Sunday School | Man is Made in the Image of God, but We Are Broken

Guys, we are early in our new section of our class. We've done theology proper—first person of God. We've done Christology—second person of God. We have done pneumatology—third person, doctrine of the Spirit. What are we doing now? Anthropology. Anthropology—the doctrine of mankind, the doctrine of humanity.

And last week, we talked about the fact that we are made in God's image. I'm gonna invoke a little bit of C.S. Lewis from Narnia. There's a scene in Prince Caspian where Prince Caspian is this young boy who becomes the rightful king of Narnia, but he was raised by the Telmarines, which are kind of a swarthy bunch. And Caspian is talking to Aslan, and he says, "Sir, I was wishing that I came of a more honorable lineage." And Aslan replies:

"You come of the Lord Adam and the Lady Eve. And that is both honor enough to erect the head of the poorest beggar and shame enough to bow the shoulders of the greatest emperor on earth. Be content."

It's a good answer. Because we are, if our doctrine of man has got to encompass two things. On the one hand, we are made in the image of God. And number two, we are tragically fallen.

Any anthropology that ignores the fact that we are image bearers—distinct, set apart—we're not just smart chimpanzees. We're not just things with thumbs. We are image bearers. And something has gone horribly awry. The image is marred. Acid has been thrown in our face. Any understanding of humanity's got to embrace both of those.

So last week, we talked about the fact that we're made in God's image. I suggested four categories to you that embody what we mean when we are made in the image of God. And they all started with what letter? R. And what were they?

Rank. Your value, your worth, your preeminence is not because of your cerebellum or your thumbs. It's because you are an image bearer.

Rule, right? Very early in the story, we're set apart. God creates a sun to rule over the world, to govern the day, and a moon to govern the night. But the primary ruler that he makes is humanity. We are to rule over the fish of the seas. We are to subdue the earth. We are the rulers, the rightful kings. And in fact, from us should come the king who ultimately reigns over all things.

Relationships. Male and female, he made them in the image of God. Men bear his image. Women bear his image. We are image bearers in the ways that we relate to one another. That one's complicated because on the one hand, men all by themselves bear God's image. Women all by themselves bear God's image. But on the other hand, men and women together bear God's image. People together in relationship with one another bear God's image because he's multi-personal. We are not independent. We are squares made for cubeness, and we realize our greatest potential in relationship with one another.

Reflect. You might recall we talked about Andrew Murray, who wrote the book Humility. His whole point is this: you weren't made to be great. You're made to reflect someone who is great. You are not suns. You are moons. We are not meant to be self-sufficient. The fact that we are images of God, that we bear his image, is meant to say that we reflect his image. We are not inherent independent things. We were created to depend on him. We're made to reflect his life.

Rank, rule, relate, reflect. So far so good.

The Problem

Here's the problem though. Every one of those is screwed up. Profoundly, deeply broken. You bear his image, but you bear his image in a broken way. And it's because the first of us—as Lewis says—Lord Adam and Lady Eve blew it. And as our federal heads, what they did cast the rest of us into a pretty despairing condition.

I want to take you to the scene of the crime. I want you to see when it happens. And I want you to notice a couple of things about it. This is the fall. We're gonna be in Genesis 3 if you want to turn there in your Bible.

Genesis 3 is the scene of the greatest con in the history of the world. Many of you, the younger people, have probably done it. You know the idea that I could sell you the Brooklyn Bridge? Like, that's not mine to sell, but I might try to sell it to you and then you get conned out of it. The world's been full of all these different cons, some of them actually on a pretty grand scale.

Bernie Madoff might be the greatest con in our, I don't know, last decade or so. How long ago was Bernie Madoff? Maybe 15, 20 years ago? Either way, this dominates every scam that the world has ever seen.

So take a look at Genesis 3. And I want you to listen. Listen for the con.

Now, the serpent was more crafty than any of the wild animals the Lord God had made. And he said to the woman, "Did God really say you must not eat from any tree in the garden?" The woman said to the serpent, "No, no, no, we may eat from the trees in the garden, but God did say you must not eat fruit from the tree that's in the middle of the garden and you must not touch it or you will die." And the serpent says to the woman, "You will not surely die. For God knows that when you eat of it, your eyes will be opened and you will be like God, knowing good and evil." When the woman saw that the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing for the eye and also desirable for gaining wisdom, she took some and she ate it. She also gave some to her husband who was with her and he ate it. — Genesis 3:1-6

That's it. That's the scene right there. That is where the mirror cracks. That is where all of the image bearers got acid thrown in their face.

