Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. Let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of heaven, over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that moves on the earth. So God made man; in the image of God He made him; male and female He made them. Then God blessed them; and God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply; fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of heaven, and over every living thing that moves on the earth” (Genesis 1: 26-28).
What does it mean for man to be created in God’s image and likeness? Christ, the incarnated Son of God, is the image of the Father. As Paul makes clear, it is through Christ that all things were created (Colossians 1:16). Man is created in the image of God. Since all things are made through Christ who is the image of the Father, man is the image of the image through whom all things were made. It is instructive that the Church Fathers never try to define exactly what is meant by “image” for that would mean attempting to define God.1
“Likeness” is not the same thing as “image.” We are created in God’s image whether we like it or not. The human souls in hell are still in God’s image. What they lack is his likeness. The more we become like God, the more we are in his likeness. Our likeness is in our control — we either accept or reject God’s grace. When we reach perfection in likeness to God, we achieve deification.
After the Fall, Adam did not lose the “image” of God. What he lost was his “likeness” to God. It is the imprecise common usage of the words “image” and “likeness” that creates confusion. We might properly say that a photograph represents a better or worse “likeness” of us, but we cannot say that a photograph is a better or worse “image.” In order to be an image, it would have to be an actual human person. It is either our image or it isn’t. That is why the inspired author of Genesis makes the distinction between “image” and “likeness.” The phrase “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness” (Genesis 1:26) suggests an intent to do both. We are in his image regardless, but we only become fully in his “likeness” after deification, which we each have to accept — this is God’s intention from the very beginning.2
When God actually does create man a verse later, the text reads, “So God made man in the image of God He made him” (Genesis 1:27). There is no mention of likeness. In other words, the intent was always for image and likeness, i.e., deification, but man can only be created in God’s image and must become his likeness.
Most people recognize that among physical beings, man alone has a free will and reason as God does. However, what most people overlook is that man has dominion.3 The word “dominion” is used twice in these verses (Genesis 1:26-28). However, in the Greek, these are two different words.4
The first is αρχομαι or archomai, which means to be first, an initiator, to take precedence, as well as to rule. The second word is κατακυπτω or katakurieuo, which means to subdue, master, have control over. Following both archomai and katakurieuo is the same list of living things. Man is to have precedence over the fish, birds, and everything that moves on the earth. Why repeat the same list? Perhaps to underscore the privileged status of man as well as to make absolutely clear that he is to be the lord and master of creation? To rule and to be privileged are two related but different things. What is God himself? He is the initiator, the first by precedence and he is the Lord and master of Creation. We are the only creatures in God’s image. As Jesus himself says, “Ye are gods” (John 10:34). Paul makes it even clearer that we will do the work of God alongside him, “Do you not know that we shall judge angels?” (1 Corinthians 6:3). Jesus also repeatedly informs us that we are his brothers and sons of God, meaning that what belongs to our Father is also ours and everything our Father possesses is our inheritance. The inescapable conclusion is that God created the realm of the physical universe as a place for us to share dominion with him both as initiators and as masters.5
Since angels were created to be messengers serving both God and Man, they are rational and have free will. However, they are not in God’s image and were never meant for dominion. Lucifer is not only usurping God’s authority, but he is also rebelling against his own nature. His attempt to set up a separate and competing dominion is doomed to fail. He doesn’t know what he is doing. He doesn’t have the capability. He is not made or intended for shared dominion. Serving those who have dominion; namely, God and man is his purpose. Dominion is manifestly not his purpose as all of Creation can see by the incompetent results he’s getting. It is similar to someone with no talent or training attempting to fly an airplane. It can only end in catastrophe.
Lucifer’s pride is the original sin. It is because of his self-love that he would not accept that he had no dominion, shared or otherwise. It is true that angels were created with hierarchy, but that does not mean that they were meant to be self directed. Hierarchy is necessary exactly for the purpose of providing coordination and direction. When the messengers start choosing and delivering their own messages, shattering chaos inevitably follows.
