SERMON - You shall not make any graven images - 26th May 2024 - Glenboig Christian Fellowship
![Second Commandment]](/media/second.webp)
Click below to listen to the sermon being preached:
After a few weeks’ break, we return this morning to our series on the Ten Commandments. As I hope you’ll remember, the last time I was here we covered the Lord’s first Commandment, that we should have no other gods but Him (Ex. 20. 2-3), and in the sermon before that we considered the Commandments as a whole, locating them in time and in theology, considering how and why they are still an essential part of our faith as Christians. You’ll hopefully also recall that, in the first sermon, we considered how each commandment has a positive and negative instruction – that is to say each commandment has a list of things we should do, and a list of things we should not do, attached to it. In circumstances where the commandment reads ‘You shall not’, we must consider the corresponding ‘You shall’, and where the commandment is a ‘You shall’, we must consider the corresponding ‘You shall not’.
So let us turn to the second Commandment:
You shall not make for yourself a carved image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. You shall not bow down to them or serve them, for I the LORD your God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children to the third and the fourth generation of those who hate me, but showing steadfast love to thousands of those who love me and keep my commandments. (Ex. 20. 4-6)
In his famous book, ‘Knowing God’, the writer and preacher J. I. Packer asked his readers what they thought of when hearing the word ‘idolatry’. Perhaps, he wrote, it conjures up images of “Savages grovelling before a totem-pole? Cruel-faced statues in Hindu temples? The dervish-dance of the priests of Ba’al around Elijah’s altar?”[^1] All of these examples are, of course, idolatrous, but Packer goes on to explain how we need to see past this if we are to really understand the Lord God’s intention in giving us this Commandment.
If you wanted a short, to the point, explanation of the second Commandment, you could find it in the Heidelberg Catechism. This catechism, which dates from Germany in the 1560s, contains many helpful gems for the Christian life. At question 96, we can read:
Question: What does God require in the second commandment? Answer: That we in no wise make any image of God, nor worship Him in any other way than He has commanded in His Word. 1
What, then, can we learn from this Commandment? It appears we can condense it into four headings:
- This commandment refers to the worship of God
- There is a right form of worship (and there are many wrong forms too!)
- Images dishonour God… a. … and mislead us.
- The instruction doesn’t just cover physical images, but mental images too.
To begin, we should understand that this commandment is only concerned with images in the context of worship. While some believers may have taken it to this extreme in the past, there is nothing in the passage that forbids the use of art for art’s sake. A landscape, a kaleidoscope of colour, even a portrait, is not in and of itself sinful. The artwork, the image, only becomes sinful if its aim is a) to represent God or b) to be used in worship.
So why, then, is God so anti images in worship? In order to understand this, we have to come to terms with a Biblical truth, which is that there is a right way to worship God. This may come across as rather legalistic, and certainly does not fit in with the zeitgeist within the Church and the world which says that we should just do things in ways that work for us – but Scripture tells us that there are things we should, and indeed things we should not, do when worshipping the Lord. There are some things which, when we do them in worship, please God, and there are some things which disgust Him.
We can see this in various Scripture passages: Jeremiah 6. 20, Amos 5. 21-23, Isaiah 1. 11: all of these verses, and more besides, are examples of the Lord God rejecting worship, not because He is picky, but because He wants to make sure we are not getting lost in falsehood. As the preacher Greg Ho explains, “Modern Christians in America seem to completely take for granted that God will accept whatever is thrown up at Him”,2 and of course we know this is not just the case in America, but throughout the world and throughout the Church. It is the job of Church leaders, and indeed every Christian, to make sure that the worship they are offering Almighty God is in-keeping with His commands. The Larger Catechism, explaining the second commandment, tells us that (among other things):
The sins forbidden in the second commandment are, all devising, counselling, commanding, using, and any wise approving, any religious worship not instituted by God Himself. 3
But let us return to the question, why is God so anti imagery? Packer explains this well, himself quoting Charles Hodge, when he says that “idolatry consists not only in the worship of false gods [which we covered last time I was here], but also in the worship of the true God by images”. 4
Perhaps it seems strange to us that God is so concerned about this. After all, we may well know people who have religious imagery about their homes: perhaps a crucifix here, or a religious picture there. Many Christians, good Christian people, would explain that gazing on such imagery helps them to pray, perhaps reminding of them of a particular point in Jesus’ life, or of a particular Bible story. We know all too well that the majority of Christians around the world worship in churches full of images, whether Roman Catholic, or Eastern Orthodox, or Lutheran, or Anglican: all of these denominations make, to one extent or other, use of imagery in their worship and in their churches. Such Christians, looking at the second Commandment, would make the seemingly reasonable assumption that what it forbids are “immoral or degrading”5 images of the Divine, and nothing more. Such images, sadly, are rife. Indeed, in my first year at the University we were shown, in the name of academia, two images: one of which was a crucifix bearing the body of Jesus, suspended in a glass bottle full of urine. It was, supposedly, making a point about something or other. The other image, equally appalling, was of people dressed in very sexualised clothing, with masks and chains and handcuffs, standing at the foot of the Cross. Needless to say, this commandment clearly prohibits those (and indeed I complained to the University authorities about them!).
