 |  |
word "likeness", which is derived from damah, "to be like". Not only does Gen. 1: 26
tend to support the idea that "Adam" was so named because he was made in the
"likeness" of God, but Gen. 5: 1, 2 seems to use the same sort of argument:
"This is the book of the generations of Adam. In the day that God created man
(Adam), in the likeness (demuth) of God made He him. Male and female created He
them: and blessed them, and called their name Adam, in the day when they were
created" (Gen. 5: 1, 2).
This passage certainly looks back to Gen. 1: 26-30, and not to Gen. 2: 7, 21-23.
The purpose for which man was created is expressed in the three terms "image",
"likeness", and "dominion". The word "image", tselem, is from the Hebrew root tsel,
meaning "shadow". The first occurrence in the O.T. is in Gen. 19: 8: "The shadow of
my roof." The LXX translates tsel by the Greek skia some 27 times. The latter is found
in the N.T. seven times as follows:
"The shadow of death" (Matt. 4: 16; Luke 1: 79).
"The shadow of it" (a tree) (Mark 4: 32).
"The shadow of Peter" (Acts 5: 15).
The word is also used figuratively of the ceremonial law: "A shadow of things to
come, and not the very image" (Heb. 10: 1; I Cor. 2: 17); and in Heb. 8: 5: "The
example and shadow of heavenly things."
Adam was not the "very image", but he in some measure shadowed forth the Lord;
and Rom. 5: 12-14 indicates that in other ways than those suggested in Gen. 1: 26, 27,
Adam was a "figure of Him that was to come".
By creation, man is "the image and glory of God" (I Cor. 11: 7); but this image is,
after all, "earthy".
"The first man is of the earth, earthy; the second man is the Lord from heaven . . . . .
as we have borne the image of the earthy, we shall also bear the image of the heavenly"
(I Cor. 15: 47-49).
In his second epistle to the same Church, the Apostle resumes the theme, and we give
below the two references to "the image" in this second letter:
"But we all with open face beholding as in a glass the glory of the Lord, are
changed into the same image from glory to glory, even as by the Spirit of the Lord"
(II Cor. 3: 18).
"In whom the god of this world hath blinded the minds of them that believe not, lest
the light of the glorious gospel of Christ, Who is the image of God, should shine unto
them" (II Cor. 4: 4).
How many know and preach this gospel? How many realize that the announcement
that "Christ is the image of God" is the "gospel of the glory of Christ", and the subject of
Satan's attacks from the beginning? Before the world was, the Lord Jesus Christ had this