The Human You Were Designed to Be
Day 8 — Unseen: Genesis 1:26-27, Colossians 1:15-17
Introduction
Before we talk about who you are, we need to talk about what you were made to be.
Not what the world has made of you. Not the version of yourself shaped by your history, your wounds, your failures, or the labels other people have put on you. Not the tired, striving, trying-to-keep-up person who picked up this devotional somewhere between exhaustion and hope.
The original. The design. The thing God had in mind when He thought of you before you existed.
Most of us have never seriously considered this question. We spend enormous energy managing who we are — improving ourselves, recovering from ourselves, presenting ourselves — without ever stopping to ask: what was the blueprint?
Because here’s what’s true: before sin entered the story, before the fall, before the long slow drift of human history away from the original design — God made something. Something He looked at and called very good. Something that bore His own image. Something that was meant to relate to Him, reflect Him, and represent Him in the world.
That something was you. The original you. The one Jesus came to redeem.
Today we look at the original blueprint.
Scripture
Then God said, “Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.” So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.
— Genesis 1:26-27 (NIV)
The Son is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation. For in him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things have been created through him and for him. He is before all things, and in him all things hold together.
— Colossians 1:15-17 (NIV)
Reflection
Made in the Image of God
Three words in Genesis 1 carry more weight than almost anything else in Scripture: image of God. Theologians have a Latin phrase for it — imago Dei — and entire libraries have been written trying to fully unpack what it means.
But here’s the simple, staggering truth of it: you were made to bear a resemblance to God Himself.
Not to be God. But to reflect Him. To carry something of His nature — His capacity for love, for creativity, for relationship, for moral reasoning, for beauty — into the world He made. Every human being who has ever drawn breath carries this dignity, this design, this original identity stamped into the very fabric of their being.
You were not an accident. You were not a product of random forces. You were made — specifically, intentionally, in the image of the one who spoke the universe into existence.
And you were made for something. The image of God was not merely decorative. It was functional. Humanity was designed to be in intimate, unbroken relationship with the Father — to collaborate with Him, to be His representatives in the physical world, to live as the visible expression of an invisible God.
That was the design. That was the original.
What Jesus Shows Us
But here’s the problem. None of us has ever met a fully human human being.
Every person you’ve ever known — including yourself — has been a distorted version of the original. Sin entered the story early and it has been bending, warping, and diminishing the image of God in humanity ever since. We were made for intimacy with the Father and we live in distance. We were made to reflect His love and we default to self-protection. We were made for the Kingdom of Light and we were born into the kingdom of darkness.
So how do we know what the original looks like?
We look at Jesus.
Paul calls Him the image of the invisible God — the exact, undiminished, undistorted representation of what God is like in human form. But He is also the exact, undiminished, undistorted representation of what humanity is like when it operates as designed. Jesus is the only human being who ever lived fully in the image of God — without sin, without distortion, without the drift.
He collaborated with the Father completely. “I only do what I see the Father doing.” He loved without self-protection. He served without agenda. He faced suffering without bitterness and death without despair. He was fully present, fully alive, fully human — in a way that none of us have ever managed and all of us, somewhere deep down, recognize as the thing we were made for.
When you look at Jesus, you are not looking at something foreign to your nature. You are looking at the original version of it. The human you were designed to be.
Grace Note
“For those God foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son, that he might be the firstborn among many brothers and sisters.” — Romans 8:29 (NIV)
The design has not been abandoned. The image has not been permanently lost. God’s intention from before time was not just to save you from something — it was to restore you to something. To the original. To the image. To the fully human life that Jesus modeled and the Holy Spirit makes possible. That restoration is already underway in everyone who belongs to Him.
Prayer Prompt
Jesus, I don’t think I’ve ever seriously considered what I was actually designed to be. I’ve spent so much energy managing who I am — or recovering from who I’ve been — that I’ve never stopped to ask about the original.
But You are the original. The image of God in human form. The only fully human human being who ever lived.
Show me what I was made for. Not as a standard to fail against — but as a vision to move toward. Show me what it looks like to bear the image of God in my actual life — in the way I love, the way I work, the way I relate, the way I face what is hard.
I want to be what You designed me to be. I’m starting to believe that might actually be possible.
Amen.
Response
1. Sit With the Image: Write down your honest answer to this question: what have I believed I was made for? Not theologically — practically. What has your life been organized around as its purpose? Then write underneath it: made in the image of God, designed to reflect Him. Let those two pictures sit next to each other.
2. Look at Jesus as a Human: Read John 13:1-17 — Jesus washing His disciples’ feet. This is not just a lesson in humility. This is a fully human human being functioning exactly as designed — serving without agenda, loving without condition, completely free from the need for status or recognition. Watch Him. This is the blueprint in motion.
3. Find One Echo: Think back over your life and identify one moment — however brief — when you felt most fully yourself. Most alive. Most like you were doing exactly what you were made to do. Write it down. That echo, however faint, is the image of God in you recognizing itself. That’s the design, still there, still calling.
To read all the posts in this devotional series, visit: https://www.thisistheway.live/t/unseen
© Steve Peschke / This Is The Way