Dangerous Appeal to the Eye

IN THIS present age of illustrations, images and pictures—still and moving, good and bad—the events just cited should make us ponder seriously. Can we not link the rapid decline in morals, the awful increase in crime and murder and violence, to the tremendous emphasis placed on pictures and the appeal to the eye, instead of to the ear of man. In the second commandment there is more than appears on the surface when God said, “You shall not make for yourself a carved image—any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth.” – Deuteronomy 5:8. Surely here is at least a suggestion already of the tremendous danger which lurks in the things that we see instead of those we hear. It is significant that the Bible is not an illustrated book. There are no pictures of any kind in the Bible, and we personally often feel that it is wrong and sacrilegious to insert pictures in the book which God himself left wholly without illustrations. It is a sign of the times that man refuses to hear and listen to God. Man is too busy looking at the things the Devil has prepared for the eye.

Our age is truly the illustrated, the picture age. Everything we do must be illustrated. Everything we advertise must be accompanied by pictures, from beer to soda crackers, and usually with pictures at least suggestive, if not bordering on the obscene. On our billboards, in our magazines, on every page of the newspaper, the appeal is to the eye through the pictures that are there set forth. Many of the illustrations in the average news sheet, not only on the theatre page, but on almost every page, should make one blush for shame.

What page does the family fight about the most? It is always the funnies. Our children go mad over comic books. The array of magazine covers displayed in the literature departments of many of our establishments, drug stores, grocery stores, not even to mention the lewd contraband publications distributed more or less secretly and underground, are a curse and disgrace to a decent community. I remind you again, therefore, that when Eve saw that the tree was good for food, when Lot saw that the plain of Jordan was well watered, when Achan saw a goodly Babylonish garment, that then they began their downward journey.

Adapted and modified excerpts from Studies in the Life of Abraham by M. R. De Haan (1891-1964)
Unless otherwise noted, Scripture taken from the New King James Version®, NKJV Copyright © 1982 by Thomas Nelson. Used by permission. All rights reserved.