A matter of perspective

The Lord is near to all who call on him (Psalm 145:18).

Anyone who wants to create pictures must study perspective. Perspective is what makes things which are far away look small, and things that are close to you look big. If you don’t understand how perspective works, the pictures you create won’t look right.

Of course, some artists love to break the rules of perspective in order to create an interesting visual. M.C. Escher is famous for drawings that appear to violate the laws of nature. In one picture, a man climbs a staircase which circles back on itself, a stairway with no bottom or top. This realistic-looking impossibility is the result of every step being drawn from a slightly incorrect perspective.

Many special effects on TV and in the movies play tricks with perspective. Doorways are sometimes made shorter than they would be in real life; when the audience sees the leading man barely miss hitting his head as he enters the room, he appears to be taller than he really is, making him seem more of a hero.

These illusions work because of how we use perspective to look at things. What this tells us, though, is that we cannot always trust our eyes to be seeing things as they really are. Someone who is clever can fool us by playing tricks with perspective.

The devil is a master at this; he constantly messes with how we see things in order to mislead us. Heaven is where we all want to go, and Jesus stands at the open gate beckoning us onward. But most of us don’t expect to die anytime soon, so the shining gate of heaven appears small in the distance. When we start thinking this way, Satan is quick to hold up a distraction right before our eyes to capture our attention. Under these conditions, money can appear to be more important than the church; popularity can seem more important than moral living; having control can appear to be more important than serving others out of love. When we think of Jesus as someone who is distant from us, it is easy for trivial things to look large and important because we hold them close to us.

But Jesus is larger than anything else—He fills the universe with His power and glory. He is also more important than anything else, since all of creation is under His control. Don’t let the devil fool you with his clever illusions—no matter how things may appear, Jesus is large and He is in charge.