Imaging God

We sometimes speak of someone having a vivid imagination or the opposite, having no imagination at all! The word imagination and image are closely linked.

 In Judaeo-Christian teaching the second of the Ten Commandments forbids making a representation of God in the form of an image (also called an idol). But why? Well, religious idols fall so far short of the reality that is God our creator ,they can only dishonour him. How would Shakespeare have reacted if his literary works were attributed to a five-year old schoolboy’s doodling!

Simply human inventions

In the Jewish Scriptures, God is emphatic that his own people must not form images of God, which was a thing the surrounding nations did for their gods. Such images are the product of the worshipper’s own imagination and therefore are simply human inventions.

All of this may sound totally irrelevant to how each of us conducts our daily lives and pursues our spiritual well-being. Yet, in conversations, I hear people say things like, ‘My God wouldn’t do such-and-such’ or ‘I can’t believe in a God as portrayed in some parts of the Bible; my God isn’t a God of wrath.’ I recall a lyric in a song that says, ‘I like to think of God as…’. Can you see what’s going on here? Such people are using their mental abilities to form their own imaginings of God. These human constructs inevitably fall far short of the power, magnificence and wonder of God that his unfathomable creation reveals to us.

One true image

There is, however, an image that does have God’s full approval. When the first Christian missionaries ventured into the non-Jewish (Gentile) countries of the Mediterranean, they announced Jesus as being the image of God. When they came across Jews living in these pagan lands, they said to them, Jesus ‘is the radiance of God’s glory and the exact representation of his being’.

You and I don’t have the capacity to imagine the unimaginable, so God has shown himself to us in a way that we can comprehend. He did this by taking on the form and nature of a man. No longer do we need to guess what God is like, nor, along with John Lennon, simply imagine.

Jesus is the very image of God and as he said to his first disciples, ‘he who has seen me has seen (God) the Father’.