I fired up the GPS and set off to give a sermon halfway up the country. Sometime into the journey, whilst on a new highway, my GPS told me to come off the road and take what appeared to be a less used road. Although this instruction seemed dubious, I faithfully followed my digital guide. Within a few minutes, my doubts grew as I found the road I was now on, completely empty of traffic. I continued more slowly. Then, emerging in the distance was a huge mound of earthworks across the entire road. The road had been closed with no way round the heap of topsoil. The highway I’d just exited to my left, with fast-flowing traffic, had clearly replaced this road. The GPS map was out of date. It did not accurately represent the territory; it did not represent reality. Consequently, it led me the wrong way. And what is true about physical maps can be true about mental maps.
We all have mental maps. These maps reflect our understanding of the territory of reality: “The mind creates maps of reality in order to understand it, because the only way we can process the complexity of reality is through abstraction”[1]. ‘Abstraction’ simply means taking specific pieces of information from what we observe, and forming a sort of summary that we then use as our reference. As we accumulate experience and knowledge, we add to our maps, and sometimes revise them. This is important because we use the maps to make sense of and make decisions about our lives. When Polish-American scientist and philosopher, Alfred Korzybski, wrote that the map is not the territory[2], he was admonishing us to remember that the mental map represents reality, yet it is not reality itself. Yet, we use these maps to make choices in navigating life.
So what if our maps do not adequately represent reality?
I’m reminded of three biblical examples where people had to revise their mental maps because they were inadequate or inaccurate. In each case, there’s a lesson for us in how to update our maps in order to make optimum decisions.
Like the ‘Parable of the Blind Men and the Elephant’, our map may consist of part of the reality. Remember how each of the blind men ‘mapped’ only one part of the beast, which led them to laughably inaccurate conclusions about what they had stumbled upon? The elephant’s trunk is not the entirety of the territory (the elephant). This same problem can be experienced when navigating spiritual terrain, too. What if our spiritual maps, our understanding of the realities of our faith community, our calling, or the plan of God, are not perfectly accurate? Then we will most likely not make the best decisions and need to learn what’s lacking to update our map.
The Parable of the Blind Men and an Elephant is a story of a group of blind men who have never come across an elephant before and who learn and imagine what the elephant is like by touching it.
The closer we can get our map to represent the territory, the better our decisions will be.
At the time of the Exodus, the Israelites, still a slave people in mentality, did not know how to live and act as free people. Their maps were built on experiences and knowledge of living in Egypt. All they had known for generations was control and coercion; they were told what to do, when to do it, and how to do it. This had shaped them into a totally dependent people, whose capability for self-determination just didn’t exist. Their map only informed them of how to follow direct and severe orders. They needed a strong leader and they got one, in the form of Moses. In fact, as recorded in Exodus 18, they brought all their problems to him—he had to spoon-feed them in the form of individual judgments because they were incapable of judging themselves. This Achilles Heel was laid bare by one seemingly innocuous event: one day Moses disappeared up a mountain! He was gone for 40 days and the children of Israel were faced with the reality of being alone and leaderless. What would happen? Their maps could not adequately inform them of how to move through this new reality of being alone. Without someone to tell them what to do every single day, they reverted back to their old maps—they built the golden calf—something familiar, something visible, where they could fill the void of invisible leadership!
They had not updated their maps with the new spiritual terrain. But God soon gave them the update: God instructed them in the Ten Commandments. At the heart of this spiritual reality check was a new identity for Israel as a nation of priests. And the ten commandments were a call to personal responsibility and accountability. For us, just as for the Israelites, feeding on God’s word is one way to update our maps to better represent the territory ahead of us.
In one of the most powerful examples of a deficient map, we have Job. Here was a righteous man who, in light of such right standing with God, could not make sense of his enormous woe, suffering in what appeared as judgment from God. His map told him such suffering was because he had sinned (Job 7:20-21; 10:6-15; 13:23-24). Yet he defended his righteousness (16:15-17; 29-31), feeling God had been unjust because, according to Job’s map, righteous people are blessed, and suffering is only meted out to sinners. This has a truth to it, but Job’s map did not fully represent the reality of how the universe works. It needed to be updated. It was Job’s lived experience, and the feedback along the way, that allowed for a revision of his map. His understanding of how God interacts with the universe was too simple, too formulaic. The way God rules the universe is far more complex, not adequately described by our equations or neat rules of how we think God should work. Instead, God is just and righteous even when bad things happen to good people. Job’s map was updated to better represent the reality.
There are lessons for us here. Job’s friends, in their lengthy dialogue (and sometimes, monologues!) with him, should have helped update Job’s map by bringing to bear their experience and wisdom. That’s one way we update our maps, through counsel and collaboration. But Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar had the same inaccuracy in their maps. It took the feedback of lived experience, explained and reasoned by Elihu and God in later chapters, to enable such a revision. And it is so with us. Don’t put off an update on your map from the feedback your lived experience is telling you.
Finally, we have an example of an inaccurate map from the disciples themselves. After three and a half years walking and talking with Jesus, their map of God’s plan and timeline was deficient, or misinformed, or misunderstood, it’s hard to say which. Whatever the reason, this encounter with the disciples’ map is recorded in the first chapter of Acts: “Therefore, when they had come together, they asked Him, saying, “Lord, will You at this time restore the kingdom to Israel?” (Acts 1:6, NKJV). This was their map! They knew Jesus was the king of Israel, the Messiah, which meant that He would establish the kingdom of Israel as prophesied. But their understanding did not correspond to the reality. This meant they did not know what decisions to make about the future. This is one of the critical problems with mental maps: they lead us to make underinformed or inadequate decisions about the future. So what was Jesus’ response? “You don’t need to know the answer to that question right now, just wait”, Jesus said in effect!
We don’t always have the means to update our map. God may not have revealed the realities, but we can wait. Waiting means we are less likely to make mistakes. But more than that, it allows new information to come over time, informing us what we might have wrong. With the disciples, just 10 days later they were filled with the Holy Spirit and empowered with new experiences and knowledge that helped them update their map of God’s plan. The new map reflected how they had just been placed into God’s Church, through which God would preach and teach many more disciples, in preparation for establishing the kingdom of Israel at the return of Jesus. There was a whole new continent added to their maps that day! Being patient and waiting on God is sometimes the best choice to make an update on our map.
We all have maps. We need maps. They help us make sense of a vastly complex world and help us navigate decisions of a spiritual nature. But as we move through life, trying to discern the spiritual contours and topography to make the best decisions, let’s remember our map is not the territory. The closer we can get our map to represent the territory, the better our decisions will be. As we continue our journeys, we have biblical examples of how to update our maps. Happy updating.
[1] https://fs.blog/map-and-territory/
[2] This idea was introduced and popularised by Polish-American scientist and philosopher Alfred Korzybski.
Auburn - June 4, 2022
What an excellent article! I especially found the example of Moses’ 40 days with God and the Israelites left alone to their own devices particularly relevant in our own church today.