Before Session 4 asks what you are invited into, and long before this course asks what you are meant to do, one question has to be answered first, because every session after this one quietly assumes an answer to it.
What is a human being?
Get this wrong and everything built on top of it tilts. If you believe you are an accident of matter and time, dignity becomes a courtesy rather than a fact. If you believe your body is the whole of you, prayer and spiritual warfare stop making sense. If you believe your worth has to be earned, you will spend your life earning it — and never quite finish.
This session gives you four answers, in order: what you are (an image bearer), what you are made of (spirit, soul, and body), where you stand (your position), and what you carry that no other creature does (the power of your own words). Everything else this course teaches about identity, authority, prayer, and transformation is downstream of what you decide here.
Consider This
Before you read further, finish this sentence in your own words, in writing: “A human being is fundamentally —”
Come back to it on Day 6.
Opening Prayer (Say this aloud!)
Father, I want to understand who I am, whose I am, and where I am. Show me anywhere I have been living by the flesh’s account of me rather than Yours. I am willing to be corrected. In Jesus’ name, amen.
Genesis makes one claim about human beings that it makes about nothing else in creation, and the whole session rests on it: you are made in God’s image.
Then God said, “Let us make humankind in our image (צֶלֶם), after our likeness (דְּמוּת), so they may rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over all the creatures that move on the earth.” God created humankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them, male and female he created them.
Word Study
צֶלֶם tselem H6754 · and דְּמוּת demuth H1823
“image” · Genesis 1:26 · “likeness” · Genesis 1:26
Range. tselem — a representative figure, a statue or carved image; used elsewhere of an idol set up to stand for a king or a god in a place he could not personally occupy. demuth — resemblance, model, shape.
The sense here. In the Ancient Near East a king who ruled territory he could not personally stand in would set up his tselem there — a statue at a border or a relief on a rock face. It was not decoration. It was a legal marker: this ground answers to the one this looks like. Genesis reaches for that exact piece of royal furniture and hands it to the entire human race.
Why it carries the argument. If tselem names a king’s stand-in, then “image of God” is not primarily a claim about a component installed inside you — a soul-faculty you possess. It is a claim about a role you fill. You are not merely carrying God’s image. You are placed on the earth as it — His declared, living representative, everywhere you stand.
Source. HALOT, s.v. צלם; BDB, s.v. דמות.
No other creature carries this designation — not the animals, and so far as Scripture tells us, not the angels. That single fact settles a question every generation tries to reopen: where does human worth come from? Not usefulness. Not intelligence. Not health, productivity, or age. It comes from an assignment given once, to everyone, that cannot be revoked.
“There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilizations — these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit — immortal horrors or everlasting splendors.”
C. S. Lewis · Oxford and Cambridge literary scholar · The Weight of Glory, 1949
Illustration
In 1 BC a Roman soldier named Hilarion, stationed away from home, wrote to his pregnant wife Alis with plain, unremarkable instructions: “If by chance you bear a child, if it is a boy, let it be; if it is a girl, cast it out.” The letter survives — Papyrus Oxyrhynchus 744 — and what makes it chilling is not malice. It is the tone. Exposing an unwanted infant, especially a girl, was routine enough to be mentioned the way you’d mention the household accounts.
Roughly a century later, a Christian manual called the Didache — a document of instruction for new believers, usually dated to the late first or early second century — gave the opposite instruction in the same flat, practical tone: “you shall not murder a child by abortion nor kill that which is born.” Historians who study the period have noted the same pattern repeatedly: early Christian communities did not merely refuse to expose infants themselves; they had a documented reputation for taking in children abandoned by others.
Same empire, same century, two irreconcilable instructions — and the difference traces directly back to whether the person in question was believed to carry the image of God.
Human dignity has never been an obvious idea. It is a specific, historically contested claim that this exact doctrine put into the world and has been defending ever since — for the unborn, the elderly, the disabled, and everyone whose usefulness has run out. My own conviction is that a discipleship course cannot teach the image of God honestly without stating that this doctrine has real, contested implications for how we treat human life at every stage — including before birth and at its end. I hold that conviction; this course is not the place to adjudicate every policy question it touches, and readers who land differently on the hard cases are not thereby rejecting the doctrine this section teaches.
Pause & Reflect
Image Bearers answered what you are. This section answers what you are made of — and Scripture’s answer has three parts, not one.
The Lord God formed the man from the soil of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being.
