A People For His Own Possession

So I'm going to start by asking you a question. Are you an idolater? Yes, says Dan. Some of you are like, what? What is an idolater? What does it mean to be an idolater or to serve an idol? Sort of a strange thing to us. And when we read in the Bible about idolatry, it takes many forms. In our passage this morning, it's very similar. to the second commandment about not making a graven image or a likeness and then not bowing down and worshiping it. Moses is warning the people not to do this as they've already done in the past. And yet I think it's a kind of, it's a concept or it's a, it's a, it's a temptation that's hard for us to connect with. The idea that we would make little images of God out of rocks or stone or 3D printing or however we might do it today. It's kind of a foreign thing. It seems kind of silly, doesn't it? It seems kind of like last century or something. That doesn't mean that idolatry is not a temptation for us. It's not something that we need to be aware of. It is still a danger to us, even if we're not making little statues out of stone or rock or metal. So as we study our text this morning, we're going to see...

the warning that Moses gives to the people. And he tells them not to make idols and not to bow down and worship them. And then at the end of our passage, he gives them a reason why. He distinguishes the nation of Israel from all the other peoples. And basically what he says to them is, everyone else worships idols because they don't know the true God. But our God's taken us to be his own possession and he's revealed himself to us in a way he's not revealed himself to anyone else. And that's actually why we shouldn't be idolaters. That's why we shouldn't return to our former way of thinking or the prevailing way of thinking around us because God's revealed himself to us. And that's a wonderful thing. He's taken possession of us, calling us his own. And so our work and our worship ought to be directed to him as he's revealed himself in his word and not through some other medium or...

or shape. That's the basic gist of the text that we're going to be studying this morning. And my hope is that God will help us to worship him properly, to not rely on images, even if only in our hearts, and that he would also confirm his fatherly love toward us as his people. As we grow in our love for God and our understanding of his love for us, it actually is a great foundation to fight idolatry from. Would you please stand now as we read the word of the Lord from Deuteronomy chapter four. Verses 15 to 20, this is the word of the Lord, and it is eternally true. 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, 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 today. This is the word of the Lord. You may be seated. So our passage flows out of... The text that comes right before it. In our sermon last week, we looked at two reasons why God brought the Israelites out to Mount Horeb. The primary reason was to teach them the fear of the Lord. He says, I brought you out here to teach you to fear me. That's why there was all of the thundering and the quaking and the smoke and the trumpets. It was to teach them to fear and to make an impression on them so that they would remember. And then Moses, both in the verses preceding this and then again here,

makes special note that when God revealed himself, he makes note of how he revealed himself, that he revealed himself in his word, through his word he spoke, and that he did not reveal himself in any sort of shape or form or body. He says, watch out for yourselves carefully, since you did not see any form on the day the Lord spoke to you at Horeb in the midst of the fire. And so our passage is a warning. To stay away from making God into an idol, giving him a shape, giving him a body, attributing to him earthly things that don't belong to him or to his character or to his godness, to his divinity. Watch yourself carefully. When you were at the mountain, you did not see anything, you heard. Moses pointed out at the end of our text last week that God made covenant with them. And he did that through his word.

Could he have revealed himself in a shape or in a body? We want to say yes, but actually the answer is no. And the reason is because, and we'll read this verse later, in John, the Gospel of John, it tells us that God is a spirit and does not have a body. Now you might be wondering, well, what about Jesus? And Jesus is an extraordinary circumstance that we're not really going to get into today. But God, as he exists and has existed for all eternity, exists as a spirit. He is not a body. He did not reveal himself with one. And so for us to attribute to him something that he doesn't have or possess or doesn't exist in that form would be sin. He does not want us to worship him by proxy. He doesn't want us to look at something that we see and can touch and can feel and can understand and say, well, we're going to worship God through this thing or by this thing. This represents him. That's what it means to worship by proxy.

