Graven Mistakes (Part 1 of 2)

The Second Commandment warns us not to make or worship idols. What does that mean now, today?

Why is that so important? Alistair Begg answers these questions on Truth for Life as we begin part one of a message titled Graven Mistakes. The first commandment deals with the object of our worship, forbidding us to worship any false god. The second commandment deals with the manner of our worship, forbidding us to worship the true God in any unworthy way.

Or if you like, to state it positively, it is not enough to worship the correct God, but the correct God must be worshiped correctly. And when we come to consider this, we come face to face with the whole issue of idolatry. Many of us would assume that the second commandment is somewhat anachronistic. Even while we were prepared to acknowledge commandment one insofar as we may worship incorrectly in terms of a misunderstanding of God, many of us would want to skip commandment two, assuming that once we'd got one correct, we certainly wouldn't get two wrong.

I think we're in for a bit of a surprise, as we'll see this morning. We contend ourselves with the fact that since we don't have any graven images in our homes or haven't been dancing around any religious totem poles lately, that presumably we're not in violation of the command. But what we're going to discover is that the essence of idolatry, which is what this is addressing, is the entertainment of thoughts about God that are unworthy of God—that is, the coming to God with imaginations which are more the product of our fertile minds than they either are of any biblical revelation. The kind of thing to which I'm referring is what we often hear people say, I like to think of God as, and then they add whatever it might be. And they think that because they preface it by saying, I like to think of God as, that somehow that justifies whatever they like to think of God as. You know, I like to think of God as the heavenly architect, or I like to think of God as the great timekeeper, or I like to think of God as just a loving Father. And when they use that word just, what they're saying is, I like to think of him this way, and I don't like to think of him in that way—as if somehow or another just our conceiving of him can create him in the way that we want to worship him. Now, one of the things that is apparent, I think, in our generation, is the lack of instruction that has a memorization as a part of it.

And we can debate that. I know I debate it all the time with educationalists who tell me that learning by rote is taboo, and it's not a good way to learn anything. Well, it sure helped me how to do the one through twelve times tables, and I could never have got through New Testament Greek without learning it by rote and myriad other things. And so this idea of that kind of memorization is spurious, has bled into our church thinking, and so we tend to kind of catch things in the air rather than to give our attention to them. Well, if we'd lived in the sixteenth century, we wouldn't have been able to get off quite so easily. And many of us would have been confronted by the Heidelberg catechism.

And we would have been sat down by our moms and our dads, and we would have been regularly drilled on these following questions. This actually is question number ninety-six of the Heidelberg catechism, so the children are already well into it by this point. The question is, what is God's will for us in the second commandment? Answer, that we in no way make any image of God, nor worship him in any other way than he has commanded in his Word. Question number ninety-seven, may we then not make any image at all? Answer, God cannot and may not be visibly portrayed in any way, although creatures may be portrayed, yet God forbids making or having such images if one's intention is to worship them or to serve God through them. Question, but may not images be permitted in the churches as teaching aids for the unlearned? Answer, no, we shouldn't try to be wiser than God. He wants his people instructed by the living preaching of his Word, not by idols that cannot even talk.

Good, straightforward, understandable, helpful, and vital. And yet this morning, most of us, even those who walk the path of righteousness, would be hard-pressed to give any kind of cogent answer to those questions. More is the pity. So what I'd like to do with you is to ask three simple questions of the second commandment. First of all, then, what is the commandment saying? Well, we discovered last time that God was interested in only one kind of relationship with us—namely, an exclusive relationship, a relationship in which we were encountering no one other than him, and there was nothing coming between us and God. He then goes on in the second commandment to tell us that God alone is to be worshiped, and that without any visual symbols of himself, in accordance with how he has revealed himself.

Now, this is very, very important, because we can be successful, as I said, in part number one, and yet make a dreadful hash of number two. If you've got your Bible open, you may want to turn to 2 Kings chapter 10 for just a moment, and there we have the record of Jehu and his destruction of the Baals. These people who were worshiping Baal had built a temple to Baal.

