5 Things God Designed You To Be (That Nobody Told You)
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In my previous video, I showed you three Hebrew words that change how you see yourself. Selem, demuth, neshama. Image, likeness, divine breath. You're a mirror designed from your very core to reflect divine light. But here's what I didn't show you. What that mirror was designed to do. Because made in God's image isn't just a label.
It's not just a description of what you are. It's a job description, a blueprint. And when you see the full blueprint, all five dimensions of it straight from the Hebrew text, it's going to change what you think you were put here for. I spent 40 years inside a religion that reduced my entire identity to sinner trying harder. My whole purpose, as far as I understood it, was to follow the rules, suppress my flaws, and hope I was good enough when the end came. When I finally went back to the original text of Genesis, not the English translation, not the Sunday school summary, but the Hebrew, I didn't just find new words. I found a complete blueprint for human life that nobody had ever shown me in four decades of church.
There are five dimensions of what it means to bear God's image that most Christians have never been taught. Five things God designed you to be. We're going to walk through each one straight from the original text. Here they are. First, why God consulted before making you, and what that tells you about your worth. Second, what you were actually designed to do in creation, and I'll give you a hint, it's not just gardening. Third, the moment God stepped back and let a human being do something only God had done before.
Fourth, the first thing God ever called not good, and why it reveals something stunning about your design. And fifth, a psalm that most English Bibles mistranslate because the original Hebrew is almost too bold to print. Five rooms in the blueprint. Each one builds on the last. Let's start. Most Christians, if you ask them what made in God's image means in practice, not the theology, but the actual lived implication, will say something like, "It means we can think. We have a soul.
We're different from animals." And that's not wrong, but it's like saying the Sistine Chapel is a building with a roof. Technically accurate, completely missing the point. And here's what's worse. Most of the teaching stops there. You hear you're made in God's image in a sermon, the pastor nods like it's significant, and then the very next sentence is about how sinful you are. The image of God becomes a passing acknowledgement on the way to the real message, which is always about what went wrong.
30 seconds on the image, 30 minutes on the depravity. I heard that pattern for 40 years, and I never once heard a pastor unpack what the image actually means in the Genesis text. Not what it implies theologically, but what God actually did and said that reveals it. In my previous video, I showed you the Hebrew words behind image and likeness, what they mean at the definition level. But Genesis doesn't stop at definitions. It doesn't just tell you what the image is, it shows you the image in action. And that's the part most people have never seen.
Because nobody walks them through what God actually did in Genesis 1 and 2. Not the words he used, the way he acted when he made us. The actions tell a story that definitions alone can't. When I first discovered what I'm about to show you, I literally had to put the book down and sit there. 40 years in church, and nobody ever walked me through this. The actions of God in the creation account reveal five dimensions of human identity that most believers have never heard taught from a pulpit. And it starts with something that happens in Genesis 1:26 that doesn't happen anywhere else in the entire creation account.
Let me walk you through the pattern first, because you need to see the pattern before you can see the break. Day one, let there be light. Spoken, done. Day two, let there be firmament. Spoken, done. Day three, let the earth bring forth vegetation. Spoken, done.
Day fourth, let there be lights in the heavens. Spoken, done. Day five, let the waters team with living creatures. Spoken, done. You see the rhythm? I mentioned it in my last video. God commands, creation obeys.
It's a sovereign unilateral act. He speaks and it happens. No deliberation, no discussion, just pure creative authority flowing outward. Then day six arrives, and the pattern breaks. Instead of let there be humans, which is exactly what you'd expect after five days of that rhythm, God says something completely different. Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness. Did you catch that shift?
He stops commanding. He starts consulting. This is the only moment in all of creation where God pauses, where he deliberates, where the language shifts from a decree to a conversation. Let us make. That's not the language of a king issuing an order, that's the language of a family making a decision together. The us and our have echoed through centuries of theology, and scholars have debated exactly who God is addressing. What we can say for certain is this.
The language reveals a God who exists as a community of love, a plural us, a shared our. Whatever the precise nature of that divine community, the text is clear that God is not solitary, and that humanity was crafted through an intimate collaborative deliberation within that community. Something unprecedented was about to be made, something that would bear the very stamp of their shared being. But here's what I want you to take from this practically. Before you took your first breath, before you were formed from dust, the God of the universe paused creation itself to have a conversation about you. Everything else was spoken into existence with a command. You were discussed.
You were consulted over. You were the subject of an intimate divine deliberation. What this means is you weren't mass-produced. You weren't a footnote in the creation sequence. You weren't an afterthought at the end of a long week. You were the reason God stopped the assembly line and held a family meeting.
And there's a layer here that makes this even more striking. Think about everything that came before humanity in the creation account. The stars declare God's power, absolutely. The flowers whisper his beauty, without question. The animals display his astonishing creativity, but none of them can choose to love. None of them can dream a new reality into being. None of them can wrestle with a moral choice, suffer through it, and come out refined on the other side.