The Hebrew behind “a living being” is nephesh chayyah — nephesh (H5315), a breathing self, the word Scripture uses of both animals and humans; chayyah, living. Adam’s body, formed from dust, became a living nephesh only when God’s own breath — ruach (H7307), the same word used of the Spirit hovering over the waters in Genesis 1:2 — entered him. You are not an animated body. You are dust that God breathed into, and Solomon describes death as the exact reversal:
… and the dust returns to the earth as it was, and the life’s breath returns to God who gave it.
The New Testament sharpens this into three named parts.
Now may the God of peace himself make you completely holy and may your spirit and soul and body (πνεῦμα, ψυχή, σῶμα) be kept entirely blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ.
For the word of God is living and active and sharper than any double-edged sword, piercing even to the point of dividing soul from spirit, and joints from marrow; it is able to judge the desires and thoughts of the heart.
Word Study
πνεῦμα pneuma G4151 · ψυχή psychē G5590 · σῶμα sōma G4983
“spirit and soul and body” · 1 Thessalonians 5:23
Range. pneuma — wind, breath, and by extension the immaterial, God-facing part of a person; the same word used of the Holy Spirit. psychē — the mind, will, and emotions; the seat of personality; the animating life-principle. sōma — the physical frame.
The sense here. Paul names all three side by side, as a set, in a single benediction — the clearest verse in Scripture on this structure, alongside Hebrews 4:12’s “dividing soul from spirit.”
Why it carries the argument. Only these two verses in the whole New Testament name spirit and soul as distinct, and neither stops to define the difference between them — which is exactly why the next section exists. But the pattern itself gives working language for something you have already experienced: the difference between knowing a thing is true (spirit — a settled conviction) and merely feeling it is true (soul — an emotion, which moves).
Source. BDAG, s.vv. πνεῦμα, ψυχή, σῶμα.
Illustration
Watchman Nee, a Chinese pastor, was arrested in Shanghai on April 10, 1952, and sentenced to fifteen years of labor reform. He was never released. He died in a labor camp in Guangde, Anhui province, on May 30, 1972 — twenty years after his arrest, his family permitted almost no contact with him the entire time. According to his family’s account, a note was found under his pillow after his death: “Christ is the Son of God who died for the redemption of sinners and resurrected after three days. This is the greatest truth in the universe. I die because of my belief in Christ. Watchman Nee.”
Whatever else two decades in a Chinese labor camp did to Nee’s body and his emotions, something in him held that his soul and body could not touch. Scripture does not promise your circumstances will spare your feelings. It promises there is a part of you circumstances cannot reach.
Pause & Reflect
Think of a recent moment when what you knew to be true from Scripture and what you felt to be true from your circumstances pulled in opposite directions. Which one did you follow — and what would it have looked like to follow the other? If nothing comes to mind, ask Holy Spirit to bring a memory of a recent event to your mind.
Not every careful reader of Scripture agrees that soul and spirit name two separate things, and the objection deserves a straight answer rather than a dismissal.
The strongest case for dichotomy — body plus one immaterial soul/spirit, not two — is that Scripture itself sometimes uses the words as though they were interchangeable.
And Mary said, “My soul exalts the Lord, and my spirit has begun to rejoice in God my Savior,”
That reads less like two faculties doing two different things than like Hebrew poetic parallelism — the same statement twice, in different words, the way the Psalms do constantly. And facing the cross, Jesus says this:
“My soul is deeply grieved, even to the point of death. Remain here and stay awake with me.”
A trichotomist’s working definitions would expect spirit there, not soul. Only two verses in the entire New Testament — the two already quoted, 1 Thessalonians 5:23 and Hebrews 4:12 — name spirit and soul as though they are distinct, and neither one pauses to define the line between them.
This series teaches trichotomy because it best accounts for those two verses and because it supplies coherent, useful language for something real: the gap between what you know and what you feel. That is my own judgment call, not a line Scripture states outright, — So, hold it as a working framework, not as a wall between orthodox and unorthodox belief. Dichotomists who take Scripture just as seriously are not denying anything essential. They are reading two genuinely ambiguous verses differently than this course does.
Where this stays unresolved. Scripture never states outright whether soul and spirit are two distinct faculties or one immaterial nature described two ways. Both readings are built from the same handful of verses. What does not move either way: your inner life is being renewed progressively, not completely at the new birth (2 Corinthians 4:16) — so a soul-level struggle is not evidence that something is broken in your spirit.
Image Bearers answered what. Spirit, Soul, and Body answered what you are made of. This section answers where you stand — and Scripture gives you a position both lower and higher than you’d expect.