That thing, whatever it is, whatever form it takes, is an idol. This is what the Israelites did when they made the golden calf at Mount Horeb or Mount Sinai. Those names are used interchangeably. When they came out of Egypt and they were at the mountain and God said, consecrate yourselves in three days, I'm going to come back. And Moses goes up on the mountain. While Moses is up communing with God, receiving the law and all these things, Aaron and the people are down there saying, This is terrifying. We need to make an image. We need to make something that's not so scary, something we're familiar with, something that takes the edge off. Now you might wonder, why did they make a golden calf? That seems like a strange thing. They all turn in their earrings and their necklaces and their jewelry. Why a golden calf? Well, most likely the reason that they made a golden calf is that they had just come out of Egypt and that Egypt had a number of gods, one of them being called Apis, who was a bull.

a god, a golden bull that represented strength and power. And so as they're standing there and this mountain is shaking and smoking and thundering and trumpets are blasting, they're going, there's power here that's scary. They make themselves a golden calf. They say, our god is powerful. This is our point of reference. We are going to fashion an image after what we see of God in this moment. So they make a golden calf. When they made that golden calf, it's important to notice that they were not saying we are not going to worship the true God anymore. We're going to go worship some other God. They weren't saying enough with Jesus. We're going to go worship Allah or Buddha or something else. That's not what they were doing. Many times idolatry is not replacing God with some completely other thing. It's taking him and shaping him into something that's more palatable to us, something that's controllable, something that's finite.

That's what they were doing. That is idolatry. That's us putting God in a box, so to speak. That's us fashioning God after our own image, which is one of the things he warns us not to do, not to make any form of any figure in the likeness of a male or female. And then he goes through all of the animals on the earth and in the sky and in the water, and he says, you can't, all of these living things, you come away thinking God is alive, God is powerful, God is smart. Which animals? which person seems to demonstrate or emulate that the best, well, we'll make God look like that. That is what's forbidden. We can't remake God into something that's more palatable for us, into something that's less scary. God didn't reveal himself in physical form, and it's because of this that we're commanded to reject all use of any images of him.

either as a man or as a part of creation, as a creature, all of that's to be rejected. Have you ever wondered why God does this? I was thinking about it as I was preaching this sermon. I'm going to step all over the toes of Eric's sermon on this from a few months ago, but I think it's okay. I don't think it's bad for us to hear these things again. Why is it bad for us to remake God or to confine God to, well, I'm sort of giving away one of the answers. When we make an image, a picture, a statue, when we have something that represents God to us, it necessarily limits who God is. It limits him. When Vanessa and I met, the first movie we went and saw was Cheaper by the Dozen. And neither one of us knew how many kids we'd have. We didn't have any ideas about anything like that. It was a newer version we went and saw, Cheaper by the Dozen.

The second movie we went and saw was The Passion of the Christ. It was a big deal at the time. I don't think I was even a Christian. At the time we saw it, I wasn't even a Christian. And none of us, I mean, there was no, it was just all the rave. If I asked you to raise your hands, how many of you saw it? Or like, could non-Christians went to see it? Christians flocked in droves to go see it? And probably there was some little group of people who were like, that's not a good thing for Christians to go see. But they were just drowned out by the overwhelming, like, interest in it, you know? That movie, along with things nowadays, what the modern day, I mean, it's not Jesus' crucifixion, but nowadays, Chosen, these things are something you should never, ever be putting into your minds. Because as you consume these things, they are creating boundaries and limits on whatever story they're telling you about God.

In the Passion of the Christ, when Jesus is being depicted and when he's being beaten and when he's being crowned with thorns and when he's being spat on and all of these different things, when you literally see, if you've watched the movie, they depict the blood and the torn flesh and all of the stuff. And the whole point of it is to impress upon you how awful it was. And that's the problem with it. Some man decided this is how awful it was. And it wasn't any worse than this. But how in the world could we begin to describe accurately the wrath of a holy God being poured out on his son? Is it possible for us to even get close to how serious and how agonizing and how painful it was? It is impossible for us to do it. We are not capable of it. And so when we make an effort in that direction to try, We fail, and our failure corrupts our understanding, okay? Some of you like to read. Some of you like to watch the movie. Which version's better? It's almost all, yes. Many people, if you're going to say, if you're going to watch the movie, you should read the book first. Why? Because as soon as you put an image in front of you, your imagination,

