On October 7, 2023, more than 3000 members of the radical Muslin extremist group Hamas surged across the Israeli border crying “Allahu Akbar” “God is good” raping women, beheading children, torturing, mutilating and murdering more than a thousand people, most of them civilians conducting the greatest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust. How would you respond to the trembling words of a seven-year-old who said, “Daddy, these bad men said God told them to do those awful things. How can this be?” This episode seeks to answer this question by understanding what the second commandment teaches.
Among the religious beliefs of those Islamic terrorists was faith in Jihad—holy war, that it is Allah’s will to slaughter all who get in the way of establishing the ultimate Caliphate where all are forced to follow Islamic Law. Muslim doctrine proclaims that men who die waging Jihad against the enemies of Islam will be rewarded by Allah in heaven as martyrs and receive seventy-two virgins to enjoy in blissful ecstasy. While the atrocities committed by Hamas’ Jihadists are not to be in any way excused, Christians must admit that one pope, (just one, I might add) Pope Urban the Second, promised Christian warriors of the Crusades that if they died seeking to take back the holy land from the Muslims, they would go to heaven.
So, Muslim clerics say, God will reward you for killing Jews and Christians. Pope Urban’s message was, God will reward you for killing Muslims. No wonder kids are confused. Is the Muslim God the true one or is Pope Urban’ God the true one? Or are both gods fashioned by degenerate minds? That brings us to the importance of understanding and teaching the next generation the second commandment. As we’ve seen, the first commandment answers the question, “Who should we worship.” The answer is the true God alone—no one or thing promising to do what only God can do. The second commandment warns us against worshiping our own faulty image for the true God.
Understanding 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).
The second commandment is not merely a prohibition against worshipping a false God; that is covered in the first commandment. It is a prohibition against using a statue—a carved, man-made image as a representation of the true God in worship. In Exodus 32, Scripture gives us a classic example of his people fashioning an image to represent him, the golden calf. The name of the golden calf was significant; it was Yahweh. They forged an image of the true God, Yahweh, and were severely punished for it.
When it comes to obedience to this commandment, if you are like me, you might be thinking, “I’m not sure I did all that well with the first commandment. I have to fight a lot of counterfeit gods whose voices promise to satisfy my heart, which I am listening to way too much! But on the second commandment, give me an A+. I’ve never even taken a ceramics class, much less crafted a statue for God. I couldn’t carve the bark off a stick to make a totem pole without endangering my hands, and if I could carve it, I sure as heck wouldn’t bow down to it!”
Well, you may deserve an A+; but let’s talk about the real meaning behind this commandment. Something more than “don’t run an idol-making business” is being said. What is wrong with a visual image or symbol, a graven image to represent God. After all, it is difficult to worship and love an invisible being. When I close my eyes and think about how much I love my wife Sandy, I picture her in my mind, or how much I love one of my daughters, my mind pulls up her picture. But what do you picture when you close your eyes to think about loving God? He is an invisible God. He is spirit.
Historically, at the time the Ten Commandments were given, the god’s of the neighboring peoples around Israel were visually represented by huge statues, overlaid with gold, decorated lavishly with precious jewels. And they were housed in enormous, spectacular temples that would hold thousands of people. Because the worshippers had visual tangible representations for their gods, their religious experience could feel more real. Contrast that to our God—the God of Scripture—who commands us not only to worship no one and nothing else but forbids his worshippers from ever creating an object that will in any way serve to represent him. “Don’t ever make anything of wood or stone, or anything else go serve as your focal point for your worship of me.” The natural question that arises is: Why not? What is the big deal? What dangers lie behind this commandment?
A. Danger #1: No image crafted by human hands could ever accurately represent the totality of who God is. In other words, any concrete depiction of God reduces God’s inherent greatness. No carving or statue could ever capture even a fraction of who our infinite, transcendent God is. God is saying, “Any physical image of me is so grossly inadequate that it is worse than no image at all.” Let’s try to illustrate this principle. Suppose a friend of yours was able to visit the Swiss Alps and find a place to stand at the foot of them and gaze up. He is so dwarfed by the grandeur of them that it takes his breath away. Suppose when he got home you said to your friend, “Help the rest of us understand what that was like. Here is a stick of chewing gum. Chew it up and make it into a replica so we can get a sense of the splendor of the Alps. After laughing at you, along with anyone else who has been to the Alps, he would say, “It’s impossible to convey the majesty of the Alps with chewing gum. I’d be better able to describe them with words. A chewing gum representation of the Alps would be worse than no representation at all.” And, I would have to say, “a chewing gum image to represent Yahweh is also worse than no image at all.” The glory and majesty and splendor and greatness of God are so magnificent that you can never begin to capture them with a concrete image. Many of his attributes are what we call incommunicable, meaning humans can’t fully comprehend them because they are outside of human experience. These are attributes like immutability, omniscience, his omni-presence. So, we must refuse to reduce God by using a concrete image to represent him.
