Image and likeness of God

“ This was some time before his sufferings in the garden. But while we admire his outward beauty as man, what vast beauty possessed his mind—wisdom, prudence, chastity, holiness, zeal, understanding, faith, hope, love, and joy; in the principle—mercy, commiseration, pity, affection, patience, gratitude, and fidelity. Look at his actions, and they all correspond with the holy principles of his mind, and this holy nature was the image of God, the exemplar pattern and likeness of the new man of grace in the souls of God’s children ”

“ The chief thing intended by the Divine image, is moral rectitude; man was created in the moral image of God; but that 382 image in man was only a likeness, it did not equal,but resembled its high original—a disparity which necessarily exists between a creature and its Creator. According to any rational opinion we can form of God, we must believe that he is a spiritual Being; which includes the simplicity of his nature, his indivisibility, and his immortality; possessed not only of every natural perfection, but of all moral excellencies. ”

“ All over the earth, in this image, are the sane, and the sound, and the true. And when and where their lives are spent arises generations of others like them, men in the true order. Not alone men in the "image of God," but "gods in the likeness of men." ”

“ If man makes anything in his image we know how this thing looks, but when God creates something in his image we are at a loss to comprehend what is meant unless God has the likeness of man. In ancient times there is no doubt but what the assertion that God “created man in his own image” was accepted literally, that the people looked upon God as a big man. Later they came to look upon man as a little god. ”

“ It means, of course, that if the Soul's capability of 'apprehending' or learning the true meaning and use of every fact and circumstance which environs its existence, were properly perceived and applied, then the 'Image of God' in which the Creator made humanity, would become the veritable likeness of the Divine. ”

“ We acknowledge and adore one supreme and infinite God. We acknowledge His Son, one Christ; the Holy Ghost or divine Comforter; and man in God's image and likeness. ”

“ Man is not God, but God's image; and the image of God ought to represent nothing but God. He is a portraiture of the Divine Being; a character, an image, in which God alone should be seen and glorified. ”

“ So that His revealed or written Word and His Word in Nature alike descend from Him, and lead up to Him, who is the inmost and animating soul of both; not a mere undefined pervading influence, but a Divine Personal God,—an infinitely glorious Divine Man, the great Archetype, of which man was created the finite image. ”

“ As the inconceivable glories of the world to come, are explained to us by the honors and pleasures of this life; so the nature of God, by a gracious condescension to our weakness, is signified to us by a likeness to our own. By human members being ascribed to God, are implied the moral excellencies of his spiritual nature, or rather his operations, which are more sensible to us than his invisible nature. His eyes are emblems of his knowledge, wisdom, omniscience, and providence. ”

“ It is the sustaining hope of the Christian that he shall be changed from glory to glory into the image or likeness of His Lord, and that when all is over for this life he shall be indeed like Him and see Him as He is. ”

“ My plain answer was, What do you apprehend to be more valuable than good sense, good nature, and good manners? All these are contained, and that in the highest degree, in what I mean by Christianity. Good sense, (so called) is but a poor, dim shadow of what Christians call faith. Good nature is only a faint, distant resemblance of Christian charity. And good manners, if of the most finished kind that nature assisted by art can attain to, is but a dead picture of that holiness of conversation, which is the image of God visibly expressed. ”

“ In which part has man the likeness of God in him? In the soul, not in the body. The soul of man has in its nature a likeness to the Holy Trinity; for it has in it three things, these are memory, and understanding, and will. ”

“ For it is then that we are truly fashioned in the likeness of God, when we represent His features in a human life, like skilful painters, stamping them upon ourselves as upon tablets, learning the path which He showed us. ”

“ It is only some of God's honour, that is put upon man, who is God's image, only as the shadow in the glass, or the king's impress upon the coin. God's image upon man consists in these three things, 1. In his nature and constitution, not those of his body, (for God has not a body,) but those of his soul. ”

“ Man is sealed by the Holy Spirit with the likeness and resemblance of the Father's Face, the Son; and having the Son within him, and giving a home within the soul to the divine character, and making this his treasure, man is formed after God.45 The supreme likeness, which is beyond all others, is impressed on human souls by the Spirit of the Father and the Son. As the defacing of the likeness, the result of the original fall, caused the obscuring of the Truth, so its restoration was itself the recovery of the Truth. ”

“ In the Bible we find the expression: "God in spirit and in truth,"—and hence we most significantly find an expression for the admission of what we call a feeling of the beautiful; for what else is this revelation of God but spirit and truth? And just as our own soul shines out of the eye and the fine movement around the mouth, so does the created image shine forth from God in spirit and truth. ”

