When God created Adam, He said, “Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness.” Before Jesus became a human being, He existed in past eternity. He was the Word in the bosom of God. Before the Holy Spirit came to earth, He also existed. They created Adam in the moral, spiritual, and intellectual nature of God… in His image and likeness.
When Adam and Eve sinned, that image and likeness became very flawed. They developed a sin-nature that was passed on to their children. By the time Noah’s generation came along, that sin-nature was only evil continually. God wiped the earth clean through the flood and started over with Noah and his family.
Any efforts to remain godly became futile because of the weakness of man’s sin-nature to remain godly. The apostle Paul said, “I don’t practice what I want to do, but I do what I hate.” That is the power of the sin-nature in mankind. The Ten Commandments became a struggle because of the power of the sin-nature working against their will to do the right thing. The image and likeness of God that once defined Adam, no longer existed.
Along came Christ Jesus. He was made in the likeness of sinful flesh, but did not have a sin-nature. He was conceived in Mary’s womb by the Holy Spirit. Jesus was not conceived by a human father, so He was not born with the sin-nature that we have through Adam. He was completely human, and remained completely God, the Word.
The apostle Paul said, “God made Him who knew no sin to be sin for us, that we might become the righteousness of God in Him.” Once again, we have been made in the image and likeness of God through the last Adam.
Romans 7:24-25 (NLT) Oh, what a miserable person I am! Who will free me from this life that is dominated by sin and death? Thank God! The answer is in Jesus Christ our Lord.