They're glorious, but they're not living reflectors. They're not beings who can consciously, willingly mirror God's moral and spiritual character. And so God, in an act of breathtaking love and trust, decided to create beings who could. Not puppets, not programs, not obedient automatons executing divine commands, free beings capable of genuine love, authentic creativity, and real moral agency. Because that's what it means to bear the image of a God who is himself free, loving, and creative. You can't reflect a free God without being free yourself. I wanted to take a moment to tell you about my book, The Broken Mirror, Rediscovering Our True Nature in Christ.
Readers call it a fantastic book where you will feel yourself discovering your identity in Christ. One reviewer praised it as five-star material for the spiritual mystic or group Bible study. It's time to escape legalism and shame. Discover you're already God's beloved child with divine nature flowing through you. With what reviewers describe as excellent writing style and elegant prose, like a campfire discussion with a knowledgeable and gifted raconteur, journey from Genesis to Revelation uncovering your true identity. This book shows how to access God's peace, wisdom, and strength from within. Your struggles become opportunities for divine light to shine through.
Available in hardcover, paperback, Kindle, and audiobook. The link to the book is in the video description. May God bless your journey along his path for you. That's dimension one. You were consulted over, not commanded into existence. Now, dimension two. And this one is going to reframe what you think the Garden of Eden was.
Most of us picture Eden as a beautiful garden. Trees, rivers, flowers, animals, a nice place to live. And it was beautiful. But the Hebrew text reveals something much, much bigger than a park.
When Genesis describes Adam's role in Eden, it uses two Hebrew words, abad and shamar. Abad means to work or to serve. Shamar means to keep or to guard. Adam is told to work the garden and keep it. Sounds like gardening, right? That's what I always assumed. But here's what blew my mind.
Those two Hebrew words, abad and shamar, work and keep, serve and guard, are the exact same pair of words used later in the Old Testament to describe the priest's service in the temple. The same words. In Numbers 3:7-8, the Levites are commanded to abad and shamar, to serve and guard the tabernacle. The same job description. The same Hebrew words applied first to Adam in Eden, and then to the priests in God's temple.
What does that mean? It means Eden wasn't just a garden. Eden was a temple, the place where heaven and earth met, the place where the divine presence dwelled without a veil, without a barrier, without a high priest needed to mediate access. And Adam and Eve weren't gardeners, they were the first priests.
Think about what priests do. Priests enter the sacred space. They tended, they maintained the holy fire. They ensure everything reflects God's order and beauty. They mediate between God and creation, carrying God's presence outward and offering creation's praise back to God. That's exactly what Adam and Eve did in Eden. They walked with God in the cool of the day.
Just walked with him. Direct, face-to-face, unmediated communion. No veil, no curtain, no elaborate ritual to approach the presence. Later priests would spend their entire lives preparing for a single moment in the Holy of Holies. And even then they'd enter in fear and trembling with a rope tied around their ankle in case they were struck down. Adam and Eve had that access every single day. That's how close they were to the source.
And consider the sacrifices. Later priests would offer animals, grain, incense, all of it pointing forward to something they couldn't fully see yet. Adam and Eve didn't need to offer sacrifices. Their very existence was a living sacrifice of praise. Lives perfectly aligned with their creator. No gap between who they were and what they reflected. The mirror was clean, facing the light, and the reflection was flawless.
Their mission wasn't just to maintain Eden, either. It was to extend it, to take the beauty, the order, the shalom of that temple garden, and push it outward into the rest of creation. They were priest-kings, mediating God's presence to a world that needed it, carrying the sacred into the ordinary, bringing heaven's order into earth's chaos. That was the assignment. What this means is that made in God's image isn't just about what you are, it's about what you were placed here to do. You are a priest-king. Your job description is to mediate God's presence to creation, to carry the sacred into the ordinary, to bring heaven's order into earth's chaos.
That's the original calling. And here's where this gets intensely practical. If you're designed as a priest-king whose job is to mediate God's presence, to reflect his light into the world, then your purpose was never to generate goodness from within yourself. It was to align with the source and let the light flow through. The mirror doesn't strain to produce light, it turns toward the sun. The entire Christian life, when you see this dimension, shifts from striving to aligning, from performing for God to participating with God. I spent 40 years trying to generate enough righteousness from within myself to earn God's approval.
40 years of striving, performing, checking boxes, and wondering why I still felt hollow. If someone had shown me what I'm showing you right now, that I was designed to reflect, not to generate, it would have changed everything decades earlier. But we're only on dimension two. There are three more, and the third one might be the most stunning thing God does in the entire creation account. If this is landing for you, subscribe, because the fifth dimension, the one from Psalm 8, is the one most Bibles are afraid to translate correctly. Genesis 2:19, God brings the animals to Adam to see what he would name them. Now, in the ancient world, naming something wasn't like putting a label on a jar.