And your comprehension, your ability to perceive and to take hold of what's actually going on is limited to what you saw. So you read the book first. Because without the image, without the boundary being established, your mind is free to be open to what you're reading. While CGI in the movie may be dramatic, may be interesting, may be... It's not the same as what your mind is able to comprehend. It does limit what you think. Well, that's how it was and that's how it happened. We see these types of things happen with like veggie tales. You know, veggie tales tells all these Bible stories to kids and the broccoli and the cauliflower. I don't know what all the animals are or vegetables rather. I don't know who they are. I've actually never seen veggie tales. But what happens is you communicate to kids that, This is how it was. Well, what happens if VeggieTales leaves out part of the story? Then what you've done is you've taught the children a lie. And you've set up that image over and above the Word of God. The same thing could be said of children's Bibles. There's a lot of blood and gore in the story that our kids love to hear about David and Goliath. But how many stories show Goliath with a stone in his forehead lodged through his head? Here's a picture, kid.

His brains are pouring out of his head. Like no children's Bible has that. But that's actually what the story tells us. Not to mention all the stories they leave out. So that overall you get a conception of God that's not accurate because it's not full. So images are really a danger to us because of their very nature. They limit our perception. And they teach us as they limit us. They teach us this is the boundary. This is what Jesus looked like when he suffered on the cross. This is what it looked like when he fed the 5,000. This is what it looked like at the Last Supper. We can't help but take the image that's presented to us, draw our conclusions about that image, and then attribute those conclusions to God. What did Jesus look like as a question?

just led to answer that question based on images you've seen of Jesus, what does he look like? Well, for one, he's white and he has long brown hair, nice curves, curls, you know, waves. He's got striking eyes, blue Fabio, maybe not quite a little less refined, maybe fit. Didn't have carpenter's hands. What did the Bible tell us about Jesus' appearance? What does Isaiah tell us about him? That he has no form that we should look upon him. It tells us basically, it comes up short of saying explicitly that he was ugly. But the fact that he was unattractive, that his appearance was nothing that would have caught anyone's eye. That's what scripture tells us. But when we make an image of him and we go, well, there's all these other stories and there's all these other miracles and there's all these other things that he did. We want to represent those attributes of him in a form, in a shape, in an appearance some way.

We all walk away going, well, Jesus is a good-looking guy. But I don't think he was a good-looking guy. And I don't think it's wrong or sinful for us to say that. The Scripture points at least in that direction. Paul, by all accounts of his own appearance, was nothing to admire. Certainly didn't spend time in the gym. Small, probably frail, short, like very hard of sight. at least later in his life. We weren't told exactly what these men looked like, but if you had to decide what Paul looked like based on the words that he wrote, would you pick someone who was small and kind of frail and weakly and big thick glasses or no glasses at that time? I didn't mean to let around by the hand like he was described in our scripture lesson this morning. That's not the picture. The pictures we would generate of him would not communicate that to us.

We'd want a picture of him at the Areopagus preaching, strong and tall and powerful. Images are actually a danger to us. They have the potential to corrupt us. That golden calf that the Israelites made at the base of Mount Horeb was the best they knew about their God. But it wasn't him. It couldn't be him. It was lacking. It was without. It was a counterfeit. It was false. It was an idol. And the things that were omitted, that couldn't be presented, led them astray. And that's what he warns us of in this passage. Watch over yourselves carefully so that you do not act corruptly, so that you're not led astray. And so our worship of God is corrupted whenever we have an image in our head that we've seen and become accustomed to.

And you're surrounded by it. You're going to have images. You can have an ironclad commitment to not violating the second commandment. And I'm sure you still have pictures of what Jesus looks like in your head. You've seen them. It's not avoidable. But what you do with them, if they just sit there and are allowed to grow and to define and to shape who God is and what he's like, they will. God is a spirit. And those who worship him must worship him in spirit and in truth. This is what... John tells us in chapter 4 of his gospel. Images attribute to God things that are not true. Here's the other danger, and this is true also in the second commandment, is that when you take an image, you might think, well, what is the harm of an image in and of itself? The harm of the image in and of itself is that it will lead you to worship. It will affect and define your worship. That's what it will do.

