You Shall Not Make a Graven Image

We're going to continue today in our study of the Ten Commandments, and this will be the third sermon, and we're going to study the Second Commandment. Now, the Second Commandment, as I was preparing for this sermon, it's a challenging sermon to preach, and it's a challenging text, I think, for us. It's easy for us to read the... second commandment and dismiss the weight of the second commandment to try and shift what it says so that it doesn't seem to have much bearing on our lives. We want to spiritualize it and escape the weight of what it has to say about images and wrestle with that and what the implications are in our own lives. And I want to raise a lot of questions in your mind about images.

And I'm not going to have all the answers. But I think we all get a little uncomfortable when we start thinking about images because in our culture we can't escape them. Images are ubiquitous. They're everywhere. They're all over in our society. And so to think that there is a problem with them or that we might have a problem with them can be an overwhelming thought. It may require us reorienting our entire life. But if God commands something, we'd be foolish to ignore it or to fear to tread where he calls us to. So I have two goals in the main for this morning. And the first one is that I'm going to exhort you to worship God as he has revealed himself to us.

And this has serious implications for how we teach our children and the content and the mediums by which we teach our children and how we consume teaching. I also want to challenge our modern assumptions about images and their usefulness. I want us to hear God's warning from his word because it cuts against the very grain of our culture. All right. If you are able, please stand for the reading of God's holy word. We're going to begin in verse 1, but the passage for today is verses 4 through 6. This is the word of the Lord, and it's eternally true. Then God spoke all these words, saying, I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery. You shall have no other gods before me. You shall not make for yourself an idol or any likeness of what is in heaven above or on the earth beneath.

or in the water under the earth. You shall not worship them or serve them. For I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children, on the third and fourth generations of those who hate me, but showing loving kindness to thousands, to those who love me and keep my commandments. This is the word of the Lord. Thanks be to God. You may be seated. Let's pray again. Father, give us your spirit. May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be honoring to you and in line with your word. Amen. So, as I've said before, the Ten Commandments are given to us as a distillation of God's law. They are a concentration of what God's will and desire is for his people. They spell out what is right and wrong, what God expects of us.

If you go to the store and there will be the juice concentrate, right? That's the Ten Commandments. In the Ten Commandments, God identifies himself. In the first commandment, God identifies himself by saying, I am the Lord. And that ought to remind us of what he said to Moses when he was talking to Moses at the burning bush. Moses is commanded to go to the people of Israel. And he says, but who shall I say sent me? And the Lord says, I am. I am sent you. I am is a complete thought, statement of identity of who he is. It's a claim to absolute sovereignty. In the first commandment, the Lord also goes on to identify himself further by saying that he is the God who brought them out of the land of Egypt, out of the land of slavery. And so he...

tells them that they may not have any other gods before him, but he also tells them who their God is. He identifies himself to the people of Israel. Thus we learn that those who hear this command are given, that hear this command, doubly owe their allegiance to God. First, because God is supreme. He has all authority and power. And the second is because he bought them and he saved them out of slavery. And the first of these are... Reasons applies to all of us in this room. Every individual owes God their allegiance as he is their creator. If you're a Christian, you doubly so owe your allegiance to him. Because not only has he created you, but he saved you. He brought you out of bondage to sin and into his light. He brought you into his presence so that now you're a slave of his.

And so both by his act of creating you and saving you, you owe him your allegiance. And so we have the first great command, to worship God alone. Now, the question then naturally would arise, if we are to worship God, how so? How should our, by what way should we worship God? What are the means we should worship God? What does actual worship of God entail? And that's the second commandment. Like all of the commandments, this commandment has both a narrower meaning and a broader meaning. The broader meaning of the second commandment is that God should only be worshipped as he's commanded us to worship him. Or if we were to state it negatively, that which isn't commanded is forbidden. If we were to study the larger catechism, it asks us what are the duties required in the second commandment.

And the duties that are required in the second commandment are receiving, observing, and keeping pure and entire all such religious worship and ordinances as God hath instituted in his word. Particularly, prayer and thanksgiving in the name of Christ, the reading and preaching and hearing of the word, the administration and the receiving of the sacraments, church government and discipline, the ministry and the maintenance thereof, religious fasting, swearing by the name of God and vowing unto him, as also the disapproving, detesting, opposing of all false worship, and according to each one's place and calling, removing the false worship, and all monuments of idolatry. So that question is the broad definition of idolatry.

