Bumping the Pedestal

They were all there: the politicos with their finely honed public persona as movers-and-shakers. They had a question to ask the simply dressed nuisance who kept bumping into their pedestals.
Would He, as King, expect his people to pay taxes to the unpopular government of Rome?  

Jesus called for a coin and drew attention to the engraving of Tiberius Caesar. Then, to this crowd who thought of image in terms of manufactured prestige and spin, He raised the issue of image as a sign of ownership. 

“Give to Caesar what is Caesar’s; give to God what is God’s.”
The point could not be missed. Beneath all their posturing they, as human beings, bore the image of God and, therefore, belonged to Him not themselves. 

Every human being possesses this stamp of ownership. Our skills of thought, language and creativity testify to God’s wisdom and power. Our sensitivities to goodness, justice, mercy and love testify to God’s character. All these and others demand acknowledgement of His original ownership. 

Our first step away from that ownership was the deliberate sham of re-creating ourselves after our own image-ination. The result has been a religious, political, philosophical and materialistic determination to erase “In His Image” from our conscience – explaining it away as a chance collection of scratches arbitrarily called “humanity.” 

Such a treacherous denial is corrected only by faith in the One, revealed in the Bible, who came as the precise image of God, the rightful Lord and the only Savior. This faith “gives to God that which is God’s” in the simple confession: “God be merciful to me, the sinner.” From that first step, God’s intends to move us forward on the path of awareness of His ownership, letting Him develop the character of Jesus in our lives as image-bearers, not spin-masters.