B. Danger #2: Whatever image you fashion to REPRESENT God, you will soon worship. Another danger of making physical images, relics, and objects to represent God is that although they start out as symbols pointing to God, there is a human tendency to begin to worship the objects themselves. During the Exodus, the Israelites suffered deadly snake bites as a punishment for their disobedience. But if they trusted Yahweh to heal them by looking at a bronze serpent, which God told Moses to make, they would be healed. Nothing more is said of the bronze serpent for hundreds of years until the kingship of Hezekiah when we find out that the Israelites had begun to worship the bronze serpent, burning incense to it.
There is a human tendency to treat relics, objects, and images as sacred. To some degree, I understand that. Physical space or objects associated with meaningful people or experience carry a sense of the sacred. We see the sites along the highway where loved ones died in car wrecks, marked by a cross or flowers. A beautiful cathedral communicates a sense of sacred awe. This past June 6th was the 80th commemoration of D-day—the storming of the beaches at Normandy in WWII. To Americans, those beaches are sacred and the thousands of crosses spreading over the fields at the Normandy American Cemetery are as well. Over six thousand Americans lost their lives taking those beaches on just the first day. When I visited Capernaum on a tour of Galilee, I stood a few feet from the foundation of the synagogue where Jesus taught. I looked down on the flat stone exit knowing it was quite likely Jesus had stepped on it. I did not want to step there; it felt too sacred. I stepped back and just looked. But there is a serious danger in treating any human objects, images, or even spaces as too sacred because doing so has often been the first step towards idolatry. It is hard for 21st century Protestants to comprehend this picture; but listen to this historian’s description of the Roman Catholic church in the sixteenth century.
The country lay under the dark pall of superstition and ignorance. Everywhere friars travelled with their holy relics which, for a fee, could be viewed and kissed. In Germany, in the city of Martin Luther, at Wittenberg in Saxony, the Castle Church contained over seventeen thousand relics including, supposedly, part of the rock on which Jesus stood when he wept over Jerusalem, the gown of the virgin Mary and some milk from her breasts, a piece from the burning bush of Moses, thirty-five portions of the cross, hay and straw from the manager at Bethlehem, some hair from Christ. (K. S. Latourette, A History of Christianity).
The accumulation of these holy relics, along with the superstition they engendered contributed to the widespread sale of indulgences—the promise of years off purgatory for viewing these relics. For example, one historian wrote “The Elector of Saxony was proud of the collection in his Indulgence Church. The pilgrim could earn one hundred and twenty-seven thousand seven hundred and nine years—and one hundred sixteen days off purgatory by viewing them all” (Ibid). We saw the same tendency to worship sacred objects a few years ago in the hoopla over the shroud of Jesus supposedly having been discovered. I personally believe that one of the reasons that God has not supernaturally preserved any of the original documents that have been collected into Scripture is because, based upon what the second commandment teaches us, had God supernaturally preserved any of them, we would worship them.
A further problem with viewing religious objects as holy is that we can easily begin to think they are necessary for worship. We need to be cautious about religious symbols, icons, basins, candelabras, altars and other religious objects lest they convey the subtle message that they are necessary for worship. But God’s clear promise is, “Draw near to me through Christ and I will draw near to you—and we don’t need any religious equipment to get acquainted” (Js 4:8) As Jesus told the Samaritan woman—it is not a matter of sacred space, being in Jerusalem or Mt Gerazim or being surrounded by worship equipment. You can come to God wherever you are, without beads, or basins, or crosses or altars so long as you come in spirit and in truth—which leads to the final danger of fashioning idols.
C. Danger #3 God wants you to worship him in truth—for who he IS not give your worship to the false god you imagine him to be. If you think about it, every craftsman who sculpts an image must have a mental image that he starts with. Statues of fertility goddesses have noticeable breasts. War gods look like warriors. The second commandment prohibits much more than making physical images. It prohibits creating our own mental image of God instead of letting the Word of God do that. I want to say that again. What the second commandment is most concerned about is the temptation to create our own mental image of God, instead of letting the Word of God frame that image. Our worship of God becomes corrupt when we worship our faulty image of God, instead of worshipping God as he truly is. It is okay to have a favorite attribute of God. I think for most of us that has to be his mercy. Yet, if we adore God only for the attributes that are our favorites, his mercy but not his wrath against evil, his grace but not his holy hatred of sin, or in some cultures loving his justice—but not his mercy, then our worship of God is corrupt; we worship a figment of our imagination. The only worship God wants is worship for who he truly is. But one of the most destructive results of the fall is human’s fashioning their own mental image of God. Notice that in Romans 1, sinful man’s suppression of the truth leads him to exchange the glorious truth about God’s, immortal, unchanging nature for a false image of God.
For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened. Claiming to be wise, they became fools, and EXCHANGED THE GLORY OF THE IMMORTAL GOD FOR IMAGES RESEMBLING MORTAL MAN AND BIRDS AND ANIMALS AND CREEPING THINGS (Rom 1:21-23).