Idolatry is worshiping God in any way that God has not prescribed. This would include any adding to or subtraction from how God has commanded himself to be worshiped. And if you were to, and I would highly recommend you do this, go to the larger catechism and look at that question, question 108. it will give you, with every one of those things that they pull out as ordinances and parts of our worship to God, they will give you scripture references. And you could look at them, and you could see, this is how we are to worship God. And so that's the broad view at worshiping God. There's also a narrower definition. And of necessity, the narrower definitions and the broader definitions of the commandments have much overlap and interplay.

The narrower definition of idolatry is worshiping God, a god, or gods through an image. Now, how many of you here think that you have a problem with the most simple and literal, the narrow meaning of the second commandment? That is, of making in images and having them affect your worship of God. How many of you struggle with this? I think that most of us think we don't really have a problem with that. After all, when we go home, we most likely aren't going to find carved statues sitting in our houses. I haven't been to all your houses, but in all the houses that I've visited so far, I've not seen a little Buddha or something. We don't have alcoves with incense burning.

In our sanctuary, we don't have any images. There's no portraits of people hanging on the walls. There's no altar. We don't even have an American flag up front. When we read the second commandment, the gross forms of idolatry that readily come to mind are not immediately apparent to us in our lives. Sure, we might think the Roman Catholics do it or the Eastern Orthodox do it. So what we immediately want to do is move from the physicality that is in the second commandment of worshiping an idol, a graven image, and make it a cold sin of the mind rather than a hot sin of the flesh. And so it's so easy for us to move from this narrow definition to a broad definition of what a violation of the second commandment would be. And that idolatry as well, Yeah, I didn't confess all my sin before I took communion or whatever. So in a sense, that's one of the ways that the catechism calls out is idolatry, right? Improperly taking of the Lord's Supper or not giving due diligence to the reading of God's Word. And so we're willing to say, so we want to make idolatry this cold sin of the mind. We do think that we break the second commandment, but...

It's in a removed, second-degree sort of way of violating it. We recall that Colossians says, Therefore, consider the members of your earthly body as dead to immorality, impurity, passion, evil desire, and greed, which amounts to idolatry. And so we're like, oh, yes, greed, that's idolatry. And so we can move off and begin looking at this broader arena of what idolatry may mean or means. And that's true. That is a valid application of the second commandment. And the catechism in talking about this does a great job of helping us understand the depth of meaning that is contained in the second commandment. And if I were to do a series on the second commandment, we would talk about a lot of those things. We would open those ideas more.

problem with the simpler, narrow sense of the second commandment. The view of our Reformed fathers in the faith is that we have a problem with that narrow side, with actual images. So take a minute with me and let's think a little bit about our culture. In our culture, we are inundated with images. On your way to church this morning, Just this morning, how many images were you exposed to? How many billboards did you see? How many bumper stickers? The car in front of me, I think, had a dozen of them. We all have phones in our pocket, right? You open up your phone, and it is filled with images. With a camera roll that has thousands, depending on who it is, right, of pictures. With a few taps on our phones, or in our computers, we can get any image imaginable. With AI, we can create an image of anything we desire. And it will be in front of our eyes almost instantaneously. And this is to say nothing about video games, TV shows, movies, YouTube, Instagram, TikTok.

Snapchat, emojis. Think about it. Think about our culture. Think about your life. You're inundated with images every waking second of every single day. And this is the context in which we live. It's the context in which we've grown up in. And it seems normal to us. And then we come to the second commandment, and God forbids the making of images and worshiping them. And we think, I do this in a more theoretical way. When God says so plainly, you shall not make for yourself an idol or any likeness of what is in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the water under the earth, it should be like running into a brick wall. It should stop you short and cause you to think, what is God telling me in this passage?

Isn't it funny that the reformers and all the leaders following the Reformation for probably the next three centuries were death on all images in churches? They were continually pointing out the danger of images. But we, in our enlightened age, are surrounded with images beyond measure, and we think that they're not a problem for us. We think that we should strictly relegate the second commandment to worship. in the sanctuary, and think that it doesn't have any implications in our broader lives and our habits concerning our phones and the movies we watch. You know, one of the pits of pride that we so easily stumble into is we read the Old Testament, and it's so easy for us to judge the Israelites. Like, we think we're so much better than them.

We were studying Genesis chapter 3 this morning in Sunday school. And you think about how easy it is for us to just cast sidelong glances at our father, Adam, and think like, man, if I was in Adam's spot, it's so easy for us to despise Adam for sinning. We think that we would do so much better. But we have to remember that their lives are laid from end to end before us. And so we are not in the throes of passion that they were. And so because we can kind of see it from God's perspective as he wrote it down, we so easily judge them. But then in our own day-to-day lives, how quickly do we forget God's mercies to us? Man's nature has not only been corrupted, listen, man's nature has only been more corrupted since the fall.

