What God telling us in the Bible

God’s wisdom is deeper than what were taught. We learned the basics — God made us, loves us, Jesus died on the cross and rose from death to save us so we go to heaven when we die. We learned important verses. But, for most of us we are only seeing the tip of the iceberg. We are missing much of God’s truth — and we can’t afford to keep missing it.

Here’s why. In Luke 24:27, Jesus walked with two disciples on the road to Emmaus, explaining the entire Old Testament and how it pointed to him, starting with Moses and all the Prophets. It’s a comprehensive hermeneutical event that is largely overlooked.

Matthew records the same pattern throughout his gospel. Six times in the Sermon on the Mount Jesus says — “You have heard it said… but I say to you.” He is not abolishing the law. He is reading it correctly in the hearing of people who thought they knew what the Bible said. He is correcting every major interpretive tradition of his day.¹

If Jesus spent that much time showing his followers how to read Scripture — it is reasonable to wonder if we are missing something too.

Go back to the beginning. Genesis 1:26 says something that should stop us mid-sentence:

“Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.”

Read it again. God made us like Himself — and He made us to rule over the earth. Not to escape it. Not merely to endure it until something better arrives. To rule it. To manage and develop it as His image-bearers. We don’t need to make statues of gods. We are the living statues of God. God gave us dominion over the earth and what we miss is – dominion over our own lives. Which means God does not overrule our decisions even they are bad ones.

That is a bigger answer than most of us were taught. This article is about what happens when we take that answer seriously — and what happens when we don’t.

Made in His Image

The Imago Dei — the image of God — is not merely a statement about human dignity. It is a statement about human essence of being.

God intentionally made us like Himself for a reason. He made us to reflect who He is. And knowing who He is and what He is like is more than we think. The basic purpose of the Bible is to reveal the nature of God.

God is a giving God. Creation itself is the first evidence — He did not need to make anything, yet He made everything and called it good. The Trinity is the theological ground of this — the eternal relationship of Father, Son and Spirit is itself a community of self-giving love. God’s being is inherently outward, inherently generous, inherently relational.

At the center of His character is love — not sentiment, not preference, but the core of what He is. God is love is not a description of His behavior. It is a statement about His being. John returns to this truth more than any other biblical writer — God is love, and the evidence of knowing God is the capacity to love. To be created in the image of a God whose essential nature is love means more than moral likeness or rational capacity. It means the ability to love and to be loved — to enter into the kind of relationship that mirrors the eternal self-giving of the Trinity itself. Everything He does flows from what He is.

The Bible uses holiness to denote God’s distinctness from creation. Righteousness, truth and love are not three separate qualities. They are the expression of His holiness in relationship to His creation. Where holiness is present, righteousness, truth and love follow. They cannot be separated from their source.

This is what the image-bearer was made to reflect. Not a list of virtues to perform — but a character to inhabit. Life flowing outward, not circling inward. Generosity that mirrors the God who gave everything to make everything. A self that finds its fullest expression not in self-serving but in self-giving — because that is the image we are made to bear.

Into this creation God places humanity — the only creature made in His image, the only creature called to bear His likeness into the world. The vocation is as large as creation itself. To rule is not to exploit. It is to steward, to cultivate, to extend the order and beauty and life of God into every corner of the earth.

Ludwig Wittgenstein observed that the limits of our language are the limits of our world. The same principle applies here. The limits of our theology are the limits of our vision. A theology that shrinks the purpose of the Image of God as a ticket to heaven has already lost something it cannot afford to lose.

The Loss

Adam and Eve didn’t lose a garden. They lost God.

That sentence deserves to sit alone for a moment. The traditional telling focuses on what was taken away — the garden, the ease, the innocence. But the deeper loss is the source of all of it. It wasn’t a case of God withdrawing His blessings. He was no longer present in the way He had been. And when the source is lost, everything that flows from the source begins to erode.

They already bore God’s image. They already reflected His likeness. They already had His breath in their lungs. They were with God. He walked with them in the cool of the day.

Satan promised them something they already had.

They were already like God. That was the lie — not a promise of something new, but a suggestion that what they had wasn’t enough.

They traded their life for a piece of fruit. And they weren’t even hungry.

That’s the cruelest joke of all. They had everything. Every tree in the garden was theirs. They weren’t starving. They weren’t desperate. They weren’t in need. They had abundance. And they traded it all for the one thing God told them to leave alone.

Satan’s promise was a lie wrapped in a truth. Yes, eating the fruit would give them knowledge. But what kind of knowledge? Thousands of years of human history prove they didn’t get the knowledge of good and evil. They got the experience of evil. They already knew the good.

I need to stop here and say something personal. I mostly don’t understand what God asks me to do or what God is doing. My default reaction is trusting my judgment, not His. That is what makes this story so uncomfortably close. Adam and Eve were not uniquely fooled. They were human. So are we. We will not always understand what God is doing. That is precisely the point where knowing and believing what God says is crucial.

Life, love, truth, justice, beauty, order — these are not abstract values that exist independently of God. They are expressions of His character. They flourish where He is present. They erode where He is not. Genesis 3 is not merely the story of disobedience. It is the story of a catastrophic disconnection from God the ground of all reality and the only source of life.

This is not punishment in the sense of an angry God inflicting pain on rebellious creatures. God  told them the truth in advance — the consequences were already embedded in the nature of what they chose. When we disconnect from the source of life, love, truth and order, we do not experience God’s wrath as an external force imposed upon us. We experience reality. We run into what the world becomes without God.

You unplug a lamp from the power and the light goes out. That is not punishment. That is physics.

If you follow the logic all the way, a place completely without God is a place without light, without love, without friendship, without beauty, without life. Not because God is punishing anyone. But because He is the source of life, love, justice, truth and all of creation.