Psychologists have for years dubbed “Homo Sapiens” the worshipping creature. Human beings alone, in the entire animal kingdom, have been worshippers in every society and culture that has existed. Indeed, Scripture tells us that only humans are created in God’s image with the capacity to worship built into us. As we saw last week, we are designed with a God-shaped worship vacuum. Life only works when he is our first love. But our sinful nature causes humans to try to fill that worship need with counterfeit gods that promise to satisfy our hearts. In my view it is extremely important in this world of multiculturalism, to help our kids understand that sin causes humans to suppress the truth about the true God and what he says in his Word because the true God demands obedience from us. But because every human is created to worship—humans make up other religions so they can still worship but ignore God’s demands upon them that they don’t like. For example, Islam allows chauvinistic Muslim men to abuse women and to slaughter those they hate. Similarly, so called Progressive Christianity, which is not Christianity at all, denies that premarital sex, adultery, and homosexuality are wrong, and that God created male and female for different roles in the home and church. But it, like today’s social media, loves to talk about injustice.
The Exodus text we’re studying explains that we are not to fashion our own religion or our own representation of God because God is a jealous god. He demands excusive worship, adored for who he is. There is an evil jealousy that says I want what you’ve got, and I hate you because I haven’t got it. But there is virtuous jealousy. J.I. Packer points out, “Married persons who felt no jealousy at the intrusion of another lover or adulterer into their home would surely be lacking in moral perception; for the exclusiveness of marriage is the essence of marriage.” We are designed for worshipping the true God exclusively. God’s jealousy inclines him to be hostile to false lovers deceiving us into giving them his rightful place and to false images of him based upon disrespecting his Word.
Twenty-First Century Application of Second Commandment
A. Don’t let the cultural myth that all religions worship the same God go unchallenged. Here is one example: Many argue that the Muslim God, Allah, is the same God as the Jews and Christians worship, Yahweh. But here are the facts:
- Allah does not exist in three persons. The Trinity is denied by Islam.
- Allah reveals his will but never himself. But Jesus said, “He who has seen me has seen the Father.”
- Allah creates evil and leads men into sin. Yahweh is holy and cannot be tempted by evil.
- Allah is not righteous, just, or morally consistent. He does whatever he wants. Yahweh’s nature never changes; he is holy and just in all he does.
- Allah can change whenever he desires. Therefore, he is not bound by his promises. Yahweh is a god whose word can always be trusted. He always keeps his promises because he is unchanging.
- Allah has no love relationship with his followers. He is unknowable and references to his love are almost non-existent in the Quran. Yahweh IS love, giving his Son to restore us to an intimate love relationship with him.
- Allah is a false God fashioned by Muhamad’s degenerate mind just as Pope Urban’s God was a false God shaped by his degenerate mind.
B. Look to Jesus to correct your false image of God. Our views of God are all imperfect, having been shaped by subjective factors like our relationship with our earthly father, religious experiences growing up, and suffering that God did NOT step in to stop. But Jesus is the revelation of the true nature of God.
- Col 1:15, 19. He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation. For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell.
- Heb 1:3 He is the radiance of the glory of God, the exact imprint of his nature.
New City Catechism Help with Commandment #2
Question 9: What does God require in the first, second, and third commandments?
First, that we know God is the only true God. Second, that we avoid all idolatry.
Teaching Outline: God very clearly says he doesn’t want people worshipping images (pictures) or statues of him. Tell the children that God wants to be known through his Word alone. That is how he has chosen to reveal himself, and that is where he can come to be known. When people make an image of God, they are using their imagination to show God the way they want him to be. The problem is that they will leave things out that they don’t like or add things that aren’t true.
Discussion and Question Time: Is jealousy a good emotion? Explain to the children that when God expresses an emotion, it is always pure and not affected by sin. It is not like our own jealousy. Just as it is appropriate for a husband not to want his wife to love anyone else, it is appropriate for God to want us to not worship anyone or anything else.
Perhaps the best way to close this episode is with Jesus’ words that remind us of how important our adoration and worship are to God; but our gift of worship to him must be based upon who he truly is. The hour is coming, said Jesus, and is now here, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for the Father is seeking such people to worship him.
For Further Prayerful Thought:
- How would you answer a new believer who said to you, “I believe Jesus is the Son of God, the risen Lamb slain to take away my sin, but why are there so many other religions in the world?”
- Why can’t a chewing gum replica of the Alps convey their glory? Do you agree that a chewing gum replica of the Alps might be worse than no physical image? Why?
- Although man was created in God’s image, our fall into sin means that we suppress the truth of who God is, especially our accountability to him, and remake God as OUR IMAGE—the way we want him to be, because we are created to worship. (Atheists usually build their life around a false ideology, which functions like a God.) How do you see this biblical truth making sense in what you observe about the world?