Our nature hasn't gotten better. And God is not in the habit of giving us pointless commands. You know, Jesus says that we should love our neighbor as ourselves. And there's a very perverse interpretation that goes around these days. That they say, what God means by that is that before you can love others, you first have to love yourself. Which is to turn what God says on its head, right? Jesus is assuming that you love yourself, and then he's saying, go and love others. Well, this is all of God's commands, right? He's commanding the thing that we don't want to do because our inclination is to do the opposite. And so God has to command us on what we ought to do. Our natures are corrupted by sin, and this means that our natural bent is towards sin. So God, in his mercy, gives us commands to correct our sinful tendencies.

The fact that God commands that we should not make graven images and we should not worship them means that you and I have a proclivity towards worshiping images. It's an obvious implication meaning of the second commandment. And yet, if you were to read and you talk to many today, maybe yourself, we're certain that this is not an issue for us today, and that the Reformers and the Puritans took things a little bit too far in their destruction of images. So what does the second commandment teach us? You shall not make any images of God or any other member of the Trinity. In Deuteronomy, when Moses is reminding the people of Israel of all that God has done, he gives us a history. The book of Deuteronomy is a history lesson.

It's the second giving of the law. Moses is going to die. And so he lays out for Israel the history of his leadership. And in Deuteronomy 4, he says, For what great nation is there that has a God so near to it, as is the Lord our God, whenever we call on him? Or what great nation is there that has statutes and judgments as righteous as this whole law? which I am setting before you today. Only give heed to yourself and keep your soul diligently, so that you do not forget the things which your eyes have seen, and that they do not depart from your heart all the days of your life. But make them known to your sons and your grandsons. So the people of Israel have seen things. God's interacted with them. He says, you're going to want to forget.

Don't forget. And then he says, you need to teach them to your children. So then the question is, how do we teach them to our children? Well, God gives instructions on how they ought to be taught. Remember the day that you stood before the Lord your God at Horeb. When the Lord said, notice all the times saying and hearing and writing are mentioned in this passage. The Lord said to me, Assemble the people to me that I may let them hear my words so that they may learn to fear me all the days they live on earth and that they may teach their children. You came near and stood at the foot of the mountain and the mountain burned with fire to the very heart of the heavens, darkness and cloud and thick gloom. Then the Lord spoke to you from the midst of the fire and you heard the sounds of words.

But you saw no form, only a voice. So he declared to you his covenant which he commanded you to perform. That is the Ten Commandments. And he wrote them on two tablets of stone. The Lord commanded me at that time to teach you statutes and judgments that you might perform them in the land where you are going over to possess. So watch yourselves carefully since you... did not see any form on the day that the Lord spoke to you at Horeb from the midst of the fire, so that you do not act corruptly and make a graven image for yourselves in the form of any figure, the likeness of male or female, the likeness of any animal that is on the earth, the likeness of any winged birds that fly in the sky, the likeness of anything that creeps on the ground, and the likeness of any fish that is in the water below the earth.

and beware not to lift up your eyes to heaven and see the sun and the moon and the stars and all the hosts of heaven and be drawn away and worship them and serve them. Those which the Lord your God has allotted to all the peoples under the whole heaven, but the Lord has taken you and brought you out of the iron furnace from Egypt to be a people for his own possession as it is today. So think about what God is saying here. He's saying, Moses is reminding them, God came and he spoke to you. And you're to remember all that God has taught. And Moses taught, right? Because the Lord wrote it down and instructed Moses. And then Moses wrote it down and instructed the people and gave these writings to the people to instruct their children. And thus the law of God is to be continually taught. But then the Lord warns that man's natural inclination is going to not trust to trust in the words that were given to them, but to desire to make an image and use the image to teach their children and to get at God through an image and to understand God better through an image. Have we progressed beyond the Old Testament to where we're no longer tempted by images? Have we as a people changed so much? God speaks and the people are to hear.

This is how God has chosen to reveal himself. But the temptation inevitably comes to make images and to use them to reach God. Images are an abomination because to make an image of God, we dilute who God is. Because an image can't contain the glory of God. Think about Mount Sinai and its trembling and its thundering and the smoke and the fire and the danger. Any picture represent that. How could it approach the glory that is required of God and the fear? And so any image of God is a diminution. It makes God small. It makes him safe. It makes us comfortable. It makes him approachable. Calvin says that God is defiled by an absurd and indecorous fiction because a picture of God is a fiction because we didn't see a form. We don't know what he looks like.