However, the way that God words the commandment shows us that this is not the extent of the rule. The fact that God says we must not use images of “anything” (Ex. 20. 4) in our worship shows us that this command goes further. There are two reasons for this:
The first is that images dishonour God, because they “obscure His glory”.6 However we may choose to display God, we can be sure that He is not like it. If we were to display Him as a man with a great beard, sitting on a cloud, we would be wrong. If we were to display Him as an animal, a bull or a goat, we would be wrong. The sixteenth century theologian, John Calvin, in his commentary on Exodus 20, explains that “A true image of God is not to be found in all the world… His glory is defiled, and His truth corrupted by the lie, whenever He is set before our eyes in visible form.”7
Let us take mankind as an example. You and I know that humanity is the highest creature on earth. We know that God made man and woman in His own image, and that He has given mankind sovereignty over all other creatures. Therefore it would be reasonable to say that the most prestigious image we could give God would be human form. To display God as a chicken would be to denigrate Him. However, in displaying God as a man (or a woman), we would be implying that He had arms, that He had legs. This, in itself, is bad enough (for He has neither), but the problem goes deeper. For wrapping God up in a human image not only claims anatomy that God doesn’t have, but it disguises characteristics that He does have. After all, how could we ever hope to display God’s grace, or God’s mercy, or His power, or His wisdom, in the image of a man?
This is taken to a whole new level when we consider what Aaron did while Moses was up the mountain. Turn with me to Exodus 32 where we can read that, while Moses was collecting the tablets of stone from God Himself, Aaron had prepared a golden calf (or bull) and set it before the people as an image of God.
When the people saw that Moses delayed to come down from the mountain, the people gathered themselves together to Aaron and said to him, “Up, make us gods who shall go before us. As for this Moses, the man who brought us up out of the land of Egypt, we do not know what has become of him.” So Aaron said to them, “Take off the rings of gold that are in the ears of your wives, your sons, and your daughters, and bring them to me.” So all the people took off the rings of gold that were in their ears and brought them to Aaron. And he received the gold from their hand and fashioned it with a graving tool and made a golden calf. And they said, “These are your gods, O Israel, who brought you up out of the land of Egypt!” When Aaron saw this, he built an altar before it. And Aaron made a proclamation and said, “Tomorrow shall be a feast to the LORD.” And they rose up early the next day and offered burnt offerings and brought peace offerings. And the people sat down to eat and drink and rose up to play.
And the LORD said to Moses, “Go down, for your people, whom you brought up out of the land of Egypt, have corrupted themselves. They have turned aside quickly out of the way that I commanded them. They have made for themselves a golden calf and have worshiped it and sacrificed to it and said, ‘These are your gods, O Israel, who brought you up out of the land of Egypt!’” And the LORD said to Moses, “I have seen this people, and behold, it is a stiff-necked people. Now therefore let me alone, that my wrath may burn hot against them and I may consume them, in order that I may make a great nation of you.” (Exodus 32. 1-10)
Aaron likely had good intentions in doing this: after all, a bull was seen as a strong creature, perhaps even uncontrollable. In depicting God like this, Aaron was ascribing strength to the Lord. However the flipside of this came when we consider what else Aaron was claiming about God – does a bull have love? Does it have mercy? Does it have patience? Aaron’s image, although intending to show God’s strength, did Him a great dishonour by hiding his other characteristics.
