Colossians 3:10 – According to the Image of His Creator

10 and putting on the young [humanity], which is being renewed into recognition, to accord with [the] Image of the One Who creates it,

Paul says that the young humanity is being renewed according to the image of its Creator. In doing so, he reaches back to Genesis, where God created humanity “in Our image and according to Our likeness” (Gen. 1:26). Genesis mentions the image but does not yet say who that image is. That is revealed only later.

At the beginning of the Colossians letter, Paul gives the answer. Christ is the “Image of the invisible God” (Col. 1:15). Strikingly, He is not called the Creator, but the Image of the Creator. God Himself is the Creator; Christ is His Icon, the visible representation of the invisible God.

Thus the Colossians letter sheds new light on Genesis. Adam was “a type of Him Who is about to be” (Rom. 5:14). Just as a prototype points ahead to the definitive version, so Adam pointed ahead to Christ raised from among the dead. For as Paul makes clear in 1 Corinthians 15, “the soulish” had to come first – Adam – and afterward “the spiritual” – the last Adam (1 Cor. 15:45, 46). Adam was a foreshadowing. Christ, the “Firstborn from among the dead” (Col. 1:18), is the fulfillment. Therefore, the young humanity is not being renewed according to Adam, but according to Christ, the Image of the invisible God.

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