In his own body and life, in his teaching, and in his resurrected body, Jesus reveals God’s design in creation. Because Jesus is the image of God, in whose likeness we are created, we must look to him as the example for all of humanity. He is the image that we must trust in for a full and clear picture of who we were created to be.

You may or may not have heard of the 2022 documentary titled with the controversial question: What is a woman? The documentary follows a conservative political commentator, Matt Walsh, as he interviews people of all walks of life and different political views, asking them to answer the question: What is a woman? The responses vary, but are mostly vague and filled with much emotion. And what the documentary does well to show is just how heated the conversation surrounding gender has become.
The very fact that we are asking the question of what a man or a woman is, shows that there has been a major shift in the way our society thinks about and discusses the notion of gender. Albert Mohler, in the foreword of the popular book God and the Transgender Debate, writes: “The sexual revolution is fundamentally restructuring our culture’s collective understanding of family, society, and the very meaning of life.” The way we think about sex, sexuality, and gender is hugely different from the way it was understood and discussed even just fifty years ago.
And so it seems that, increasingly, Christians and church leaders are going to be called to defend the biblical truth that human beings are created male and female, in God’s image.
One Answer, in Genesis
For many of us, we immediately turn to Genesis 1-2. For it clearly and unambiguously teaches that God created two distinct genders: male and female, both in his image (Genesis 1:27). The first two chapters of the Bible teach us two fundamental truths about every human being. Firstly, we are created in God’s image. Secondly, we are created either male or female. But what about the rest of the Bible? Where else can we turn to develop these fundamental truths that we learn about in the creation account?
When we begin to survey the riches of scripture, we start to realise that it is the person of Jesus Christ—the perfect image of God—who is the clearest example of God’s design for his creation.
Looking to Jesus
We saw that Genesis 1 and 2 teach two fundamental truths about human beings: we are created in God’s image; and we are created with a distinct gender. And both of these truths are revealed perfectly to us in the person of Jesus Christ. In Colossians 1:15, Paul says Jesus is: “the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation.” This verse shows us that Jesus reveals God to us, and through him, we can better understand the nature of God.
John 14:9 teaches us that when we see the Son, we do in fact see the Father. In Colossians 1, Paul doesn’t write that Jesus was made in the image, but that he is the image of God. Jesus Christ, who is both unchanging and who existed for all eternity, is the image of God. He is “the radiance of God’s glory and the exact imprint of [God’s] nature” (Hebrews 1:3). Because Jesus is the original, unchanging image of God, we must come to see that human beings were created in his image. When we want to better understand fundamental truths about how human beings were created, we must look to Jesus Christ. For he reveals God. And he shows us what it means for us to be created in God’s image.
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“It to be a grave mistake to present Christianity as something charming and popular with no offense in it. Seeing that Christ went about the world giving the most violent offense to all kinds of people, it would seem absurd to expect that the doctrine of his person can be so presented as to offend nobody.”

