"In Our Image After Our Likeness"

What God Meant By;
“In Our Image after Our Likeness.”
By Steve Poland

H.O.P.E. Institute
The Great Doctrines of the Bible








I am going to be utterly transparent (pun very much intended) and sincerely honest with you in this report on what I think God meant by the phrase “In our image after our likeness.”

I have read the assigned passages of scripture and all the noted cross references. I have read, re-read, and read again the chapter “The Doctrine of Man”. I consider myself to be of average intelligence and possess a slightly above average reading comprehension, but these equivocal explanations leave me groping for a substantial meaning.

For me to decisively grasp a theory or concept of what this means, at least for the time being, is eluding my capacity to understand. I am profoundly stymied. Certainly, I have thoughts, ideas and suspicions, but to claim that I know beyond any question would be presumptuous.

In other words, I can do nothing more than guess and to do otherwise would be doing nothing more than employing magniloquent language, which might sound good, but from my perspective would be duplicitous.

I was actually amazed to discover during my attempt to create a report that would accurately convey my thoughts and feelings on this subject (and in fact my thoughts and feelings surrounding my relationship with God in general over the past few days) that there is a term poignantly describing how I feel. Cognitive dissonance.

Webster’s defines cognitive dissonance as; “The confused mental condition that results from holding incongruous, often mutually contradictory beliefs simultaneously.

If there is a spirit of cognitive dissonance that methodically assails the weary, despondent minds, spirits and souls of desperate individuals, then consider me ruefully plagued and in dire need of deliverance.

Therefore, the answer to the question is; I don’t know.