Almighty God permits only one image of Himself on this earth, and it’s the original that He created and Adam and Eve reproduced. God is a Spirit, so for Him to be visible to the rest of His creation the image had to be visible also. It had to be able to listen and to speak. It had to be a living image because it was created in the image of The Living God.
In writing that the Jesus is “the image of God” the Apostle Paul is linking “the last Adam” to the first Adam (1 Corinthians 15:45). It follows that if we would know who Jesus is, we need to take a close look at who Adam was. When we do, we will find that the only two men in the Bible who are referred to 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 firstborn Son. Adam was the only created image of God. (Eve was created from the DNA in Adam’s rib.) The descendants of Adam and Eve (and that’s us) are not creations but reproductions. There can be countless, individually numbered reprints of a painting, but they are reproductions of one original.
When God breathed “the breath of life” into the image that He had created, it became a living man rather than just a divinely sculpted figure. He 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 god-man forms, such as that abominable and blasphemous one on the ceiling of St. Peter’s Basilica in the Vatican. Idolatry then debases God’s image of Himself into Adam to that of birds, animals, reptiles, and homosexuals (Romans 1:28).
No wonder the Apostle John spoke of Jesus in so dearly, 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 was remembering Jesus as the image of the firstborn Son of God in a way not unlike the way the creation would have looked at the first created son. Who is Jesus? He is the answer to the question your heart is asking.
In fact, Jesus is the answer to every question you’ll ever ask!