Little Shop of Horrors

Then he said to me, Son of man, have you seen what the elders of the house of Israel are doing in the dark, each in his room of pictures? For they say, The LORD does not see us, the LORD has forsaken the land. -- Ezekiel 8:12

Those of us who are not famous and influential live and act within modest confines.  We care for our families, do our jobs, do our duty.  None of it seems terribly significant against the scale of human history and even less so compared to the immensity of the universe.  But we are important.  What we think and what we do matters to God, who cares much less about governments, political systems, and economies than He does about the individuals who are involved and affected by those things.  A government is transitory.  If a nation lasts a thousand years, it is as a day to the Lord.  An individual soul is eternal.

Paul says that our bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit , that the body is for the Lord, and the Lord for the body.  We build great cathedrals to God's glory, that we may gather and praise Him in the congregation.  This is good, but the Lord is at home in the frail frame of human clay.  The temple of Solomon was a magnificent structure.  The interior, though, was rather simple.  There was a Holy Place and a Most Holy Place.  Only a veil separated the two.  The same design had been in the tabernacle of Moses.  When Christ died, the veil in the temple was torn in two from top to bottom.  This signified the opening of the way directly to the presence of the Lord.

We tend to keep things in separate chambers.  We like rooms in our houses.  Even my parents first slapdash shack had two rooms.  The outhouse was downstream a ways.  In modern America, we have distinct rooms, walls and doors to separate and isolate everything.  We have kitchens and dining rooms, bedrooms, bathrooms, family rooms, living rooms, recreation rooms, and sun rooms.  We have garages for our cars and shops for our tools, walk-in closets for our clothes, basements and attics.  We have schools -- all divided up by grades and groups, where we learn, job sites and offices where we work, places where we shop, places we go to be entertained, places we go to eat, even places we go to worship God.  Division and distinction come naturally to us, and, for the most part, it is harmless when it's not beneficial.

But within ourselves, in the temple where the Spirit dwells, there are no rooms.  It is all one Holy of Holies.  Moses and Solomon acknowledged the separation of soul and spirit, the partition that has to exist apart from the Cross, not by God's will, but by our own inability to dwell always in His presence. 

Do I have my room of pictures?  Do I have something that I look at that I would rather God did not see?  Let's not fool ourselves into thinking we are talking just about naked women -- or, I guess, naked men.  Nor is it limited to idolatry of one kind or another.  It may be something dark and sinful -- lust, hatred, greed, or envy.  But it may also be something that hurts us, a wound we hide, some wrong done to us or by us that we can't bear to have Him look upon.  It doesn't matter if my room of pictures is the size of a trunk or the Louvre; it's still a shut off place, something I want to hold for myself, that I don't want God to clean out or even rearrange.  I have it the way I like it.  It is mine.

Maybe you say that you do not have such a room, but I would ask you if there is a place to which you retreat in difficulty.  I have an angry room.  When the pressure is on, that's where I am apt to head.  I always slam the door behind me.  The elders of Israel didn't just go down in their dark room for no reason.  They saw the troubles of their people and themselves, and they said, God has forsaken the land.  I mean, what are we supposed to do in an undead attack?  We barricade ourselves in some place, our safe place, our room of pictures.

And what is a picture?  It can be a reminder of the love and joy and happiness we have experienced at different times, an anchor in reality.  There's nothing wrong with that.  We won't have any problem showing God that picture -- in fact, that's the kind He usually shows us, pictures from the Logos, of the perfections of heaven.

Sadly, pictures can also be a means of creating something unreal, of distorting, isolating, and objectifying reality.  If our room of pictures becomes our reality, if we prefer to live in an intellectualized, romanticized, simplified representation then we are going to wall ourselves off from God.  The danger is that our very understanding of God will become distorted, stripped of awe, and neutered.  We might even convince ourselves we could take His place.  Sealed in the darkness with our images and imaginations, we are truly trapped in a chamber of horrors, next door to hell. 

Don't add any more bricks to the wall.  Tear it down.