Image and Reflect

Strong’s Concordance #6754 OT

Revealing

Building on the framework introduced in God’s Business Model — Top-Down, this page explores two Scripture words that are especially fitting for Vertiwords: image and reflect. Together, these words help trace how God’s nature and intention are expressed and how He reveals Himself through what He makes or creates. His likeness, reflected through His creation ultimately revealed in humanity, created in His image. As we consider God’s first action before He spoke a word—hovering over the waters—we can see a foreshadowing of what was to come. Six days later, that reflection appeared in creation when male and female were made in His image. We were created not only to bear His image, but to reflect Him. His rule and sovereignty, revealed from the beginning, were also part of what He intended to be expressed through mankind.

The Image We Were Made to Bear

The descriptive words that emerge from image—shadow, model, idol, representing, and figure—begin to reveal why this word carries such significance throughout Scripture. An image is something that gives form to, represents, or points toward something beyond itself. A shadow can suggest the outline of what stands before it. A model provides a pattern to follow. A figure can represent another reality. In each case, the image points beyond itself to an original.

This helps us understand the profound statement in Genesis 1:26: “Let us make man in our image, according to our likeness.” Humanity was not created to invent an image of God; humanity was created as an image of God—to represent His nature, character, and rule within His creation. We were designed to bear His likeness and reflect the One who made us.

The Image and the Idol

This also helps explain why the first two commandments of The Ten Commandments address images so directly. The first commandment establishes who is to be worshiped: “You must not have other gods besides me.” The second addresses how God is not to be represented or replaced: “Do not make an idol for yourself” (Exodus 20:3–4). God was establishing a boundary around His image and His worship. Nothing made by human hands could become a substitute for the Creator.

The distinction is important. God had already established His own image—He created humanity in His image. The commandment therefore warns against making another image and assigning to it the honor that belongs to God alone. An idol is a created representation that has been given a place it was never designed to occupy. Instead of pointing the heart toward the Creator, it can become a substitute for Him.

There is a striking contrast here: God creates an image to represent Himself; humanity makes images to represent a god. The first is God’s design. The second is precisely what the commandments forbid. God does not need us to manufacture an image of Him. He has already revealed Himself through what He has made, through His Word, and ultimately through His Son.

He (Christ) is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation. For everything was created by him, in heaven and on earth, the visible and the invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities all things have been created through him and for him. He is before all things and by him all things hold together.
Colossians 1:15-17 (CSB)

Go Deeper

This gives deeper meaning to the purpose of being made in His image. We were not created merely to look like something; we were created to represent something—to bear the imprint of our Creator and reflect His character in the world. The image was never intended to receive the glory. The image was intended to point back to the One whose likeness it bears.

Strong’s Concordance #2734 NT

Reflecting His Image

These two words, Image and Reflect, belong together, just as the Creator and Christ are united from beginning to end. We find our place within that relationship by what we reflect, and through His Word this becomes both our hope and our aim.

Throughout both the Old Testament and the New, God the Father has been drawing us toward this very change: to be shaped by Him, purified by hope, and to bear His image more fully. What we behold shapes what we become; what we see in Him becomes what we are called to reflect.

From the earliest stages of life, we see this principle at work. Babies and young children instinctively watch, imitate, and repeat what they see in those around them. They learn by observing before they can fully understand or explain what they are seeing. Science has explored this capacity through what are known as mirror neurons—a reminder that God designed us with an extraordinary capacity to learn through observation and imitation.

Could this help us appreciate more deeply why Scripture repeatedly calls us to behold, to look, and to see? What we continually place before our eyes can shape what we become. As we behold Christ through His Word, we are not merely gathering information about Him; we are being transformed to reflect Him.

It’s God’s Business Model — Top-Down: what originates above is revealed below.

Dear friends, we are God’s children now, and what we will be has not yet been revealed. We know that when he appears, we will be like him because we will see him as he is. And everyone who has this hope in himself purifies himself just as he is pure.
1 John 3:2-3 (CSB)

Behold His Glory