When he who is incorporeal, without a body, is assimilated into corporeal matter. So God is without a body, we make him a body. What absurdity. He who is invisible to visible. He who is a spirit to an inanimate object. And he who fills all space to a bit of paltry wood or stone or gold. Which fills one tiny space. Well, what about Jesus? See, often when the discussion comes up in Reformed circles or amongst ourselves, people sort of can get the idea that, well, we shouldn't make a picture of God, right? Like God is a spirit. But Jesus, he came as a man, and he took on flesh. So are we able to make a picture of Jesus? There are many arguments as to why we shouldn't. Here are a few.

Acts 17.29 says, being then the children of God, we ought not to think that the divine nature is like gold or silver or stone, an image formed by the art and thought of man. All images of Jesus or God are an image formed by the art and the thought of a man. The chosen, the passion, any of these movies, which you have an actor, Choosing to portray himself as Christ and how he will is a picture of the divine God of Jesus that's being formed by the art and the thought of a man. Another reason that we should not make images of Christ is because in doing so, we're actually teaching one of the ancient Christological heresies. In that, What Nestorius did is he said there's a radical division between Christ's humanity and Christ's deity. And any pictorial representation of Christ is a one-sided view because we can't portray Christ's deity. How would we portray that? And so in making an image of Christ, we've split him. We're teaching his humanity, but we're ignoring his deity. Third, it's just an outright falsehood.

We have no idea what Jesus looked like. And so all representations of Jesus are false representations of Jesus. They're fake. They're a lie. Furthermore, this means that how they depict Jesus is teaching you something about him. What artistic drawing of Jesus have you seen that shows a man who's capable of constructing a whip and flipping over tables and driving out? wicked men. Do you think that there could somehow be a correlation between this soft, effeminate Jesus that we always see portrayed and the idea that Jesus is my boyfriend and that he's all love? Couldn't the way that our culture approaches Jesus and God be affected by how our artists have unceasingly portrayed him? And so then when we Teach our children, do our books have this picture of Jesus? And what is the soft, conditioned hair and the perfectly groomed beard and the uncalloused hands teaching our children about Christ? Now, what people will tell you is, you can have all artistic representations of God, especially of Jesus, are wrong if they were created to worship.

But can't we make an image of Jesus that isn't designed to worship God or worship him? Can't we separate the two? I say, what an abomination. How do you think? Is it right that we create some means of dwelling and thinking and teaching about Christ that does not lead us to worship him? Why would we want to train ourselves to have thoughts about Christ separated from worship. How dangerous and foolish of us to train ourselves to be reminded of Jesus and not have it lead us to worship him and to desire to fall on our knees and call on his name. You may say, well, it's an aid. We use it as something to point us to Christ. What do you think an idol is? In a few short chapters after the giving of the Ten Commandments, Israel gets freaked out and they want a comfortable, safe God.

So they say, Aaron, make us a god, and he makes a golden calf. What did Aaron say? He said, here's the god who brought you out of the land of Egypt. They weren't worshiping a golden calf. The golden calf was a representation of Yahweh. It was a representation to lead their hearts to worship the true god. That's what idolatry is. It's a tool and a means which we use to try and reach the true god. So to say, whoa, you know, this cross is an aid. That's idolatry. It's what leads your heart astray. The point of an idol is that it's a sign to point you to a god. And if you think this is new, it's not. Calvin quotes Augustine. Augustine tells us that this same excuse was employed by the idolaters of his time. The vulgar, when accused, replied that they did not worship the visible object.

but the deity which dwelt in it invisibly. Those who had what he calls a more refined religion said that they neither worshipped the image nor any inhabiting deity, but by means of the corporeal image beheld a symbol of that which it was their duty to worship. What then? All idolaters, whether Jewish or Gentile, were actuated in the very way which has been described. Not contented with spiritual understanding, not contented with spiritual understanding, they thought that images would give them a surer and nearer impression. When once this preposterous representation of God was adopted, there was no limit until, deluded every now and then by new impostures, they came to think that God exerted his power in images.

Still, the Jews were persuaded that under such images they worshipped the eternal God, the one true Lord of heaven and earth. And the Gentiles also, in worshipping their own false gods, supposed them to dwell in heaven. Do you get this contrast that's being drawn between images and the power and impression of images versus teaching in the word of God? In the beginning of the sermon, I was talking about images in general. And starting to try and put doubt in your mind that you don't have a problem with images. Then we've talked more specifically about images of God himself. And I hope you've seen links and are drawing some links and comparisons between the two. But let me help you. Why are images appealing to us? We don't want to take God at his word. Eve didn't want to trust God's command. Words take faith. It takes faith to trust what God says.

