Salvation is resurrection into the new creation, yet it also involves our transformation into a glorious new image.

the end goal of salvation is that through allegiance we become fully human—that is, that we flawlessly mirror God because we have been fully conformed to the image of Jesus the Christ.

But as with many other visible pictures in the Bible, God intended Adam as image-bearer as an anticipation of a deeper, richer, fuller image-bearer who preceded him in a hidden fashion and would appear publicly in the future.

The one to come, Jesus, was the fuller reality that Adam, the type, anticipated; Adam was a type of Jesus, a blueprint that anticipated the house, a visible imitation that anticipated the fullness that has now arrived in Jesus the king.

In a like manner, Adam truly bore the image of God, but did so in a limited fashion. As the image of God, he was a type.

That is, although Jesus is not the only human to bear God’s image, he is the only one who imaged God in a complete manner.

to be fully human doesn’t mean to be the opposite of God; it means to fully image God, to reflect and represent God flawlessly in God’s entirety, glory, and splendor.

Initial declared allegiance (pistis) to Jesus the king forges a union with the king and his body (the church), and this union is upheld subsequently through embodied allegiance, an enacted loyalty that is inclusive of good deeds.

The contexts in the Synoptic Gospels in which we find this saying do, however, suggest that this irreversibility is not due to God’s lack of willingness to forgive should repentance occur but rather to the inability of the blasphemer to take the initiative in repenting.