#17 Two Images

[Matthew 22:19] Show me the coin used for paying the tax. "They brought him a denarius, [20] and he asked them, "Whose image is this? And whose inscription?" [21] "Caesar's," they replied. Then he said to them, "So give back to Caesar what is Caesar's, and to God what is God's." [22] When they heard this, they were amazed. So they left him and went away.

In Dale Bruner’s classic commentary[1] about this incident, where the Herodians (those Jews in favor of Roman rule) try to trap Jesus into saying He is against the Rome, Bruner discovers two images in this discussion. Certainly the image of Caesar on the denarius belongs to Rome, but when Jesus said to give to God what is God’s, He is speaking of another image - that we all are made in the image of God and owe Him our allegiance.

[Genesis 1:26] Then God said, "Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness,"

God’s image is stamped on our heart, our soul, our mind and our conscience. The mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal said: “Inside each person is a God-shaped vacuum.” We are not satisfied until we let God inhabit us – nothing else can fill that vacuum. Even when we do yield to God, sometimes we get so busy working in the world that we forget that we were created in the image of God (Imago Dei[2]).

The apostle Paul warns: [Romans 1:22] “Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools [23] and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images made to look like a mortal human being and birds and animals and reptiles.”

We can make a cheap trade for instant gratification which will not last, instead of grasping the eternal, which is a much harder, longer road to follow. C.S. Lewis reminds us that God did not give us the Happy Spirit, but the Holy Spirit – and that being holy is hard work. God is not finished perfecting us here on earth.

So lest we be too quick to be critical of the Herodians, we too must keep our eyes firmly fixed on God, to help guide our discernment of what we owe to our government and the world and what we owe to God. And we need to discern when that conflicts with what we owe God, who has put His signature on our heart, through the seal of the Holy Spirit.

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[1] Bruner, Frederick Dale; Matthew, Volume II: The Churchbook – Matthew 13-28; Word, Inc., 1990
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image_of_God