When I look up at the heavens, which your fingers made, and see the moon and the stars, which you set in place, of what importance is the human race, that you should notice them? Of what importance is mankind, that you should pay attention to them? You made them a little less than heavenly beings (אֱלֹהִים). You crowned mankind with honor and majesty; you appoint them to rule over your creation.
Word Study
אֱלֹהִים elohim H430
“heavenly beings” · Psalm 8:5
Range. The ordinary Hebrew word for “God” — but plural in form, and used in a handful of places (as here) of divine or angelic beings generally rather than God Himself.
The sense here. The context decides the sense. The next clause — “crowned … with honor and majesty” — is language the Old Testament otherwise reserves for kings, not for God alone, which is why translators read elohim here as the heavenly court rather than God’s own person.
Why it carries the argument. The verse holds two facts in tension and refuses to soften either one: you rank below the heavenly realm, and you are crowned and given rule over everything else God made. Not the highest being that exists. Not an afterthought either. A specific rank — and the specificity is the point.
Source. HALOT, s.v. אלהים.
Paul names a second coordinate, and it is stranger still.
I know a man in Christ who fourteen years ago — whether in the body or out of the body I do not know, God knows — was caught up to the third heaven … was caught up into paradise and heard things too sacred to be put into words.
This course uses “third heaven” as shorthand for a working map: the first heaven is the sky and world you can touch, where your body and soul are right now — “the earth he has given to mankind” (Psalm 115:16). The third heaven is God’s throne room, where Christ is seated — and where, in Him, your spirit already is.
… and he raised us up together with him and seated us together with him in the heavenly realms in Christ Jesus
Here is a caveat I want to be honest about, because precision matters more than tidiness. Paul names a “third heaven” exactly once in all of Scripture, almost certainly borrowing language already familiar in first-century Jewish thought. He never numbers a first or second heaven. The popular teaching that “the second heaven is Satan’s current territory” is a widely taught pastoral inference, not a sentence Scripture states. It leans on real texts —
For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the powers, against the world rulers of this darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavens.
— but that text describes contested authority in some aerial or heavenly realm. It does not hand you a numbered three-story cosmology with the enemy assigned to floor two. Remember the map, because it is a genuinely useful way to hold real texts about real spiritual conflict — but hold it as a concept, not as inspired Scripture in its own right.
Illustration
An embassy is, legally, the territory of the country it represents — not the country it sits in. Walk onto the grounds of a foreign embassy and you have, in a real legal sense, left the host country without leaving the city. That principle — extraterritoriality — was formalized internationally in the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations in 1961, but the practice long predates the treaty.
Your spirit, in Christ, works the same way. Your body and soul are still walking around inside the borders of a contested world - this earthly world. But your spirit is already standing on otherworldly ground — seated, the text says, in the heavenly realms in Christ. You have not yet left the physical earth. But legally, a piece of you already has.
That distinction — position versus condition — is the load-bearing idea in this section. Your position is a legal, settled fact established the moment you were born again: seated with Christ, not up for renegotiation by your performance. Your condition is your day-to-day experience of that position, which does fluctuate with obedience and the renewing of your mind.
Be angry and do not sin; do not let the sun go down on the cause of your anger. Do not give the devil an opportunity.
Unconfessed sin does not change your position. It changes how much ground — the Greek is topos, literally “place” — you hand the enemy to operate in your condition. Confusing the two is one of the most common sources of needless Christian discouragement: considering a bad week or a besetting sin as proof your position has shifted, when Scripture insists it has not.
Pause & Reflect
Where have you been treating a condition problem — an emotional low, an unanswered prayer, a besetting sin — as though it were a position problem, evidence God has pulled back from you?
One question is left: what did God give His image bearers that no other creature received? Scripture’s answer, from its first page, is words.
God said, “Let there be light.” And there was light!
Ten times in Genesis 1, creation proceeds the same way — God speaks, and what He speaks comes to be.
By faith we understand that the worlds were set in order at God’s command, so that the visible has its origin in the invisible.
John reaches for a richer word to name the One doing the speaking:
In the beginning was the Word (λόγος), and the Word was with God, and the Word was fully God.
Word Study
λόγος logos G3056 · and ῥῆμα rhēma G4487
“the Word” · John 1:1 · “word” · Romans 10:8
Range. logos — reasoned, purposeful speech; a discourse, an account, a message; here, with the article, John’s own term for the eternal Son. rhēma — a specific spoken utterance, narrower than logos’s wider sense of a whole message.
