Bible Meaning

The Bible is a book about humankind in our relation to God, and it therefore starts with certain fundamental statements regarding this relation. These are to the effect that death, and consequently disease and decrepitude, are not laws of humankind’s innermost being. How could they be? How could the negative be the law of the positive? How could death be the law of life? Therefore, we are told that in the true order of things, this is not the case.

The first thing we are told about humankind is that we are made in the image and likeness of God, the Spirit of life, therefore capable of manifesting a similar equality of life. But we must note the words “image” and “likeness.” They do not impart identity, but resemblance. An “image” implies an original to which it conforms, and so does a “likeness.” These words remind us of the passage in which St. Paul speaks of our “reflecting as a mirror the glory of the Lord” and being thus “transformed into the same image from glory to glory.” (II Cor. 3:18) It is this same idea as in the first chapter of Genesis, only expanded so as to show the method by which the image and likeness are produced. It is by reflection. Our mind is, as it were, a mirror reflecting that toward which it is turned. This is the nature of mind.

We become like what we contemplate. We cannot avoid it, because we are made that way, and therefore everything depends on what we are in the habit of contemplating. If we realize that growth, or the manifestation of the spiritual principle, always proceeds from the innermost to the outermost, by a creative process from within as distinguished from a constructive process from without, we will see that the working of the mind on the body and the effect it will produce on it depends entirely on what form the mind itself is taking, and what form it will take depends on what it is reflecting.

This is the key to the great enigma. In proportion as we reflect the pure Spirit of life, we live, and in proportion as we reflect the material, contemplating it as a power in itself instead of as the plastic vehicle of the Spirit, we bring ourselves under a law of limitation that culminates in death. It is the same law of mind in both cases, only in the one case it is employed positively and in the other negatively.

From Bible Mystery and Bible Meaning, by Thomas Troward

A Newt List publication, spiritual ebooks updated and gender-neutral

You may also be interested in these related Newt List titles: