“The Spittin’ Image”

I’ve heard that term all my life.  Sometimes it’s used to describe the accuracy of a rendering or painting of an object or person.  A near identical copy of an original.  Other times it is used to encourage a new parent to help them believe their newbie is where it needs to be because the child looks like one of the parents.

There is a belief that the term is a shorting of “spit and image.”  “Image,” I get, and will return to it in a moment, but “spit”?  That is a simply disgustingly revolting image. Yes, the word is in both the New and Old Testaments, but I still don’t like the image.  It turns out the word “spit” in the early 1800’s had a definition of “perfect likeness.”  Having read that in the Meriam-Webster dictionary does not help me believe that the “spit” I’m familiar with started out meaning “perfect likeness.”  Our mother tongue has taken some weird twists and turns over the centuries.

When I twelve or thirteen Mom led the Baldwin boys in a necessary car wash preceding a family trip.  I began washing the front left fender and moved my way back.  At one point I was having to scrub hard to remove Dad’s “spilled milkshake” from the lower half of the driver’s door.  My complaint to Mom was met with, “That’s not a milkshake, Fred.”  (I just had a shudder again now fifty years later.)

Enough already!  Back to the “spitten image” or the “perfect likeness image.”   Long before “image” meant the public impression of a person, thing, or event, “image” referred to a statue which looked exactly like the model or subject under the sculpture’s eye. 

When considering the action of the Creator in pulling the first human out of the clay, He knew exactly what He wanted to create.  The image in His mind was exactly what he created, exactly!  That “image” God had was exactly what was needed to accomplish His plan for all creation, His will, His desire.  There were no mistakes.  Nor where there any flaws in the clay He worked with or in the movement of His hands at work in the clay.  Adam was exactly what was in God’s mind before He began to create.  What is far more amazing is that that first human is still what God has in mind.  The Creator’s original image of humans is still the same image He has today. Just because humans fouled put what God had created, God did not alter His original image He wanted to create.  He created a way to fix it!  Grace in action.

There are two ways to process the truth that humans were created in the Creator’s image.  One is that we were created to look like Him in some way.  That is how I have always interpreted the idea.  But lately I have come to see a second way to understand the idea.  We have each been created according to a picture of what He was thinking about, imagining, when He began to “knit us together” in our mother’s womb. 

You may have always seen “image of God” the second way, and I am just now having a breakout from an old smaller belief.  Here is what I’m thinking now captured for us in this old “spitten image” phrase.  God had, and continues to have, in His creative mind an image of a necessary Gardening tool you and I know as Fred Baldwin.  It is His “image,” His purpose and will. Each deviation from that image He calls sin.  There is nothing wrong with His image for me. However, the “spitten” part, i.e., my being the prefect manifestation of His magnificent idea for a Fred Baldwin, is what He and I are working on right now.  I long to be exactly what he envisioned Fred Baldwin to be, no less, no more.  My Creator longs to finish His creative work of His originating Fred Baldwin vision, no less, no more.  It is only as I reject my image of Fred Baldwin to accept my Creator’s image of Fred Baldwin that I will have peace and He will be seen as Glorious.

The same is true for you.  The earth will be set ablaze with the wonder of God as His image of humanity is realized in His people, one at a time. Oh, to be “the spittin image” of our Father!

Photo – Retired steam tractor on a Robertson County, Tennessee farm.