When Adam and Eve sinned for the first time in the Garden of Eden, the wages of their sin were felt not only by themselves and their descendants, but also by the entire physical universe. The idea of “first fruits” is a common one in Scripture. Adam is the first fruit of humanity. Jesus, as the New Adam, is the first fruit of redeemed humanity. His resurrection occurs on Easter Sunday which is also the Feast of First Fruits in the Jewish calendar.
A common view of the Church Fathers was that man was created not just as the summit of Creation, but as a microcosm, since man contains within himself all of the characteristics of Creation. Man is spirit as are God and the angels, but he is also physical. The angels pre-exist him, but he is the last being made on the sixth day, making him God’s greatest work. As the nexus between the spiritual and physical worlds, the state of his soul, including his moral weakness or greatness, affects his physical body. Those effects in turn ripple through the rest of physical creation over which God gave him dominion. We will revisit this topic in upcoming posts. However, it is worth mentioning that it is because of man’s God given dominion that this is possible. When man chooses and acts, human nature and the created world is affected.
When Lucifer fell, the wages of his sin would only felt by him personally, unless he could seduce other angels to go along with him. Unlike human beings, each angel is his own unique species. They cannot reproduce. Each angel was created in an act of special creation. Since they are all their own species, when the Archangel Michael and the other good angels drove out Lucifer and the other rebellious angels from heaven, the good angels’ pre-existing natures were unaffected and they remained without taint of sin. Creation at large was not spoiled. In order to mock God and spoil all of Creation in one stroke, Lucifer would have to seduce Man.
If God is eternal, self-conscious Being and his thoughts are what is truly Real, then he cannot forget the angels and the souls that he has thought into existence. Even if he were to try to make an act of the will to “forget,” he would know and remember the act of the will required for forgetting. If he tried to forget that act of the will, then he would be quickly trapped into an eternal regression of forgetting, which is illogical. The most God can do is to cease to actively love something. He knows Lucifer and the other damned exist; he simply doesn’t actively think about nor share his being with them. They are cut off. Lucifer, as the brightest of all created beings, must have understood that he came from God and that annihilation would be a risk. For a being puffed with pride, annihilation would not do. Lucifer must have understood that he would continue on after his rebellion, but would be lacking a union with God and separated from Grace. This isolation may even have been attractive to him. Sinners prefer no interference and prefer the darkness. He would continue on, but alone with his self-love. However, all rational beings are created by God to be in a relationship with him.
We are all relational, because we were all meant to love. It is not realistic to exist in perfect aloneness; it is against the very essence of all of our personal natures, human or angelic. Lucifer had the capacity to love, but would not. Instead, he interacts with other relational beings in an attempt to usurp God’s role as the source and object of their love. That is what his self-love and desire for dominion demand.
However, if love is defined as freely seeking the good for another, then the opposite of love, demanding evil for another, is hate. Hate demands subjugation. The result is not an intense love between relational beings, but an intense hate between fallen relational beings who are perpetually striving to subjugate each other. Domination replaces dominion. Pride quickly leads to hate and both lead to spiritual and intellectual blindness. Why do Lucifer and the other demons choose a strategy of opposing God and choosing their own dominion, while knowing that it is a strategy guaranteed to fail? Perhaps they were so blinded by pride and hate that they couldn’t see the obvious? We have all done prideful things that in hindsight made us look ridiculous, things that could have easily been avoided had we just been more humble. Perhaps, and this is more likely, they were so filled with pride and hate and desire for dominion and subjugation that they didn’t care. It didn’t matter that they could not create any kind of functioning dominion. They preferred their grotesque dominion to the nurturing dominion of God just because it was theirs, not because in any objective way it could be better for others or for themselves. Frustrated pride always degenerates into an orgy of nihilism6 and annihilation.
The other notable way that man is in the image of God and the angels are not is in man’s ability to be an initiator and creator. Man is eminently creative in every sphere of his life and existence. Witness the development of culture, technology, etc. However, man also co-creates other men. In the opening quote from Genesis, the phrase “male and female” follows immediately after “in the image of God.” While God can create man or anything else he likes with no assistance or cooperation from anyone, man does not have that absolute ability. However, with the assistance of other human beings, specifically those of the opposite sex, humans can initiate the co-creation of other humans. Our physical co-creative ability is shared among us. Just as God creates man out of the constant and committed Love of the persons of the Trinity, man is meant to create man out of the constant and committed love of the persons who are man and wife. Once the creation of the body is initiated, God has obliged himself to provide an immortal soul to complete each human person. Man is then co-creator of man with God. Intriguingly, man is the instigator and initiator of the creative process of new human beings. Instigation is very much a divine property, particularly of the Father; yet, God has delegated that privilege to the human fathers that he has created in his Image.
