Our ability truly to conceive God determines the measure of our experience of heaven, or harmony. Instead of accepting the limited and corporeal sense of God and man we must be prepared to grasp the purely spiritual and incorporeal sense of God and therefore of man in His image and likeness. By degrees we obtain these clearer views, and our life takes on a diviner sense and shape from this advancing concept.
The Bible portrays the development of humanity's concept of God. When God was thought to be corporeal and limited in nature, when He was thought to be formed after the pattern of human passion and impulse, men were enslaved by the belief of intelligent matter, corporeality, and the material senses. This state of thought is portrayed as the bondage of Egypt which was broken only when Moses began to perceive the real nature of God as the great I AM or incorporeal Mind. This high concept enabled Moses to be the leader of the children of Israel out of the false sense of life and intelligence in matter to the true sense of divine Mind as the seat of intelligence and control.
That man is the image and likeness of God is a spiritual and scientific fact. It is the erroneous belief that Life, or God, can he confined, that Soul can be limited to a body, and that Mind can be made manifest through matter that results in the limited concept, or human body, called mortal man. A finite concept of God necessarily results in a limited sense of man. Christ Jesus came to correct this misconception of Life; and his teaching and example were designed to turn mankind from matter to Spirit, from mortality to immortality, and from sin to holiness. He brought forth the clearest idea of God as infinite Love—incorporeal, unconfined, universal, ever present. He taught that God is Spirit, diseaseless Life, the one infinite Soul or creator of man. In demonstrating the true nature of God he healed the sick, transformed the sinner, and raised the dead, thus showing that man in the image and likeness of God cannot be limited or enslaved, diseased or defeated.