In the second commandment, it says, you shall not make for yourself any graven image, the likeness of on the earth or things above the earth and all these other things. And then it has another commandment, and you shall not bow down and worship them or serve them. The making of the image, the seeing it with our eyes, the information that it communicates leads to worship. The danger is we'll think we're worshiping the true God when in fact we're worshiping a misrepresentation, a lie. Our natural desire as men, as created beings. as sons and daughters of Adam, is to worship. Unbelievers worship. Everyone has something that they worship or multiple things that they worship. What is worship? At its most basic level, worship simply means that you would offer your attention, your sacrifices, and your obedience to something in hope of either a blessing or avoiding a judgment. You say, Power is there. Power to give good things. Power to give bad things. You have my attention. You have my resources. You have my obedience. So that you will give me good things and not bad things. At a really basic level, just functionally, that's what worship is. Everyone does it. Because worship is an outworking of being created. Men aren't the only ones who worship. The Bible tells us that

The trees blow and give glory to God. When the wind blows and they rustle and they do their things, they're giving glory to God. When the sea rages, it's worshiping. It's testifying to the power of God. When the sun shines, when the rain falls, when the grass grows, it's all testifying to God having made it for that purpose. And so all of creation worships, not just Christians. And we don't worship because Jesus came to earth. We worship because we were made. We are created by God. And because he created us, he deserves our attention. He deserves our sacrifices. He deserves our obedience. Not because he saved us, but because he's made us. And I say this to point out that God doesn't earn our worship. There was never a time where he didn't deserve our worship. There was never a time when we weren't in danger of giving our worship to someone else. In Psalm 100, in verse 3, it says, know that the Lord himself is God.

It is he who has made us and not we ourselves. We are his people and the sheep of his pasture. And the question I want to ask is, who is that addressed to? If you think about it carefully and you say, okay, the worship that he's owed is based on him making us and not we ourselves, who then is liable to worship God? Who's responsible to worship God? Everyone's responsible to worship God. All mankind is responsible to worship God. The vast majority of mankind doesn't worship God, though. They worship something else. Or they worship a false image or representation of the true God. The question has never been whether men will worship. The question has been who will you worship and also how will you worship. If you're to offer worship to someone, to God, Is it any surprise that he tells us how to do it? Like what's allowed and what's not allowed? What's good and what's bad? It's no surprise. He's God. He comes to us and he tells us, I've made you. You're mine. You bear my image. Worship me and worship me in this way. And in this text, he says, don't use any images. I'm a spirit. Worship me in spirit and in truth. What does it mean to worship in spirit and in truth?

I think many times sort of the Christian group that gets a hold of that passage is the more charismatic. They're like, we got the Spirit, and it's all going to be about the truth here as God reveals it to us in the moment, and we're going to do the thing. I don't think that's right. To worship in spirit is actually a prohibition of worshiping some image. God is a spirit, therefore we're to worship him in spirit. And according to the truth, the truth that he's revealed to us about himself, and about ourselves and how he wants to be worshiped. The Israelites were made to worship. And that's what they did at the foot of the mountain. They worshiped. They worshiped falsely. So falsely that God wanted to destroy them. And Moses prayed and asked God to relent, to not destroy them. The reason he wanted to destroy them was not because they said, we reject the covenant we just made with you, and we've decided to serve the Egyptian gods. But he wanted to destroy them because...

they'd made an image and denigrated his glory and said, you're in the heavens, but we're going to represent you with things from the earth. We're going to take these dead things, these elemental things, this gold, which we see as being valuable, and we're going to fashion it into the shape of a bull, which we see to be powerful, and we're going to worship you through him. And God's response was to want to consume them. It's actually a big deal to God how we worship him. I think in our church, we often, like when it comes to decorations, we just talk about decorations. We talk about, is it pretty? In the foyer, we ask, is it going to muffle the sound? But one thing that we've never done, and it's not just by like, huh, I wonder, is that we don't have pictures of Jesus or pictures of Bible stories up anywhere.

