Creation as a whole is a Temple, the heaven-and-earth reality in which God wants to dwell, and the mode of his presence in that Temple (as anyone in the ancient world would have known perfectly well) was the “image,” the cult object that would represent the creator to the world and that wider world before the creator. Complicated? Yes, but it only seems that way to us, because our culture has done its best to unlearn this kind of thought. Complex but coherent, a bit like creation itself, in fact, or indeed like a human being.
