Its beauty will justify the effort |
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Soaring 700 feet above the forest floor is a granite dome two miles long and a mile wide. Stone Mountain, 16 miles east of Atlanta, Georgia, was the ideal site for a memorial to General Robert E. Lee.
Only in 1958 did the Georgia state legislature create a memorial association to buy the mountain. Sculptor Walter Kirtland Hancock resumed the work in 1963, completing it in 1970. Hancock's epic sculpture depicts General Robert E. Lee, Lieutenant General Thomas J. “Stonewall" Jackson, and Confederate President Jefferson Davis, all riding majestic horses. The figures are so colossal that at the dedication 30 men were able to stand on Lee's shoulder. God wanted the likeness of His Son to be spectacular and to remain beyond the day when the figures on Stone Mountain will have eroded to a pile of gravel. His design was conceived in eternity and initiated at Calvary, but to this day the carving continues in your heart and mine (Rom. 8:28-30). The project will be completed if we do not call a halt to it (1 John 3:1-3). What a tragedy it would be, what a waste of centuries of sacrifice and effort, if the divine Sculptor had to abandon His work! Just after visiting Stone Mountain, I found myself viewing it again from the air, because the site is below a holding pattern for the Atlanta airport. The beauty of the final sculpture more than justifies the years of struggle and toil required to complete it. So will ours. |
| —Steve Singleton DeeperStudy.com |
Want to go deeper?The Greek noun eikōn ("image, likeness") occurs 23 times in the New Testament. All three references in the gospel accounts (Mark 12:16; Matt. 22:20; Luke 20:24) concern Jesus' question to those trying to entrap Him by forcing Him to take a public position on Roman taxation. Jesus called for a coin and then asked, "Whose image is this?" When His opponents replied that it was Caesar's, Jesus sprang a trap of His own: "Give Caesar what belongs to him and to God what belongs to Him." Implicit in His reply is the question, what bears God's image in a way analagous to how the coin bears Caesar's. The answer is every human being (see Genesis 1:26-27; 5:1). So the drawn out way of stating Jesus reply would be, give Caesar what bears His image (coins), but let God have what bears His image (human beings, you in particular). Paul also refers back to the beginning, at which the Creator hard-wired His own image into the psycho-socio-somatic composition. He points out that the first man was the image and glory of God (1 Cor. 11:7), and that Christ is God's image (2 Cor. 4:4; Col. 1:15). He draws a contrast between that first Adam, whose image of dust we bear now, and Christ, the second Adam, whose heavenly image we will bear at the End Time (1 Cor. 15:49; cf. 2 Cor. 4:4). Paul says by the Spirit we Christians are being transformed into Christ's image in greater and greater degrees of glory (2 Cor. 3:18; Col. 3:10), according to God's purpose that the redeemed should be conformed to the image of His Son (Rom. 8:29). Other occurrences of "image" refer back to the prohibition (Exod. 20:4; Deut. 5:8) of fashioned images commonly used as idols. In describing the sins of the nations, Paul mentions their rejecting God's glory and fashioning images of created things for them to worship (Rom. 1:23). This theme of rebellious idol-making carries into Revelation, especially regarding the worship of the Beast through his image (Rev. 13:14-15; 14:9, 11; 15:2).
Michael Wilkins. In His Image: Reflecting Christ in Everyday Life (1997) If your desire is to be more like Christ, it's important that you understand the relationship between following him and becoming like him--and that's exactly what Wilkins clearly explains in this book! His invaluable insights as a New Testament professor will help you reflect Christ's image in a world in desperate need of the Son's light. Recommended for online reading: Andreas Juergen C. Caspers. The Footsteps of Christ (Eng. ed., 1871). Four sections are Christ For Us (33 chapters), Christ In Us (33), Christ Before Us (16), and Christ Through Us (3). |
In 1915 the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) obtained a deed from the owners of the mountain, accepting their proviso that the work be completed by 1928. They hired sculptor Gutzon Borglum, who began cutting in 1923. After a dispute with the sponsors, Borglum abandoned the project to work on Mount Rushmore. Although another sculptor, Augustus Lukeman, resumed the task in 1925, he was unable to finish by the 1928 deadline, and the original owners reclaimed the mountain, abruptly stopping the project.