they'd go right there and right there. We'd have a big banner and we'd change them out every so often. And there'd be lambs and there'd be crosses and there'd be stars and there'd be all kinds of things that were meant to make you feel things about God. You know what would never end up on one of those banners? Fire and brimstone raining down on Sodom and Gomorrah. Have you ever seen a banner in a church with that on it? It'd be memorable, wouldn't it? You'd remember it. But we wouldn't dare put that up there because... We wouldn't want our pictures to be unsettling. We'd want to curate our pictures, even if they're not of Jesus himself, of himself. We'd want to curate our pictures in such a way as to shape your understanding of who God is. We could have a picture of sheep over here, goats over here. And would you know what that, I don't know if I've got it backwards, right and left, I get confused. But, if you're right and left. But, would you know what that represented?

The final judgment where all the people come and they say, Lord, Lord, didn't we? And he separated them. It's like, seen that picture? It would be instructive if you did though, wouldn't it? And the fact that we don't show pictures, even leaving aside pictures of Jesus and images of God, even the fact that we won't show pictures of the hard things only reinforces the point that we use images to teach. And they do just exactly what we mean for them to do. And so we ought to be very careful with them. Instead of looking and perceiving, we ought to listen and obey. One of the things, as long as I'm the pastor here, one of the things we'll never have are images and pictures and slides to help you understand what I'm talking about. I think you're smart enough. I think, unless I'm just a poor communicator, I think most of you generally track with what I'm saying.

There are times I sit there and go, why do I have to have Scripture up there? Historically, no one had that sitting in front of them to stare at. They had to listen to it. They had to pay attention to it. They had to remember it. But as it stands, we have the words up there. But we won't have more than that. Maybe for slides for Awana, you'll have your little sunburst picture. But when it comes to teaching you something about who God is and what he's like, we're not going to use images to do that, even with the kids. Now, I know they get coloring pages, and I'm not sure quite what to think about all that. It's something our CE committee should think about. Get some pictures of Sodom and Gomorrah, let them color those, you know. But these are the things we should be thinking about as Christians. We don't do everything just right. When it comes down to it, all of this idol worship, it's all the world has. It's all the world has. And it's all the world has because God hasn't revealed himself to them. He's hidden himself. He's hidden himself.

He's hidden his truth. He's kept it away from them on purpose. You remember when Jesus spoke and they said, why do you speak in parables? You remember what he said? If I spoke plainly, you would believe. I mean, I'm paraphrasing what he said, but he said, if I spoke to you plainly, then you would perceive and understand and you would believe. And you're like, well, isn't that what we all want? And he's like, not for everybody. Not everyone was ordained to see and to believe. God's hidden things from people. But in this passage and in the passage preceding it, God's not hiding anymore. God's revealing himself in his word to his people through covenanting with them like we talked about last week. And this week at the end, what it says is, the Lord has taken you and brought you out of the iron furnace from Egypt. Now, if you haven't been in an iron furnace, what's that make you think of? It makes me think of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego. Now, that story comes later.

in history, but you know, you heard it and you're like, yeah, they got thrown into a fiery furnace. It was awful. It was miserable. And here God's using a similar imagery to describe the land of Egypt where they were. They were boxed in. It was hot. It was deadly. And it was deadly. Moses wasn't supposed to live. It was so deadly. It was a poisonous place to live. The Lord has taken you and brought you out of that iron furnace from Egypt to be a people for his own possession. And then the sweet thing, it says, as today. Now, I ask you, were the Israelites the kind of Christians you'd like to be at this point? Would you look at them and say, there's the varsity team playing. We need to be like them. We laugh because we're like, no. These are the people that just made a golden image, a golden calf. These are the people who grumbled and complained and wanted to kill Moses.

These are the people who refused to go into the promised land and had all of their older men die. They're not the people you would look at and say, they're the ones I want to become like. But there is a sense in which you should say, yes, I want to become just like them. And it's in this context that you want to become just like them. God has taken you and brought you out of the iron furnace, out of Egypt, to be a people for his own possession as today. As they stand there before him in that moment, all full of sin and corruption and idolatries and all kinds of things and dangers to come in the future. In some ways, they had less propensity to stray from the Lord when they were in Egypt because they were just in bondage. They didn't have any freedom. They didn't have any prosperity. They were under guard. But now they're going into a land that flows with milk and honey that's going to be theirs. And they're to get rid of all of the Canaanites and they're going to inhabit this fruitful land.

