Resting your imagination on God

The original version of My Utmost for His Highest daily thoughts reads…

Thou wilt keep him in perfect peace whose imagination is stayed on Thee. Isaiah 26:3 (RV margin).

The updated version has…

You will keep him in perfect peace, whose mind is stayed on You. Isaiah 26:3

And throughout the daily meditation, Oswald Chambers’ word ‘imagination’ is changed to ‘mind’. This may seem a helpful update to many but I don’t think it captures what OC is wanting to say. Oswald Chambers was an artist and towards the latter years of his life developed a passion for the ‘redemption’ of the world of art and creativity. Such a vision must begin with the individual. OC is addressing the topic of the creative powers of imagination rather than the cerebral capacities of the mind.

Let me try to illustrate, as I see it. Have you read much of Thomas Hardy? I really enjoy most Victorian novelists but Hardy is hard work. Everything that can possibly go wrong will go wrong in a Hardy novel. Crucial mistimings, cruel coincidences. If Hardy had any notion of Providence it was mischievous and cruel interference in the patterns of life. He had a fertile imagination but his novels are atheistic in the sense that God is conspicuous by his absence. If the world were really as imagined by Hardy you would hardly dare go out of doors.

Hardy is not alone in this but the phenomenon is brought into sharp focus in his writings. In fact, and this is why it is important for all reading of novels, God is almost never present; it is true of TV soaps too. Their tangled stories are told in a God-forsaken world. This is why Christians need to be cautious in their reading and their watching. In reading almost all novels they will immerse themselves in a world in which there is no Providence and no grace. Human beings are alone in these worlds and have to make do as best they can.

Those are the worlds that we inhabit with our worries. We imagine the consequences or sequences of events that may happen, will probably happen, at some time in the future but God is seldom in these imagined worlds. Our imaginations play their games in a God-forsaken landscape. We step into an imagined world in which there is no hope and we are ‘without God’ in the world. These imagined worlds will have a formative effect on our mindset. They fashion our mind’s imaginative creativity ‘according to this world’.

How can we escape the pervasion of propaganda that rains down on us? How then can we be prepared against the barrage? Is there no safe place? There is a way, relying on the mercies of God, we present our bodies a living sacrifice that is holy, set apart, acceptable to God and which is our ‘logical’ service.

  In that day shall this song be sung in the land of Judah: We have a strong city; salvation will he appoint for walls and bulwarks. Open ye the gates, that the righteous nation which keepeth faith may enter in. Thou wilt keep him in perfect peace, whose mind (imagination ASV mg) is stayed on thee; because he trusteth in thee. Trust ye in Jehovah for ever; for in Jehovah, even Jehovah, is an everlasting rock. (Isa 26:1–4 ASV)

“Perfect peace’ is a repetition of the same word. In Hebrew, shalōm, shalōm. – the ultimate peace. We may refuse to imagine a world or a future without God. In all our ways we acknowledge him and are confident that he will direct our paths. We may stay (lean all your weight) upon God himself. We refuse to imagine any scenario that does not include the presence and power of God. Because we trust him we can lean hard upon him, and because we lean hard upon him we know his perfect peace garrisoning our hearts.

The imagination is a powerful weapon for those who rest upon the everlasting rock.

https://www.hymnal.net/en/hymn/h/718