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What does an Image tell us…

What does an Image tell us…

Last updated on: October 17, 2009 at 1:33 am by Billy Kangas

What does an Image tell us… 2009-10-17T01:33:00-04:00 Billy Kangas

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When Christianity first got started images were not used in worship. They were viewed in the same class as Idols… We now live in a culture in which everything is distilled into an image. I thought I would post three questions and some quotes to stimulate thought…

Why do we create Images?

“Politics will eventually be replaced by imagery. The politician will be only too happy to abdicate in favor of his image, because the image will be much more powerful than he could ever be.”
– Marshall McLuhan

“He was given power to give breath to the image of the first beast, so that it could speak and cause all who refused to worship the image to be killed.” Revelation 13:15

Every man builds his world in his own image. He has the power to choose, but no power to escape the necessity of choice.
-Ayn Rand

“Cursed is the man who carves an image or casts an idol—a thing detestable to the LORD, the work of the craftsman’s hands—and sets it up in secret.” Then all the people shall say, “Amen!” Deuteronomy 27:15

Men create gods after their own image, not only with regard to their form but with regard to their mode of life.
-Aristotle

King Nebuchadnezzar made an image of gold, ninety feet high and nine feet wide, and set it up on the plain of Dura in the province of Babylon. Daniel 3:1

The beginning of love is to let those we love be perfectly themselves, and not to twist them to fit our own image. Otherwise we love only the reflection of ourselves we find in them.
Thomas Merton

What Image are we?

A life is either all spiritual or not spiritual at all. No man can serve two masters. Your life is shaped by the end you live for. You are made in the image of what you desire.
Thomas Merton

Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, in our likeness, and let them rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, over the livestock, over all the earth, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.” Genesis 1:26

I think computer viruses should count as life. I think it says something about human nature that the only form of life we have created so far is purely destructive. We’ve created life in our own image.
Stephen Hawking

The god of this age has blinded the minds of unbelievers, so that they cannot see the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God.
2 Corinthians 4:4

Hell is an outrage on humanity. When you tell me that your deity made you in his image, I reply that he must have been very ugly.
Victor Hugo

Man is an exception, whatever else he is. If he is not the image of God, then he is a disease of the dust. If it is not true that a divine being fell, then we can only say that one of the animals went entirely off its head. G.K. Chesterton

Should a Christian use Images in worship?

“We become what we behold. We shape our tools and then our tools shape us.”
Marshall McLuhan

“The whole person, with all his senses, with both mind and body, needs to be
involved in genuine worship.” -Jerry Kerns

God says to Moses in the Mathnavi of Rumi

“Ways of worship are not to be ranked as better or worse than on another
Its all Praise its all right
Its not me who is glorified in acts of worship
It’s the worshippers! .

Forget phraseology
I want burning, burning.”

“Worship changes the worshiper into the image of the One worshiped”
-Jack Hayford

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