But I'm curious if you heard the conniness of the con. It's in verse five. What is Satan's offer? "You will be like God." Do you hear it? Why must what follows be a con? She is already as like God as it is possible to be. His offer is, "Hey, you wanna be like God?" Well, she should have said, look at me—she is as like God as it is possible for a creature to be. He is selling her what she already owns and thereby destroying it.

And when she takes the bait, or maybe more particularly when Adam goes along with it—it seems like Adam's fall. Even though he wasn't the initiator of this, when Adam took the bait, that is when everything goes sideways.

John Calvin says this: "Though we grant that God's image was not totally annihilated and destroyed in man, yet it was so corrupted by sin that whatever remains is a frightful deformity."

From that moment on, those of us who are image bearers—and the Bible continues to refer to us as image bearers. That didn't stop being true in Genesis 2, it continues on through Genesis 3 and 4 and 5 and all the way to the end of the book. We still bear God's image, but the mirror's been cracked. It's no longer the same.

How the Image Has Been Corrupted

So let's take some time and process through each of these four: rank, rule, relate, reflect. How has your sense that your value comes from being made in the image of God—that your rank is predicated on that—how has that been broken? How has that aspect of the image been corrupted in your life and in your experience?

When somebody who's driving just like me gets in front of me, I see it. Everyone's as bad as me.

How many of you, if I were to press you and say, "Why do you think you're valuable?" How many of you would say, "Because I'm an image bearer"? Is this what you go to? Do you remember a couple of weeks ago when I was preaching on all the things that we treasure about ourselves—that you're the singer, you're the actor, you're the athlete, you're the smart kid in the room, you're the pretty one, whatever you are? Does that not have a greater power in your sense of your own self-worth than the fact that you're made in the image of God?

This is pervasively the case. We are supposed to say, when Andrew Murray says, "Hey, you know what, you're not made to be great, you're made to reflect someone who is great," we should be like, "Yeah, obviously." But you don't. Because every one of you has learned to find your value elsewhere.

What do you think right now? If you're born into this culture at this time, what is the source of value for most people? What's the list?

Likes. Likes, okay. So social media is an enormous edifice to this reality. I mean, we have an objective way that you and everyone else who's watching can literally keep score on how popular you are, how many followers you have, how many likes that you get.

Have you ever posted something online and then checked it for the next three days to see how many points it accumulated for you? This is a thing. So likes—what else? What are the other score-keeping mechanisms?

Where do you really think makes you valuable? Or actually, that's too painful, so don't do yourself—just do the person sitting next to you. Think of someone in this room and tell me what's their obvious score-keeping card.

Okay, keeping up now: is this more financially? Yeah, so who's got the nicest car? Who's got the biggest lake house? Who's got the pick-a-thing, whatever it is—whatever the tokens of wealth and success are. This is where you find your value. And you might even find that when you are making a lot of money, you feel better about yourself, you feel more valuable. And when you lose your job, your entire sense of self-worth just plummets, right?

Okay, what else? What are the score-keeping cards that we use?

Accomplishments. Accomplishments, so what is this? Career? So yeah, did you make—I don't know—whatever the next promotion is? The next—if you're in the military, did you make the next rank? And not only did you make it, but actually I was the youngest person to ever make that rank, right? Or I oversaw the greatest number of people. All of these things. Why are those so delicious to us? Why is it we treasure up all of these tokens that say "I deserve a spot on the lifeboat"?

Most of us live our lives like—you know, there's a lifeboat, there's only room for ten, but there's twelve of us on here. So somebody's going overboard, and why do I deserve a spot, right? This is a pervasive human experience.

A couple more, Dan.

Well, I'm gonna kind of answer the question I think we're asking. It's this weird combination: we need this propping up from our earthly existence because we understand, we feel deep down that we're broken. And the flip side of the brokenness of this is that we're worth nothing. So I have to make something of myself so that I can feel like I am worth something.

Yes.

And it is ultimately the downside that we, I think, most deeply embrace.

Amen.

