Who Do You Think You Are?.

In the summer of 2023, I was invited to lead my church’s weekend prayer team retreat. With about fifty pastors and volunteer leaders in the room, I opened my first teaching with two questions:

“Who do you think you are?” ....and.... “What do you think you’re doing?”

Admittedly, I knew both questions, not to mention the way I asked them, were a little cheeky and maybe even a bit off-putting for some. But I was going somewhere!

“Who do you think you are?” is usually not really a question. It is something we say when we are challenging someone’s behavior.

And while challenging certain behaviors was certainly part of what I was getting at, I wasn’t trying to pick a fight with people who had entrusted me with their weekend. I was going after something I believed could change the way we ministered to others, the way we prayed, and maybe even the way we lived out the Gospel in our day-to-day lives.

Who we think we are, what we actually believe to be true about ourselves, shapes how we behave and how we understand what we’re doing with our lives.

To put it another way:

When I was in school, there weren’t a lot of kids with the last name Lee. Which meant I heard the same joke over and over: “Are you related to Bruce Lee?”

After about the hundredth time, I started responding, “If I was, do you think I’d be at this school?” It was a joke....mostly.

But the joke only works because we instinctively understand that identity changes expectations.

If I actually belonged to some famous family, if I had grown up surrounded by an entirely different history, inheritance, and set of expectations, I assumed my life would probably look different too.

A different identity would introduce different perspectives of our shared reality and different possibilities of my place within it.

Now let’s take that idea and put some real weight on it.

The book of Exodus shockingly introduces us to the promised descendants of Abraham enslaved in Egypt. For generations, their lives had been shaped by Pharaoh’s definition of who they were. Pharaoh saw a workforce, the Egyptians saw slaves, and their value was measured in bricks, quotas, production, and what their bodies could produce for someone else’s kingdom.

As readers of Scripture, however, we already know something about these enslaved people that Pharaoh does not. Before Exodus introduces us to them in Egypt, Genesis has already traced their story back through Abraham and, ultimately, all the way to the beginning. Genesis says that humanity was made in the image of God, and among humanity, Abraham’s descendants, these very people now enslaved in Egypt, were chosen to participate in God’s purposes for all people. So, while their slavery in Egypt was painfully real, it was not the truest thing about them. Egypt described their present condition, but Genesis had already told us who they were and what larger story they belonged to.

The question that hovers over Israel’s story is this: Who do they think they are? Again and again, their lives suggest that they have forgotten, stopped believing, or simply allowed the reality of their circumstances to overshadow the truth of who they are. Through Jeremiah, God says, “I thought you would call me ‘Father’ and not turn away from following me” (Jeremiah 3:19), confronting their belief of their father/son relationship with him. Jesus later brings that same tension into vivid focus when he tells his disciples, “You are the light of the world. A city set on a hill cannot be hidden” (Matthew 5:14); reminding them of what is already true before calling them to live accordingly.

A people who had been trained for generations to think like slaves had to learn to understand themselves through a story much larger than slavery. While Egypt was an undeniable part of their history, God was determined that it would never become the whole story through which they understood who they were.

Before they could fully inhabit what God was calling them into, they had to learn to live from an identity that generations of slavery had taught them to forget. God was not simply leading them out of Egypt; he was forming them into a people who could understand themselves according to his story rather than Pharaoh’s.

What was true for the people of God then is still true for us now:

That is why this matters even in something as ordinary as serving at church.

If serving in our local churches gets reduced to filling a volunteer slot, we can serve the program and miss the beauty of serving people and the Lord.

But when you are convinced that you bear God’s image and have been placed in his world to represent him, even the most ordinary act of service becomes part of something much larger than the task itself.

Prayer becomes more than a polite ask or religious formality. Service becomes more than obligation. Ordinary things can become worship when they are done from an entirely different understanding of who you are.

If this is who you think you are, then you are not merely filling a role at your job or getting through another week. You are participating in God’s work in the world, learning to make his goodness, presence, and rule visible wherever he has placed you.

And that is only the beginning of the claim Genesis is going to make.

As the biblical story unfolds, we will see human beings placed at the meeting place of heaven and earth, made to represent God’s presence and rule in his world. And in Christ, by his Spirit, that calling becomes even clearer as God makes his home among and within his people.

But if you answer “Who do you think you are?” differently, you might discover that the answer to “What do you think you’re doing?” changes too.

That is the change in pattern between working for identity and working from identity. One is driven by the need to become somebody. The other can become worship.

You can watch this play out all over Scripture, but two familiar scenes make the point especially clear, one in the life of David and the other in the life of Jesus.

First, David.

Who do you think you are, David?

By the time David walks into the Valley of Elah in 1 Samuel 17, almost everyone around him has an answer to that question.

His older brother Eliab sees the little brother who should be back with the sheep:

Saul sees an inexperienced kid standing across from a seasoned warrior:

And when Goliath finally sees David coming toward him, the text simply says that he looked David over and “despised him” (17:42).

Everybody sees the same David, but they are all defining him by what they can see.

The little brother. The shepherd. The inexperienced kid.

The underqualified volunteer who somehow wandered onto the battlefield.

But David has been living inside a different story.

One chapter earlier, Samuel had poured oil over his head and identified him as God’s choice, and “from that day on the Spirit of the LORD came powerfully upon David” (1 Samuel 16:13).

And even before that public moment, something had already been forming in the pasture. David tells Saul about the lion and the bear, not as a résumé of how tough he is, but as evidence of how faithful God has been:

David does not walk onto the battlefield trying to figure out who he is. He walks onto it with a confidence in God that has already been formed in the hidden places.

