teaching/sermons/col-1-15-20/expansion/01_image_of_god.md

01 — Image of the Invisible God (εἰκών / eikōn)

Col 1:15 — "He is the image of the invisible God..." Col 1:16 — "...things visible and invisible..."

The visible/invisible thread runs from 1:15 through the whole hymn. Eikōn of the aoratos (invisible) God. Paul is saying something specific that the English flattens.

What BP says here

The radical inversion: Jesus IS the image; humans are in the image

Tim's central claim, repeated across many records:

"He doesn't say Jesus is in the image of God. He is the image. ... When he reads Genesis one, he sees the pre-human Jesus as being the image that humans are the image of. He's the divine one who is the image that humans are in image of." — [podcast:firstborn-creation]

"Humans are the image of God. He's THE image." — [podcast:theme-god-e18-who-did-paul-think-jesus-was]

The Genesis 1 vocational claim doesn't go away — humans ARE made in the image — but Paul is naming a prior reality: the image they are made in is a person, and that person is Christ.

Jesus is the human Adam was supposed to be

"Jesus, the firstborn of creation, is the image of the invisible God and the image humans were made to be, which means Jesus shows us who God is and Jesus reveals to us what it means to be truly human." — [podcast:firstborn-creation]

"Even though he's like a new Adam, he's actually the first real human." — [podcast:firstborn-creation]

Two simultaneous claims:

  1. Jesus reveals who God is — he is what the invisible God looks like.
  2. Jesus reveals what humanity is — he is what humans were made to be the image of, AND the first one to be it.

The image is the embodied representation — physical presence, not picture

This is the BP-distinctive ANE move. Eikōn in the LXX translates Hebrew tselem — and tselem means cult-statue / idol. An image isn't a picture of an absent god; it's a physical embodiment that mediates the deity's presence.

"Humanity is image, representative. The word image means representation, one who represents another. And it also is the word for idol-statue. It's the same word as statue. ... Which is what a physical representation of a god in the ancient world meant." — [podcast:who-bible-about]

"A physical embodiment of the divine presence. ... The peculiar purpose for their creation is — and then he spells it, uses just a Greek word, theophoric, which is a compound Greek word meaning revealing the God, God revealing. To represent or mediate the sovereign presence." — [podcast:priests-of-eden]

"The image of god is a embodied representation of the creator. ... humans are these embodied witnesses..." — [podcast:can-i-get-witness]

So when Paul says Jesus is the eikōn of the invisible God, he is making a temple/idol-statue claim: Jesus is the physical, embodied locus where the unseeable becomes seeable.

The temple/incarnation overlap

This is the same claim as fullness in 1:19 and tabernacle language in John 1:14:

"Jesus is the warmth, the reality of the creator's power comes to him, to hit our face and to meet us where we're at." — [podcast:book-hebrews-pt-1-are-you-listening]

"It's very similar to the radiance of the sun and the source of the father's glory, but it's a different image. Same but separate. The thing that you see [the sun] is the visible expression of the [invisible source]." — [podcast:jesus-opens-way-cosmic-mountain]

"That is why the New Testament authors call Jesus the, capital T-H-E, image of God. Because he's the glorious human — he's like, if there's anything he's the reality of which you and I are just shadows..." — [youtube:2I73In_xNQw]

"The whole premise"

"The whole premise of the biblical story is the invisible God [becoming visible]..." — [podcast:jesus-opens-way-cosmic-mountain]

The visible/invisible binary that Col 1:15-16 plays with is THE biblical premise. Paul isn't smuggling in Greek philosophy. He's naming the heart of the whole canon.

Iconography — humans as "animate icons"

The line that connects image directly to apocalyptic:

"Iconography, which isn't just a picture, it's a window into the heavenly reality, that humans are called animate icons. Or think of our language then of apocalypse. Humans are an apocalypse — humans are an apocalypse — an unveiling." — [podcast:walking-talking-apocalypse]

This is enormous. If a human is an animate icon — a window into the heavenly reality — and Jesus is the icon, then Christ is the window through which the invisible God becomes seeable. And every human bearing his image becomes an unveiling-in-miniature.