Not having bodies, angels cannot reproduce themselves. They are created whole and complete by God. They do not grow up, mature, die or experience anything associated with a bodily existence. They also do not have a sex. There would be no purpose. The complementarity of the sexes is required for procreation. As God shows John in Revelation, as part of his plan of redemption, God will espouse himself to his bride, the Church.
“Come, I will show you the bride, the Lamb’s wife.” And he carried me away in the Spirit to a great and high mountain, and he showed me the great city, the holy Jerusalem, descending out of heaven from God (Revelation 21:9-10).
The “Lamb” of course refers to Christ and “Jerusalem” to his people, the Church. Attacks on the structure of the family are direct attacks on God. Sexual deviancy in all its forms, particularly transgenderism and homosexuality, which deny basic truths about human beings and the natural world, are overtly Satanic in origin. In our degenerate modern era, where Satan has been given an unprecedented free reign, we see this revealed in his unrelenting attacks on the traditional family. As an androgynous, sterile being, bitter and envious, Satan hates everything that represents the loving union of persons, not just the carnal union of persons through human sexuality, but also the physical union of God and humanity in the Incarnation. Satan’s self-annihilation finds a perfect analogue in the self-loathing of homosexuals and the self-mutilation practiced by the transgendered, who reject the divine power of co-creation shared with them by God, and in their grotesque parodies of traditional families. Voltaire is widely quoted as saying, “If you can get a man to believe absurdities, you can get him to commit atrocities.” For example, if you pretend there is no difference between a man and a woman, you will mutilate the innocent — castrating young boys and removing the breasts of young girls. Eventually, the absurd man will not only see no harm, but actually believe it is good to not just imprison, but to exterminate human beings for “thought crimes.” Totalitarian states and hell are built on exactly such logic.
This is also why Satan and the demons work so obsessively to destroy us. After all, what are we to them that they should lavish so much energy and attention upon us? Is it because we are in God’s image, the very image that they hate so much?
John recapitulates these ideas in his own Creation narrative,
He was in the world, and the world was made through Him … But as many as received Him, to them He gave the right to become children of God, to those who believe in His name: who were born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God (John 1:10-13).
In Gregory of Nyssa’s words, “And further, besides these facts, the fact that it is the image of that Nature which rules over all means nothing else than this, that our nature was created to be royal from the first…the likeness is commonly spoken of as human nature, as it was made to rule the rest, was, by its likeness to the King of all, made as it were a living image, partaking with the archetype both in rank and in name, not vested in purple, nor giving indication of its rank by sceptre and diadem (for the archetype itself is not arrayed with these), but instead of the purple robe, clothed in virtue, which is in truth the most royal of all raiment, and in place of the sceptre, leaning on the bliss of immortality, and instead of the royal diadem, decked with the crown of righteousness; so that it is shown to be perfectly like to the beauty of its archetype in all that belongs to the dignity of royalty.”
Gregory of Nyssa, On the Making of Man, IV. 1., accessed May 3, 2025, https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/2914.htm.
Yet another translation issue; however, this one is fundamental. In the Septuagint there are two words loosely meaning “dominion” as discussed. In the KJV and other Protestant English translations, the first word αρχομαι or archomai is rendered as “dominion.” The second word κατακυπτω or katakurieuo in the KJV and their other translations is ignored and isn’t even translated. The verse ends up as gobbledygook about being “given” everything to eat. To be fair, the Masoretic and the Douay-Rheims are no better.
However, as the Incarnation and the crowning of the Virgin Mary as Queen of Heaven and Queen of Angels demonstrate, shared human dominion with God does not end with physical Creation; it also extends into the spiritual realm.
"Nihilism,” Wikipedia, accessed May 3, 2025, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nihilism.