The I Am And The Image

I'm currently reading God With Us by K. Scott Oliphint. In summary, the book is about how God's attributes can be completely independent of creation, yet how his actions can interact with creation. To (over) simplify, how does an infinite, eternal, and unchanging God interact with space, time, and ever-changing creation? Oliphint spends a lot of time unpacking the name of God, "I AM WHO I AM". Without getting into the argument of the book, one thing in particular was driven home in the chapter "I Am ... Your God": creation is a translation of the thoughts of God. Oliphint uses the Eimi/eikon ("I Am"/image) distinction. God is the Eimi and creation is the eikon. While creation reflects God, it is not God. Building upon the notion that creation was in the mind of God before it existed, Oliphint says, "No matter how accurately [creation] represents God's thoughts (and it does represent them accurately), the fact of the matter is that it re-presents those thoughts; it re-presents them as created, which, in their original form, they were not." This Eimi/eikon distinction is a part of the Creator/creature distinction.



Keeping this distinction present in the forefront of our minds will help us greatly as we think about God. Recently I was finally persuaded of the doctrine of the impassibility of God. The Westminster Confession states that God is "without body, parts, or passions". Oliphint, commenting on the Confession, states that, "whatever God 'feels,' he does so according to his own sovereign plan and not because he is dependent or because something independent of him cause him to re-act to something outside himself." This is a good understanding, though for a more in depth discussion, one can look here. While I was wrestling against the doctrine, one of the main reasons that I came back to was that since we are created in the image of God and we have emotions, God must have emotions like us. It made sense, for a while, but the Eimi/eikon distinction really shines here. I cannot seek to understand God by looking at myself. Nothing in creation can understand God by looking at itself. No, we understand ourselves by looking at God.

This type of thinking seems to be very common. People often object to attributes or actions of God as unfair and unjust. While there most certainly is a true fairness and justice, it is not defined by the creature but by the Creator. We can understand, and even appeal to justice and fairness, but the standard by which we appeal to is rooted in the character of God. Examples of this type of flawed thinking come in many forms. If something is important or valuable to us, it must also be so to God. If something is offensive to us (and mankind has many very different standards of what is offensive), it must also be offensive to God. Certainly, to the degree we are reflecting our Creator's perfect will, this may very well be the case. But we are fallen and tainted by sin. While we still do reflect the image of God, in a sense, that image is tainted. This is why when we seek to understand God by using our reflection, we have everything entirely backwards. Oliphint says rightly that, "no matter how accurate the translation, the original does not, and could not, become the translated." We are the reflection of God (true, yet imperfect until the consummation), God is not the reflection of us. How are to think about these things? As we seek to understand who God is, as he is revealed in Scripture, we will then understand who we are more accurately.

It is good to keep things in perspective. The eikon (creation) is the reflection of the Eimi (Creator). A confusion of this reality creates God in our own image, which is the nature of idolatry. Let us keep this distinction before us as we continue to strive in our understanding of I AM WHO I AM.