Jehu was not pleased with this and took it upon himself to make sure that they wouldn't be doing that for much longer. He comes up with a dirty little trick, whereby he tells all the Baal worshippers that he wants them to come because he's worshiping Baal too, and they were all going to come and meet in the temple. When he gets them all in the temple, he gives them all new robes, so they're all getting excited about how things are going, and then he tells the people that he has got surrounding the building to go in and run them through with the swords. And so he takes care of Baal and his worshippers. And in verse 26 of 2 Kings 10, we read, They brought the sacred stone out of the temple of Baal and burned it. They demolished the sacred stone of Baal and tore down the temple of Baal, and people have used it for a latrine to this day. And people walk past and say, You know, that used to be where they worshiped Baal.

Hmm. I tell you what, Jehu really dealt with that, didn't he? He was concerned that they wouldn't be worshiping the wrong god. He wanted to make sure that everyone worshiped the right god.

So far, so good. But look at verse 28. So Jehu destroyed Baal worship in Israel.

Now, the word however that introduces verse 29 is important. However, he did not turn away from the sins of Jeroboam son of Nabat, which he had caused Israel to commit—namely, the worship of the golden calves at Bethel and Dan. In other words, he was clear that there was only one true God who was to be worshiped.

He got that correct. But then he fouled up by assuming that the true God could be worshiped incorrectly by means of the construction of these calves that they had set up in these pagan shrines. You see, we need to understand this morning that idolatry consists not only in the worship of false gods but also in the worship of the true God in false ways.

Okay? Now, we could expand this if we were talking with one another along all kinds of lines. That is why the nature of what happens here in worship has to happen within the confines of what the Bible says worship is all about. This is not a theater.

This is not a performance. Rather, this is a place in which we are compelled to worship the living God in all of his glory, in all of his power and his might. Therefore, there needs to be about our worship that which is true—not the worship of self, not the worship that is false, but that is true, so that it is transcendent, so that it begins and magnifies God in his glory. So when people come in, as we hope they will, it will not be to come into something that they immediately find acceptable, but it will be to come into something that they immediately find challenging.

What is happening here? Here we have a company of people who are seeking to worship the true God and to worship the correct God correctly. So when we deviate from that, we deviate badly. When God constructed the temple or commanded the construction of the temple, he made sure that there was to be no representation of the deity. You can read of this in 1 Kings chapter 6. He allowed for the use of color and shapes and images from the natural world—fruit and trees and flowers and land and water. After all, the heavens declare the glory of God, and the firmament shows his handiwork. But there were to be no images of God himself, because it would confuse people as to the nature of what they were dealing with.

Now, people react fairly vehemently to this, I've discovered. Folks often say that there's no problem in our having statutes or pictures of the one that we're worshiping. After all, aren't they just an aid to worship?

What harm can they do? Surely this only applies to images which somehow are contrary to God as he has revealed himself. But when you look at the commandment, you find that that isn't the case. God says, You shall not make for yourself an idol in the form of anything. Even if it is approximating to who I am, you're not supposed to do it.

Even if it is your best guess at who I am and what I am, you're not supposed to fiddle with it. Well, in every generation, people have rejected that. People have said, you know—and Thomas Aquinas was one in an earlier century—he said that people would be more easily moved by what they see than by what they hear or what they read. And people say that all the time. They'll say, That's why we think that we ought to do this or we ought to do that or we ought to use drama or we ought to use these things. Because after all, far more will take place in an instant in what people see than will take place in an hour and a half of reading the Bible.

And that's not true. Or there may be more than impinges upon the senses of a man, depending on the context out of which he comes, but in terms of God revealing himself, it isn't true. The Reformers had to answer it carefully. Calvin, responding to the kind of things that Aquinas was saying, said this, Because God does not speak to us every day from the heavens, there are only the Scriptures in which he has willed that his truth should be published. It is only in the Scriptures that he has willed that his truth should be published. That's why the Bible must be central.

It's not that we worship the Bible, but that it is in the Bible that God has made himself known to us. It is in the incarnation that he has manifested the nature and the totality of what he is, as we will see as we bring this to a conclusion this morning. That's in accord with what all of Scripture has to say.

