Abortion and the Image of God

Human beings are made in the image of God. Christians often try to capture this in our language by saying things like, “we bear the image of God.”  This implies that we carry the image as if it is some kind of weighty burden and that this tiresome effort is the natural, perpetual, and intended state of our duty.  While this statement is true so long as we walk in a fallen world where sin and evil appear to rule, and where principalities and powers hate that image, the phrase doesn’t necessarily capture God’s intention.  The full truth is that we are the image of God on Earth.  The more we become like Jesus, the more clear and sharp that image becomes. Don’t confuse what I’m saying here. We are not God, but we are his image. This isn’t a matter of what we look like, but what status we occupy. We are the pinnacle of creation, and we are to be like him in his loving attributes as we advance his kingdom, proclaim his name, spread his truth, embody his values, subdue the Earth, and have dominion over all of its biological life (Genesis 1:26-28). 

This is why murder is such an egregious crime, both religiously and criminally. Murder is the destruction of an image of God. It is, in effect, a disrespect of God – not just God’s rules, but a disrespect for his very image. This is likely why most people have an internal, personal coding that makes the killing of another human being extraordinarily challenging – even when it’s legitimately warranted by situations like a just war or self-defense. There is an unconscious part of us that recoils at disrespecting the image of our creator even when our lives are at stake.

This is also why Christians are so viscerally opposed to abortion. Abortion is the destruction of God’s image before a new human has had any opportunity to willfully tarnish that image with personal sin. Babies are as innocent as humans can be. Abortion destroys that divine image before it has realized any possibilities.  It robs the child of life, and it robs the world of the potential for godly good. It robs mothers, foster families, and adoptive parents of their opportunity to live out their imaging responsibilities as they sacrificially love through challenges and difficulties. Sadly, there are people who want to celebrate abortions – who want to remove a woman’s natural revulsion for destroying the image of God by destroying her child. All too often, freedom from anxiety is promised to the woman who fears taking care of a child. Instead of the promise, the anxiety is commonly replaced with regret. The celebration of abortion as it is codified into cultural DNA represents the satanic mutation of a civil society‘s genes. That celebration is nothing less than an evil disrespect for the image of God by the culture doing the celebration. One horror of this is that if such cultural coding is allowed to go unchecked, each passing generation’s cultural genes will progressively mutate into something that not only disrespects God, but the very humanity that is made in his image. That end is one of selfishness, darkness and hatred.

Christians must always lovingly, firmly, and assertively oppose the morally baseless destruction of God’s image – especially when the expression of that image beams from the faces of the most innocent among us.  Doing so is being the image of God. In a fallen world, being that image is sometimes a weighty burden, but bearing that burden in moments of challenge and sacrifice make the goodness of his image undeniably sharp and clear.