GENESIS 1:26

Q: Who is the”us” God is referring to? Also, it says, “Let us make man in our IMAGE." What is that similarity?

Regarding your first question:

1. It is sometimes proposed that God is talking to the heavenly court of angels, but nowhere else in the Bible is it taught that we were created in the image of angels.

2. The standard Christian view is that this is the first reference to the Trinity in the Bible. This view is supported by the fact that the Holy Spirit (Genesis 1:2) and Christ (John 1:1-4) were both involved in the creation.

3. A third grammatical explanation, which is consistent with #2 above, is that God is talking to himself in this sentence. The plural pronouns "we" and "are" are utilized so as to be in agreement with the plural word for God in the sentence: Elohim. This so-called "plural of majesty" is used in Hebrew for other objects that contain more than one part to them, such as mountain ranges. An English example of plural of majesty would be the word "scissors."

Addressing your second question, several proposals have been offered to explain what the similarity is:

Older commentators sometimes pointed to intelligence and self-awareness as being the characteristics that set us apart from the animals. However, more and more scientific studies are demonstrating that at least some animals do possess what we could call true self-awareness and intelligence.

When I used to teach creativity classes at work, I would explain that the only thing we really know about God up to that point in the Bible is that He is a creator. Therefore one could make the point that creativity is what we have in common with God. Dorothy Sayers, for one, agrees and argues: “When we turn back to see what he says about the original upon which the image of God was modeled, we find only the single assertion, 'God created.' The characteristic common to God and man is apparently that: the desire and the ability to make things.” But I am no longer wholly satisfied with this answer either since animals have again been shown in studies to possess a certain amount of creativity in solving problems and can even make tools to aid them.

Another approach that some take is to state that man was indeed perfect like God until the Fall and expulsion from the garden. However, note that Satan tempted Adam and Eve with the possibility of becoming like God. And, when they were driven out of Eden, God did not say, “Now they will no longer be like us” but “See, the man has become like one of us.”

Probably the most common approach taken nowadays is this: The prohibition against making images of God comes from the fact that only man is in God's image. “God set man in the world as a sign of his own authority, in order that man should uphold his-God's-claims as Lord...man is God's authorized agent on earth and has his worth only as such.” (von Rad)  The nature of the likeness is thus not physical, but in terms of function—lordship over the earth. This explanation stresses the idea of stewardship using Genesis 1:26b as the context.

But I think that all of these similarities take a back seat to the really important one. In Genesis 2:7 we have a more detailed description of man's creation. Whether this merely elaborates on the Genesis 1 story or describes a separate creation of the first truly modern man does not really matter. The important point is that God took dirt to fashion him and breathed life into him. This is quite different from God's creation of the plants and animals by merely speaking them into existence. The dirt represents mankind's wholly physical nature while the breath of God represents mankind's spiritual component. This point is even clearer in the original Hebrew since the word ruah can mean breath, wind or spirit.

Without that spiritual component, which gives us such things as a free will, we are only a tool of the deterministic universe and have no more control over our actions than a machine does. That is what truly sets us, along with the angels, apart from the rest of God's creation. We are no longer complete slaves to the chain of cause-and-effect that runs most of the universe.