Images & Imagination

 June 10, 2021

The men in our Thursday morning prayer group prayed for a man suffering from PTSD this morning. When Harry mentioned that the man couldn’t get the images out of his mind, God brought Scripture to mind, specifically, the second Commandment: “You shall not make any carved image...you shall not bow down to them.” An image in one’s mind is not carved in a physical sense, but a traumatic experience can be carved into our psyche, and however much we may want to remove it, we must first stop bowing down to it. How often we have images of various issues or problems in our minds that may or may not be accurate, but which determine our feelings and actions like little gods. We dwell on that image, allowing it to dominate our thinking, going over and over it till we give in and allow it to tell us who we are.

I’ve often wondered how people could go from bowing before the One True God to worshipping images until I realized that we do this on a regular basis. We imagine how a wedding or graduation or some other celebration will be, but if things don’t entirely fit that image, we are upset. We imagine how the person we pledge our love and life to will be when tired and aching, and get angry when our expectations aren’t met. We have an image of what Sunday mornings should be like, but are disgruntled when the hymns are too slow, or the worship songs unfamiliar, or if the pastor’s sermon isn’t worthy of publication. We bow to our imagination instead of Christ.

Scripture tells us that “the weapons we fight with are not the weapons of the world. On the contrary, they have divine power to demolish strongholds. We demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God, and we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ” (2 Corinthians 10:4-5). God has given us very specific weapons with which to defeat the idol of imagination. Paul speaks here of pretension, another way of talking about imagination, the way we think things should be done. We aren’t left to figure it all out on our own; we have the spiritual armor of Ephesians 6, specifically, the Word of God and the shield of faith. The only way to eliminate a false image is to replace it with the true image, which is Jesus Christ, the visible image of the invisible God (Colossians 1:15). I need to stop giving time to my false and faulty imagination and begin bowing before the Word which points me to Christ, the true image of the Father. The Second Commandment remains: “Do not bow down before any image,” even those we construct in our minds and hearts.