To name something was to define its essence, to exercise authority over it, to speak identity into existence. That's a divine act. Look at what God does earlier in the creation account. God names the light day and the darkness night. God names the firmament heaven. God names the dry land earth. Naming is what God does.
It's an expression of his sovereign creative authority. And then, in Genesis 2:19, the God of the universe, the ultimate namer, the sovereign creator, steps back. He brings the animals to Adam and essentially says, "Your turn." Whatever the man called each living creature, that was its name. Not God reviewed the names and corrected the bad ones. Not God approved the ones he liked. Not God gave Adam a multiple-choice list and let him pick.
Whatever Adam called it, that was it. Period. Full authority, full trust. The creator of the universe delegated a divine act to a creature made of dust, and then he honored the result without a single edit. I want you to feel the weight of that, because it's easy to skip past this verse. God, who spoke galaxies into existence, who named the light and the darkness and the heavens and the earth, that God looked at a human being and said, "Now you." Can you feel the dignity in that?
The shared authority? God isn't looking for passive servants who sit quietly and wait for instructions. He's not looking for obedient automatons who do exactly as they're told and never think for themselves. He's inviting humanity into a co-creative partnership, a dance. You name, you create, you exercise authority, you participate in the shaping of the world alongside the one who made it. This is what bearing God's image looks like in practice. Not sitting in a pew waiting to be told what to do next, partnering with the creator, bringing order out of chaos, speaking identity and purpose into the world around you.
Every time you solve a problem, build something, write something, teach something, name what hasn't been named, you're living out this dimension of the image. Dimension three. You were designed as a co-creator. Not creating from nothing, that's God's alone, but participating in the creative process, bringing new beauty and order into the world. That's yours. That was always yours. Now, dimension four.
And this one starts with the only thing in all of creation that God said was wrong before sin ever entered into the picture. Everything in Genesis chapter one gets the same verdict. Light, it is good. The land, it is good. The animals, it is good. It's a drumbeat that runs through the entire chapter. Good, good, good, good.
And then, in Genesis 2:18, for the first and only time, God says something is not good. It is not good for the man to be alone. This is before the fall. Nothing has gone wrong yet. Sin hasn't entered, the serpent hasn't appeared. Everything creation is functioning exactly as designed, and still God looks at this perfect world with his perfect image-bearer in it and says, "Something is incomplete." Why?
Because God himself isn't solitary. The let us make language we saw earlier reveals a God who exists as an eternal fellowship of love, a divine community in relationship from before time. And a solitary reflector cannot fully display the relational heart of a God who is relationship. The image requires an us. One mirror alone can't reflect the full character of a God who exists as a community of love. So, woman is formed. And Adam, seeing her for the first time, erupts into the first poetry in human history.
This is now bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh. He recognizes in her not a subordinate, not an accessory, but a co-image bearer. Someone who carries the same salem, the same demuth, the same neshama. And Genesis 1:27 confirms it explicitly. So, God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them. Male and female he created them. The divine image is fully reflected not in maleness alone, not in femaleness alone, but in male and female, in relationship, in community.
The mirror is communal. This is why isolation is so devastating. This is why loneliness isn't just uncomfortable, it's a violation of your design. You were built for us. Your mirror was never meant to stand alone in a dark room. It was designed to be part of a hall of mirrors, reflecting light to each other, amplifying it together, throwing it further into the world than any single mirror could reach. During my seven years in the wilderness, after I left the religion I'd been part of for 40 years, I was more alone than I'd ever been in my life, cut off from the only community I'd known.
And I think, looking back now, that the isolation damaged me more than the doubt did, because I was living against my design. A mirror in a dark room facing a wall. Of course, I couldn't see the light. I was positioned against everything I was made for. Thank God I'm married to a wonderful woman who stood by me and with me that whole time, or I don't know if I would have made it. Dimension four, you were designed for community. The image is relational, the mirror is communal.
Everything I've shown you so far, the consultation, the temple, the co-creative authority, the relational design, builds to one final dimension. And the fifth one is one that most English Bibles won't let you see, because the original Hebrew is so bold that translators softened it. What David wrote in Psalm 8, when you read it in the original language, is one of the most staggering statements about human identity in the entire Bible, and almost nobody knows it's there. And that brings us to the fifth and final dimension. This is the capstone, and it's the one that made me sit down and stare at the page for a long time, because I couldn't believe nobody had ever told me this. Psalm 8. David, writing long after the fall, long after everything went wrong in Genesis 3, goes outside one night, looks up at the immensity of the cosmos, and asks a question that might be the most honest prayer in all of scripture.