The sense here. John 1:1 is deliberately unusual Greek — theos appears without the definite article, and the NET translators render the effect as “the Word was fully God” rather than simply “was God,” to signal that John is describing the Word’s nature rather than collapsing the Word into the Father as the same person. In Romans 10:8, Paul’s rhēma is specifically the confession spoken aloud — “in your mouth” — not merely something privately believed.
Why it carries the argument. If you are made in the image of a God whose own eternal identity is Word, your own words are not incidental to who you are. And rhēma narrows the point to something practical: the New Testament’s confidence is not in words in general but in a specific, spoken alignment with what God has already said — not in speech as a force that operates on its own.
Source. BDAG, s.vv. λόγος, ῥῆμα.
Paul makes the same distinction concrete a few chapters later, in a verse this session’s I Am Not Saying will return to:
But what does it say? “The word is near you, in your mouth and in your heart” (that is, the word of faith (ῥῆμα) that we preach),
Death and life are in the power of the tongue, and those who love its use will eat its fruit.
Guard your heart with all vigilance, for from it are the sources of life.
Proverbs is naming what Jesus later states plainly — “the mouth speaks from what fills the heart” (Matthew 12:34). Your words are not a separate compartment from your heart. They are its mirror.
Illustration
Beginning around 2000, researchers on the Bucharest Early Intervention Project — led by Charles Nelson, Charles Zeanah, and Nathan Fox — studied children raised in Romanian state institutions, many of whom received almost no spoken language directed at them: fed, changed, and kept alive, but rarely spoken to or answered. The measurable outcomes were severe and specific — delayed language, altered brain development, impaired attachment — and the deficits were sharpest exactly where speech had been absent.
No one needed to say a cruel word to those children to damage them. Silence where words belonged was enough. If the mere absence of ordinary human speech measurably shapes a developing person, Scripture’s insistence that words carry real weight is not superstition. It is naming something true that a secular research team later confirmed from the outside.
Naming carries the same weight throughout Scripture. God brought the animals to Adam “to see what he would name them” (Genesis 2:19). When God renamed Abram “Abraham” — father of a multitude (Genesis 17:5) — or Jesus renamed Simon “Cephas” (John 1:42), a spoken word did not merely describe an identity. Scripture treats it as establishing one.
James refuses to let this stay abstract:
With it we bless the Lord and Father, and with it we curse people made in God’s image. From the same mouth come blessing and cursing. These things should not be so, my brothers and sisters.
Cursing another person, James says, is a direct offense against the image they carry. This section and Image Bearers are one topic, not two.
That fence is deliberately drawn narrow. Whether it is drawn in exactly the right place — whether the church’s necessary caution against health-and-wealth excess has also cost us something true about how seriously God takes a spoken word — is a bigger question than this session can carry. Session 15 takes it up directly.
Even Mark 11 — the passage most often reached for to argue words alone move mountains — sits inside a Gospel devoted to Jesus submitting every request to the Father’s will.
“I tell you the truth, if someone says to this mountain, ‘Be lifted up and thrown into the sea,’ and does not doubt in his heart but believes that what he says will happen, it will be done for him.”
“Abba, Father, all things are possible for you. Take this cup away from me. Yet not what I will, but what you will.”
Read together, the same Jesus who taught that a word of faith moves mountains also modeled, in Gethsemane, submitting His own spoken request entirely to the Father’s will. Faith is not a formula or technology for overriding that will. It is confidence that aligns with it.
Pause & Reflect
James says cursing another person is really an offense against the image of God they carry. Is there someone you have been speaking about — even privately, even if they never hear it — that this reframes for you?
You now know what you are, what you are made of, where you stand, and what you carry. None of it was information you needed for its own sake.
Here is where it turns into obligation. If every person you meet today is an image bearer, your words about them are never a neutral act — they are either treating God’s representative the way His representative deserves, or they are not. If your spirit is already seated with Christ, then today’s condition does not get the final word about your position, and you are permitted to stop negotiating for a status you already hold. And if your words carry the weight this session has just shown you, then the sentence you were about to say — about yourself, or about someone else — is worth one more second of thought before it leaves your mouth.
Scripture gives you a model for speaking deliberately rather than carelessly: a structured, repeatable blessing God gave Aaron to speak over Israel, not invented on the spot.
“The Lord bless you and protect you; the Lord make his face to shine upon you, and be gracious to you; the Lord lift up his countenance upon you and give you peace.”
That is the pattern for this week’s practice: not composing new words under pressure, but learning a structure of Scripture-rooted declarations you can return to until you know it without looking.
