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Many years ago, thanks to a book by Watchman Nee, I came to the understanding of what the phrase “made in His image” in Genesis means.

I will give the disclaimer that could be applied to a lot of theological topics: that my understanding or interpretation of it is by no means the right or only one. But I do think it is the best one, or at least the one that makes the most sense to me.

When the Bible says that God made man in His own image, there are a lot of different explanations out there. Just for fun, I looked up what the internet had to say, and to me they were either too deep or too shallow. The shallow answers just glossed over the concept and said something like “it means we represent God”. And the deep answers talked about a lot of things but didn’t give a definitive answer.

That’s why I’ve gravitated toward the Watchman Nee school of thought on this topic – because it’s a concrete answer and it makes sense.

God is a Trinity, and what He said is “make man in Our image”. Not images, but image. And likeness. So it has to be representative of the multiple persons of God.

What are those? The Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.

And what attributes do we give to those parts of the Trinity?

I’ll answer that by referring to another verse, where we are instructed to love God with “all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.”

Based on that, and some other verses, we see that the Trinity can be thought of as the mind, the body, and the soul. More or less correlating with the jobs of the three parts of the Trinity.

So humans reflect God’s image by having a triune nature.

And I would also argue that’s what makes people different from other animals – they have mind and body, but they are not made in God’s image so they do not have the soul.

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