It's true that if I feel fundamentally worthless—and I will tell you, like, for Tim Henderson, my sweet wife has had to live with this for like thirty-three years—but like, on a Saturday, I don't like weekends. I don't like evenings usually, because if I don't have something to do, I get super gretzy. I hate leisure. I need something to do, and preferably the thing that I'm doing is getting the grass cut. Preferably the thing I'm doing is something I can look back and say I've accomplished my whole life. I need something to do, or I kind of get a little—ah. And so it is, I am filled by the end of it. If I spent the whole weekend doing nothing—you know, I played video games. Well, first of all, that would never happen because I would kill myself before we got to that point. But if something happened that at the end of the weekend, all I did was spend the weekend playing video games, I'm a nightmare to be around, because I hate that. Because my—it's really hard to get outside of like, "Why am I valuable?" Because I get crap done, watch me, right? And if I don't, my sense—I know that I'm supposed to actually have the answers to this for you, but the reality is that this is a common thing. It may not be that exact particular disorder, but that or something like it. If I'm not filling in the blank—whatever that is—then our sense of worth, creators.

There's a hand in the back. Yeah, Bianca?

So we were created to mirror God's glory.

Yep.

And that's broken because it's been kind of rough for us. Although we do—we're still made that way—but we've been deceived. We have to create the glory.

Yes, we are deceived that we need to create glory. That's an apt summary of this.

What? We do, in the fact that we accomplished or we find value in whatever it is that we find value, right? So for some people it is looking a certain way. When they leave the house. And for other people it's the accomplishments or feeling like they can contribute, people are listening, whatever it is, right? Like all these different things that are reflected in promotions or accolades.

Yes.

Financial then successes. But we're looking to create glory that's already existing.

That.

We were made to do.

Exactly.

Then we've been deceived, and not deceived.

Bianca, that is perfect. That's exactly right. I hope you could all hear that. We are deceived. We were meant to reflect the glory that is preexisting, but we've been lied to saying, "Okay, you can be like him"—when we're already like him. And thereby we cease to be as like him as we could be. Then we're constantly trying to pick it up and make it up and create something that was already made for us that we merely need to reflect.

Now, here's somebody who does a masterful job of this. In front of you, probably, there's a children's Bible. Maybe, maybe not. Where the heck are these things? Okay, if you have one of these in front of you, you could look at this.

This thing is brilliant. Sally Lloyd Jones wrote this children's Bible. We give these things out like water around here. Just have a baby, we'll give you one. It's not worth it ultimately, but if you're having a baby already, we'll give you one. And there's this phenomenal framing of it all. God makes the world here. It begins with all this wonderful goodness—God has made the world and everybody's in and everything's great.

And what ends up happening is there's a chapter called "The Terrible Lie." It's got this big, scary looking snake. Eve picked the fruit and ate some and Adam ate some too. And a terrible lie came over the world. It would never leave. It would live on in every human heart, whispering to every one of God's children:

"God doesn't love me."

It wasn't a dream, it was a nightmare. A dove flew from Adam's hand, a deer darted in the thicket. It was as if they were frightened by something. A chill was in the air, something strange was happening. They'd always been naked, but now they felt naked and wrong, and they didn't want anyone to see them. So they hid.

Later that evening, as God was taking his walk, he called to them: "Children." Usually, Adam and Eve loved to hear God's voice and would run to him, but this time, they ran away from him and hid in the shadows.

"Where are you?" God called.

"Hiding," said Adam. "We're afraid of you."

"Did you eat the fruit I told you not to eat?" God asked them.

Adam said, "Well, Eve made me do it."

"What have you done?" God said.

Eve said, "The terrible serpent made me do it."

And a terrible pain came into God's heart. His children hadn't just broken the one rule. They had broken God's heart. They had broken the wonderful relationship with him. And now he knew that everything else would break. God's creation would start to unravel and come undone and go wrong. From now on, everything would die, even though it was all supposed to last forever. You see, sin had come into God's perfect world and it would never leave. God's children would always be running away from him and hiding in the dark. Their hearts would break now and never work properly again.

And she says this a page later:

"You see, no matter what, in spite of everything, God would love his children with a never stopping, never giving up, unbreaking, always and forever love. And although they would forget him and run from him, deep in their hearts, God's children would miss him, always, and long for him. Lost children, yearning for their home."

Before they left the garden, God whispered a promise to Adam and Eve: "It will not always be so. I will come to rescue you. And when I do, I'm going to do battle against the snake. I'll get rid of the sin and the dark and the sadness you let in here. I'm coming back for you." And he would. One day, God himself would come.

