Colossians 3:9-10 to Genesis 1:26-27
NT Text: "put off the old man... put on the new man... being renewed... according to the image of the one who created him"
OT Source(s):
- Genesis 1:26-27 (κατ' εἰκόνα τοῦ κτίσαντος αὐτόν - "according to image... created him")
- Genesis 3:7, 21 (clothing metaphor - fig leaves removed, God clothes Adam/Eve)
- Genesis 2:17; 3:2-3 (knowledge/epignosis theme)
Source: Treasury of Scripture Knowledge
Reference Type: Allusion
Connection Method(s): Typology
Significance: Paul commands the Colossians to have "put off the old self with its practices and put on the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge according to the image of its Creator" (Col 3:9-10), deliberately echoing the creation account: "according to the image of the one who created him" reproduces the language of Genesis 1:26-27, "let us make man in our image... so God created man in his own image." The garment metaphor Paul chooses is not incidental — it recalls the moment humanity's original innocence gave way to the first, inadequate coverings after the Fall (Genesis 3:7), the first sign that the image had been marred. Paul presents union with Christ as a genuine re-creation: believers do not merely improve the old Adamic self but "put it off" entirely, the way a garment is removed, and are clothed instead with a "new self" being progressively conformed to the very image after which humanity was first made. This is typological, not merely illustrative — Adam, as the first image-bearer, functions as a historical pattern whose vocation Christ, the last Adam, fulfills and escalates: what Adam was created to be and failed to remain, believers are now, in Christ, being actively renewed to become, with a knowledge and a righteousness the first Adam never sustained. The renewal is "in knowledge" — a direct answer to the serpent's false promise of hidden knowledge in Eden (Genesis 3:5) — so that the new self does not seek forbidden wisdom apart from God but receives true knowledge precisely by being remade after him. The image lost in the garden is thus not merely restored but is being brought, in Christ, to a fullness Eden itself never reached — a renewal completed only when believers, beholding the glory of the Lord, are at last fully transformed into that same image (2 Corinthians 3:18).
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