Created: Who Tells Us Who We Are?

Part 1 of the Created for Tov series: Six movements in God’s story of human flourishing.

We live in a culture that gives us extraordinary freedom to express ourselves, yet often leaves us with the exhausting task of first deciding who that self is.

We are encouraged to define ourselves through work, relationships, achievement, personality and experience. We are told to discover our identity, build it, protect it, and present it clearly to the world. Some of this is useful — it can help us understand our gifts and our direction. But it also creates a quieter pressure: the sense that identity is a project we are responsible for completing successfully, and that we might get it wrong.

What happens when the work changes, the relationship ends, health declines, or the plan we built our life around falls apart? The roles that once told us who we were no longer feel secure enough to hold the weight we’ve placed on them.

Scripture begins somewhere more stable than self-construction. Before asking “Who will I become?”, it asks “Who created me, and what was I created for?”

We are created, not self-created

The opening words of Scripture are about God, not humanity: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth” (Genesis 1:1). Human identity is set inside this larger story from its first sentence. We do not originate ourselves, and we do not sustain ourselves. Genesis describes God forming humanity from the dust and breathing life into it; Paul later tells the Athenians that it is in God that “we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28).

The theologian Stanley Grenz makes a case worth sitting with here: creatureliness is not a diminished form of existence waiting to be outgrown. In a culture that treats self-sufficiency as the mark of maturity, Grenz argues the opposite — that dependence on God is the proper and life-giving condition of being human, not a stage we graduate past. Our origin, our sustaining and our purpose all come from outside ourselves.

That is not a comfortable claim for anyone taught that needing nobody is a sign of strength. But it does mean something specific: we are known before we perform, and valued before we prove ourselves useful.

Made in the image of God, not merely possessing it

Genesis takes the argument further. Humanity is not simply part of creation — it is made “in the image of God… male and female he created them” (Genesis 1:27).

Christians have often located that image in a faculty we possess: reason, conscience, freedom, spirituality. Grenz pushes past this. He treats the image less as a static quality sitting inside each person and more as a role each person is summoned to — to represent God within creation, and to reflect something of God’s character through how we live, relate and act.

That shift matters practically. The image of God is not merely an attribute to catalogue; it describes both the dignity humanity receives and the calling humanity is given. Our worth precedes performance and survives failure, limitation and decline. No person can be reduced to their diagnosis, productivity, worst decision or usefulness to someone else.

Created for relationship

Genesis names something as “not good” before it names anything as broken: “It is not good for the man to be alone” (Genesis 2:18). The point extends well beyond marriage. Grenz places real weight on the fact that the God whose image we bear exists eternally in relationship — Father, Son and Spirit — and argues that human identity, made in that image, cannot be adequately understood through isolated individuality. We come to know who we are through relationship with God and with others: family, friendship, community, care given and received.

This is not a claim that community is automatically safe. Relationships nurture, but they also wound — and the fracture of human relationship is where the next article in this series begins. What Genesis insists on here is narrower, and still significant: isolation was never the goal.

Created to cultivate

Genesis also gives humanity work: Adam is placed in the garden “to work it and take care of it” (Genesis 2:15). Andy Crouch’s language is useful for unpacking what this looks like in practice. He distinguishes between cultivating — taking what already exists and helping its possibilities emerge — and creating — bringing something new into being that did not exist before. Both are forms of the same underlying vocation: taking responsibility for helping something, or someone, move toward what it was made to become.

This reframes what counts as meaningful work. A parent cultivating a home, a teacher cultivating a student’s understanding, a counsellor cultivating the conditions in which someone can tell the truth about their life — none of these are lesser expressions of vocation waiting for a more visible calling to arrive. Purpose here is wider than a job title, and it does not wait for career success to validate it. Identity comes first; vocation flows from it, not the other way round.

A Biblical vision of flourishing

Put together, Scripture offers something more substantial than comfort or personal fulfilment.

Flourishing means receiving life from God, living from a dignity we did not earn, belonging to relationships we did not construct alone, and using what we have for the good of others and the world.

At Tov, we understand human flourishing as whole-person life in right relationship with God, self, others and the created world, expressed through purposeful participation in God’s goodness. That understanding shapes how we approach education, counselling, leadership and organisational culture. We do not view people primarily as problems to solve or resources to manage, but as people worthy of care, capable of growth and entrusted with responsibility.

The New Testament does not leave this account in Genesis. Christ is described as “the image of the invisible God” (Colossians 1:15) — the clearest picture of what humanity was always intended to be. We will return to this later in the series; for now, it is enough to recognise that the Christian vision of humanity ultimately finds its clearest expression in Christ.

Seeing ourselves differently

Many of us have learned to understand ourselves mainly through what we do, what has happened to us, or what others expect of us. Genesis offers a different starting point: you are not self-created, your worth was not earned, and your identity is larger than your success, your failure or your pain.

What might change if you began today by remembering whose creation you are, rather than what you still need to prove?

That is where the biblical story of flourishing begins — but Genesis 1–2 is not the whole picture. Identity gets confused. Relationships wound. Power gets misused. If flourishing belongs to God’s good purpose, why does it so often feel out of reach? That is where the next article picks up.

Next in the series: Broken — Why Flourishing Feels Harder Than It Should

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Further reading

Stanley J. Grenz and Jay T. Smith, Created for Community: Connecting Christian Belief with Christian Living 

Andy Crouch, Culture Making: Recovering Our Creative Calling