Right at the beginning of the Bible – at the beginning of time – God sets out the significance of what it means to be a person.

In Gen. 1:26-31 we read,

²⁶ Then God said, “Let us make human beings in our image, to be like us. They will reign over the fish in the sea, the birds in the sky, the livestock, all the wild animals on the earth, and the small animals that scurry along the ground.”

²⁷ So God created human beings in his own image.
In the image of God he created them;
male and female he created them.

²⁸ Then God blessed them ....

³¹ Then God looked over all he had made, and he saw that it was very good! (NLT)

‘Identity’ is one of those commonly used words that feels quite hard to pin down. I had a look at how the Oxford dictionary defines it and two of the options were: ‘the fact of being who or what a person or thing is’ and ‘the characteristics determining who or what a person or thing is.’ When I think of the idea of ‘identity’, what comes to my mind are questions rather than definitions. Who am I? Where do I belong? What makes me matter? What am I worth?

Over the years, there have been many attempts to explain what exactly is meant by being made in God’s image or likeness. This would be a pretty long article if I sought to unpack them all – but there are three things in particular that I think could be helpful to us.

1. Incalculable value

Being made in God’s image and being seen as ‘very good’ means that we have value not from what we produce or consume, or how admired, clever, or socially skilled we are. God places incalculable value on human beings before we have done anything.

Think about that for a moment: every single person you meet or talk to or talk about today is made in God’s image. Every person embodies something of their creator God, whether they (or those around them) recognize, respect or abuse that imaging. Every act, both big and small, that honours the dignity and value of an individual is a declaration that they matter.

2. Reflecting God

Being made in God’s image or likeness seems to mean we reflect and represent God is some way. Genesis presents human beings as joining with God in what he is doing in the world. If you like, we are given a job to do. My former professor Gordon McConville puts it beautifully:

‘Godlikeness is not a status that has been achieved and now merely needs to be enjoyed. Rather, it commits both God and humans to a life together… it includes those strands of the Old Testament that call the human partner to imitate God in his fundamental orientation toward the world­—that is, in his justice and righteousness, faithfulness, holiness, compassion, and truth.’

To put it more simply, being made in God’s image isn’t just a title we can claim and leave it at that. It’s an invitation to join with God, to be more like Him. We’re invited to see the world the way God sees it. We’re invited to care about the things that He cares about. We’re invited to partner with Him and to share His love, kindness, mercy and justice in our own communities. And notice how our value and vocation is not taken away by the events and consequences of human rebellion in Genesis 3.

3. Seen and Declared ‘good’

Third, look at how Genesis portrays God as ‘seeing’ his work of creation, declaring good, and blessing.

He makes light, and He says that it’s good. He makes land and sea, and He says that they are good. He makes the plants, and He sees them and says that they are good. The same goes for the sun, the moon and the stars, the birds and the fish, the animals.

Then He makes people – he makes humans like you and me. And we read in verse 28 that he blesses them. And He looks at us, and everything He has created, and He says it’s all very good.

God looks at us – He blesses us – and He sees that we are good.

Identity can be a complex thing for all of us at times. Those questions – Who am I? Where do I belong? What makes me matter? What am I worth? – can feel particularly loud or confronting in different seasons.

For children and young people with experience of care, the complexity of identity, of understanding who you are, can feel even heavier. Our identity is made up of so many different pieces – but what happens if some of the pieces feel ‘missing’? What if parts of our identity that are unknown to us, that have been lost or forgotten, that feel muddled or that haven’t been accurately captured and remembered? What if some of the pieces were misplaced when things changed, or someone somewhere decided it wasn’t important enough to take a note of? What if you’ve lived with a few different families, in a few different homes - each has brought it’s own pieces, but you’re not sure how they all fit together?

Figuring out their sense of ‘who they are’ will be a long and winding journey for many care-experienced people. Questions will come, and they might, at times, be challenging.

But we know and hold on to the belief that each and every child and young person has been designed and lovingly created by God, in His image and likeness. These questions and challenges will never make that untrue.

Each and every child and young person has incalculable value. They are immensely valuable – and it has nothing to do with what they can do or what they have done. It’s not altered by anything they’ve experienced or endured.

Each and every child reflects to the world around them the image of their Creator. They have the ability to show us parts of God’s character that we might not see anywhere else. They have the opportunity and responsibility to be an important contributor to what God is doing in our world.

Each and every child has been seen by God, and declared ‘good’. Our society might place labels, statistic or headlines over them; it might assume outcomes or be clouded by stigma. Not so with God. Our God sees these children, holds these children blesses them and declares that they are good.

If you want to explore these themes in more details, a very helpful recent book is Carmen Joy Imes, Being God's Image: Why Creation Still Matters (IVP, 2023). See also, Gordon McConville, Being Human in God’s World: An Old Testament Theology of Humanity (Eerdmans, 2016)