Greek/Hebrew territory

The Greek is doing what English can't: naming a paradox. The unseen God HAS an image. The image is a person. Looking at that person IS looking at God.

ANE frame reset

This is one of BP's strongest moves on the image-of-God thread. In Egyptian, Babylonian, Assyrian, and Syrian sources, "image of the god" was reserved for the deified king — Pharaoh Ahmose called "the prince of Re, the child of Qebehut." A letter from Adad-shumu-usur calls "the king, the lord of the world, is the very image of the god."

Genesis 1 takes that elite royal title and democratizes it to all humanity — every human, male and female, is the image. The royal vocation belongs to everyone.

"In the ancient world, you lived under the authority of a king. ... This task that once belonged only to elite kings is here in the Bible, the task of all humanity. ... a genuine democratization of ancient Near Eastern royal ideology." — quoted in dictionary entry democratized-image-of-god (citing J. Richard Middleton)

What Paul does in Col 1:15 is the inverse move — re-aristocratize the image in Christ. The democratized image was meant for all humanity, but it can only function fully through the one who is the image. Jesus re-collects what was scattered. The cosmic firstborn is also the true royal image, in whom every other image-bearer can be re-imaged.

Hyperlinks BP names

Dictionary entries directly relevant

Refused binaries BP would name here

The "no one has ever seen God" thread

Worth noting: Paul's aoratos (invisible) doesn't mean "non-physical." In Hebrew Bible thought, God IS embodied — sits enthroned, has a face — but human eyes cannot bear the sight (Ex 33:20). The invisible God is the seen-but-not-bearable God.

"There is the father who is above all and over all who no man can see me and live. Right. But God, within God's own self has bridged the gap and is made visible within creation. And that's the angel of Yahweh through the fire and the glory and the wisdom. And what they're saying is that that is the one that became human and that we met named Jesus of Nazareth and he is the image after which humanity was made as an image." — [podcast:firstborn-creation]

So Col 1:15's "image of the invisible God" is a continuation of the Hebrew Bible's angel-of-Yahweh / glory / wisdom thread — the divine identity that has always been the seeable face of God, now incarnate.

Pointers for digging

Classroom additions (2026-05-06 expansion pass)

Heaven-and-Earth Session 28 — the deepest BP image-vocabulary treatment

[class:heaven-and-earth:28] (Humans as the Image, or Idol, of God) is now the densest eikōn/tselem exposition Tim has on record. Several quotable scholar citations land here:

Harold Niehr (cited verbatim by Tim):

"Genesis 1:26 can only be understood against the background of an ancient Yahweh statue. ... Humanity is by this term regarded as the statue of God. ... Humans were created to be the living statues of the deity. There was no need of a divine image because humans represented Yahweh as the statue would have done." — Niehr, "In Search of Yahweh's Cult Statue in the First Temple," cited by Tim in [class:heaven-and-earth:28]

Crispin Fletcher-Louis (cited verbatim by Tim):

"Humanity in the garden is an incarnation of God's heavenly presence and rule on earth. To appreciate the full force of this image-of-God-in-humanity theology, we must have in mind the role of idols in the ancient Near Eastern religion ... where an idol is set up to be the real presence of a god." — Fletcher-Louis, cited by Tim in [class:heaven-and-earth:28]

Richard Middleton (cited verbatim by Tim):

"In ancient royal ideology, the king is the image of god. ... Humanity is dignified with a status and role that is analogous to the status and role of kings in the ancient and Near East. Genesis 1 constitutes a genuine democratization of ancient Near Eastern royal ideology. As the imago Dei, humanity is called to be the representative and intermediary of God's power and blessing on earth." — J. Richard Middleton, The Liberating Image, cited by Tim in [class:heaven-and-earth:28]

Tim's own framing of why this matters for Col 1:15:

"In other words, the concept of a human being a bridge of heaven and earth and of divine presence and divine rule, that's not the revolutionary thing. The revolutionary thing is that it's all humanity that's given this identity on page one of the Bible. ... There is not a human on earth who doesn't have the royal priestly status of an image of God." — [class:heaven-and-earth:28]

The Hadad-iti statue. Tim shows a Syrian king's statue (excavated 1960s-70s) inscribed in Aramaic: "This is the likeness of Hadad-iti, which he placed before Hadad ... controller of water in heaven and earth ... the image which is for establishing his throne, that is Adad's throne, so that his utterance may please the gods." The same Semitic vocabulary as Genesis 1:26-27, applied to a human king as the embodied image of a deity. This is the cultural script Paul subverts when he calls Jesus eikōn tou theou tou aoratou — the real royal-image, of the real God.