And the danger is going to increase, and so God warns them. There's danger coming because I've set you free from your sins. Don't go back to your bondage. Don't go back to your slavery. I brought you out, and in bringing you out, I made you mine. They belong to him. What does it mean to be possessed by God? What does it mean to be possessed by him? Well, if you're a child and you think of your parents, you might have some concept of being possessed. There's ownership. And it's not a passive ownership of like, well, whatever happens and you'll figure it out and it'll be okay. And you'll learn by experience. That's not what it means to be possessed. That's not what it means to be loved. Intense care, strong desires. You're mine. I know it and you need to know it. You're mine. You don't belong to anyone else. That's what it means to be possessed. And that's the language that's used here for the people of God, as sinful as they might be.

We talk a lot about sin here. And we need to be reminded of our sins. But there's something else we need to be reminded of. And it's shown up in this passage. And it's that you've been set free from the bondage of your sin. That's what it means to be a Christian. Now, you still struggle with sins. And they're real and it's intense. But it is so different than before you were a Christian. It's so different than those whom God has not revealed himself to. They have nothing but idols. But you, you have God who's revealed himself to you and plucked you up out of a pit and set you free. That's why you shouldn't worship idols. That's why if he says, don't make any images of me, not in the form of a man and not in the form of an animal or a bird or a fish or stars or suns or moons, that's the best the world can figure out based on my law being written on their hearts, Romans 1 type of stuff. But not you.

You, I saved you out of all of that. And I revealed myself to you and I gave my son for you. So don't do that. And we as children should say, enough and yes. I'll listen and I'll obey. There's a prophecy in Luke 4 about being set free. Speaking of Jesus, it says this is when Jesus was in the temple and he stands up and he takes the scroll from Isaiah and he reads this. He says, And then what did he say? It says he handed back the scroll and said, Freedom. Freedom away from the idols. Freedom apart from the... The best the world can do. Paul says in Galatians 5.1, it was for freedom that Christ set you free. Therefore, keep standing firm and do not be subject again to the yoke of slavery. Don't turn back. Don't turn back. The Israelites wanted to turn back to Egypt. These people, when they came out of Egypt, what did they want? Well, we want to go back there because at least there was meat in our pots. Don't turn back. That was idolatry for them to want to turn back. You see it shown up in them making the golden calf. They had been infected.

And the whole message of God bringing them out of that place and giving them their own land was to say, you were a slave and I'm making you free. Don't go back to your slavery. And that's the message to us today. Jesus came, he lived, he obeyed his father, he kept the law, and then he died. Rather, he was murdered for you and for your sins. Why? So that you would be set free from them. So that God wouldn't look at you anymore with contempt. and judgment and wrath stored up for you when you stand before him. He set you free and he made you his own. So don't go back to the way you used to live. Don't give in to the temptations that you face. Don't do it. God's loved you and sent his son. How will he who's given us his son not freely give us all things? Why would we go back to this? We do and shame on us and it's an indication of our weakness and our need of God's help.

But brothers and sisters, he sets you free. If you're a Christian, don't go back to Egypt. Leave your idols behind. I thought long and hard I was going to list all of our idols. I don't know what they are. I just kept drawing a blank. I'm like, I don't know. If you've got crosses hanging up with Jesus on your wall, get rid of them. If you've got pictures, famous artwork or otherwise that has Jesus or God in it, get rid of it. If you have children's Bibles that have Jesus, get rid of them. Like, go through your house and say, we're going to get rid of this stuff. If you own the passion of the Christ, get rid of it. Stop watching Chosen. Like, do those things. But do it because you were set free from that bondage. God's way better than anyone's ever shown him to be. But you can only know that from his word. And so that's my expectation to you. Don't go back. Don't go back. Don't give up.

the true and living God who saved you from your sins, to worship some sorry representation of him. Worship him as he is, with fear and trembling. Enter into his gates with thanksgiving. Let's pray.