She does a masterful job of tracing this thread through—when the terrible lie entered the world, this contentment that we were supposed to live with was ruined. It starts with our sense of worth. The rank has all been jacked up.

Broken Leadership

What's the second one? Rank, rule. Can we make a case that leadership in the world is broken? Would that be a difficult case to make? God has instituted leaders. He put us in charge of creation. And from almost the word go, leadership has been corrupted.

Leadership is the granted authority to bless those you are called to lead. And throughout human history, leaders just use their authority to benefit themselves. Do you think anybody in Congress has made money in the stock market because they're in Congress? Maybe just a wee bit. Do you think anybody has ever used power to send other people, other men's sons to war and not their own? Do you think anybody has ever used power and lorded it over those that they are called to serve?

We are meant to rule, you guys. Leadership is God's idea. God is a leader. He's instituted it. But it's broken. Not just our sense of self-worth, but our understanding of the very nature of leadership.

What was Jesus's answer to this question when he talks about how Christians are to lead? Do you remember what he said?

"The greatest of you is to be the servant of all." — John

That's right. He says, "The rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them. And then he says, 'Not so with you.'" He is ushering in a complete restoration—everything Jesus is doing is restoring the lost image. The very nature of leadership is meant to be humble servant leadership.

So when Jesus comes back, he says:

"I did not come to be served, but to serve and to give my life as a ransom for many."

He's coming to those of us who—it doesn't matter if you're leading the PTA.

You probably lead the PTA in a corrupted way. You certainly lead your families in a corrupted way. When you were a seventh-grade kid and you got chosen captain of the baseball team, you were probably selfish about the way you exercised that authority. And Jesus comes in and says, "Not so with you. We are to be different. We rule, but we should rule in a completely different way than the world around us rules."

Relationships and Authority

OK, next one—relationship. How are we doing? Men, are you exercising your God-given authority to love your wives as Christ loves the church? Wives, do you respect your husband's authority and partner with him in it? How are we doing? How about—how are they doing? Is that an easier question to answer? Are they doing poorly? Do we not see? I mean, it's unbelievable.

Or how about even this? Let's make it less personal. Have you noticed—if you were to step back and look at the world and watch the way that Satan interacts in our world, just notice: where does he like to put the guns?

Strategic Ground

If you were fighting in an actual battle, if you went to, I don't know, Gettysburg or something, and you wanted to go watch through the history of Gettysburg and how that battle played out, you would see Little Round Top, right? You would see these strategic hills in this valley. And you would understand that the South wanted to get their guns on Little Round Top, and the North wanted to get their guns on Little Round Top. Because they knew that if they get the high ground, then they're going to have sweep and command over this part of the battlefield, and it's going to help with the mission, right?

There's this much of military strategy basic to you—that there's certain ground that you want to occupy. And if you can occupy that ground, then you can impact other things, and it's going to be significant, OK? Because of that, all you've got to do is notice: where does the enemy want to put his guns? And if you can figure out where he's choosing to put his guns, then you can have a little bit of insight into what the strategy is.

Does this all make sense? Can you tell that Satan has seen fit to put his guns on everything touching sex, gender, masculinity, femininity, marriage? Have you noticed this? Does this not seem like this is high ground that he would like to occupy, and which to a large extent he has occupied, especially in the last—what do you want to call it?—100 years? 50 years, right?

Not uniquely. He's been going after this for millennia with varying degrees of success. But right now, you are—we are deep into an assault on everything regarding sex, sexuality, masculinity, femininity, all of it, right? It might be worth pausing for a second. It's OK. Why? Because it might not look like high ground to you. It might not look like it's a high hill, but I promise you it is. And if you're going to understand the strategic value of owning that, then you might have a little bit more purpose in understanding what his purposes are.

And in a twisted, weird way, you might come to understand what God meant when he did it in the first place. And if we act like, "Well, if you want to have gender, it's fine. You can have gender. We don't really care"—because we fail to recognize the strategic value, the high ground of that—we might be giving away more than we should. And in fact, we are. There's more going on here than meets the eye.

Satan can be like a submarine. There's going to be a subterfuge there. There's going to be a secret attack. That's all the case. So let's just pause for a second. Zoom out.