Or perhaps we can see this from the crucifix. To differentiate from a cross, a crucifix is a model or image of a cross with Jesus hanging on it. Some people use the words cross and crucifix interchangeably, but this is incorrect. Lots of Catholics have particular devotion to the crucifix, you often see them in their churches and homes. While the crucifix does a good job at displaying Christ’s humanity and suffering, it does little (if anything) to display His sovereignty, His power, or indeed the fact He is the Son of God. “It depicts the reality of His pain, but keeps out of our sight the reality of His joy and His power.”8 This is why, in his letter to the Romans, Paul describes those who looked unto idols and statues as “fools”, who “exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and creeping things… [they] served the creature rather than the Creator.” (Rom. 1. 23-25)
The second reason is that not only do images dishonour God, but they mislead us by conveying false ideas about Him. Put it this way, most if not all of us will have seen a picture of Jesus in a child’s Bible, and probably seen Him depicted as a white man with blue eyes and blonde hair. And yet we know that, given the part of the world He lived in, this is extraordinarily unlikely to have been the case! Or, returning to Aaron’s bull or calf, we can see that the people’s response to seeing the image of the uncontrollable animal was to worship it with wild frenzy. Aaron called it “a feast to the Lord” (Ex. 32. 5), yet Biblical commentators describe it as a “shameful orgy”!9
In his ‘Notes on the Book of Exodus’, Mackintosh explains that:
*The enemy [satan] is ever active in seeking to make us cast away these divine realities, take up the ‘graving tool’ of unbelief, and ‘make gods’ for ourselves. *10
And don’t we see this to be true in our own lives, friends? We see something in God that we don’t like, or don’t agree with, and all too often we seek to excise that bit from Him (with our ‘graving tool of unbelief’) and make out that ‘our God isn’t like that’. Then we worship the god we wish we had, not the God we do have.
The danger, explains Packer, is that:
Psychologically, it is certain that if you habitually focus your thoughts on an image or picture of the One to whom you are to pray, you will come to think of Him, and pray to Him, **as the image represents Him. Thus you will in this sense ‘bow down’ and ‘worship’ your image; and to the extent to which your image fails to tell the truth about God, to that extent you fail to worship God in truth. *11
However, lest you come away from this sermon thinking that it is just a Michael rant against stonemasons and painters, it is important for us to realise that images are not only molten: they can be mental too. This is why the Larger Catechism counsels against “making any representation of God, of all or of any of the three persons, either inwardly in our mind, or outwardly in any kind of image”.12
I wonder how often you have heard someone, perhaps within, perhaps outwith, church say, ‘I like to think of God as…’? Perhaps they say, ‘as the Architect’, or ‘as the Artist’, or even ‘as a Force in the Universe’? Or perhaps you have heard the opposite, people saying ‘I don’t think of God as xxx, but rather as yyy’? I’ve certainly come across a number of people who’ve said things like that: ‘I don’t think of God as my Judge, I think of Him as my Friend’. Unfortunately, though, this is also contrary to the second Commandment. It is not for us to imagine God in the way we wish Him to be. After all, just like the artist, the very best we can imagine God to be is as nothing compared to His reality.
I remember when I was in Sunday School. I can’t have been much more than 7 or 8 years old. My Sunday School Teacher asked us all to draw what we imagined God to look like. I know, alarm bells!
I remember sitting and thinking for a moment, before I realised that God is very very powerful. So I tried to think of the most powerful person I had heard of. Then it came to me – God must be like George W. Bush! After all, as President of the USA, Bush was surely the most powerful man I could think of! I therefore, blissfully unaware of the Commandment I was violating, drew God Almighty in the image of the 43rd President of the United States of America!
And yet, friends, we know that “God is not any sort of man. We were made in His image, but we must not think of Him as existing in ours.”13 The Apostle Paul was clear about this when he wrote to the Corinthians. In his first letter to them, Paul explained that “the world did not know God through wisdom”. (1 Cor. 1. 21) It was not by thinking really really hard that mankind could come to know God. It was not through imagining Him in really clever ways. Rather, following the wisdom of our own hearts is a sure-fire way to remain thoroughly “ignorant of God, and to become an idol-worshipper.”14
I keep coming back to this, I know, and we are only on the second commandment as it is(!), but you will remember that with every commandment comes a positive and a negative. We have spent a lot of time thus far concentrating on the negatives. I think we can all understand some of the reasons that the Lord forbids us to worship using imagery, but let’s now think to the positives.