And man, do images bring God down to our level and make him safe. Jesus could have come at a time when we had cameras and videos. He didn't. He could have come and had a statue carved of himself. But apparently, Jesus thought that his word was sufficient for us, and we didn't need such things. Is God's word sufficient, or do we need images? Images don't really require that much faith. are better teachers than the Word of God. Question 98 of the Catechism says this to us. But may not images be tolerated in churches as books to the laity? No. For we must not pretend to be wiser than God, who will have his people taught not by dumb images, but by the lively preaching of his Word. We like physical things. We're physical people. We want images. Images are fake.

and they're easily manipulated. They're not telling the truth. Seeing is not believing. Pictures are not worth a thousand words when it comes to the truth of God's word. Habakkuk says, what prophet is the idol when its maker has carved it? Or an image, a teacher of falsehood? Habakkuk says, images are teachers of falsehood. We think that images have more power than words. We think a movie of Jesus may have more effect in... evangelism than a sermon. Brothers and sisters, let's not try to be wiser than God. Images simply require sight. God's words require faith. So, I have eight thoughts, and we're done. Phones. Calvin says that our hearts are idol factories. What can we say about our phones? Have we outsourced our source of idolatry? Just walk around it with our phones?

Our phones feed us anything we desire. See, the external images that the pagans made were an externalized form of what they desired, what their gods did, they did, right? And now we have this phone which can give us all of our desires instantaneously. And they change, right? Because if I want one thing, I can find it one day, and I want the other thing. Pornography is idolatry. All throughout Scripture, we see sexual sin and idolatry go hand in hand. And if you look and prostrate yourself before an image, and you watch it, and you masturbate to it, you are giving yourself to idolatry. You have the image before you. You're offering it your strength. You're offering it your worship. Movies.

the images on your phone and your TV to preach to you? How many hours do you spend with an endless parade of images running before your eyes? Do you think that that parade of endless images does not affect your worship of God, affect my worship of God? Though they may not have been intended to make you worship, they might just be leading you towards worshiping something else other than God. Do you think that... The endless array of images might, might be deceiving you. That you might be susceptible to that. What about actors and actresses? You know, there's a frustration. People are like, oh, you know, actors should act. But then they start speaking out on cultural issues. And people are like, I can't believe they do that. Well, maybe they feel the need to speak out on cultural issues because we put them on a pedestal. And we all want to hear our God speak and influence.

Do you religiously subscribe, follow, and like everything the person creates on YouTube? Do you offer that kind of devotion to God? Fourth thought, images are in opposition to words. This is a critical problem because God has revealed himself to us through his word. Christians are people of the book. In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the word was. God. Five, our culture's reliance on video and images is destructive to literacy. We must guard against this in our lives and in the lives of our children. You must teach your children to read. You must teach them that the greatest reason that they need to learn to read is because they need to know the word of God. And they need to understand what words mean and how sentences work.

and how to comprehend a written phrase and images are detrimental to your ability to read and to think. And if you cannot read and think, then how will you know God's word? Listen, you know, point six. Images are dangerous because we inherently make the connection between them and the reality that stands behind the image. If you were to show me a picture of your mother and I were to drop it on the ground, and grind my foot into it, how would you react? You understand that there is an inherent connection between an image and what is represented by that image. And it actually leads you to care about the thing that's behind it. So how can we say that we could have an image of God and it not lead us to worship? Because the way we reverence an image tells us something about the connection that we understand behind what we're trying to image.

and what is imaged. Seven, listen. God has called us to be different than the world we inhabit. If our media and the way we consume images is no different than the world's, we have a problem. Being different than the world will require much of you, but I promise you this, that God is no man's debtor. God will richly reward and bless you for all that you give up in order to better serve, follow, and worship him. And you will never be the loser for ditching your social media accounts so that you can spend your time communing with God and living with real people instead of living among images. Finally, we are in the last days. This means that sometime soon, whether we're alive or dead, we will be awakened with a mighty trumpet call. And in that day, our great hope will be realized.

Faith will in that day become sight. Jesus, our Lord and Savior, is going to return on clouds, and we will finally see him fully revealed in all his glory. Brothers and sisters, can we not wait till then to see him? Why do we waste time piddling around with these stupid, dumb, blasphemous images and movies of some creature's deceptive image of God? Devote yourselves to his revealed word and be satisfied with what God has given you and said was enough until that great day when we will see him face to face. And let's teach our children to do the same. Let's pray.