God created Adam “in His image” (Genesis 1:27) God is a Spirit, so to be visible to the rest of His creation, His image had to be visible physically. The image had to be able to listen and to speak, so that it could hear from and speak to God. The image had to be a living one because its Creator was The Living God.
God permits only one image of Himself on this earth — the one that He created. So, in writing that the Son is “the image of God”, the Apostle Paul is linking Jesus, “the last Adam” to the first Adam (Colossians 1:15; 1 Corinthians 15:45).
It follows that if we would know who “the last Adam” Jesus is, we need to take a closer look at who “the first Adam” was. In doing so, we will find that the only two men in the Bible known as “the [definite article] son of God” are the first Adam and the last Adam.
The difference between the two is that Adam was God’s created son, whereas Jesus was God’s only-begotten Son (Luke 1:35 & 3:38). (Eve was created from the DNA in Adam’s bone marrow.) This means that the descendants of Adam and Eve are not creations but human reproductions of God’s original creation of Adam, and then Eve from Adam. (Any number of reprints can be copied from a painting, but there is only one Original.)
When God breathed “the breath of life” into the image it became a man rather than a divinely sculpted clay figure. We know that God created Adam, but we tend to forget that the first Adam was the only image of God on earth. The practice of idolatry “changes the truth of God into a lie” by portraying the Almighty God in human-like forms that are part-man and part-god. Idolators then debase that image from an upright figure through bird and animal life to reptiles (Romans 1:28). They also confuse the separated Adam-Eve genders by making them non-gender specific.
No wonder the Apostle John spoke of Jesus with awe as “that…which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon, and our hands have handled…” (1 John 1:1)
John’s remembrance of Jesus was an audial, visual and tactile one of “the image of the invisible God”, in the way the original creation would have heard, seen and brushed up to the first Adam (and submitted to him) as the first, human son of God (Luke 3:38).
Who is God? Jesus said: “He who has seen me has seen the Father.” Would you like to know what God is like? Hear Him speak through the words of Jesus in the gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. See Him in the descriptions there of His Son Jesus. If you wish to know God as your Heavenly Father, firstly, accept His Son Jesus as your Saviour and confess him as your Lord. Secondly, ask a minister to baptize you in water. Thirdly, receive from the glorified Jesus the gift of the Holy Spirit. You will then be able to worship God “in spirit and in truth”(John 4:24).
From then on, a process of transformation will change you into the image of Jesus Christ. (Your physical, individual image will remain the same, but the characteristics of Jesus Christ in you will begin to appear to those around you. Friends and family will see Jesus in you — in the way you act, and in your greater love and your deeper compassion for them.