"if a house be divided against itself, that house cannot stand." (Mark 3:25. KJV)
“No one can serve two masters. Either you will hate the one and love the other, or you will be devoted to the one and despise the other."
(Luke 16:13, NIV)
"The light of the body is the eye: if therefore thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be full of light. But if thine eye be evil, thy whole body shall be full of darkness." Matthew 6:22-23, KJV)
British Psychiatrist R.D. Laing wrote a landmark book, The Divided Self: An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness, in 1960, arguing that mental states associated with psychosis were actually rooted in the human impulse to create a false sense of self as a way of coping with feelings of alienation. Jesus already grasped this fundamental truth about the dangerous and divisive inner conflict between true and false understandings of who we are in quotations like these above from the Gospels. He calls for a singularity of vision in dealing with the world and the rejection of "masters" like wealth, power, public adulation, and other soul-destroying temptations that draw us away from faith and trust in God. Swiss Printmaker Max Hunzicker gives us a vivid image of a man torn in two by inner conflict in this second illustration from his 1945 edition of the 17th century German novel, The Adventures of Simplicius Simplicissimus. (John Kohan)