If we cannot know God through images, or through our imagination, how then can we come to know Him? This commandment encourages us to rest in the knowledge that God is beyond all human knowledge and comprehension. To try and imagine Him would be to try and restrict Him to our human wisdom, and this is simply impossible. It is therefore a “summons to us to humble ourselves, to listen and learn of Him, and to let Him teach us what He is like and how we should think of Him.”15
God tells us in His Word, does He not, that “my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways” (Isa. 55. 8), while Paul (in that beautiful cry of the contented believer) declares, “Oh, the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable His judgements and how inscrutable His ways!” (Rom. 11. 33)
If we want to get to know God, therefore, it must be on His terms. We will never be able to comprehend our way up to Him, nor can we rely on other people’s interpretations of Him. Through His Holy Spirit, through His Holy Scripture, “we may form a true notion of God; without it we never can.”16
This is why, in the Heidelberg Catechism, question 98 asks:
*But may not pictures be tolerated in churches as books for the laity? Answer: No: for we should not be wiser than God, who will not have His people taught by dumb idols, but by the lively preaching of His Word. *17
The question we should ask ourselves this morning, having considered all this, is how we stand on this commandment. True, our church here may not be full of religious art. We may not see depictions of Christ on the wall, or an image of God in the corner. Above the communion table there does not hang a crucifix. And in our homes we may not have pictures of Christ, nor an image of a bull symbolising God’s strength. And yet, still we must ask ourselves whether the God whom we worship is the God of the Bible, or the god of our imaginings? Do we worship God “in spirit and in truth”? (Jn. 4. 24) Do we agree with Peter that “we have something more sure [than even the voice of God], the prophetic word [found in Scripture], to which you will do well to pay attention as to a lamp shining in a dark place, until the day dawns and the morning star rises in your hearts”? (2 Pet. 1. 19) Is the God whom we worship the God of the Bible? The Lord Jehovah?
We might ask, ‘How can we tell?’ The answer is relatively simple. Scripture shows us that God has spoken through His Son (Heb. 1. 2), meaning that “the light of the knowledge of the glory of God [is found] in the face of Jesus Christ.” (2 Cor. 4. 6) Therefore, “Do I habitually look to the person and the work of the Lord Jesus Christ as showing me the final truth about the nature and the grace of God?”18
Dear friends, if you have been to Calvary and laid hold of the solution that Christ prepared there for you on the Cross, dying once and for all for your sins, and if you look to Him, fixing your eyes on “the founder and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy that was set before Him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is seated at the right hand of the throne of God”, (Heb. 12. 2) then you can be sure that you are a claimant of eternal life and worshipping the living God in the way that He requires, thanks to the definition that the Lord Jesus Himself gave:
And this is eternal life, that they may know You the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom You have sent. (John 17. 3)
Books cited:
- Calvin, John. ‘Exodus 20’. In Commentary on the Bible. Christian Classics Ethereal Library. Accessed 23 May 2024. https://biblehub.com/commentaries/calvin/exodus/20.htm.
- Greg Ho. ‘Does God Accept Your Worship?’ Sermon, Calvary Community Church, 22 September 2019. https://www.calvaryem.org/sermons/does-god-accept-your-worship/.
- Mackintosh, Charles Henry. Notes on the Book of Exodus. 3rd ed. London: George Morrish, 1862.
- Packer, J. I. Knowing God. Paperback edition. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2013.
- The Heidelberg Catechism or, Method of Instruction in the Christian Religion. Edinburgh: The Banner of Truth Trust, 2013.
- Westminster Divines. ‘The Larger Catechism’. In The Confession of Faith, 49–112. Edinburgh and London: William Blackwood and Sons Ltd., 1969.
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The Heidelberg Catechism or, Method of Instruction in the Christian Religion (Edinburgh: The Banner of Truth Trust, 2013), 66. ↩
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Greg Ho, ‘Does God Accept Your Worship?’ (Sermon, Calvary Community Church, 22 September 2019), https://www.calvaryem.org/sermons/does-god-accept-your-worship/. ↩
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Westminster Divines, ‘The Larger Catechism’, in The Confession of Faith (Edinburgh and London: William Blackwood and Sons Ltd., 1969), 79. ↩
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Packer, Knowing God, 48. ↩
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Ibid. ↩
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Ibid., 49. ↩
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John Calvin, ‘Exodus 20’, in Commentary on the Bible (Christian Classics Ethereal Library), 20, accessed 23 May 2024, https://biblehub.com/commentaries/calvin/exodus/20.htm. ↩
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Packer, Knowing God, 50. ↩
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Ibid., 51. ↩
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Charles Henry Mackintosh, Notes on the Book of Exodus, 3rd ed. (London: George Morrish, 1862), 331. ↩
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Packer, Knowing God, 51. ↩
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Westminster Divines, ‘Larger Catechism’, 79. ↩
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Packer, Knowing God, 52. ↩
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Ibid. ↩
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Ibid. ↩
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Ibid., 53. ↩
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The Heidelberg Catechism or, Method of Instruction in the Christian Religion, 67. ↩
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Packer, Knowing God, 55. ↩