The Uniqueness Of God

In all of God’s glorious creation, there may be nothing more mystifying than mankind itself. Genesis 1:27 is clear when it states, “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.” According to Scripture, God saw man’s creation, and all creation for that matter, as good. John Frame quotes John Murray on the matter when he writes, [Genesis 1:26-31] emphasizes the uniqueness of man in many ways…The terms “let us make” indicate that there is unique engagement of divine thought and counsel, and bespeak the fact that something correspondingly unique is about to take place.” Therefore, a clear distinction is already being made between mankind and the rest of creation, a distinction that carries with it an intrinsic significance that deems mankind as special and patterned after God himself. However in Genesis 3, a drastic turn of events wreaked havoc upon God’s original design and intent as man, out of a desire “to be like God,”

Berkouwer’s take on the matter of imago Dei rest on “man’s inescapable relatedness to God.” Berkouwer claimed that “man must always be seen as he stands before the face of the Almighty, bound to God religiously in the totality of his existence. This relatedness to God, moreover, is not something added to man but is constitutive of his being.” For Berkouwer, the image of God relies heavily upon the notion of relationship and relatedness to others and to God as a result of becoming a new self through Christ redemptive work. Hoekema comments that:

For him [Berkouwer] the image does not consist in certain structural qualities that resemble similar qualities in God, but in concretely visible sanctification – that is, in the newness of life to which we are restored in Christ. This renewal of the image is both a gift from God and the task of man. The image of God and its renewal is therefore not a static entity but an ever-beckoning ideal, a challenge to consecrated