My Screen Is Too Small

Not long ago, a colleague sent a photo of his family by e-mail, and I wrote him back thanking him for it. It was really good of him and his two sons. I remarked that his wife must have been behind the camera, and to tell her we missed seeing her. It was only later, when I opened the file to show Abbie the picture, that I noticed the scroll bars at the bottom and the side of the screen. Aha! there was more to the picture than I first thought. Not only was his wife "hiding" off to the right, but their third son was, also. Well, he had entitled it "Family Picture." That should have been my first clue. I quickly fired back another e-mail and admitted my mistake.

I'm sure it's happened to you. Someone sends you a photo via e-mail and the file is so large that the whole picture won't fit on the screen. It reminded me of man's attempts to understand God. No matter how we try, we'll never get the whole picture on the screen. That doesn't mean we can't catch real and true glimpses of God and His nature, though. The initial view I had of the family picture was true and accurate, just incomplete.

Creation is one of the ways God has revealed Himself to us, but sin has smudged the lens, scratched the film and created a fog that keeps that image from being clear to us. Not only is creation marred by the effects of sin, so that what we see is not in the state God originally created it in, our own spiritual vision has been affected. "Blindness in part is happened..." not only to Israel, but to mankind as a whole.

Taking the comparison a bit further, perhaps we could say that Jesus, God Incarnate, is as close as we get to a reduced image of God, one that comes closer to fitting on our screen...a true image of His nature, but clothed in human flesh, giving but an inkling of His full glory that allows us to see the Father.

Sadly, many have "clicked" on to an image that's been falsely labelled as "God". Satan has many such images to offer, and no amount of focusing or image editing will produce a true picture.

In the case of my colleague's picture, I used the scroll bars and was able to move around the image and see all of the family members. In man's dealing with the various sources of the true revelation of God's person (whether through nature, the Bible, or the person of Jesus), I wonder whom I pity most: those who are frustrated because they can't see the whole picture of God at one time, so they give up even seeking; those who reduce Him to a thumbnail size they can conveniently transport at will; or those who forget to use the scroll bars and think that what they see is all there is to God, and woe to others who suggest there is more to God beyond the narrow limits of their screen.