I received this question recently in regard to John 4:24, which tells us that “God is spirit.”
The question was, “We are struggling with the idea that ‘we are made in his own image.’ How can we reconcile this?”
My response — When we say we are made in God’s image we are most likely not referring to our physical appearance. Rather we are referring to the fact that humans have personality, the ability to think and create, the ability to love and be loved, the ability to praise, the ability to remember, etc.
In other words it is the more “spiritual” aspects of our being that we think come from being made in God’s image. That is why when humans create a robot that looks human it is not made in the image of God even when it physically looks like a human.
If there is some aspect of our physical appearance that is made in God’s image, then it would have to be after the pattern of Jesus’ incarnational body. Jesus’ body would have been planned by God for him to have before the beginning of time, since God the Father doesn’t have a physical body for humans to be patterned after.
Blessings,
Jim