Made in God's Image: Why Shedding Blood Strikes at God (Genesis 9:1-7)

The creation blessing again

God repeats the creation blessing because He is starting the world again with the purpose He had at the beginning: Noah, like Adam, is sent out to fill the earth. The first words over the new earth are borrowed from the old one. "Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth" (Genesis 9:1) repeats the blessing God spoke over humanity on the sixth day (Genesis 1:28). Be fruitful, parah (H6509), and multiply, rabah (H7235), are the same two verbs, the ones God had already spoken over the animals leaving the ark (Genesis 8:17), now carried across the flood and set over Noah himself. By the end of the passage God says it a second time: "be fruitful and multiply; spread out across the earth and multiply upon it" (Genesis 9:7). The blessing frames the whole section, spoken at the front and again at the back. Noah stands on washed ground as a second Adam, handed the same commission and the same empty world to fill.

The life is in the blood

Blood carries a creature's life, and that life belongs to God, so He keeps the blood as His own even while He gives animals as food. Here God widens the diet. "Everything that lives and moves will be food for you" (Genesis 9:3), a permission Adam never had. But one clause guards the gift. "You must not eat meat with its lifeblood still in it" (Genesis 9:4). The word rendered "lifeblood" holds two Hebrew words together, nephesh (H5315), the life or soul, and dam (H1818), the blood. The Hebrew reads, roughly, its flesh with its nephesh, its dam. Israel would hear the reason spelled out at Sinai: "the life of the flesh is in the blood" (Leviticus 17:11). To Genesis, blood is where the life lives, and the life is God's. Even as God fills the plate, He keeps His claim on the one thing that is His alone to give and to take.

Murder and the image of God

Murder strikes at God because every person carries His image, so to pour out a human life is to deface God's own likeness on the earth. Here the passage reaches its centre. "Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man his blood will be shed; for in His own image God has made mankind" (Genesis 9:6). The verb for shed is shaphak (H8210), to pour out. The word for image is tselem (H6754), the same word used when God made humanity "in the image of God" on the sixth day (Genesis 1:27). Every human being alive is a walking tselem of the Maker. Follow the logic. To pour out a man's blood is to deface the image of God on the earth, an assault on the likeness of God Himself, stamped on the one whose blood is spilt. That is why the penalty is so heavy, and why the accounting belongs to God Himself: "I will require the life of any man or beast by whose hand your lifeblood is shed" (Genesis 9:5).

The image and the blood in Jesus

Both find their end in Jesus: He is the perfect image of God, and His blood is the price God pays to restore the image-bearers who spilled it. The two threads of this passage, the image and the shed blood, both run forward into the gospel.

Take the image first. Humanity carries the tselem of God, cracked and smeared by sin from Genesis 3 onward. The New Testament names the one place it is perfect. Christ "is the image of the invisible God" (Colossians 1:15); the word for image there is eikon (G1504), the flawless likeness the rest of us carry only in fragments. What Adam and Noah bore in a broken way, the Son bears fully, and the aim of salvation is that we are "conformed to the image of His Son" (Romans 8:29). The defaced tselem of Genesis 9 is being restored in Him.

Now the blood. Genesis 9 says human blood is so weighty that God Himself will require an accounting for it. Hebrews carries that weight to the cross: "without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness" (Hebrews 9:22). The blood God guards in Genesis is the very price He will one day pay, in His own Son, to buy back the image-bearers who spilled it. And so the blood of Jesus "speaks a better word than the blood of Abel" (Hebrews 12:24). Abel's blood, the first human blood shed in Scripture, cried from the ground for justice (Genesis 4:10). The blood of Christ, poured out by the hands of men (Acts 2:23), cries mercy over the guilty.

Read Genesis 9 and you can see the shape of the whole Bible in it. God blesses, God gives, God guards the life He made in His own image, and when that image is marred beyond human repair, God gives His own blood to mend it. To know this God is to see every human face, including the ones you would rather avoid, as the image of the God who speaks. And it is to know that your own defaced image is being remade by the blood He shed.

The Doxa Daily Lift today stayed on Noah stepping into the new world, the blessing, and the fence God put around human life. Read it here.