THE IMAGE OF GOD

The Image of God in a Kingdom

Good evening. Over the past two weeks I have been spending time studying the Kingdom of God and what it means for a kingdom to be a kingdom. I will be sharing a series of blogs that address this subject. Section 1 is all about the image of God in a kingdom.

A well known section in the gospel of Matthew that most of us have read or heard many times reveals a very important fact.

Matthew 22:15–22

Then the Pharisees went out and laid plans to trap him in his words. They sent their disciples to him along with the Herodians. “Teacher,” they said, “we know that you are a man of integrity and that you teach the way of God in accordance with the truth. You aren’t swayed by others, because you pay no attention to who they are. Tell us then, what is your opinion? Is it right to pay the imperial tax to Caesar or not?”

But Jesus, knowing their evil intent, said, “You hypocrites, why are you trying to trap me? Show me the coin used for paying the tax.” They brought him a denarius, and he asked them, “Whose image is this? And whose inscription?”

“Caesar’s,” they replied.

Then he said to them, “So give back to Caesar what is Caesar’s, and to God what is God’s.”

The Pharisees came to trap Jesus with a question about taxes. Should they pay Caesar or not? If he said yes, he would have looked like a Roman collaborator. If he said no, he would have been arrested. This was a delicate situation.

Jesus asked for a coin. Someone handed him a denarius, a small silver Roman coin that served as the standard currency of the day. He held it up and asked them one question: whose image was on it?

Caesar’s, they said.

Then give to Caesar what is Caesar’s, he told them. And give to God what is God’s.

Most of us have spent our whole lives hearing the first half of that sentence and missing the second half. For me it had always been a statement about taxes, and I moved on without ever reflecting on what Jesus actually said next.

Give to God what is God’s.

That coin represented something. In the ancient world, the image on a coin was not a design preference as we see on money today, or a cultural tradition. It was a legal declaration of ownership. Every coin in the Roman Empire carried the emperor’s face because every coin was his. The image represented a voice that declared in whose world you were living, under whose authority you were governed, and whose name backed the currency in your hand. To use the coin was to acknowledge, whether you thought about it or not, that you were living inside someone else’s kingdom.

So when Jesus held up that denarius and asked whose image was on it, there was a deeper truth he wanted to reveal.

He was setting up the most important question anyone would ever be asked.

Because if the coin bearing Caesar’s image belonged to Caesar, then what bore God’s image belonged to God.

And that left one question hanging in the air that Jesus did not need to say out loud, because every person in that crowd already heard it the moment he spoke.

What bears God’s image?

The answer was there from the very first page of the very first book, Genesis was written before the law, before the covenant, before Israel, before everything else. So God created mankind in his own image. In the image of God he created them.

We do. Every human being carries the image of God pressed into the core of who they are as the most foundational fact of human existence. We are the living currency of the Kingdom of God.

An Identity That Cannot Be Revoked

We live in a world that tells us identity is something we construct for ourselves. We choose who we are, we define what we stand for, and we build our sense of self from our achievements, our relationships, our choices, and the story we tell about our own lives. And when those things shift, when the job disappears, when the relationship ends, or when the version of ourselves we worked so hard to build starts to crack under pressure, we discover that a self constructed identity has no foundation underneath it.

But the image of God was not something you constructed. It was placed in you before you made a single decision about anything. Before you succeeded at anything or failed at anything. Before anyone told you who you were or who you were not. Before your best moment and before your worst.

The image was already there, and it does not depend on your performance to remain in place. Your identity is not primarily something you built; it is something you received when you were born into this earth. And it cannot be revoked by failure, by other people’s opinions, by your own darkest seasons, or by anything the world does to you.

The Person Sitting Across From You

There is one more thing the coin tells us, and it is perhaps the most demanding of all.

Every person you encounter every day carries the same image. The colleague who makes your Monday harder than it needs to be, the family member who knows exactly which wound to press, the person whose choices you fundamentally disagree with, the one you have quietly decided is not worth your full attention. Every single one of them has the King’s face stamped into who they are. And the way we treat them is the way we treat the one whose image they carry.

There is no such thing as an insignificant person. There is no interaction that falls below the level of the image of God. There is no one we are permitted to write off.

The Pharisees came to trap Jesus with a coin and walked away carrying a question they could not ignore.

Never forget who you belong to. And whose image you bear.

God bless you.