The first hint of God's plurality.

To most Christians, God is a singular and male figure, and no question about it. And it's true that for most of the bible God is presented that way. He refers to himself as "I" (singular) and people refer to him as "He" (masculine).

But the first few chapters of Genesis, I'm noticing, seem rife with hints about God being a plural being. Not one, but many.

And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: (Genesis 1:26)

Note the use of the words "us" and "our". Plural words.

God is repeatedly presented in this way, especially in Chapter 2, but I'll get to that when I get there, since I want to do this blog in order, rather than jumping all over the place.

Some people have no doubt argued, in the past, that here God is using the "Royal We." An interesting defense, but it makes no sense when you know that the Royal We is supposed to refer to God being in agreement with the monarch saying it. If a monarch says, for example, "We are not amused," what they mean is, "God and I are not amused." They include God because of the long-standing believe that monarchs were divinely appointed, and thus what the monarch says and does must therefore be approved of by God.

So unless God is making reference here to a being even higher than himself, the Royal We argument holds no water.

So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them. (Genesis 1:27)

This is the big hint that God is not entirely masculine, something that gets ignored a lot in mainstream religion. Man here means human, of course, and it explicitly says that God created both male and female in his image. It stands to reason then, that Gods image is both male and female.

Another thing that makes more sense when you consider God to be more than a singular being.

It's my personal opinion that calling God male constantly is a symptom of the limitation of language. English isn't one of those languages that has gendered nouns, but lots of other languages do. The original word used to God (likely something that means simply "deity", but I can only speculate on that, of course) was a masculine word, and eventually people took this to mean that God was a masculine figure. It's not a hard leap of logic to make, and I can understand how people would come to such a conclusion.

Plenty of people on the fringe of mainstream religion take this to mean that God is inherently a male and female entity, something that gains a little bit more support a chapter later in Genesis. (Once again, I'll get to that when I get to it, since I want to go in order here.) God would have to be, after all, for both males and females to be created to look like him.

Unless, of course, "in his image" doesn't mean what we think it means. Maybe the word image doesn't refer directly to appearance. Maybe it means more like "in the manner of", a theory which could also gain a little weight after Adam and Eve get booted from Eden.

Of course, there are plenty of people who don't like that notion either, I imagine. For one thing, it would so easily reconcile humanity and evolution. If we weren't made to look like God, then we could have started off looking like something else. Lower primates, maybe? But we had that God-spark, that likeness inside of us that helped us rise up and become what we are today.

That would put the Answers in Genesis people out of business, though, so I can't see that theory gaining mainstream popularity any time soon.