Dr. Ron Sumners
February 15, 2004
Not many people worry today about keeping the second commandment. They do not think that it has anything to do with their way of life. Most of us feel comfortable that we haven’t broken this commandment. I don’t know any of you who have household gods, nor do we abide religious icons in the Baptist Church! It may have meant something to the ancient Israelites or the Hittites, Jebusites, or Samsonites - whose luggage was very nice. But it is not an issue for the modern, civilized, western world.
Because we feel this way, we may be astonished that it is this commandment that carries a sever warning: “You shall not bow down to them or worship them; for I the Lord your God am a jealous God, punishing children for the iniquity of parents, to the third and fourth generation of those who reject Me, but showing steadfast love to the thousandth generation of those who love me and keep my commandments.”
For a generation that wants a serviceable God and moderate expressions of religion, such vigorous language seems out of touch with modern life.
But the Commandment is there, like it or not. I happen to like it very much! Like the other commandments, it is intended to expand the borders of life, not to make life smaller or less beautiful.
One thing is very sure: This commandment was very serious to the pious Jews, and to the prophets who sought passionately to keep them in line. When the Israelites wandered from God, their wanderings almost always began with a graven image. As a matter of fact, Israel broke this commandment before Moses had even delivered the stone tablets. While he was receiving these laws from God, his brother Aaron was making a golden calf for the people to worship. They were bowing down to idols even as Moses approached them with the divine ordnances.
When Israel settled into the Promised Land, it was a violation of this Commandment which signaled their spiritual unfaithfulness. They were soon bowing down to Baal and Astarte (Judges 2).
The great Hebrew prophets who eventually came on the scene found this idol worship not only repulsive but also absurd. We are likely to honor the prophets for their majestic social conscience or their vision of the coming Messiah, but for them, no subject was felt more intensely than the issue of idol worship. Jeremiah spoke with nothing less than scorn as he warned God’s people:
For the customs of the people are false: a tree from the forest
is cut down, and worked with an ax by the hand of an artisan;
People deck it with gold and silver; they fasten it with hammer
and nails so that it cannot move. Their idols are like scarecrows
in a cucumber field, and they cannot speak; they have to be
carried, for they cannot walk. Do not be afraid of them, for they
cannot do evil, nor is it in them to do good. (Jeremiah 10:3-5)
Jeremiah was a rational man, and he was offended that the people to whom he belonged could be so irrational as to see any power in idols, poor things that had to be carried because they could not walk. How could such a helpless object strike fear into anyone’s heart? The prophet Isaiah felt the same combination of astonishment and contempt for a craftsman who cuts down a tree, uses half of it to make an idol and the other half for firewood. He roasts his meat with one half and asks the other half to save him (Isaiah 44:12-20)!
But before we become too condescending toward the idol maker’s superstition, we should consider the susceptibility of our culture to the same thing. How many hotels have a floor 13? Or consider the major league ball player, who is idolized by millions. He may have a dozen clearly defined superstitions that he considers as important to his batting average as his skill in hitting a curveball or slider. Are we any more rational than the idol worshippers?
Of course, the issue is greater than superstition. If idols were merely the objects of superstition, the prophets would not have been so worried. What was and is the danger? Simply and directly, the real danger is the individual’s perception of God. Nothing is more important than that. It goes back to the first commandment that we discussed last week: Our picture of God determines our picture of everything else. We may not realize it, because it isn’t often a conscious relationship, but our picture of God determines all our other pictures. This one concept establishes the whole foundation of our existence. What do you believe God to be?
An image or an idol is something that can be seen. A little boy was drawing intently with his crayons. When his mother asked what he was drawing, he answered, “God.” His mother explained that no one knew what God looked like. “They will when I get finished with my picture,” said the boy. This is the essence of all of our idol making. When we are finished with our idol, we will know what god looks like. We will have a god that can be comprehended with our senses. We can see the outline of our god, we can hear what it sounds like, we can taste it (so a restaurant critic describes a certain dish as “divine”), we can smell the incense we offer, and we can touch the contours of our god. With an idol, we have a god that can be grasped by our senses. This is very appealing, because it means that our god can be fully comprehended.
If a person does not believe in the true God, I believe that they will inevitably believe in an idol, something earthly and limited. All idol-gods are earth bound and limited.
Here is the issue in Jesus’ conversation with the woman of Samaria. Her key theological question was one that grounded and limited God: “Where should God be worshipped,” she asked, “on the mountain in Samaria or in Jerusalem?” Jesus said that God cannot be limited. Neither the mountain nor Jerusalem mattered, because “God is spirit, and those who worship Him must worship in spirit and in truth” (John 4:24).
