When God said, “Let us make man in our image”, we are swept back into the trinity before the creation of the world. Here is thought, because God is a personal God, who thinks, who acts, and who feels in his love. The balances here are most delicate and we must hold both sides or we lose the wealth of the Christian position. There is an external world; it is not the extension of God’s essence. But while there is a true external world which is not the extension of God’s essence, God thought first. These realities were in the thought of God before they were brought forth by his power, his creative fiat as the objective and external world. On the ceiling of the Sistine chapel in Rome there are the tremendous frescoes by Michelangelo. Among them is that magnificent picture of the creation of man. God is reaching out his finger and man, having just been created, reaches to him as well. But their fingers do not touch. This is true Christian insight. Man is not an extension of God, cut off like a reproducing amoeba. God created man external to himself, and they must not touch in the picture. However, this point must be made: That which is created out of nothing and now has objective reality, does show forth the thought of God and is therefore an exhibition of who and what he is. The external world is not an extension of the essence of God,; nevertheless, the external world does reveal and exhibit who and what God is. Image, in it’s truest meaning, is the essence of what really is. Man is the likeness of one subject (God)–expressed visibly through another (man). This does not mean physical characteristics–for God is invisible spirit. But this image is unique to man. Only after God created the plant life, animal life, and such, and declares, them all “good,” does He create man. Only humanity received the image of God, which separates man from animals and gives him dignity. Consequently–the unbeliever perceives man as equal to animals because he lacks understanding of his special dignity as a human being. On the other hand, on the other extreme, the unbeliever can perceive God as being equal..which is an unfounded liberal perspective of “image.”
That man was made last of all the creatures, that it might not be suspected that he had been, any way, a helper to God in the creation of the world: that question must be for ever humbling and mortifying to him, Where wast thou, or any of thy kind, when I laid the foundations of the earth? Job 38:4. Yet it was both an honour and a favour to him that he was made last: an honour, for the method of the creation was to advance from that which was less perfect to that which was more so; and a favour, for it was not fit he should be lodged in the palace designed for him till it was completely fitted up and furnished for his reception. Man, as soon as he was made, had the whole visible creation before him, both to contemplate and to take the comfort of. Man was made the same day that the beasts were, because his body was made of the same earth with theirs; and, while he is in the body, he inhabits the same earth with them. God forbid that by indulging the body and the desires of it we should make ourselves like the beasts that perish! 