Since one collection of essays by the late great Dorothy Sayers is titled The Whimsical Christian, let me begin with a whimsical personal story. A learned and well-read friend had shared a neat Sayers’ quote on a social media post of mine, but without further reference. Now to my way of thinking, not at least mentioning the book or article a quote comes from is an unforgivable sin.
I suspected where it might have come from, but I had to spend the next 10 minutes sniffing around, until I finally found it. So I pulled that volume off my shelves, and this article is a result of all that. But there was another good outcome: in the process I came upon another of my books that also quoted it, and in it was a ‘free coffee’ card!
Moral of the story: do not use ‘free coffee’ cards as bookmarks. But in this case I rebuked my friend for her grave sin of half-hearted referencing, and then I thanked her for the pleasant discovery en-route to finding out the source of the quote. (And to make it even more interesting, moments after I found this card another friend was quoting from the very book I had just found it in.)
So I pulled out the essay in question and reread it: Creed or Chaos? It was a talk she had delivered on May 4, 1940. Hodder & Stoughton released it as a booklet that year. It has appeared in various other forms since then. One of them that I also have is the aforementioned The Whimsical Christian (Macmillan, 1978), which first came out as Christian Letters to a Post-Christian World (Eerdmans, 1969). It contains 18 of her more important writings on theology and Christianity.
While she is quite well known for her Lord Peter Wimsey detection novels, her work as a lay theologian is top-notch and deserves widespread attention. I discuss her a bit more in this article: https://billmuehlenberg.com/2006/05/03/a-review-of-creed-without-chaos-exploring-theology-in-the-writings-of-dorothy-l-sayers-by-laura-simmons/
Here I want to simply offer a number of quotes from her brief essay. The 18-page piece opens with these words:
And when he is come, he will reprove the world of sin, and of righteousness, and of judgment: Of sin, because they believe not on me; Of righteousness, because I go to my Father, and ye see me no more; Of judgment, because the prince of this world is judged.
-John 16:8-11
It is worse than useless for Christians to talk about the importance of Christian morality, unless they are prepared to take their stand upon the fundamentals of Christian theology. It is a lie to say that dogma does not matter; it matters enormously. It is fatal to let people suppose that Christianity is only a mode of feeling; it is vitally necessary to insist that it is first and foremost a rational explanation of the universe. It is hopeless to offer Christianity as a vaguely idealistic aspiration of a simple and consoling kind; it is, on the contrary, a hard, tough, exacting, and complex doctrine, steeped in a drastic and uncompromising realism. And it is fatal to imagine that everybody knows quite well what Christianity is and needs only a little encouragement to practice it. The brutal fact is that in this Christian country not one person in a hundred has the faintest notion what the Church teaches about God or man or society or the person of Jesus Christ.
If you think I am exaggerating, ask the army chaplains. Apart from a possible one per cent of intelligent and instructed Christians, there are three kinds of people we have to deal with. There are the frank and open heathen, whose notions of Christianity are a dreadful jumble of rags and tags of Bible anecdote and clotted mythological nonsense. There are the ignorant Christians, who combine a mild gentle-Jesus sentimentality with vaguely humanistic ethics – most of these are Arian heretics. Finally, there are the more or less instructed church-goers, who know all the arguments about divorce and auricular confession and communion in two kinds, but are about as well equipped to do battle on fundamentals against as a boy with a pea-shooter facing a fan-fire of machine guns. Theologically, this country is at present in a state of utter chaos, established in the name of religious toleration, and rapidly degenerating into the flight from reason and the death of hope. We are not happy in this condition, and there are signs of a very great eagerness, especially among the younger people, to find a creed to which they can give wholehearted adherence.
This is the Church’s opportunity, if she chooses to take it. So far as the people’s readiness to listen goes, she has not been in so strong a position for at least two centuries. The rival philosophies of humanism, enlightened self-interest, and mechanical progress have broken down badly; the antagonism of science has proved to be far more apparent than real; and the happy-go-lucky doctrine of laissez-faire is completely discredited. But no good whatever will be done by a retreat into personal piety or by mere exhortation to a recall to prayer.
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Written by W. Robert Godfrey |
Tuesday, December 20, 2022
John promised that whoever reads this book aloud and hears it and keeps it will receive a blessing (Rev. 1:3). We will indeed be blessed as we read it slowly, thoughtfully, and meditatively, asking what God is teaching us through the images He uses.

The whole Bible is the Word of God—inerrant, authoritative revelation. That revelation is in words, and those words come to us in a variety of literary styles. For example, some parts of the Bible are history, and some are poetry. Both forms are the revelation of God, but they must be read somewhat differently for their meaning to be properly understood. When biblical history says that David was a shepherd, it means that he tended sheep. When the poetry of Psalm 23 says that the Lord is our shepherd, it means that the Lord cares for His people in a way that is similar to the way that a shepherd cares for his sheep. To insist that Psalm 23 teaches that the Lord tends sheep is to miss the point completely. To interpret Scripture properly and to truly understand its meaning, we must recognize the various ways that the human authors of the Bible were inspired to write and what they intended.
Careful attention to style and the intention of the author is particularly important as we approach the book of the Revelation. There John is writing prophetically and using a great many word pictures that often have a poetic quality. Consider, for example, John’s description of Jesus in the heavenly temple in the first chapter of Revelation. He does not name Jesus explicitly, but his meaning is clear. He sees “one like a son of man” (Rev. 1:13), and initially the picture he paints seems straightforward: “clothed with a long robe and with a golden sash around his chest. The hairs of his head were white, like white wool, like snow. His eyes were like a flame of fire” (Rev. 1:13–14). Already we may have questions. Does the glorified Christ in heaven literally have white hair? That is possible, but John may also be speaking somewhat poetically and suggesting the maturity and wisdom of Christ. Does Christ in heaven have eyes like a flame of fire? Again, John may be teaching us the intensity of His searching sight rather than the color of His eyes.
These questions are really answered for us by John in the final two elements of his description of Jesus: “From his mouth came a sharp two-edged sword, and his face was like the sun shining in full strength” (Rev. 1:16). Clearly, John is teaching that from the mouth of Jesus comes the sharp, judging Word of God in the spirit of what we read in Hebrews 4:12: “For the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing to the division of soul and of spirit, of joints and of marrow, and discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart.” Even more certainly, when John writes that His face was shining like the sun in full strength, he shows that his description goes beyond the literal appearance of Jesus in heaven in order to communicate its meaning. If the face of Jesus was literally shining like the sun, then John could not have seen His hair or His eyes or His mouth. John writes of the shining of the face of Jesus to show His glory and the fullness and purity of light that is in Him.
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