“ If, therefore, we have been successful in depicting the Lord as He is now, while seated at the right hand of God; namely, an incorruptible, honourable, powerful, living person, substantial and tangible, shining as the sun, and able to eat and drink, and to display all mental and other phenomena in perfection: if the reader be able to comprehend such an "Image of the invisible God," he can understand what they are to be, who are accounted worthy to inherit His kingdom. ”

“ But where is the man now living, or when did the man live, who has not formed images of the Deity, or who does not instinctively and habitually do it every day of his life? Every man makes a likeness of God, or what he supposes to be such, every time he thinks of such a being. ”

“ Indeed, from the profusion with which loveliness is sown broadcast over the works of God, I have often thought, though it is not directly revealed, that a sense of the beautiful and a complacency in it, altogether independent of fitness for certain ends, or the uses which may be subserved, is an attribute of the Holy One Himself, and that our perception of it is the reflection of His—a part of that image of God in which man was created, and which sin has not wholly obliterated. ”

“ Disfigure it, crush it to dust if you will, the glory of heaven will cling round it still, and hallow all on whatsoe’er it rests. And when this pure and holy vision forms a chain, linked by the will, uniting the brilliant powers of intellect with the bright spirits that adore, then is man god-like. ”

“ Is there, and can there be, a perpetuity in mortal charms without the recognition or the supposition of a moral beauty connected with them, which alone is pure and imperishable, and which alone creates the sacred ecstasy that revels in the enjoyment of what is divine, or what is supposed to be divine, not in man, but in the conceptions of man,—the ever-blazing glories of goodness or of truth which the excited soul doth see in the eyes and expression of the adored image? It is these archetypes of divinity, real or fancied, which give to love all that is enduring. ”

“ For when we see the drawing in the Image, in our mind's eye we pass over to the true form of which it is an Image, and devoutly worship the form of him who for our sake was made flesh, not making a god of it, but saluting it as an image of God made flesh, with desire and love of him who for us men emptied himself, and even took the form of a servant. ”

“ Your countenance is just reflecting a little of the glory of the skies. And so, when with the spiritual eye we see the beauty of Christ, we begin to be somewhat like Him. When His moral glory is flashed upon us, it transforms us more or less into His likeness. Beholding, though only in a glass, the glory of the Lord, we are changed into His heavenly likeness, from day to day. ”

“ God is seen only in that which reflects Good, Life, Truth, Love, — yea, which manifests all God's attributes and power, even as the human likeness, thrown upon the mirror, repeats precisely the looks and actions of the object in front of it. ”

“ It is in all its gradations, in that marvellous range of the same being which stretches from the highest saint matured in acting and suffering to the most imperfect penitent received into the bosom of the one mother, a copy, more or less resembling, of our Lord Himself. He, the divine Image, is the original from which every Christian lineament is traced, and every one of His race repeats Him in some degree. Every virtue is such as a transcript of some portion of His character; and the whole life of the individual resolves itself into an imitation of Him. ”

“ Whether the idol was an image, the work of men's hands, or any created thing, as the sun, moon, and stars, or a human being (for men, both dead and living, were made objects of worship) , the effect was to draw away the spirit from conjunction with God and heaven, and thus to extinguish all spiritual light in the mind, and to render it grossly natural. ”

“ That God is infinitely adorable in his abstract perfections I am sure, though I cannot fathom these abstract perfections, nor conceive of him but as revealed in his blessed word in connection with his chosen, and as personally exhibited by him who was the brightness of his Father’s glory, and the express image of his person, and this is not in abstractions or apart from our happiness. ”

“ Now, the great God is invisible—a Spirit—and not a body, as I think you all know; and when it is said that God made man in his own image, it must mean that man was made to be holy, and just, and good, and merciful; and he was made to be a careful and loving ruler over the poor dumb creatures, as the Lord God is a careful and loving ruler over all that he has created. ”

“ In the presence of the highest manifestations of thought and love, of truth and beauty, nothing perfect or divine is incredible. Men of genius, philosophers, poets, and saints, who by thinking and doing make this ethereal but most real world rise before us in concrete form and substance, are heavenly messengers and illuminators of the soul. Had none of them lived, how should we see and understand that man is Godlike and that God is truth and love? ”

“ To conform, therefore, to the great end of our creation, we must prefer God to ourselves, and not desire our own happiness, but for his glory; otherwise we shall go contrary to his order. As the perfections of the Deity are intrinsically amiable, it is our glory and perfection to go out of ourselves, to be lost and absorbed in the pure love of infinite beauty. ”

“ For, as I have said, this article is so far above the power of the human mind to grasp, or the tongue to express, that God, as the Father of his children, will pardon us when we stammer and lisp as best we can, if only our faith be pure and right. By this term, however, we would say that we believe the divine majesty to be three distinct persons of one true essence. ”