Image εἰκών
Whose face is on it?
Before it was ever a theology word, eikōn was an everyday one. It is the portrait stamped on a coin. When Jesus holds up a denarius and asks, “Whose is this image and superscription?” (Matthew 22:20), image there is eikōn. The face on the metal tells you whose the coin is and whose authority it carries.
It is also the word the old Greek Old Testament reaches for in Genesis 1:27 — God made man in his image. So when the New Testament writers use eikōn, they are picking up Genesis’s own vocabulary, in the Greek their readers read.
Every coin in the province carries the portrait. That is how a place a thousand miles away knows whose rule it lives under. Then one morning the door opens and the face itself walks in — and every coin in every pocket suddenly makes sense.
The office, filled
Genesis handed out the image as a job: God’s representative, set up in God’s place, so the world would meet the King in him. Paul says Christ is “the image of the invisible God” (Colossians 1:15) — not a man who has one, the thing itself. That verse belongs to another page, and it is worked out there: the image of God, in Genesis 1.
What this page follows is what happens next. Once the office is filled in person, the New Testament starts talking about a family being shaped to match.
A family with the family face
Read the last clause slowly, because it explains the first. Why conform anybody to the Son’s image? So that he would be the firstborn among many brethren. Firstborn is family language, and it needs a family to be first in. The image here is not a decoration hung on individuals. It is a household resemblance — brothers who look like their eldest brother.
Changed while you look
Two things in that verse are worth stopping on. The first is we all — Paul has just been talking about a veil, and here the whole company stands with faces uncovered. The second is the direction of travel: from glory to glory. Something is moving. Elsewhere Paul says the same thing with Genesis’s own words — believers are “renewed in knowledge after the image of him that created him” (Colossians 3:10). Day six’s language, used of people being changed now.
Two portraits, and which one you wear
Same word, twice, in one line — and the two images are named by two men. “The earthy” is the dust-man, and Paul has a rare word for him that he uses nowhere else in the Bible. That word is next door: choikos, of dust. Here is the short version. Genesis gave the image as an office. The New Testament shows the office filled in person, and a family being grown into the likeness — carrying one portrait now, and promised another.
The Image stands twice in the sky — once on day six, once at dawn — the office given and the office filled.
Open the dawn sky →The “conformed to the image” texts describe a work in motion, and Christians differ over its stages — where it starts, how far it goes now, what is left for later. This word study shows you the direction, not a diagram. Note too that eikōn is not automatically a good word: ten of its New Testament appearances are in Revelation, and every one of those is the image of the beast — an image can be counterfeited, which is part of why whose image matters. And when Paul calls Christ the image, that title may carry more than an office; we are tracing the office thread here, not setting a ceiling.