapter is summoned.

The three captives' refusal is the topic's confessional anchor. "But if not, be it known to you, O king, that we will not serve your gods, nor worship the golden image which you have set up" (Dan 3:18). The graven-image prohibition of Sinai meets, here, the imperial image-cult of Babylon, and meets it head-on.

Caesar's Image on the Coin

Centuries later the image returns in a smaller form, but the question is recognizably the same. The Pharisees and Herodians come with a denarius. "Bring me a denarius, that I may see it. And they brought it. And he says to them, Whose is this image and superscription? And they said to him, Caesar's. And Jesus said to them, Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and to God the things that are God's" (Mark 12:15-17). Luke reports the same exchange: "Show me a denarius. Whose image and superscription does it have? And they said, Caesar's. And he said to them, Then render to Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and to God the things that are God's" (Luke 20:24-25).

The reply trades on the image-language. The coin bears Caesar's image and goes back to Caesar. The unstated companion question — what bears God's image, and goes back to God? — is left to the hearer to fill in from Genesis.

The Image of the Beast

Revelation gathers all the older image-strands and folds them into one figure. The second beast counterfeits creation by fabricating a worshiped image of the first beast. "And he deceives those who dwell on the earth by reason of the signs which it was given him to do in the sight of the beast; saying to those who dwell on the earth, that they should make an image to the beast who has the stroke of the sword and lived. And it was given to him to give spirit to the image of the beast, that the image of the beast should both speak, and cause that as many as should not worship the image of the beast should be killed" (Rev 13:14-15). The image speaks; the worshiper who refuses it dies. The Dura music has become a Dura sword.

The wrath sequence keys directly to this worship. "If any man worships the beast and his image, and receives a mark on his forehead, or on his hand, he also will drink of the wine of the wrath of God, which is mixed undiluted in the cup of his anger; and he will be tormented with fire and brimstone in the presence of the holy angels, and in the presence of the Lamb: and the smoke of their torment goes up forever and ever; and they have no rest day and night, those who worship the beast and his image, and whoever receives the mark of his name" (Rev 14:9-11). The first bowl follows the same line: "and it became a noisome and grievous sore on the men who had the mark of the beast, and who worshiped his image" (Rev 16:2).

The counter-image is the company that refused. "And I saw as it were a sea of glass mingled with fire; and those who come off victorious from the beast, and from his image, and from the number of his name, standing by the sea of glass, having harps of God" (Rev 15:2). The closing judgment removes the beast and the image-makers together: "And the beast was taken, and with him the false prophet who did the signs in his sight, with which he deceived those who had received the mark of the beast and those who worshiped his image: both of them were cast alive into the lake of fire that burns with brimstone" (Rev 19:20). And the millennial vindication is reserved precisely for those who refused: "and such as did not worship the beast, neither his image, and did not receive the mark on their forehead and on their hand; and they lived, and reigned with Christ a thousand years" (Rev 20:4).

The Two Tracks Resolved

Across the canon the image-language sorts into a single contrast. There is the image not to be made — the graven likeness of Sinai, the seat of jealousy in Ezekiel's temple, the gold colossus on the plain of Dura, the coined head of Caesar (rendered, not worshiped), and the speaking image of the beast. And there is the image given by God — Adam in the divine likeness, Christ as the image of the invisible God, and the saints conformed to that image, transformed glory to glory, awaiting the day they will bear the image of the heavenly and see him as he is.

The two tracks meet at one decision: refuse the image that demands worship, and let the Image who is worthy of worship remake you into his.