Imago Dei With The Gospel CoalitionSample

Imago Dei in Others 

The imago Dei helps us understand the great commandment—to love God and to love others as ourselves—because all of us bear the same image.

We love God because we recognize His intrinsic worth and His lovingkindness toward us. We can love ourselves because we see God’s image in us, and that’s the source of our worth. And finally, we can love others because we see God’s image in them.

Within God Himself we can see the principle of others. The wonder and mystery of the Trinity affirm one God in three Persons: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Each of these distinct Persons participates in loving community with the others: the Father sending and blessing the Son, the Son sending and blessing the Spirit, and the Spirit stirring our hearts to love and worship both the Father and the Son. 

One distinctive of the Trinity is that each member is different from the others. They reveal themselves in different ways, and They have different roles in relationship with one another. The love They display through those differences serves as a model for the way Christians should love one another in spite of our differences. 

Saving faith brings us into the community of the saints. The necessity of community permeates Scripture. God determined that it wasn’t good for man to be alone, so He created a family—a type of human community. The greatest commandment involves loving other image bearers (see Matt. 22:39). The entire New Testament emphasizes the importance of relationships through numerous one-another passages. We learn some of what it means to image God by being in community with others.

The division and discrimination we see in humanity, whether it’s due to race, ethnicity, class, or age, entered the world after the fall. These divisions were steadily broken down in the New Testament, where we read, “There is no Jew or Greek, slave or free, male and female; since you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Gal. 3:28).