Replacing/transforming our destructive ideas & images

IMAGES: IDEAS PICTURED - Closely associated with governing ideas are images, which are concrete or specific as opposed to the abstractness of ideas. They are laden with feeling. In recent history, hair (long, short, skinhead, green, orange, purple) has provided powerful images of conflicting idea systems. 

In many churches today, the services have divided into traditional and contemporary, so that the guitar and pipe organ are no longer just musical instruments but powerful symbols. Such divisions are not unimportant or sinful, but one does have to understand what drives such divisions in order to act responsibly in relation to them. Jesus carefully selected an image that conveys himself and his message: the cross. It presents the lostness of humans as well as the sacrifice of God and the abandonment to God that brings redemption. No doubt it is the all-time most powerful image and symbol of human history. 

Ideas and images can be a stronghold of evil in the human self and society. They determine how we understand the things and events of ordinary life, and they can even blind us to what lies plainly before us. Ideas and images are the primary focus of Satan’s efforts to defeat God’s purposes with and for humankind. When we are subject to Satan’s ideas and images, he can take a holiday. Thus, when he undertook to draw Eve away from God, he did not hit her with a stick, but with an idea: that God could not be trusted and that she must act on her own to secure her own well-being. 

The single most important thing in our mind is our idea of God and the images associated with it. Images increase the danger of inadequate ideas. They have the power to obsess and to hypnotize, as well as to escape critical scrutiny. To manipulate images—and thereby people—is the work of the propagandist and the advertiser. Unfortunately, it is often done in the name of Christ to achieve some desired result. 

The process of spiritual formation in Christ is one of progressively replacing those destructive images and ideas with the images and ideas that filled the mind of Jesus himself. We thereby come increasingly to see “the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God” (2 Corinthians 4:4, NRSV).

 DAVE'S AFTERTHOUGHT: I need to be careful of images associated with our Heavenly Father and our Lord Jesus. As two boys with a vision confirmed: "Jesus doesn't look like His pictures." And whether you liked or disliked the book, The Shack, one thing I took away from it was, "Any image you have of Me is wrong." We are not to picture God in our minds other than, perhaps, pervasive Light. One religion holds up a round waver encased in gold. The ceremony is called Adoration. Personally, I fear that that gets too close to the prohibition in the 10 Commandments, not to bow down or worship an image.