Photo and Commentary ©2024 by Maylan Schurch
Sabbath, July 20, 2024
Friday morning at a busy intersection, the red light was so long that I had a chance to look around a bit. To my left, as part of a rock garden next to the entrance to a bank, I noticed this stone pillar.
Keeping an alert eye on the traffic signal, I snapped a couple of photos, and this is one I had to enlarge later, so it’s a bit fuzzy. I don’t think it’s truly a sculpture, just a rough-carved slab someone thought would be picturesque.
But it gave me a funny feeling nevertheless. If I were an idolator, I thought, and this was supposed to represent a god of wealth, and if I’d been trained from my youth to worship this god, how different might my life be?
As I stared at this rock, my imagination actually began searching for a figure within it. In fact, to me it looks like the image of an older man, head mostly covered with a cloak, crouched on his bent knees.
Shuddering, I blinked a couple of times and thanked God that not only did He firmly forbid worshipping other gods, but He also forbade carving images that might become objects of worship for people with impressionable minds.
And God’s Son Jesus, of course, gave stern warnings about making a deity out of our dollars. You’ll find this news among the Bible texts in the link just below: