While browsing the internet, I came across this blog. The author wrote a post displaying the images that many of us have seen in newspapers, magazines, and the internet that have impacted public perception of things going on in the world.

And as I was reading this post and looking at the images, it amazes me how much a picture can move us. We can read articles in a newspaper about a car crash or an oil spill or a fire, but we can never fully realize the gravity of what happened without a picture. There seems to be something about seeing an image that adds to our understanding. No matter how well we can visualize from the words, it can never be as real as the picture.

The same thing happens when we talk about God and the Bible. We can read all the stories, from Joshua to David to Isaiah to Jesus to Paul, and we can get what they’re saying and what’s going on and the meaning behind it all, but it seems hard sometimes for the stories to seem real because we don’t have a picture to look at. We can imagine what it would have looked like when the walls of Jericho fell down or when Jesus rode through Jerusalem on a donkey. But it’s hard to fully grasp the situation without being able to see it. Jesus wasn’t walking around taking pictures with his Canon PowerShot and then posting them to his MySpace account. Paul wasn’t traveling around taking pictures to put up on Flickr.

That’s where it becomes important to see God moving in today’s world. God was moving and working all throughout Biblical times, and when the Bible ends in Revelation, God doesn’t end. God has continued to move and be present in our world. So although we cannot Google photos of Moses parting the Red Sea, we can know that God is an everpresent God and is still at work in the world. The Bible tells us that God has moved in the world and what he wants the world to move towards and we can definitely encounter God through the Bible. However, the Bible is not meant to be static. It has implications for today, and it drives to seek God in our lives and in the world. And when we find God in the world — and in our lives — we find that picture in which we start to understand what God’s all about. We find God in our reality and not just in our brains.

Words provide understanding and knowledge, but pictures make the words real.