Why does God say 'us' in Genesis 1:26?

God & the TrinityIn theological review

The short answer

God says 'us' because, as the rest of Scripture reveals, the one God who creates is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit together at work. The plural appears again in Genesis 3:22 and 11:7, angels neither create nor share in the act, and John 1 identifies the Son as the one through whom all things were made.

The fuller answer

When God says let us make man in our image in Genesis 1:26, he is not talking to himself in the way a king uses a royal plural, and he is not consulting angels. Read across the whole Bible, the plural is an early glimpse of what later Scripture states plainly: God is one, yet the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are together at work from the beginning, and creation itself is one of the works they share. It is one of the first puzzles a careful reader meets in the Bible, arriving in the opening chapter, before any doctrine has been explained or defended.

Then God said, “Let Us make man in Our image, after Our likeness, to rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, over the livestock, and over all the earth itself and every creature that crawls upon it.”

Genesis 1:26 (BSB)

Genesis uses the pattern more than once. After Adam reaches for the knowledge of good and evil, God says the man has become like one of us (Genesis 3:22). At Babel, God says let us go down and confuse their language (Genesis 11:7). In each case the speaker is God alone, acting with divine authority no angel shares, yet speaking in the plural. Angels do not create, do not judge the world, and are never asked to lend their image to mankind.

Then the LORD God said, “Behold, the man has become like one of Us, knowing good and evil. And now, lest he reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life, and eat, and live forever...”

Genesis 3:22 (BSB)

The New Testament opens the curtain further. John begins his Gospel by placing the Word with God in the beginning, and says the Word was God and that all things were made through him. That is the same beginning Genesis describes, now with the Son identified as the one through whom the Father made everything. The Spirit is there too, hovering over the waters in Genesis 1:2, present before the first let there be was spoken.

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.

John 1:1 (BSB)

Christians have therefore read the us of Genesis as the triune God speaking within his own fullness, a hint given at the start and explained by the end of the story. It is not the whole doctrine of the Trinity in one word, and Genesis alone does not spell the doctrine out. But it fits nothing else in the Bible as well, and it means human beings, made in that image, were made by a God who has never been solitary. The church did not invent a Trinity and then hunt for proof texts; it found hints like this one waiting from the first page of its Scriptures.

Sources

Berean Standard Bible (BSB)

Review status: in-theological-review. Every Contend page passes a human theological review against the Statement of Faith before it is published as approved teaching. This section is in that queue.

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What is the Trinity?The Trinity is the Christian confession that there is one God, and that this one God is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, three persons, each fully God, equal in power and glory. The word itself is not in the Bible. The reality is taught everywhere in it, and the church forged the word to protect what the Bible says from being flattened in either direction.How can God be three and one at the same time?God is three and one in different senses, so there is no contradiction: one in essence, one single God, and three in persons, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Scripture holds both together, confessing that the LORD is one while baptising in the one name of the Father, Son, and Spirit.Is the Trinity taught in the Bible if the word is not?Yes, the Trinity is taught in the Bible even though the word itself is not there. Scripture repeatedly shows Father, Son, and Holy Spirit together, distinct and each divine, at Jesus's baptism and throughout his teaching, and Tertullian later coined the Latin word trinitas to name that biblical pattern.Who is the Holy Spirit?The Holy Spirit is God himself, the third person of the Trinity, not a force, a feeling, or God's power in the abstract. He is there at creation, hovering over the waters. He speaks, teaches, and can be lied to, and when Peter confronts Ananias he says the lie told to the Holy Spirit was a lie told to God.Bible Character: AdamThe first man, formed by God from the dust of the ground and placed in the garden of Eden.Bible Character: MosesThe prophet who led Israel out of slavery in Egypt, received the Law on Mount Sinai, and brought the people to the edge of Canaan.Lesson: I believe in God, the Father almightyThe Creed opens by naming who God is before it says anything about us. Take the first line apart, word by word, with the Scripture under each word.