So when Goliath asks, in effect, Who do you think you are?, David’s answer is not really about David at all:

And then he tells us what he thinks he is doing:

There are the two questions again.

David’s defeat of Goliath certainly becomes part of the road that eventually leads him to the throne. But make no mistake, David does not step onto the field to become somebody. He steps onto the field because he already belongs to Somebody.

Who do you think you are, Jesus?

Centuries later, on the last night of his life, Jesus gets up from the table, takes off his outer clothing, wraps a towel around his waist, and begins washing feet.

John tells us that “Jesus knew that the Father had put all things under his power, and that he had come from God and was returning to God” (John 13:3).

Jesus knew where he had come from, where he was going, and what the Father had entrusted to him. And out of that certainty about who he was, look at what he did:

Jesus does not wash their feet in order to become a great leader. He washes their feet knowing that the Father has already placed all things under his authority.

That distinction matters because Christ-like humility does not come from uncertainty about significance. Jesus’ humility flows from complete security in who he is. He has nothing to prove, no status to protect, and no identity to earn, so he is free to kneel.

So as we see David walking toward a giant and Jesus kneeling to wash dirty feet, the actions could hardly look more different, but the movement underneath them is the same.

Neither is working for identity and both are working from it.

And this is part of what Genesis does for the people of God.

For Israel, Genesis reaches behind Pharaoh and slavery and tells them who they were before Egypt ever tried to define them. And for those of us who follow Jesus, Genesis reaches behind sin itself and tells us something even more original about what it means to be human.

Genesis 1 tells us what a human being is before Genesis 3 tells us what went wrong with humanity.

Don’t miss the order…

Before anyone needed to be rescued from sin, human beings had already been named the image of God.

That means sin is essential to understanding the human condition, but sin is not the starting point for understanding what a human being is.

So, when Christians say, “I’m just a sinner saved by grace,” I understand what we mean, and there is something gloriously true in it. We are sinners, and we are saved only by grace.

But that is a statement about what God has rescued us from, not the whole story of what God created us for.

Genesis 3 tells the truth about what has gone wrong with us.

But Genesis 1 tells us what was there before anything went wrong.

And I have become convinced that a great deal of our trouble, inside the church and outside it, comes from allowing Genesis 3 to become our starting definition of humanity instead of letting Genesis 1 tell us what sin actually distorted.

So before we ask what is wrong with us, maybe we need to ask the earlier question:

Who do you think you are?

The answer that is too small

Ask most Christians what makes a human a human and, sooner or later, you will get some version of Genesis 2:7: dust given the breath of life.

There is nothing false about that.

But it is not the whole picture, and the text itself will not let us stop there.

The phrase translated “living being” is nephesh chayyah. And here is where things get interesting: Genesis uses that same language for other living creatures, for the creatures of the waters and the animals of the land (Genesis 1:20, 24), and again for the animals brought before the man in Genesis 2:19.

Ecclesiastes makes the point even more directly. Humans and animals “all have the same breath” (Ecclesiastes 3:19).

So body and breath make us alive. They do not, by themselves, explain what makes human beings distinct within creation.

Theologian Joel Green points out that nephesh is not a thing a person has, as if the body were one part and the soul another thing stored inside it. It is a way of describing the whole living person. Green argues that Genesis 2:7 is better understood as “the human being became fully alive” than as the moment a soul got installed. ¹

If we build our whole definition of humanity on body and breath, we have built it on something Scripture says we share with the animals. That is not insignificant, in fact, later I will argue that Christians have sometimes made the opposite mistake and treated the body as though it hardly matters at all.

But body and breath still cannot carry the weight of the whole biblical picture.

Genesis 2 tells us that human beings are living creatures.

Genesis 1 tells us what kind of living creatures we are.

What Genesis 1 actually says

Genesis does not begin by telling us only about the body and breath we are made of. It tells us what we are made as, and then what we are made for.

Carmen Imes makes a case I find persuasive that the little Hebrew preposition we usually translate “in” can carry the sense of “as.” In other words, humanity is made as God’s image, not merely with something called the image somewhere inside us.²

That distinction matters.

God does not make human beings and then place his image inside them like a feature that can be added, damaged, or removed. He makes humans as his image.

The image is not a capacity we possess, like intelligence, morality, consciousness, or even some detachable thing we call a soul; it is who we are.

In fact, the rest of Scripture keeps talking this way even after Genesis 3.

Genesis 9:6 still grounds the value of fallen human life in the fact that humanity is made in God’s image. James says that with our tongues we curse human beings “who have been made in God’s likeness” (James 3:9).

Yes, the fall damages plenty, but it does not erase the image.

Disability cannot diminish it and failure cannot forfeit it. Similarly, no increase in intelligence, independence, usefulness, or spiritual maturity can make you more of an image-bearer, and no loss of those things can make you less of one.

Michael Heiser, working with the same Hebrew construction, reaches a similar conclusion: “The image of God is not a quality within human beings; it is what humans are.” He argues that “in” can carry the sense of “as” or “in the capacity of.”³

The phrase in the capacity of helps me because we use similar language to describe the role a person occupies. I often say that my mother and sister work in medicine, or that my brother works in landscaping. The language tells us something about the role they occupy and the work they do. That is the larger idea here.

To be made as God’s image is to be made to represent God, to live in his world as a visible sign of his presence and rule.

In this we can see why identity and activity have been sitting so close together from the beginning. Genesis does not give us an identity and then, much later, invent something for us to do with it.

Who we are is already pointing toward what we are for.

That is where the series will go next.

But for now, stay with the first question.

Who do you think you are?