So You Wanna See a Picture of Jesus?

“If Jesus is the image of the invisible God, how do we see Jesus today? Jesus is not to be worshipped through physical icons or images. We have no account of him teaching his disciples to draw or sketch or sculpt. We have books they wrote but no images that remain for our adoration. In fact, the earliest image we have found of Christ was made in derision. It was found on the wall of a Roman catacomb. It is a cross with a stick figure and a donkey’s head with the mocking inscription scrawled beneath: “Aleximenos worships his god.”

John of Damascus said that to deny icons was to deny the incarnation. It may be that in his day some who denied the use of icons did deny the incarnation, but those who went before him neither denied the incarnation nor used icons. The point of the incarnation was never the mere physical appearance of Christ. It was the life of flesh and blood that he lived out. Christ could probably not be identified in a photo of him with the 12 disciples. There was nothing distinctive in his appearance (Isa. 53:3). But let that photograph become a moving picture, and I think by his loving interaction with others, his glory would begin to appear.

Do not misunderstand me. I do not mean to deride our desire for the visible. People say this is a visible age. Every age is a visible age. We are made to crave the immediacy of sight. We naturally desire to see God immediately, but that blessing was taken from us at the fall. We live in salvation history in the era not of the eye but of the ear. One day that glorious immediacy of seeing God will be restored to us—that is the climax of the Bible. That is the consummation we find in Revelation 22:4—they shall see God! Until then, God is most visible, it seems, not in two-dimensional paintings, but in the lives lived out in the local church. That is his plan for church membership: to display oh his nature of goodness and love and so bring him praise.”

--Mark Dever, “The Practical Issue of Church Membership,” in Those Who Must Give an Account