13 Aug Image Bearers of the Trinity
“Then God said, ‘Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.'” (Genesis 1:26 NIV).
Something that strikes me in the above verse is how God made it clear to us in the very beginning that He existed as a self-sufficient community. It is not by accident that the pronoun “us” is used instead of “me” and points directly to God as the Holy Trinity. What is more, we are created in His image, which means we are three persons in one.
Wow! This excites me, because as an introvert, I have always had the ability to enjoy my own company. It is quite a relief to know that this is not a bad thing if it is one of the aspects of our creator. The only difference is that I am imperfect, which is why unlike God, I can’t be holistically self-sufficient.
This idea of being an image bearer of the Holy Trinity has opened an entirely new way of viewing God and therefore how I may relate to and connect with Him. In the past, I have sometimes struggled with the concept of the Trinity, because I would find myself praying only to Jesus for example, and then worrying that I had neglected our Father or His Holy Spirit, and vice versa. But of course, it is not possible to speak to Jesus alone without speaking to God the Father and the Holy Spirit. While from the beginning of my faith journey I have known this in my head, I have not always had a full revelation in my heart of why it’s not possible, until recently.
My starting point was Jesus, “The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us.” (John 1:1 NIV). When Jesus was born, the world for the first time was able to physically see and tangibly hear God through him, and this is similar to us too. In our bodily forms, we are able to tangibly relate to the world and communicate with it through our words, our expressions, our attitudes and the things that we ourselves create, such as art, music, governments, infrastructure, varying ideologies in different spheres, and on an individual level, we create through our relationships, our homes, personal journals, photographs, social media posts and even words that may impact others around us.
Yet these are manifestations of the unseen aspects of us that don’t directly connect to the world; our thoughts, our opinions, our knowledge, our memories and our creativity. All of these things are not visible entities to the outside world, but they do exist within the holistic entity of our mind, which is central to everything else about us. Then there is the entity of our souls, or for the purpose of this post to draw clearer comparisons, our spirit, which connects us to everything unseen in the eternal spiritual realm and includes things such as our love, which has been described as living beyond the grave by even the secular world.
Therefore, if you speak to me, you are not only speaking to my body, you are also speaking to my mind and my spirit which coexist unseen together; yet it is all me, but different entities of me coexisting in every breath and every moment. If we are to look at ourselves in this way as three in one image bearers of God, we can then perhaps begin to see how God the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit exist as three in one. This idea is what has unlocked a new understanding of my relationship with God and I have experienced new depths of what it means to be an image bearer of God the Trinity.
Jesus claimed that he was a direct reflection of the Father when he said, “Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father.” (John 14:9 NIV). Therefore, if Jesus is represented by us in our physical forms, then by extending the above thoughts of the mind, body and spirit, we can perhaps compare our minds to the Father, and therefore how well are we reflecting the Father through what happens in our minds and how we use them?
If our physical bodies and physical communication with the world are to be compared to Jesus, then how are we reflecting Jesus in this way? How do we actively love those around us? How do we serve others? How much do we care for our physical selves in a Godly way, simultaneously are we obstinate when it comes to how we are physically used by God? Then there is our own spirit, our own eternal entity and eternal destination. How do we reflect the Holy Spirit in our spiritual lives?
This new way of viewing the Holy Trinity has not only allowed me to explore the way in which I reflect God, but it also means that I have uncovered new ways to connect with Him, because I now have different layers of my make-up with which to draw nearer to Him that go beyond a checklist of activities, but rather seeing how God can renew me in both my mind, body and my spirit.
I am a volunteer blogger with a passion for God and writing. My hope is to help others choose faith – or to walk deeper in their faith – through my own introspections and observations.
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