What Do You Love More? The Law of God and Second Commandment Violations
In this series, I take our law homily from our church gathering each week (The law homily is where we read from the law of God and let His law examine our hearts so that we can be a tender-hearted and repenting people), and I post them here for your edification. Here is this week’s law homily on the prohibition against mental idolatry.
4 "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. 5 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 the fourth generations of those who hate Me, 6 but showing lovingkindness to thousands, to those who love Me and keep My commandments. - Exodus 20:4-6
THE GRAVITY OF IMAGE-MAKING
After the Lord gave us the most foundational commandment to have no other gods before Him, He forbade us from the abominable practice of lessening and cheapening His matchless glory by trying to cast it in a limited frame. This is clearly a consequence of God being the one and only God, maximal in all attributes, infinite in all His knowledge, power, being, glory, existence, and attributes. If God is limitless in all these things, and He is, then these flimsy, shallow, and hollow images cannot constrain him. Trying to cast an infinite god in any finite frame is not only an offense to Him but infuriates His holy and righteous wrath. It is to lie about who He is. It is to say to Him that you have commanded me not to do this, but because I am a visual learner, I do not care about your commandments and will make you into whatever image and likeness I want. At the core of it, it is to say that I am God. I choose how God will be revealed to me instead of allowing God to make that choice for you!
And this kind of behavior manifests itself in a variety of ways. In ancient Israel, they did the unthinkable by trying to limit the infinite God, casting Him in the image of a golden calf. They took the one who has no end to His power, majesty, and glory, and they cast Him as an animal that stands in its own feces, which is a disgusting, deplorable, and abominable action. God was gracious not to smite them all where they stood and instead made them drink their idol once it was crushed into powder and added to their water supply. As it ripped open their bowels, they were to learn that idolatry is not only an offense to God but tears us apart as well.
You think about the golden calf on Wall Street, the image of the American God of wealth and gluttony. You think about the morbidly obese Buddha with that silly smile on his face as a picture of what men and women in the Orient believe about God. You think about the depictions of Jesus as a white European with long flowing hair, which is a statement about what men and women in the Renaissance believed about God. You think about the campaigns to depict Jesus as a woman, as a black or oriental man. You think about shows like The Chosen, who cast the most holy face of Jesus Christ, the one who said if you have seen me, you have seen the Father, the one who who now sits upon the throne of heaven, with the face of a human sinner, I believe the Lord is righteously indignant about that.
And maybe you are saying, Kendall, do not be a killjoy… I like The Chosen. I like the Passion of the Christ. I like my Jesus picture on my wall.
WHAT DO YOU LOVE MORE?
But, I would ask you, do you love your images more than the commands of God? He said not to make any image of ANYTHING that is in heaven above or of ANYTHING that is upon the earth below and worship it. And you may say, but I am not worshiping it. But, yes, you are! When we make images of Jesus, those images inevitably end up becoming a part of our mind's calculus, the amalgamations of who we think Christ is, defining in our imagination what the divine is like contributing to our conscious approach to worship. We watch these shows to experience Jesus and to learn more about what He is like. We watch these shows and look at these mediums to gain a deeper glimpse into who He is. We are asking the film's director, the artist who captured the image, and the designer of the picture to help us understand Jesus better and more fully. And we take the knowledge given to us by other people's imaginations and bring that with us into worship! Brothers and sisters, we cannot help allowing images to creep into our worship. And when we do that, which we inevitably will, we violate the command!
We violate the same command that led God to decimate Israel. We take His gracious Words and loving commands, which are given to us because of our weakness, and we make excuses on how we are not violating them and how this image or that image has ended up on the approved list. We play a dangerous game with God, Spiritual Russian Roulette with a fully loaded revolver, when we approach the one who said make NO IMAGES of ANYTHING with our images, our movies, our big budget productions, and convince ourselves that this kind of behavior pleases God!
How could it? Didn't Jesus say to Thomas that the ones who have never seen His face are more blessed than the doubting apostle, who needed to stick his finger into the bloodied side of Christ? Why did He say that? Because Jesus did not envision us needing Jim Caviezel and Jonathan Roumie to aid us in the blessing of knowing Him! He is all we need. We do not need to see His face; we are blessed by not seeing! We are blessed by waiting until heaven to see the only approved image of Jesus, the one that the Father chose to reveal the Son to us in, the face above all faces, the one and only shining face of our Lord Jesus Christ!
THE IMPOSSIBILITY OF DEPICTING CHRIST
Why is this commandment so strict on these things? Because our God is spirit, as Jesus taught in John 4. He is infinite, transcendent, beyond physical representation. As Isaiah asks, "To whom will you liken God, or what likeness compare with Him?" To attempt to capture the essence of the immortal, divine Christ in a mere physical image is to engage in the most extreme folly. Jesus was not like other men. He is the God-man! In Him, all of the fullness of God dwells in human form. To make an image of Him is to create an image of God!
Paul says that He existed in the very form of God before taking on a servant's form. In human form, He remained truly God and truly man. And after His resurrection, He appeared in the glory of His immortal, eternal being, as described symbolically by John in Revelation 1. Any earthly image we could ever make fails to convey the reality of who Christ was, is, and will forever be.
That makes it idolatry! That makes it a grievous sin. And we must be cautious because we tend towards idolatry and excuse-making in our sinful human nature. How quickly the Israelites turned from the Living God to a molten calf! Even a well-intentioned image of Christ can soon become an object of reverence that violates the commandment against idols.
As the Apostle Paul warns in Romans, we must not exchange the glories of the immortal God for mere images resembling mortal man. Every image, no matter how skillfully rendered, is limited by human art and imagination. It cannot help but fall short of representing the fullness of Christ's divine and human natures.
And this is not just me saying this. This has been the consistent witness of most faithful men throughout Church history. The early Father Eusebius rejected portrayals of Christ due to the Second Commandment. Epiphanius was so convicted that he actively destroyed such images in churches. During the Reformation, stalwarts like John Calvin recognized that making images of Christ violated this very command. Even the Westminster Larger Catechism prohibits representations of any part of the Triune Godhead.
SPIRIT AND TRUTH WORSHIP
Ultimately, Christ Himself calls us to something greater—to worship the Father in spirit and truth. We are not to rely on external representations or symbols but to draw near to God at a heart and spirit level. Making images of Christ distracts us from this high calling.
So let us be a people obedient to God's commands. Let us honor Christ's infinite dignity and resist diminishing His matchless glory. And let us be a people who truly repent. If we have reduced the glory of the immortal God down into the likeness of a sinful man If we have watched television shows where human sinners are betraying our sinless savior, if we have adored images of the infinite reduced down unto the finite, if we have violated God's second commandment, then let us repent of that sin, and as a part of our repentance, let us flee from our sin and put away all traces of idolatry.
