God's Image and Likeness:
Does God Look Like You?

How we are created in the image and likeness of God (Genesis 1:27) is a ministry nightmare that creates bitter controversy by mixing gender politics with the scriptural mandate to keep the Commandments...which are gender neutral.

While modern day gender politics demand gender equality in the workplace (and rightly so), the same democratic idea has been applied to the alleged gender of God.

This has created contention, confusion and has led possibly to heresy and schism within the churches.

To resolve the confusion, but not the contention, people pray to God Our Father, God Our Mother and God Our Mother and Father.

Here is a reflection of the confusion of millions of people who query the search engines which return millions of pages that try to answer...

(Click on the tabs below to open a panel. Reclick to close to minimize scrolling.)

Some teachers have even gone so far as to resolve the image and likeness gender controversy by claiming God is not a single being; s/he is two distinct beings because, they say, the Hebrew name for God, Elohim, is a masculine plural noun that embraces the feminine word, Eloah. Eloah does not mean woman or female, it means Powerful.

The two-God proponents ignore the grammatical fact that in Hebrew Elohim becomes singular when the verb is singular and masculine when the verb form is masculine; Bereshit bara Elohim. Bara = "he created". "In the beginning, God (that is, the all Powerful One) created...

Nevertheless...

But this is merely a pseudo-scholarly way of being politically correct.

It is an attempt to arrive at religious truth by misinterpreting a mere grammatical convention.

However, crawling through imaginary grammatical loopholes to reveal newer 'truer' gods, has the opposite effect...

Gods, one male and one female, are not supported in the Hebrew creation story because Elohim is used as the name of God, it is not used as a collective noun. Otherwise the verbs would be plural.

To create an image and likeness of God from some imagined grammatical loophole in the inspired text, to justify the politically correct demands of gender politics, is to re-create God in man's or woman's image and likeness...and thus violate the First Commandment...

Even worse, God would be contradicting himself, and sinning against himself, to make a graven image of himself in violation of his own Second Commandment (Exodus 20:1-5).

He "created them male and female" refers to Adam and Eve, not to God.

The image or likeness of God is translated from the Hebrew word tselem, which means shadow. And shadows are intangibles not concrete reproductive characteristics.

As you can see each of these questions is about the boundaries of ministry.

So, if the expediencey of gender politics causes you to de-emphasize God's holiness, and God's politics, to work on re-creating him in some politically acceptable bi-sexualized human digital copy, it is worth remembering and reflecting on the fact that...

1. God punished his beloved Moses for failing to reflect his holiness to the people he had just freed from slavery to earthly government (Numbers 20:12).
2. And Jesus solemnly denounces inauthentic ministers who use his name and sends them packing (Matthew 7:21ff).

And finally, God (the Spirit, not the bi-gendered political compromise) made it plain when he said (John 14:21):

Whoever has my commandments...

and observes them...

is the one who loves me.

You can return from this image and likeness page to separation of church and state.

Or you can...