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Man, the Image of God

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Review and Herald Publishing Association · Tacoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Jul 15, 1915

FromReview and Herald, Vol. 92, No. 35.

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Man, the Image of God

By L. L. CAVINESS

L. L. CAVINESS
ONE of the fallacies of Christian Science is that man is now the image of God. The Christian Science healer will sometimes begin his conversation with the one who has come to him for help, with such questions as the following: “You believe that God is love? You believe that man was made in the image of God? You would not say that the image of God had the rheumatism?”
This method of procedure is intended to prove that the trouble lies not in the real man, but in his thought—in “mortal mind;” but the fallacy is easily discovered when we turn to the teachings of the Scriptures. “To the law and to the testimony: if they speak not according to this word, it is because there is no light in them.” Isa. 8: 20.
It is true that “God is love.” 1 John 4: 8, 16. It is also true that man was created “in the image of God.” Gen. 1: 27. The Scriptures, however, teach that “all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God.” Rom. 3: 23. Yet the image of God has not been irretrievably lost. When God planned that his own Son should come to the earth as a man and die for men, he arranged a plan whereby man might again be “conformed to the image of his Son.” Rom. 8: 29.
As God made a man a free moral agent, a man may refuse to believe in the atonement for sin which Christ made by his death, and may refuse to receive the divine power necessary to live the Christ life. Of such it may be said: “The god of this world hath blinded the minds of them which believe not, lest the light of the glorious gospel of Christ, who is the image of God, should shine unto them.” 2 Cor. 4: 4.
The method by which the image of God is restored in man is clearly shown in the words of the apostle Paul: “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.” 2 Cor. 3: 18. Realizing that man has lost the image of God, let us look to Christ, that by the Spirit the divine image may be restored in us; or, in the words of another scripture, let us “put on the new man, which is renewed in knowledge after the image of him that created him.” Col. 3: 10.