Submitted by Andy McIlvain.
What is a mirror? Almost all of us get up in the morning and look into one. We look into the mirror and we recognize ourselves. This is unique in all of creation. A dog or cat, for example, sees a stranger or an intruder when they gaze into a mirror.
The dictionary defines a mirror as a reflective surface, now typically of glass coated with a metal amalgam that reflects a clear image.
Mirrors can be made of many things, stone or metal for example. Mirrors in the middle-ages were controlled by a secret guild. Today they are mass produced and used for everything from home decorating to the Hubble Space Telescope. The largest manmade mirror is the Large Binocular Telescope on Mount Graham with a diameter of 27 feet across, weighing about 20 tons, made of 40 mm thick glass, and costing about $4 million.
Mirrors have always been about light and looking. And their symbolism relates to our contradictory nature of wanting to know reality and yet yearning for mystery and illusion.
When we look into the mirror what we see is a reversed image, right to left. The true expressions and emotions conveyed by your face and eyes are backwards.
This is much like the image of our creator that we reflect NOW in this earthly life. We are not the true image of God that we were intended to reflect. Sin has distorted and disordered that image, it is backwards.
To image God means we are to display him and his character in our lives. To recover that ability we must be redeemed and sanctified by Jesus and the Holy Spirit as we mature and grow in faith.
God is the true reality and we are the image of that reality. So we must talk and act in a way that reflects God and his character to the world around us. Our behavior, our thinking, and feelings reveals to the world the WHY of our existence and life.
Have you ever heard of a True Mirror? A True Mirror is a non-reversing mirror.
From the very beginning of Scripture in Genesis humans were created to glorify God (Genesis 1:27; Isaiah 43:7). That image has been stamped on us. We represent him in a world of sin and chaos. Each of us is unique and complex with a combination of gifts and skills that no one else has.
That image includes our morality – our sense of right and wrong – our rationality with reason, and spirituality as we relate to God. Another image we exhibit is our aesthetic sense in art in all its many forms, which is unique to humankind and a reflection of our creator.
Christ is our true mirror, he is the image, and people are created in his image.”
Christ is the glorious image to whom we look, and as we look to him our personhood is restored.