Heaven-and-Earth Session 29 — image-arc through the canon, climaxing in Col 1:15

[class:heaven-and-earth:29] (The Image of God in the Storyline of the Bible) traces the tselem/image vocabulary from Genesis 1 through Daniel and into Christ. Most directly relevant for Col 1:15:

"The image of God language doesn't really appear very consistently after you've got it in Genesis 5 and 9, but then it doesn't really re-emerge until the New Testament, where it's focused on Jesus." — Tim citing Richard Lints in [class:heaven-and-earth:29]

"From Genesis 3 onwards, it's like we're subhuman. It's like I'm subhuman until I'm renewed according to the image of Jesus." — [class:heaven-and-earth:29]

"All the threads come back together in one particular book of the Hebrew Bible, to the book of Daniel. ... So the four metals of the statue [tsalma in Aramaic, same root as tselem] represent these four mutant beasts. ... When humans deify themselves in their own created structures, we become less than human." — [class:heaven-and-earth:29]

The Daniel 7 climax: Caiaphas at Jesus' trial "makes you swear by the living God: tell us, are you the anointed one, the Son of God?" And Jesus answers with Daniel 7's son-of-man-on-the-cloud claim — making Caiaphas the beast in his own narrative. Tim's punchline:

"Jesus is clearly claiming to be the one who's gonna ascend on the cloud. If he's the one ascending on the cloud, what does that make the current anointed one in Jerusalem? The beast. He's a monster. ... So as you go into Paul's letters, then what it means to follow this Jesus is to be transformed into his likeness, which is to have the the true human image renewed." — [class:heaven-and-earth:29]

For Col 1:15, that's the long arc Paul is naming when he calls Christ eikōn tou theou tou aoratou: the image-vocation that ran through Genesis, fragmented through priests and kings, was caricatured in Caesar — comes to its true expression in this one Jew Rome crucified.

Heaven-and-Earth Session 27 — Genesis 1:26-28 poem structure

[class:heaven-and-earth:27] (The Rulers Below) reads the Genesis 1:26-28 image-passage as a three-part poem with the male-female-and-image triad at center. Tim names the framework "dianthropic" (NT Wright via the student) — "the working through humans in the world God":

"The God of the Bible is a God who delights in partnering with others so that their united wills discover a future together. ... Humanity is not just the passive recipient of God's purposes ... we're summoned to be actively involved in the very means by which his purposes are accomplished. ... The human destiny is the destiny of the cosmos." — [class:heaven-and-earth:27]

This is the exact theological logic Paul deploys in Col 1:15-18 (Christ as image AND head of body): the image-bearing royal-priestly humanity is the means, in the body of Christ, by which the cosmic-Christ enacts dominion. Image (1:15) → head of body (1:18) is one continuous claim.

Jacob 5 — the verbatim Col 1:15 reading

[class:jacob:5] makes the most direct in-class connection to Col 1:15-20 in any classroom session in the corpus. While treating Jacob's deception of Esau (Genesis 25), Tim names the bekorah (firstborn-right) and eikōn themes as one:

"In the Eden story and the seven-day creation story, what humans are called is the image, the image of the invisible God, and then the royal priestly representatives ... So in the slot of the image and the royal priest is a firstborn. ... So this one's for free, well actually this is all for free. But in this really neat opening poem in Colossians chapter 1, the Apostle Paul ... describes Jesus as the image of the invisible God and the firstborn of all creation. The image and the firstborn. They're two ways of talking about the chosen representative that God installs to rule over the cosmos." — [class:jacob:5]

That last sentence is the most compressed exposition of Col 1:15 in BP's catalog: image and firstborn are two ways of saying the same thing — the chosen royal-priestly representative installed by God to rule the cosmos. Pull this on the pulpit, and you have the BP synthesis in one sentence.