Judgment Day is still future. What we experience now is not final judgment — it is the natural consequence of a world increasingly disconnected from the Creator God. The erosion of justice, beauty, truth and order in the modern world is not God punishing civilization. It is civilization experiencing what happens when it walks away from the Creator that sustains those things.

The image was marred. Not destroyed — the capacity to love, to reason, to create, to long for something more remained. But the full expression of godly character — the outward flowing life of a creature made in the image of a giving God — was broken. Humanity turned inward. Self-centeredness replaced self-giving love.

The Promise

God did not abandon us.

Genesis 12:1–3 is the turning point — not the resolution, but the beginning of the long pursuit of restoration. God calls Abraham with a promise that reaches far beyond one man and one family:

“All peoples on earth will be blessed through you.”

This is not a promise about real estate. It is a promise about restoration. Through Abraham God begins to rebuild what Genesis 3 destroyed — a people who bear His image, who know His character, who demonstrate to the watching world what life restored to God actually looks like.

Israel was called to be a light to the nations. Not a conquering army. Not a superior civilization. A light. A demonstration. A people whose life together — their justice, their care for the poor, their worship, their covenant faithfulness — would show the nations what it means to be human beings restored to the image of God.

The history of Israel is the history of that calling held and lost and recovered and lost again. The prophets named the failure with unflinching honesty. The exile confirmed what the prophets said. And yet the promise held — because it was God’s promise, not Israel’s achievement.

The Fulfillment

Jesus arrives not to start something new but to fulfill what Genesis promised.

The Gospel of John opens where Genesis opens — “In the beginning.” The Word who was with God and was God enters the broken creation. John 1:12 tells us what happens:

“To all who did receive him, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God.”

Not just forgiven. Restored to the family likeness. The image that was marred in Genesis 3 is being renewed in the people who follow Jesus. Romans 8:29 names the goal — “conformed to the image of his Son.” The Image of God is not merely recovered. It is fulfilled in ways that go beyond what Adam and Eve carried in the garden.

The kingdom of God begins now. The mustard seed is in the ground. The leaven is in the dough. Our life in the kingdom begins in this life and grows and continues into the next. Eternal life is not simply living forever — it is a quality of life, the life of God Himself. Paul describes it as life in the Spirit.

Jesus came to show us what God’s kind of life looks like lived in a human body in a damaged   world. And then He called His people to live the same way — bearing the image, extending the kingdom, being the light the nations were always meant to see.

The Church and Israel — the Question We Are Afraid to Ask

There is a question most of us are afraid to ask out loud — why is God taking so long to fix the world?

From Abraham to the present is roughly four thousand years. The promise of Genesis 12 is still unfolding. The kingdom Jesus announced is still growing. The image that was marred in Genesis 3 is still being restored in people one life at a time. The honest observer looks at the world and asks — if God is as powerful as the Bible claims, why does evil continue?

It is not a weak faith question. It is an honest faith question. Job asked it. Habakkuk asked it. The martyrs under the altar in Revelation cry out — “How long, O Lord?” God did not rebuke any of them for asking. He answered them.

The answer is not that God is working mysteriously. The answer is simpler and more demanding than that.

God chose to work through His people.

From Abraham forward the plan has been the same — a people bearing His image into the world. Israel was called to be a nation of priest and light to the nations that reveals the glory of God.

They held the form and lost the source. The prophets named it. The exile confirmed it. And still God did not bypass His people to fix the problem Himself — because bypassing people was never the plan. He made us to rule, not to be ruled over. To bear His image, not to watch from the sidelines while He does it without us. We have the privilege of working with God on the earth he created.

The Church is the same story. Same calling. Same mercy offered. Called go into all the world and proclaim the gospel — to show a watching world what life restored to God’s image looks like. And asking the same question Israel asked — why is God taking so long?

The delay is not evidence of weakness. It is evidence of a God who refuses to abandon His original design. He is building something that will last — not patching something that keeps breaking. The mustard seed takes time because that is the nature of mustard seeds. The kingdom grows from the inside out, through image-bearers who bear the image faithfully, one life at a time.

Peter answers the question directly:

“The Lord is not slow in keeping his promise, as some understand slowness. Instead he is patient with you, not wanting anyone to perish, but everyone to come to repentance.” — 2 Peter 3:9

The delay is mercy.

The whole Bible is telling us God wants to give us His quality of life. That the way of the righteous is better than the way of the wicked.  The history of the world shows us what life without God becomes.

Our Reward

After the promise was made, after the years of waiting, after the questions and the doubts and the long silence between God’s word — God speaks to Abraham again.

“Do not be afraid, Abram. I am your shield, your very great reward.” — Genesis 15:1

Not — I will give you a reward. Not — the reward is coming. I am your reward.

Job suffered everything a man could suffer. He lost his children, his wealth, his health. He argued with God. He demanded answers. And at the end — God didn’t give him an explanation. He gave him Himself.

Job’s response when God speaks from the whirlwind is the most honest thing in the book —

“My ears had heard of you — but now my eyes have seen you.” — Job 42:5

That is the reward. Not the restoration of what was lost — though that came too. The reward was the encounter. The presence. God Himself.

That is the answer to the questions we have been asking our entire lives.

GOD IS OUR REWARD.

¹ Robert Guelich, The Sermon on the Mount: A Foundation for Understanding (Word, 1982). Guelich’s doctoral work on Jesus and the Law provides the exegetical foundation for this reading of Matthew 5. The author studied under Guelich as an undergraduate and in seminary.

© 2026 Dennis Zaderaka, author of Why God Made You: Discover Your God-Given Purpose