Imago Dei - for a four-year-old?
Then God said, “Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness…” –Genesis 1:26a (NIV)
One of my most favorite jobs in the Kingdom of God is teaching preschoolers about Jesus. We play and act silly and sing and dance, and in the span of about forty minutes they’ll hear a Bible story, learn a Bible verse, and have some Biblical truth introduced or reinforced. I use props, science experiments, games – anything I can bring to the table to make things fun. In the process, I pray they’ll enjoy themselves enough to keep coming back to spend time with people who care enough to show them a picture of Jesus.
Our assignment the last few weeks has been covering the Genesis story of creation. I’m naïve enough to believe that, as adults, we can engage healthy discussion about the logistics of creation without breaking fellowship. Whether you’re a “Young earth guy”, or a “Six literal 24-hr days guy”, or a “’Maybe the days represented epochs’ guy” or a “’What about the fossil record?’ guy”, the underlying story remains the same: A Supreme Being working outside the confines of time and space conceived, designed, and built everything out of nothing, launching elegantly balanced cycles that have continued for millennia. That “big picture” story is the one the preschoolers (and probably the rest of us) need.
So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them. –Genesis 1:27 (NIV)
As the crowning achievement of that process, He saw fit to create humanity, creatures with whom He could enjoy fellowship. With a spark of the Divine inside each of us, we became the Imago Dei. What does that mean? More to the point, what does that mean to a four-year-old? In what is likely a gross over-simplification, I’m boiling it down to this:
We can know there is a God.
We have awareness other species do not possess. We can observe the universe we inhabit and deduce that some intelligence bigger than ourselves put it all together.
We can know the difference between right and wrong.
Humans act on more than instinct. We need a code of ethics to assign relative value to our actions, so much so that even communities that reject an absolute outside standard will adopt one of their own invention.
We can choose to seek God and do what is right.
We are responsible for our own choices. God desires relationship with us, and though we sometimes make it harder than it is, we can find Him, know Him, and know His will for us.
Of course, there are spiritual and theological questions that emerge from these truths. Just because we know good from evil doesn’t mean we’ve always chosen good. Where does that leave us? Does God still love us, even while we’re in rebellion? What has He done about that? How do we respond? Does that fix the problem?
Those are concepts we’ll visit in time – it’s a process. For this week, it’s the fact that every human being reflects the Imago Dei, along with three simple statements that help frame that idea. Our illustration will be a short video of faces from around the world – though they appear very different, they all bear the image of their Maker.
God saw all that he had made, and it was very good. And there was evening, and there was morning—the sixth day. –Genesis 1:31 (NIV)