Answering Kids’ Hardest Questions: What Does It Mean to Be Made in God’s Image?

This article is part of the Answering Kids’ Hardest Questions series.

God as Creator

So what does it mean that we are made in God’s image? This is something that we teach our children and should teach our children. It’s what the Bible tells us. But they might ask, “What does that really mean?”

In my family, we tease our youngest because he looks a lot like his dad, especially when his dad was his age. And so my husband will often say to my son, “How’s my face doing today?” Or he’ll point to the gray hair in his beard and say, “Hey, this is going to be your face one day.”

Who Are You?

Christina Fox

Designed for children ages 3–5, this engaging and lyrical picture book encourages kids to ask important questions about their identity while presenting a more stable and fulfilling perspective rooted in their relationship with God.

We do that because my son is like an image of my husband. And so in a similar way, we were created as God’s image-bearers. We don’t look like him because he’s a spirit and he doesn’t have a body like man, but he made us to image him by doing what he does. And while we aren’t God and we don’t have all of his characteristics—such as we can’t be everywhere all at once and we aren’t all-powerful and we can’t know all things—there are certain characteristics about him that he’s given to us. We’re creators; we make things. And when we do so, we are doing the thing that God does. God makes things. He made all things. We also love others. We’re patient with others.

And when we do that, we are doing the thing that God does. And so we are imaging him to the world around us. And there are a lot of ways in which we image God. I often taught my own children by looking outside at the moon at night. It’s this big, round, white ball in the sky, but it’s a rock. It doesn’t have any light of its own. The bright light that we see is it reflecting the light from the sun. And in that way, it’s imaging the sun to us, and so that’s how we see that light. And so God created us to do that—to show others who God is by doing what he does.

Christina Fox is the author of Who Are You?: A Little Book about Your Big Identity.

Christina Fox (MS, Palm Beach Atlantic University) is a speaker and author of Tell God How You Feel: Helping Kids with Hard Emotions and Like Our Father: How God Parents Us and Why that Matters for Our Parenting. She works as the assistant director of alumni relations at Covenant College. She and her husband have two sons and reside in the Atlanta area, where she coordinates a soul care ministry at her church.

View All

Answering Kids’ Hardest Questions: Will God Always Keep Me Safe?

William R. Osborne

November 02, 2023

As a parent, we’re often trying to help our kids overcome fears that they might be encountering in their lives. But we have to remember that God never promises bad things won't happen to us.