I love a keen insight into God or the Bible that I had never seen before. Especially when it tears down assumptions and presumptions about God that we’ve picked up along the way without realizing it. Sometimes the Bible says a lot less about something than we think. And that’s significant. In fact, in the process of inferring lots of meaning from picking verses from all around, we may miss the one item that was clearly in the text to begin with.
That is the sort of ah-ha moment I had reading part of the main thesis to Sayer’s The Mind of the Maker. This is some of the real meat of the whole book.
The Jews, keenly alive to the perils of pictorial metaphor, forbade the representation of the Person of God in graven images. [The Muslims still do this]. Nevertheless, human nature and the nature of human language defeated them. No legislation could prevent the making of verbal pictures: God walks in the garden, He stretches out His arm, His voice shakes the cedars, His eyelids try the children of men. To forbid the making of pictures about God would be to forbid thinking about God at all, for man is so made that he has no way to think except in pictures. But continually, throughout the history of the Jewish-Christian Church, the voice of warning has been raised against the power of the picture-makers: “God is a spirit”, “without body, parts or passions”, He is pure being, “I AM THAT I AM”.
Man, very obviously, is not a being of this kind; his body, parts and passions are only too conspicuous in his make-up. How then can he be said to resemble God? Is it his immortal soul, his rationality, his self-consciousness, his free will, or what, that gives him a claim to this rather startling distinction? A case may be argued for all these elements in the complex nature of man. But had the author of Genesis anything particular in his mind when he wrote? It is observable that in the passage leading up to the statement about man, he has given no detailed information about God. Looking at man, he sees in him something essentially divine, but when we turn back to see what he says about the original upon which the “image” of God was modeled, we find only the single assertion, “God created”. The characteristic common to God and man is apparently that: the desire and the ability to make things.
-Dorothy Sayers, The Mind of the Maker, Ch.2
How is exactly that we are made in the image of God? The answer usually has something to do with free will, desire for relationship (which includes a desire for language and expression), and such. And I think you can make good cases for all of those. However, I must confess I’ve missed the only thing explicitly mentioned in Genesis: that we must be like creators.