Berksblog

3 John 13-15

There is a strange double vision in the way Scripture talks about us. In the same Book, often in the same breath, we are told that we are ruined and told that we are royal — and we are not permitted to pick one and drop the other. James presses both into a single sentence — and he hangs it on the tongue, that small, restless member behind the most ordinary thing in the world, the things we say:

“With it we bless our Lord and Father, and with it we curse people who are made in the likeness of God.” (James 3:9)

That word it has a history in the verses just before. James has spent the whole paragraph on the tongue: a small member, he says, that boasts of great things, a spark that sets a forest ablaze; a fire, a world of unrighteousness, set among our members and staining the whole body; a thing no human being can tame, a restless evil, full of deadly poison. And then he springs the trap the portrait was built for. This same untamable tongue blesses God and curses people — from the same mouth come blessing and cursing — and his verdict is blunt: these things ought not to be so.

“From the same mouth come blessing and cursing. My brothers, these things ought not to be so.” (James 3:10)

And what he assumes is everything. The people we curse — the neighbor who wronged us, the stranger who cut us off, the figure on the screen we have decided to despise — are, at the moment we are cursing them, still “made in the likeness of God.” James is writing long after Eden, to and about sinners, and he reaches without hesitation for the language of the first page. The fall bent the image. It did not burn it off. The stamp is defaced; it is not erased.

The Bible insists on this from very early, and rests real weight on it. When Genesis opens, it does not command the image into being or argue for it; it reports it as a finished fact about what man is: “in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.” And then, after the flood, after the human race has thoroughly proven how marred that image has become, God grounds the gravest of prohibitions on it still standing: “Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed, for God made man in his own image.” If the image had washed out with the fall, that command would have lost its ground. The likeness survives the ruin — which is exactly why a careless word flung at a person is never a small thing. It is aimed at someone who bears, even now, even unwashed, the mark of his Maker.

But the bent image is not the end of the account, and it was never the highest thing in it. Paul speaks of the image not as a relic to be carefully preserved under glass but as something alive and in motion — being remade:

“and have put on the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge after the image of its creator.” (Colossians 3:10)

Being renewed. Which means it was marred, or there would be nothing to renew. And renewed “after the image of its creator” — measured against a pattern. Paul tells us in the same letter whose face that pattern wears:

“He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation.” (Colossians 1:15)

There is the whole arc in two words across two pages. Man was made in the image. Christ is the image. The likeness stamped on Adam in the garden was never an end in itself; it was pointing forward the entire time, a true thing that pointed past itself to a truer — to the one Man in whom the image is not bent or faded but entire. What was given in the garden and lost in the rupture is not merely patched in the gospel. It is fulfilled in a Person who was the image all along, and our remaking is not the recovery of a lost antique but conformity to him.

We are not told, and should not pretend to settle, exactly what the image consists of — whether reason, or the capacity to love, or the charge to rule, or some union of them all. Scripture asserts the image and defends it and renews it without ever laying it on the table to be taken apart. What we are given is enough: you bear it, your fall did not abolish it, and Christ is its true and unbroken measure.

So hold both halves the way James held them, and let them do their work on you. The next time you are tempted to despise someone — to write a person off, to curse with the same mouth you bless God with — remember what your contempt is aimed at: a likeness that would not wash out, however buried under the wreckage. And the next time you are tempted to despair of yourself, to conclude you are too far gone to be worth God’s trouble, remember the same thing turned toward you: the image you cannot seem to scrub clean is the very thing he is patiently remaking, after the face of his Son. You were made in a likeness no sin could fully erase. You are being remade into the likeness of the One who is that image entire. Treat every face you meet — including the one in the mirror — as what it actually is.

HEB