If you were Satan's advisor 80 years ago, and you were to say, "Hey, here's an idea. Let's go after marriages. Let's do this. I bet you, if we play this right, by the year 2025, not only can we have a majority of Americans thinking that men can marry men just like men can marry women—that it's basically an equality of that—but if you give me another decade, we can convince, I bet, 80 million people that men can become women and women can become men."

Imagine it is the year 1940, and you are trying to say, "Hear me out. By the year 2025, both of those things will be true." First of all, good luck having that much imagination. But second of all, why would you bother to do it? Because if you get that, what else do you get? Do you understand the question I'm asking you? Like, why was this the play? It's not an accident.

God meant something when he made us male and female. And that is getting obliterated. And by and large, we're either going along with it, or we're defending against it in incredibly ineffective and unknowledgeable ways.

But I do want to expand on this if I can't be specific about gender in America, because I think what we're seeing with AI—and I think this was a message you guys preached maybe a year or two ago—is that AI is robbing society of genuine, original, God-inspired thoughts and creativity and expression that makes us uniquely human. And so what we're doing is we're stripping things out. Like, gender. And now we're stripping out the safety of marriage, which creates family, right? And now we can strip out what makes us human—thoughts. Where does that leave us? That leaves a society that can be completely ruled, because there's no opposition, there's no identity, there's no unity or community, right? Just mindless creatures that can be herded over. And so I don't know if that's the ultimate end goal of certain thought, like, if we can just keep paring away at this whole society—we can kind of just create mindless means that we can control.

So I feel like that has to maybe be part of the conversation. It's not just about gender, marriage, and family, but it's also going to eventually be about our thoughts as a whole.

So what Bianca—if you didn't hear all that, I'll try to recap briefly. Bianca is observing that not only are we living in a world where sexuality is being confused, but the very nature of humanity itself, right? So the AI stuff that's going on, if you've ever played around with ChatGPT or I don't know what the other models are, some of the stuff that they can do is extraordinary. It's just stunning. And like it or not, maybe you do like it, maybe you don't. But it's coming, and it's going to be a massive technology change for the world in all sorts of ways. But part of the risk of it is not just the Terminator's Skynet destroying the world, but it's transhumanism in a lot of ways. So we've gone from transgender to transhuman. What do these things mean? That's going to be beyond our scope. I'm not going to talk about that right now, because I've got so many other things I want to say. So we will get into the transhumanism and part of our anthropology, perhaps, maybe we'll do that on a subsequent week. For the moment, though, I want to bring you back to sex and sexuality, because I do want you to wrap up with this question: Why? Why would everything about maleness and everything about femaleness be such a battleground?

And it is my case, and it may be provocative for you to hear me say this, but I believe that Satan is ultimately behind all of that. He is, and I don't really mind if you don't like me to tell you that, and we can talk about that if you want to. There's more going on than meets the eye. Why? What is so important about the fact that he made us male and he made us female? What was going on there? Because if we don't understand what he was doing, then I don't think we're going to understand why we need to protect what he did and live in light of it.

You want to take a stab?

The healthy family that is the foundation of society is the absolute foundation of all good things come from within the four walls of a healthy home. So God creates different institutions. There's churches, and there's the state. But the root institution is the family. And if we can wreck that, and we have—and by the way, if we're being honest, it is not merely the LGBT crowd that is ruining the family. We, without their help, heterosexual couples can destroy that all by ourselves, and in many ways have. So there's the family unit. There's something strategic there.

The image of God—image bearers of God. And I can see him wanting to wipe out anything that God has created, and especially us who are like him. We are the pinnacle, the final flourish. Women, in particular, are literally the final thing that God ever makes. And this is meant to be—there's a beauty that's meant to point to him.

Because God made us male and female as one, it's a reflection of the Trinity, and it's a reflection of God himself, and by corrupting that, he's completely corrupting our view of who God is and our ability to interact well with it. It is a fundamental attack on God.

Excellent. OK, this is great. I'm going to work from that right there. If you were here for the first service, you know that we're doing a series on the Gospel of John, and we talk about the fact that John always calls miracles signs. And that's because they're not just events. They're messages. Signs signify. There's a meaning to it. In a similar way, when God made us male and female, it was also a sign. It was a message. It was communicating something.

And Dan picked half. I would say there are chiefly two things that are imaged. The fact that there are multi-persons who come together to form a unit is a picture of the Trinity. He is a multi-personal God. We are made in his image. But it is also a picture of the way that God relates to his people.

