Ever since Anthony van Leeuwenhoek (1632-1723), who was a master lens grinder, put together the first microscope and saw his tiny "animalcules" or "tiny beasties;" and ever since Galileo looked through his crude telescope at Jupiter's moons, man has been using lenses and prisms to bend light to his own purposes. From microscopes to telescopes, from cameras to eyeglasses we bend light to retrieve, process and transmit information. This bending is called refraction, and it depends on the phenomenon that light travels at slightly different speeds in different media. Every time light passes from one medium to another, it is refracted due to this difference in velocity. A big problem with refraction is that different colors are refracted different amounts; this is called chromatic aberration. Thus, the lenses in any optical instrument must be corrected to compensate for this aberration with achromatic lenses. Sir Isaac Newton was the first to show this color separation of colors during refraction. When he passed white light through a prism it broke up into a wide color band, called a spectrum. When he passed this through another prism, the colors rejoined into white light again. From this he concluded that white light is a mixture of pure colors. We can observe this color dispersion in many common places such as in rainbows, in crystals, and in soap bubbles.
There is another way we have of changing the direction of light rays, that is by reflection. This occurs when light bounces off a smooth surface so that the angle of reflection equals the angle of incidence. In reflection there is no chromatic aberration since all colors are reflected at equal angles. It is much easier to grind a parabolic mirror than to grind a lens, so all large telescopes use mirrors to focus light on the eyepiece. Mirrors are a convenient device to look at oneself, albeit, even here we get a distorted image, since the reflection is bilaterally reversed.
The Bible states that our picture of God is a puzzling or cloudy reflection (1 Cor. 13:12). Our image of God obtained from nature is certainly distorted from the perfect world God created before it was destroyed by the Flood. Jesus may have revealed God's character, but the closest the disciples came to seeing Him as God was on the Mount of Transfiguration. Moses, even though he talked to God, for his own protection was only allowed to see God's back parts (Ex. 33:20.23).
Parents are in the place of God to their children, and how often we give them the wrong impression of Him. We may be the only image of God that somebody will see. How important it is that, imperfect as we are, we should strive to be "God's reflection."