Over yourself, aloud, slowly: I am made in the image of God — His representative, carrying a dignity that was given to me, not earned by me. My spirit, soul, and body belong to Him. My position in Christ is secure, not because of what I have done, but because of what He has done. Today, I choose words that build rather than tear down — starting with the words I speak over myself.
Over one other person, aloud or in writing: [Name], you are made in the image of God, carrying a dignity that is yours by design. I bless your spirit, soul, and body. The Lord bless you and keep you; the Lord make his face shine on you and be gracious to you; the Lord lift up his countenance on you and give you peace.
Big Ideas
Kingdom Principle
You were not made to become God’s representative someday. You already are one — starting with the next word out of your mouth.
Closing Prayer (Say this aloud!)
Father, thank You for making me in Your image and giving me words that carry real weight. Forgive me for the times I have used that weight carelessly, against myself and against others. Teach me to speak the way You speak — truthfully, purposefully, for the building up of whoever hears me. In Jesus’ name, amen.
Go Deeper
Accessible
Nancy Pearcey, Love Thy Body (Baker Books, 2018). A readable, contemporary defense of human dignity grounded in the image of God, applied directly to the sanctity-of-life and disability questions this session only introduces.
Substantial
Watchman Nee, The Spiritual Man (Christian Fellowship Publishers, 1968). The classic full-length case for the trichotomy this session teaches — written, in part, out of the same imprisonment named in this session’s illustration.
Academic
J. Richard Middleton, The Liberating Image: The Imago Dei in Genesis 1 (Brazos Press, 2005). The scholarly case for the royal, representational reading of tselem this session’s word study relies on — including the Ancient Near Eastern background in full.
Wayne Grudem, Systematic Theology, 2nd ed. (Zondervan, 2020), chapter on the dichotomy/trichotomy debate. The strongest available case for dichotomy, written by a careful scholar who lands differently than this course does. Read it if the What About section above did not fully persuade you either way.
Day 1 Read Genesis 1:26–31. Slowly. If “image” means a king’s representative marker, what does it mean, practically, that you are God’s tselem everywhere you go today?
Day 2 Read 1 Thessalonians 5:23 and Hebrews 4:12. Name one recent moment where your soul (emotion) and your spirit (settled conviction) were telling you two different things.
Day 3 Read Psalm 8:3–6 and Ephesians 2:6. Where right now have you been living from your condition instead of your position?
Day 4 Read Ephesians 4:26–27. Is there unresolved anger you are carrying that may be giving the enemy ground — topos — in your life?
Day 5 Read Proverbs 18:21 and James 3:9–10. Keep a simple tally today. How many of your words built someone up, and how many tore someone down — including yourself?
Day 6 Find what you wrote in Consider This at the start of this session. Read it again. What would you change — and what does the change tell you?
Practice the Blessing Declaration this week: once over yourself, once over someone else. Notice what shifts, even slightly, in how you carry yourself afterward.
If something in this session stuck with you, confused you, or hit harder than you expected, I’d genuinely like to hear it — email me.
Kingdom Essentials · Session 3 · Argument Map
Kingdom Man
“What is a human being — and what does that make you responsible for the next time you open your mouth?”
Genesis makes one claim about you it makes about nothing else in creation: you bear God’s image — not a soul-faculty installed inside you, but a role you fill, His representative wherever you stand.
You are not an animated body. Scripture names three parts — spirit, soul, and body — giving you real language for the gap between what you know and what you merely feel.
Ranked below the heavenly realm, yet crowned — and seated with Christ in the heavenly realms. A legal position, settled at new birth, that does not move with your condition.
Made in the image of a God whose own identity is Word, your words carry real weight to bless or curse — not a formula for outcomes, but a mirror of what fills your heart.
What you are, what you’re made of, where you stand, and what you carry all turn into the same obligation: the next word out of your mouth is never a neutral act.
So Now
Your worth comes from being God’s representative on the earth — a gift given, not a wage earned by usefulness or ability.
Genesis 1:26–27Your standing in Christ is a legal fact that does not move. A bad week is a condition problem — never proof your position has shifted.
Ephesians 2:6Every sentence you speak — about yourself or someone else — either honors an image bearer or offends one. There is no third option.
James 3:9–10Kingdom Principle
You were not made to become God’s representative someday. You already are one — starting with the next word out of your mouth.
Next · Session 4, Kingdom Invitation. You now know what you are. Session 4 is about the invitation extended to you — and the design, the fall, and the solution that make it possible.