When God made the world, he makes two people. He makes men, and he makes women. What he's intentionally doing from the get-go was creating one creature who would represent himself in a particular play that will be lived out for the rest of history. And one other creature that would represent the people that he loves.

We are fundamentally actors in a play. More precisely, there is an actor, and there is an actress. All men are cast to reflect God. All women are cast to reflect the people that he loves. Together, as a body of humanity, we are all the feminine. We are all the female. Men, you are part of the bride of Christ. And you may be like, oh, that feels weird. We'll deal with it. Because relative to him, he is masculine. He's not male. God does not have a penis. Jesus does. But when he describes himself in masculine terms, he's always the groom. We are always the bride. He is laying into the very nature of our lives. This play, these two characters. There's God, and there's the people that he loves.

We are to treat women. Men are supposed to treat women the way Jesus treats the church, because there's a play that's being lived out. And that is latent in the thing. And as the story unfolds, God always refers to himself as the masculine. He is the father. He's never the mother. He's always the father. We are the bride. And this is not something that shows up just in the church. This is true in the Old Testament, too. God sings over us. The whole story of Hosea and Gomer is a parable of the way God loves his people. As it's always meant to be. And that image—that is ultimately what's being ruined.

Now, when we explain that on Main Street, people ask, but why can't you have gay marriage? Well, because God's not going to marry God. And the church doesn't marry the church. Jesus and his church is supposed to be a male and a female. The play needs to have a male. And the play needs to have a female. That's what it is. That's what it's for.

Secondarily and meaningfully, it becomes a context of joy. It becomes a thing from which life flourishes. But what it is, is the play. What we are is the portrait of what God is doing. And as long as that is getting assaulted, as long as a picture is ruined, and people cease to be able to see the way God loves his people and the way his people ought to respond to the God who loves them—all of these images that are meant to be little pictures, little portraits, little plays are getting ruined. And they have been ruined. And we've largely let it happen because we largely don't know what I just explained in the last five minutes. That's not common knowledge. Should be, isn't.

And the relationships, the way in which we bear his image, male and female, has been marred. We've failed to protect it. And we have a lot of work to do in that regard.

Reflect

Rank, rule, relate, and reflect. We've already touched on this one somewhat. But how many of you feel like you get up in the morning thinking, my job today is to simply reflect the glory of God? As opposed to, my job today is to be a light source. My job—not a reflector of light, but a source of light.

You guys, the reality is you were made to live before the face of God. He is supposed to be your source of light and warmth, but the mirrors of our lives are turned away from the sun of his goodness toward a thousand lesser suns. And the thing that you reflect is very often probably not him. Very often, you're reflecting whatever your Twitter feed is feeding you, whatever your cosmopolitan magazine is feeding you.

How many fifteen-year-old girls are imitating advice from cosmopolitan magazine? How many boys are imitating masculinity that they learn from either abusive or absent fathers? All the time. We reflect all sorts of unworthy things.

And what it all adds up to—rank, rule, relate, reflect. Check, check, check, check. They're all jacked up. It's all broken. We are still image bearers. It still exists. You still do—in fact, you're worth comments because you're made in this image. And you still have the authority granted by God to rule. We are. We're it. Better or worse, this is it. We still, to certain degrees on a good day in our marriages and our relationships with others, relate. And some days, we do reflect him.

Some days, we're sufficiently in the Word and sufficiently yielded to his Spirit, officially in his community that we live before his face. We phase in and out of it, right? Sin and repentance, sin and repentance, sin and repentance. And we do repent. And it is working. Redemption is having its effect. But there's a long way to go. Amen?

Looking Ahead: The Hope of Christology

Next week, here's what we're going to do. If we've seen we're made in his image, but we're tragically fallen—even though, ostensibly, this is anthropology, this is humanity—we're going to slip back into a little Christology. Because if there's any hope for this image to be restored to his image, we're going to need somebody to become a human being. Somebody who already is in his very nature God, to be made to look like us, so that we can once again be made to look like him.

You cannot do anthropology absent Christology, because it is in our Christology that we regain the perfections, maybe I should say, of his image that was placed in us. So next week, Jesus is going to show up. We're going to meet him in Colossians 1, and we're going to see how is that image being restored. Cool? All right, that's all for now. Thank you.