What agreement does a temple of God have with idols? For you are a temple of the living God. Even as God said, “I will dwell in them and walk in them. I will be their God and they will be my people.”
Idols: the false objects a mind places between itself and its brother, blocking the light of Christ only while belief keeps them standing
Christian Psychology lens · 2 Corinthians 3:7
They stripped him, and took his head and his armor, and sent into the land of the Philistines all around, to carry the news to their idols, and to the people.
Now concerning things sacrificed to idols: We know that we all have knowledge. Knowledge puffs up, but love builds up.
Little children, keep yourselves from idols.
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The veil is the belief in separation, the only thing that has ever hidden the face of Christ, which is what God's Son looks like when he is seen as he is. What lies across the heart is sin, and sin is drapery rather than stone, light enough that two standing before it together can raise it between them. Fear of God hangs there as well, a second covering over the same glory, and the shining once hidden from a whole people was never too strong for them to bear. They were afraid to look.
The blindness lies over the whole world's understanding and not over one people bent above an old book, and what lifts it is the Word of God heard in stillness, which wakes whoever has been sleeping through the reading. Turning toward the Lord is the instant in which idols are recognized as nothing. Idols are the objects a mind sets between itself and its brother and then asks to stand in for God, and they block the light of Christ only for as long as belief holds them upright.
Beyond the cloth is a mirror. A mind reflects whatever it consents to be shown, the holiness of its Creator or the darkness the ego offers, and when the glory of the Lord appears in it the one looking is seeing his own true face, because what shines in Christ's countenance is what he is. To be changed into that same image is to become a spotless mirror standing in the world, so that his Creator's holiness falls from him on everyone who comes near. No gap is left between him and the brother who raised the covering with him, and the Presence beyond it is entered by the two of them together.
The body is the temple, and the dwelling of the divine is inside a person, not in any building of stone. Idols are the outward forms and fixed images the mind sets up and bows to, the frozen objects of worship that can share no ground with the living presence. Being the temple of the living God is carrying that presence as the very structure of the flesh, indwelt and walked through from within.
The house and its occupant are one thing, the sanctuary a person already is. There is no agreement between this indwelling life and the dead images, because a living presence cannot be lodged in a fixed form.
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