Isaiah chapter 40 verse 18, To whom will you liken God, or what likeness will you compare unto him? How are you going to make anything that approximates to the creator of the ends of the earth? So when God establishes the building of the temple and establishes the place in which his presence was to be manifested, there was nothing in there.

It's interesting! In pagan cultures, there'd be some great monolithic thing. People would go in and go, Whoa!

That's it! But not for God, no. It was just a cedar place. And in it dwelt the ark, and in the ark dwelt the tablets and dwelt the law of God. What was God saying? Don't look for me in shrines. Don't look for me in paintings.

Don't look for me in statutes. I'm not there. Look for me in my Word. And that's why, you see, the Reformation church, coming out of the dark ages, was at pains to make it clear to the people, and something that needs to be reiterated to our day, that there were three things essential for a church to really exist. Number one, the presence of the Scriptures proclaimed in all their fullness. Number two, the expression of the sacraments—of baptism and of the Lord's Supper. And number three, the establishing of church discipline. Now, doesn't that seem a little kind of limited? After all that had gone before the sixteenth century?

Certainly. Were Cromwell and the roundheads simply just a bunch of bad guys, or did they have any theological underpinnings to them at all? What were they doing going, knocking down all these things and firing cannonballs all over the place? Why was it so important? It was so important because they thought that the second commandment was to be taken seriously, and anything that was in violation of it should be destroyed.

It was a theological underpinning for them—a theological underpinning which needs to be grasped again in our day, because we are living in a world of great confusion, not least of all in relationship to the nature of God. It is impossible for man to try and encapsulate the living Creator God in a box, in a statue, or in a painting. It's interesting that even in the incarnation we have no record of the physical appearance of Jesus Christ. There is no indication whether his hair was long or short, whether he had brown eyes or blue eyes, whether he was five foot six or six foot two—none of that.

It's interesting, isn't it? There isn't another figure that ever walked the stage of human history that was devoid—whose record is devoid of that kind of information. God deliberately left it out. Because imagine if Jesus actually had been six foot two with dark hair and brown eyes, and you happened to be six foot two with dark hair and brown eyes.

You'd be saying to people, Hey, don't you think I look a lot like this? You know, see? And we'd be tempted to somehow circumscribe deity in our own little deceptions, and the second commandment is dealing with that. Jesus makes this clear to the lady at the well, John chapter 4. Remember, he's thirsty, the disciples go off to get something to eat, off for a sandwich, to bring it back for Jesus. He meets the lady at the well, he begins a wonderful conversation with her, and as he begins to talk to her concerning her life and her understanding of spiritual things, the lady throws out a kind of red herring.

She begins to see that this person to whom she's speaking is someone extraordinary, and in verse 19 of John 4 she says, I can see that you're a prophet. Our fathers worshiped on this mountain, but you Jews claim that the place where we must worship is in Jerusalem. So she's about to have a discussion now about locations, about where worship should take place—the kind of thing that often happens to us in conversation with our neighbors and our friends. We begin to talk concerning spiritual things, and they want to push it out to discussions about, well, my grandmother used to go to the church of the such-and-such in South Euclid. Oh, what a wonderful church that was for worship, you know. What a reverberation there was in there, you know.

They had no carpeting in there. It was just wonderful the way it went around, and they wanted to talk about that and about something else. And Jesus sits this lady and said, Hey, wait, we're not talking about up here or down there.

This is what we're talking about. God is not concerned about Gerizim, Jerusalem, first of all. God is Spirit, says Jesus to the lady, and they that worship him will worship him in spirit and in truth, for they are the kind of worshipers the Father seeks. God is Spirit, and his worshipers must worship in spirit and in truth. The implication being that if we endeavor to introduce any kind of intermediary element, we inevitably obscure the true truth of God as he has revealed it. And our images and our shrines and our icons do a great disservice to his glory.

Now let us go on and ask a second question. If that is the case, why is the commandment important? Now, it's obviously important because God said it. Everything that God has said in his Word is important.

