Then God said, “Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness; and let them rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over the cattle and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.” And God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them (Genesis 1:26,27).

Of Penguins and People In the March 1999 National    Geographic is a picture of emperor penguin chicks huddled around an adult. The caption indicates that the chicks are so uniform in appearance that the only way parents can identify their respective chicks, and vice versa, is by the sounds they make. The same point is made in a more humorous way by Gary Larson’s The   Far   Side calendar for February 20, 2002. The cartoon depicts two penguins discussing the case of a dead penguin lying in front of them and the three of them surrounded by many others. The caption reads: “He’s dead, all right — beaked in the back … and you know this won’t be easy to solve.” These scenarios well illustrate an outstanding and interesting fact about animalkind as opposed to humankind. Members of any animal species generally look so much alike that they are practically indistinguishable. Apart from minor individual variations discoverable by close and prolonged examination, any two members of any animal species could pass as “twins.” This is so true that “Flipper,” the famous dolphin of the mid-sixties television series, was actually portrayed by six different dolphins. Viewers never knew the difference. On the other hand, the faces of any two humans appear immediately and distinctly different. With the exception of identical twins, no two humans look alike, so that switching out six different human actors to play one character would have been easily detectable. Why is it that human beings have this unique feature of being individually distinguishable from one another? If, as evolutionists claim, humans are merely another animal species, why do they not all look alike, just as the members of the same animal species do? The answer reveals itself as one considers what would happen if all humans looked alike. What if police and crime victims could not identify the perpetrators? Justice is possible only under circumstances which allow the visual identification of the guilty. Yet, there is no way to account for the obvious visual differences between any two humans except by tracing their origin back to their origins in the moral nature with which God created them. Animals have no moral nature. They do not have a sense of right and wrong. They kill one another and humans kill them without any consideration for morality. Since moral guilt or innocence is not attributable to animals, it is not important that they be visually discernible from one another. However, when humans commit a crime, it is crucially important that they not be confused with one another so that innocent people are not condemned. Thus, the fact that any two people look different from one another points clearly and directly to the fact that humans are special. They are not animals, they do not look like animals, and neither are they to act like animals nor be treated like animals. Rather, they have been created in the image of the God who is preeminently concerned with matters of right and wrong, as shown by the existential fact of the moral uniqueness reflected in the equal uniqueness of each person’s face. Humans look different because they are morally accountable creatures, and each one of them would do well to prepare himself for the great accounting by getting to know the Creator and Judge who reveals Himself in the Bible.