When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars which you have set in place, what is mankind that you are mindful of them, human beings that you care for them? It's a question born of awe. The universe is so vast, humanity is so small. Why would the creator of all this care about us? And then David answers his own question, and what he says is so bold that most English Bibles soften it. Your Bible probably reads, you have made them a little lower than the angels, or a little lower than the heavenly beings. That's what the NIV says.
That's what most translations say. But the Hebrew word David actually uses is Elohim. And Elohim is not the word for angels. That would be Malakhim. Elohim is the word used throughout the entire Old Testament for God himself. It's the word in "In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth." That's Elohim.
It's the most common word in the Hebrew Bible for the one true God. So, what David actually wrote, what the Hebrew text actually says is, "You have made them a little lower than God." Now, I understand why translators softened this. The ancient Greek translation of the Hebrew scriptures, the Septuagint, used the Greek word for angels here, and the writer of Hebrews quoted it that way when referencing the Psalm. So, there was a translation path to follow, and a little lower than God sounds audacious, even dangerous. Translators, maybe wanting to avoid any suggestion that humans are divine, opted for a safer word. But the Hebrew is what it is, and David, writing in a fallen world, looking at broken, sinful, very imperfect humanity, still saw beings of such breathtaking worth, crowned with such inherent glory and honor, that their created status is just a breath away from the divine.
He's not saying we're God. Let me be absolutely clear about that. The creator-creature distinction is absolute and non-negotiable. But he's saying that our designed dignity is so profound, so deeply woven into the fabric of what we are, that even sin, as devastating as it is, couldn't entirely erase its imprint. A little lower than Elohim. That's what David saw when he looked at humanity. That's what the Hebrew says you are.
So, let's put the full blueprint together, because when you see all five dimensions at once, the picture that emerges is staggering. Before the shadows fell, before anything went wrong, humanity was crafted through intimate divine conversation, not impersonal command. Placed as priest-kings in a temple garden, mediating between heaven and earth. Entrusted with co-creative authority, naming, ruling, partnering with God in the shaping of the world. Made for community, reflecting the inherently relational nature of God himself. And crowned with a dignity so breathtaking that David, even after the fall, could only describe it as a little lower than God. This isn't a picture of God's pets.
This isn't even a picture of God's servants. This is humanity as God's representatives, his co-regents, his living displays designed to manifest his glorious nature throughout all of creation. And most Christians have only ever been taught one of these five dimensions, if that. If this is what you were designed for, priest-king, co-creator, relational reflector, crowned with near-divine dignity, then the traditional framework of try harder, do better, earn God's approval doesn't just miss the point, it inverts it. It takes a being designed for royal partnership and treats them like a criminal on probation. A mirror doesn't strain to produce light. A priest doesn't generate the presence of God.
They mediate it. A co-creator doesn't work alone. They partner with the source. And a being crowned a little lower than God doesn't grovel for scraps of approval. The entire Christian life, when you see the full blueprint, shifts from striving to aligning, from performing for God to participating with God. Prayer shifts from begging a distant deity to aligning your inner mirror with the light that's already shining. Work shifts from drudgery to co-creation, bringing order, beauty, and meaning into your corner of the world.
Relationships shift from obligation to design. You were made for us, so community isn't extra credit, it's essential equipment. Self-worth shifts from achievement to design. Your value doesn't come from what you do, it comes from what you were made to be. And even suffering shifts. Instead of punishment from an angry God, it becomes the process by which the mirror gets cleaned, the grime gets stripped away, and the reflection underneath gets a little clearer. Not because God enjoys your pain, but because the mirror underneath is worth restoring.
Once you have this framework, you'll see it everywhere. Passages you've read a hundred times suddenly explode with new meaning. What I've shown you today is the blueprint, the original design before anything went wrong. Five dimensions of what it means to be made in God's image, and most of us were never shown more than a fraction of one. You weren't designed to grovel. You weren't designed to perform. You weren't designed to try to generate enough goodness from within yourself to earn the approval of a distant God.
You were designed to be consulted over, breathed into, placed as a priest-king in a temple garden, trusted with co-creative authority, knit into community, and crowned with a dignity that David could only describe as a little lower than God himself. That's the blueprint. That's what sin damaged, and that's what Christ came to restore. There's a question I haven't answered yet, and it's the one I know is forming right now. If this is the blueprint, what happened to it? What exactly did the fall break? Did it break all five dimensions, or just some of them?
And what did the serpent actually offer Adam and Eve in that garden? The answer is in Genesis chapter 3, and here's what most people miss. The serpent wasn't offering them divinity. They already had participation in divine nature. That's the whole point of everything I've just shown you. What the serpent offered was something far more subtle and far more destructive. That's the next video.
Subscribe so you don't miss it. And if this blueprint hit you the way it hit me, if you're sitting there right now thinking, "How did nobody ever show me this?" share this with someone who needs to see the full picture of what they were made for. I'll see you in the next one.
