A recent headline caught my attention. It read, "Fighting the images graven in men's minds." The article was about a country undergoing years of conflict, but a similar story could be repeated in many parts of the world today. Certain images of warring factions become entrenched in thought. Those images then make it hard for the individuals concerned to break away from the mold in which they have been cast. Such events, repeated daily, depict violence and destruction as the norm, often without any message of restitution or hope. These experiences tend to perpetuate fear, aggression, and despair in human thought.
Such news items show the constant need to be monitoring our thinking and asking ourselves what mental models we are accepting as true. And certainly one of the great lessons Christianity teaches is that through prayer we can challenge the ultimate validity of a picture of man as an aggressive warring mortal and hold to the spiritual concept of man as made in God's likeness, governed by the divine Principle of his being.
The importance of challenging false images is not, of course, only a twentieth-century issue. In early Biblical times the Israelites were taught to worship one God, and no material representation was to be substituted for His divine nature. Idolatry was forbidden. God was to be known through His actions and presence with His people. God's indivisibility was understood to be implicit in His character, and He could never be depicted in human form, for that would signify a man-made God instead of the great I am who communed with Moses at Horeb See Ex. 3:14.