It is true that behind the stone or wood image of an idol is someone’s mental image. So why should the Commandment be so specific about “graven images?” Why not a broader prohibition against all perceptions of God? If our graven images come from our thoughts, why doesn’t the Commandment forbid thinking about God or speculating about God?
I suspect that is because physical images are so much more restrictive. If you tell me about your friend, I may form a mental picture, but if you show me his picture, my mind has no further to go.
That is not what we need with our perception of God. To have a picture of the friend is a good thing. To think that we can conceptualize all God is in an image is a false idea. There is more to God than can ever be capture in a picture or an image or an idol! To make an image of God is to restrict God so much that he becomes a lie. An idol insists that your God can be no bigger than what the idol-maker perceives God to be!
Perhaps that is why there is such a fierce warning which comes with this commandment. It says that judgment will fall on succeeding generations. Idols are the sort of things that are passed from one generation to another. They become enshrined with tradition, so that long after the original propose of the symbol is forgotten, its power remains. The idol that one generation builds controls the generations that follow. That happens until someone destroys the idol. No wonder that when King Josiah wanted to bring Judah back to God, he began by destroying the idols (2 Kings 23:4). The idols had transmitted the curse of past generation to Josiah’s time.
If idols are helpless, as the prophets said, why do they continue to appeal to people? Why would God’s own people, the Nation of Israel, be tempted to bow down before them? The answer is simple: Idols are manageable, and we are always looking for a manageable god.
We want a god that will do our bidding. This is not limited to ancient, primitive people. It may be a bigger issue today, in our materialistic society, as it has ever been in the history of the human race!
We see athletes praying to God for their team to win. A salesperson bargains with God to get a name on the dotted line; an executive aims for victory in a negotiation; a parent asks God for help in getting a child to qualify for college. None of these goals are evil. It wasn’t evil for a farmer in Judah to pray for an abundant crop. But when we make God nothing more than an instrument in our drive for success, we have reduced the God of the universe to a graven image. God becomes a delivery agent, essential to our comfort, but not intended to make claims upon us. Such a god is to be manipulated and used, not loved and obeyed! It is easy to leave this kind of God for someone else that offers a better deal. This is why the prophets accused the people of spiritual adultery; they were looking for a god that might offer better benefits.
Am I saying that we should never ask God for material benefits? This is not the case at all. Jesus told us that we should pray for our daily bread. But that petition came after the right mood had been established: “Hallowed be your name.” Our asking must always be set in the recognition that God is God.
As idols make god smaller and manageable, they also make us smaller. The Hebrew prophets said that those who worship idols are like unto them. Hosea said that when the Israelites came to worship Baal that they “became as detestable as the thing they worshipped” (Hosea 9:10). If one bows before an image of an ox, gradually the ox becomes the measure of my person. I am saying that I am inferior and the ox has something that I need.
If we measure our lives by the abundance of our crops, or by the size of our house or car, or by the extent of our holdings, we are dismal creatures indeed!
The God revealed in scripture is beyond any image I can make. He is more than I can conceptualize. Whatever image I can create, God is greater!
We will make our mental images; we must, in order to have enough perception of God to establish a relationship. The Bible lays out all sorts of possibilities for us. Names and figures of speech are given for us to try to understand the qualities of God. They are pictures of God in action. These are all helpful, but God is always beyond us!
To catch God is like trying to catch a whirlwind. How can we find words, much less an object that even begins to explain the awesome, sovereign, omnipotence of God? No one is poet enough. No craftsman is skilled enough. No theologian is clever enough. No wonder the law forbade making graven images, and no wonder the prophets looked with a mixture of horror and scorn when the people did so. Since heaven and earth cannot contain God, how horribly I will distort God if I make an image to represent Him!
Someone has said that to fill God’s place with an image is like blotting the sun out of the heavens and substituting a 15-watt bulb in its place. There is so much of God to be known, so much of the divine goodness to be released in our lives, that any limiting of God is unthinkable. The real horror of idols is not simply that they give us nothing, but that they take away even what we have. Believing is more than seeing! The second Commandment sets us free to enter into more of the majesty and mystery of God. And in that process, we become more fully ourselves. God is a wondrous mystery that neither I nor anyone else will ever discover to its limits. How wrong it would be to dwarf it by a graven image!
Have you reduced God down to your size? Have you made God your delivery boy? God is bigger; God is greater than we can ever imagine. If we understand that and worship Him in spirit and in truth, we can be greater than we ever imagined also!
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