Images

Last summer, Beijing hosted the world’s first games for humanoid robots. Machines ran races, kicked balls, broke records, fell down and got up, and the crowds cheered the getting up, because that’s the part that looks like us. The machines walk better every season. They answer faster. They look more like us every year.

I have no fear of the robots, and I’m not here to give you a sermon against technology. But that image, a machine on a track learning to move like a person, sits right next to the oldest question in the Bible and the oldest commandment about images. Genesis says God made man in his own image, in the image of God he created him, male and female he created them. And the second commandment says, “You shall not make for yourself a carved image” (Exodus 20:4).

The people of God were commanded not to make images. And the people of God are image makers. It’s the first thing the text tells us about ourselves. Something is going on there, and last summer it walked a track in Beijing.

Made, Not Manufactured

Start with what Genesis actually claims. In the ancient world, every nation made images of its gods, statues in the temple, and the statue wasn’t a symbol. It was believed to carry the presence of the god, the place where heaven touched earth. When Genesis says man is made in the image of God, it’s picking up that word on purpose. You are where heaven touches earth. Not a statue in a temple. A whole person, walking, working, speaking, made to carry the presence of God into the world in a way no mountain or monument ever could.

Genesis actually gives us two accounts of the making of the human, and they sing together. In the first, God speaks the human into being with a word on the sixth day, as he spoke everything else, and stamps him with image and a commission: “let them have dominion” (Genesis 1:26, 28). In the second, the camera comes close and the grammar changes: the LORD God forms the man from the dust of the ground and breathes into his nostrils the breath of life (Genesis 2:7). The human is not only spoken. The human is handled. Breathed into. And there is a distance between everything else that was made and the one made in the image, and no machine closes that distance, because no machine was formed and breathed. It was assembled. It can imitate the walk, the voice, the getting up when it falls. It cannot bear the image, because the image is not a set of motions. It’s a breath. It’s the attention of God, the forming of his hands. And notice too that in Genesis the image comes with a job: the image is the king’s living deputy, given care of the world on its Maker’s behalf. An image is not a portrait in that world. It’s a presence with an appointment.

That has a sharp edge for the age we’ve entered. If a person is a pattern of behavior, then a machine that reproduces the pattern is a kind of person, and the questions get dark fast. But Genesis says a person is not a pattern. A person is a formed and breathed creature, known by name before one day of them existed, as the psalm says, “knitted together,” “fearfully and wonderfully made” (Psalm 139:13-14). You were not generated. You were known. The machine can fake the output and it will fake it better every year. But whatever it becomes, it was not knitted, and it was not known before one of its days existed, and that difference, knitted and known, is the whole distance between a person and an image of a person.

Whose Image Is This?

The enemies of Jesus asked him a tax question once, trying to trap him between Rome and the synagogue. Whose side is God on, Caesar’s or ours? And Jesus did what he always did with traps. He asked for a coin. “Whose likeness and inscription is this?” They said, “Caesar’s.” And he said, “Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s” (Matthew 22:20-21).

The word he used for likeness is the word from Genesis. Eikon. Image. The coin bears Caesar’s image, so it belongs in Caesar’s economy, spend it there. And if a coin that bears Caesar’s image belongs to Caesar, then a man who bears God’s image belongs to God. Jesus didn’t say that last sentence out loud. He left the inference hanging in the air, and every person in the courtyard drew it themselves. His answer was never mainly about taxes. It was about the man. The coin is the small item in the story. You are the large one.

And that flips the whole modern anxiety on its head. The machines are learning to look like us, and the joke underneath the whole age is that we’re learning to look like them. We answer people like prompts. We measure the value of a day in output. We sit in rooms full of other image-bearers and stare at rectangles. We ghost each other, because a person who has become an image on a screen can be closed like a tab. We’re not watching the machines become human. We’re watching ourselves become mechanical, priced like equipment, scheduled like inventory. And the robots are not the scandal of this age. We are, and we were, first.

But Here’s the Mirror

Now the mirror, because the church has been in the image business a long time.

We make images of each other constantly. That’s what gossip is: a compressed file of a person, small enough to pass around, missing most of the person, carrying the worst frame. That’s what the caricature of an opponent is. That’s what the meme is. Let me be honest about what I’m doing here: the second commandment in Exodus 20 is about images made for worship, “you shall not bow down to them,” and Israel made other images God himself commanded, the cherubim over the mercy seat among them. So I’m not citing a statute. I’m following the logic of it into a place it reaches. An image in the Bible is a stand-in for a person that receives what belongs to the person, and the question is what gets handed to the stand-in. We pass around images of human beings, flattened and captioned, small enough to forward, and we never once made those people with our hands. The graven image we’re most devoted to is the one we made of the person we dislike.

And we have handed over parts of ourselves to the imitation. The conversation with the chatbot instead of the friend, because the friend might be inconvenient and the chatbot never will be. The sermon clip instead of the assembly. The notification instead of the knock. Now, if you’re shut in and the recorded sermon is your lifeline to the word of God, that’s not a sin, that’s a mercy, and I thank God for it. And if a chatbot has been your company through a long and lonely stretch, I’m not going to kick you while you’re down; loneliness is heavy, and the Lord is kind to the lonely. But for most of us the trade is not necessity. It’s convenience, and we make it by the dozen, daily, and the ledger never shows the cost, because what was lost was attention, and attention never shows up on any statement.

Here is where the gospel does what no engineering can do. God, who cannot be imaged, made an image of himself and sent it into the world. “He is the image of the invisible God” (Colossians 1:15). When we looked at Jesus, we saw what a human being fully alive looks like, and it wasn’t optimization. It was obedience, and touch, and tears at a tomb, and bread broken with hands. The Word became flesh. Not pixels. Flesh. And he let Rome’s image be stamped on a coin while bearing God’s image to a cross, and what he saves is not your data. It’s you. The whole knitted, fearfully made, formed-and-breathed you.

So What Do We Do?

Refuse the flat images. This week, when you’re handed a caricature of somebody, on the screen or across the fence, decline to take it. Ask one honest question about the person instead. Gossip and caricature are image-making, and image-making is forbidden, and the commandment doesn’t have an exception for people we’re sure about.

Spend attention on persons, not copies. One face-to-face conversation with somebody who has no utility to you. Sit across a table. Look at the image of God in a face, because you can’t knit a person, and neither can anything else.

And here’s one offered as wisdom, not commandment, because God didn’t put me in charge of your conscience: consider unplugging for a real day each week. Take it or leave it, try it and see. The point wouldn’t be to be superior about it. It would be to remember what a person is, starting with the one in your mirror. The image of God needs silence the way a field needs the seventh year.

And render to God what bears his image. The coin goes to Caesar, fine, pay the tax and don’t lose sleep over it. But you were stamped by God in the beginning, claimed back at the cross, and sealed by his Spirit, and the question Jesus asked in the temple is still the only question worth answering with a life: whose image is this, and whose, then, is it?