The creation of adopted sons of God elect in his only begotten Son.

Prof. Rodney Moss - Johannesburg

According to the first chapter of Genesis, people are created in God’s image and likeness. As such, they are called to reflect God’s goodness and love in everything they think, say and do, in their very being. Human beings are most truly themselves when they are the mirror images of God. Thus the divine is truly implanted in every human heart. In fact, even the insights of modern science indicate that the deepest need of human beings is to love and to be loved – a perfect description of those who are the reflections of a God who is love.

The most perfect human being is Jesus Christ, the Son of God, the most perfect image of God the Father. Through him, God broke through into our human world, to restore his image in human beings who had allowed it to become distorted through sin. Jesus Christ redeemed us from our fallen state and restored to us our integrity, that is, he restored God’s image in us, making it once again possible for human beings to reflect the God in whose image we were originally created.

St Paul mentions our vocation and destiny in glowing terms. In Ephesians he says: “Before the world was made, God chose us, chose us in Christ, to be holy and spotless, and to live through love in his presence, determining that we should become his adopted sons, through Jesus Christ for his own kind purposes, to make us praise the glory of his grace ...”

(1:4-6) More than that, he also recognises that “I live ... no, not I, Christ lives in me. It is thus by our union to Christ that we become the adopted children of God. The purpose for which we were created is ‘to be holy and spotless’; in other words, to be such perfect mirror images of God that sin no longer has a hold on us. This is possible only if we maintain our union with Christ Jesus ‘in whom we live and move and have our being’.

St Paul reiterates this again in the letter to the Romans: “God cooperates with all those who love him ... they are the ones he chose specially long ago and intended to become true images of his Son, that his Son might be the eldest of many brothers [and sisters]. He called those he intended for this; those he called he justified, and with those he justified he shared his glory.” (8:28-30) Indeed, from the beginning God intended to follow through with his original plan: when human beings failed to reflect God faithfully, he sent us his Son, Jesus Christ, who is the human image of the Father, his perfect ikon. As human beings we find it easier to relate to the Christ whom we can see than to his Father whom we cannot see. Paul, utterly imbued with Christ, is convinced that our union with Christ ‘justifies’ us, it enables us to understand and live the righteousness of God rather than our own. And in so doing, we share God’s glory as from now, there is no need to wait for the hereafter.

In his letter to the Colossians, Paul explains that by following Christ, by assimilating his presence within themselves, “you have stripped off your old behaviour with your old self, and you have put on a new self which will progress towards true knowledge the more it is renewed in the image of its creator; and in that image ... there is only Christ: he is everything and he is in everything.” (3:9-11) The more we become like Christ, the more we become his image, the more the image of God is restored in us and we truly become what we have always been, God’s adopted sons and daughters in Christ.