What does imago Dei mean?

The point of this post is not to give an exhaustive scholarly definition of what the term "imago Dei" means, but rather to help the average believer understand it's importance and why it should be a lens that all believers should be viewing life through. It's a concept that has come to have an increasingly greater impact on my life the further I dig into it, and yet I don't pretend to be doing anything other than scraping the surface of its depths.
 

Imago Dei is a latin phrase that translates to "the image of God". It may sound like a boring theological term, but the importance of grasping what it truly means can not be overstated. It's key to answering life's most important questions because it's a term that is used to describe what we are, or rather what we are supposed to be. There is a crisis of identity for the modern day Church in western culture and a correct understanding of the historical concept of imago Dei would go a long way to get us back on track. In our misguided zeal to be progressive and mainstream, we've made a wrong turn by trading "true" for "new". As one of my favorite quotes from C.S. Lewis states:
 

Why do any of us exist? If you believe we all got here by some random series of events, I don't see how you can really answer that question. Random things don't have purpose in the deepest sense, they just exist. They might meet a need, but that's only by chance. If something is random you can't say why it does something, you can only describe what it randomly happens to do. Only created things can truly have a purpose because all created things are made with an intent to do something. I believe that science and logic show us that there is an astronomical amount of intent in our universe because it is too finely tuned to exist by chance. No, we are created beings and as such, the only place we can go to find true purpose is to look to our creator.

So, we look to God's own words in the bible in the creation account that we find in Genesis. After God made the heavens and the earth, he created all the living creatures that exist. All that he created glorifies the creator in the way a painting glorifies an artist. We can see is power, his creativity, and so many of his attributes through creation. That's why in Paul writes in Romans 1:20 "For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made". But humans were singled out to do this to a degree that no other aspect of creation is.
 

This concept is echoed in Genesis 5:1-2 and Genesis 9:6. Sometimes it uses the word "image" and sometimes it uses the word "likeness". These words are not used to describe anything else in all of creation. The point is that here our creator is telling us what we were created to do and be. We were made to be representatives of God! Not exactly like him, because we aren't God, but to share in more of his attributes and qualities than anything else in all of creation.

He put humans in charge of all the rest of creation as ambassadors and viceroys. Our job was to represent and glorify him on earth. When God tells Adam and Eve to go forth and multiply (Genesis 1:28), He's commanding them to go forth and fill the earth with His glory!

Throughout history theologians have wrestled with huge lists of questions and tried to study scripture to accurately answer them. Often times these questions and answers were organized together into what's historically called a catechism. In modern terms I guess we would call them a theological FAQ. In the Westminster Shorter Catechism, written in 1646, the first question they tackled was, "What is the chief end of man?", to which they answered, "Man's chief end is to glorify God, and to enjoy him forever.".