But beyond that, let me say two things. This commandment is important, first of all, because images dishonor God, and secondly, because images misdirect men. Images dishonor God, and images misdirect men.

Let's spend a moment or two in the first. The real problem with statues or shrines or pictures or anything like that is not that they don't look good. But it is this—that no matter how good they look, no matter how grand and wonderful they may be, they will inevitably conceal most, if not all of the truth, about the nature and character of God. See? So, when we say to ourselves, Well, I like to think of God in a certain way, and my imagination is very important to me—the way I think of God is very important.

I hear people saying this to me all the time. There is great danger in this, loved ones. I hope you understand this. If that had been so important to God, he would have revealed himself in some other kind of way so as to make it possible for us to latch on to some imaginary capacity whereby we may know God better. But he hasn't done that. He has revealed himself in the creative order, he has revealed himself in the written Word, and he has revealed himself fully in the person of his Son, Jesus Christ. And we are to look no other place nor create any other thing that would divert us from that pathway, his pathway of revelation. There have been many times in the history of man when the work of a sculptor or an artist has been laid aside because the monarch whom the artist was seeking to portray judged that they had highlighted one aspect to the detriment of others, and thus the monarch said, This image is singularly unhelpful. And so the artist who had done his best with the sculptor is sent packing with his little sculptor, because the king or the queen said, It doesn't do me justice. Don't come here with that crummy painting.

I look far better than that. Now, the fact may be in relationship to earthly monarchs that that may not have been the case. Some of them, if their renditions of them are anywhere close to accurate, they needed merciful painters—merciful portrait painters.

But nevertheless, many of these artisans were thrown out because the monarch said, It doesn't do me justice. Not true, necessarily, but in God's case always true. There is no statue that could ever be erected. There is no painting that could ever be painted. There is nothing that could be done to visibly express God that would do anything other than diminish our view of God. I mean, it is impossible to conceive of something greater than God. For anything of which we conceive is going to be inevitably less than God. Therefore, something that is less than God to portray God is going to diminish our understanding of the God that we're trying to portray.

I mean, it's a dead-end street. It's stupidity. It's idolatry. And it is ultimately blasphemy. The Bible makes it clear that we are to worship the correct God in the correct way.

You're listening to Truth for Life with Alistair Begg. Alistair's messages are making it increasingly clear that it's impossible for us to uphold God's law by our own efforts. In his book Pathway to Freedom—How God's Laws Guide Our Lives, Alistair explains that the Ten Commandments aren't meant to be a ladder we climb to earn God's acceptance.

They are instead more like a mirror that exposes our sin and sends us to Jesus, our Savior, the one who offers hope and forgiveness and freedom. In the book Pathway to Freedom, there is a full chapter dedicated to each of the Ten Commandments. You will better understand each of God's foundational laws.

You'll get a clearer picture of why they're so important. For example, you'll learn that idol worship is still alive and well in our world today, why Sunday should be a holy day and not a holiday, and you'll see why it's so important that we properly use God's name. Each chapter of Pathway to Freedom uncovers more of our sinful nature, but the good news is it does not end there. In the book, we're reminded that God has provided a way out of our predicament. In fact, the final chapter is called Good News for Lawbreakers, and in it Alistair clearly presents the Gospel, offering a simple prayer for readers at the end. The book is convicting and yet encouraging. We think this is a book you'll want to share with others, with friends or family members. You can request your copy of Pathway to Freedom when you make a donation to Truth for Life today. Just click the image of the book in our app or visit our website at truthforlife.org slash donate. And if you'd prefer, you can call us at 888-588-7884. If you'd rather mail your donation along with your request for the book, write to Truth for Life at Post Office Box 398000, Cleveland, Ohio 44139. I'm Bob Lapine. Thanks for listening. Be sure to join us tomorrow for the conclusion of today's message when we'll hear about the grave danger inherent in manmade images, shrines, or statues that depict God. The Bible teaching of Alistair Begg is furnished by Truth for Life where the Learning is for Living.