And ye are complete in Him, which is the Head of all principality and power. Colossians 2:10
Some big changes came into being when our first parents sinned in the Garden of Eden. We don’t know exactly what Adam and Eve were like before the fall, but we do know they were much different from us now. As far as God was concerned, they were complete in Him. They had a spiritual likeness to God: they were innocent. They had a character likeness to God: they did His will. They had a physical likeness to God: they were made in His image. They lost all of that in the fall, but we regain all of that in our salvation.
In Adam’s innocence in the garden, he could commune with God in the cool of the day. His mind was not taken up with the false and failing things of the world but was able to enter into deep spiritual truths that were precious to him and to God. Oh what an incredible change that occurred in that spiritual likeness to God when he sinned! That spiritual likeness was lost to mankind, and can only be restored when we enter by salvation into a new relationship with God. The things of God are hidden to the unregenerate man because they are spiritually discerned (1 Corinthians 2:14). But they are revealed again to the redeemed man because of the Holy Spirit. Through the Scriptures and prayer, we can experience some of the sweet fellowship that Adam once enjoyed.
A Christian friend reminded me recently that we are all liars. And that is especially true of the unsaved, because they are still under the control of their father the devil, because he is the father of lies. This is in contrast to the character of God, Who cannot lie. It is God’s holy character that we seek to copy, and we have in the person of Jesus Christ a perfect example of One to follow and imitate, in order that we might be transformed more into the image of God’s character. This the unsaved are unable to do; this the saved are now able to do, by the enabling power of the Holy Spirit. It is called sanctification, which is God’s will for us.
Mankind is made in the image of God. It is true that we have not lost all of that image, but we have lost much of it. Man in God’s image was incapable of weakness or deformity of any kind. But today we see the ravages of sin upon us so that we are all marching a downward path to eventual death. All of the flaws and suffering that we encounter along the way are marks of our own destructive ways that have warped us from the physical likeness of God. To an extent, some of that harm is alleviated as we allow Christ to reign in our mortal bodies (Romans 6:12), although we are all still marching downhill to the grave. But even as we commit our saved loved ones to the dust, we do so in the knowledge that their mortal bodies will someday be raised in immortality.
Our text reminds us that we are complete in Him. The spiritual likeness, the character likeness, and the physical likeness to God are all being restored. – Jim MacIntosh