Deuteronomy 5.8–10; 4.9–20
The second sermon in a series on The Ten Commandments, preached at Nedlands Anglican Church 13th August 2023
The second commandment forbids the making of idols:
You shall not make for yourself a carved image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is on 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 fourth generation of those who hate me, but showing steadfast love to thousands of those who love me and keep my commandments.
Deutereonomy 5
Carved idols and graven images seem a bit distant to us in Australia. John Edison tells this story:
A clergyman walked into his church one day and saw an old tramp studying the the Commandments, which were painted on the front wall. He was about to speak to him, when the old man turned around and shuffled out muttering to himself, “Well anyhow, I’ve never made a graven image.”
Nor have I, and I don’t suppose you have either. But the world is shrinking. People are traveling and encountering idols not far from our shores. Idol temples are springing up in our own land, and shrines in front of people’s houses. The lure of idols is not so far away.
Let me tell you about Albert. He helped me have a kitchen built for my college in South Africa and always took me to lunch when I was in Sydney. He had an antiques business in Sydney that specialized in idols and worship objects from Asia—not the souvenirs that people bring back from Bali to decorate their living room, but the real thing.[1] He also worked on musical shows and was in the midst of producing a new age spiritual production for a theatre in London when God opened his eyes and he came to know Jesus. It all happened rather suddenly, and he found he couldn’t continue with the show. He apologized and went back to Sydney. He collected all the cult objects from his shop—$30,000 worth, he told me—and sank them in the middle of the harbour. As an Asian person he knew that some of these things had an occult power. Ever since, he has been something of a father to the Chinese Christian community in Sydney.
Our modern world is split down the middle by idolatry. In India, a billion people worship them. Many of those who don’t, hate them. In 1947 a million people died in the conflict between Hindus and Muslims at the time of partition. Idol gods was the issue. The unrest continues—erect a shrine in your garden in Saudi Arabia and you will be killed. The Burmese army wants to get rid of Muslims from its land.
If we are to trust God and obey him, we first need to be sure he is real, and then to know what he is like. Most people at most times that humans have lived on earth have not had any trouble with the first of these. They have looked at the heavens at night, experienced the power of a storm, watched a bird in flight, studied the patterns in a flower, and known that these things could not be without some extraordinary intelligence. Modern man thinks he can do away with God: science explains everything. But science cannot explain science, and the more we know—well, you would think the more we know, the simpler and explainable things would be, but actually the opposite is the case—the more wonderfully complex we see things are. Even in our scientific age most people believe in God.
One of the teachers who came to George Whitefield College grew up in West Africa. He remembered sitting with his father with a group of village elders around a fire on a beautiful clear night. As they looked up into the heavens, his father asked, “Who made all this?” The Africans answered: “God, of course.” “And what do you know about him?” he asked. “Nothing, really,” they replied, and that is the story in much of Africa. Everyday dealings are with the dead ancestors, which brings fear, as do the spirits of our own indigenous peoples.
Israel knew God was real, because he revealed himself to them. “I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt …” And he commanded them that their worship was to be for him alone. This was the first commandment. But what is he like? this is what the second commandment is about.
If God wants people to worship him, you wouldn’t think he would forbid the very thing that people down the ages have found most helpful in their worship: the use of statues and pictures.
An idol—a statue, or it could be a picture that you use to focus your thoughts—if you intend to make one, you must first ask yourself what God is like. And there is the problem.
In 1986 our little family spent a few months in India; I was teaching at a Bible college in Pune (Poona), a forty-minute flight from Bombay. In the midterm break we were able to take an all-night ride on one of India’s famous trains. We stopped at Bangalore, and took a bus to Mysore, stopping on the way at a famous Hindu temple. It wasn’t pretty like most of the temples we saw; more like a huge mound than a building. With four-year old Daniel on my shoulders—that was where he spent much of his time in those days—I ventured into a long tunnel lit by burning torches, at the end of which we could see an inner vault where priests in loin cloths were worshipping the statue of a huge black crouching bull. We were still in the approach tunnel when Daniel pulled on my hair and said, “Daddy, take me out; this is an evil place”; it was. We turned back, and reflecting on it afterwards, I understood that temple was designed to create fear. Is that what God is like?
We saw a lot of bull-idols in India. One strong memory I have is climbing a steep path to a shrine in Pune, which also had a big stone crouching bull. A woman approached carrying a small baby. She sprinkled the bull with yellow flower petals and touched the baby’s head on it—praying for health and other blessings, I supposed. But what did she think was the power that could actually grant those blessings? And why worship that God, and not another?
When you worship with the help of an idol or devotional picture, that is how you will think of God. You may protest that you are not worshiping the image; the image is just a representation of the God, who is spiritual. But if you worship with something visual before your eyes, you will imagine God that way, and it will be a deception. God is not like that. The idol may picture some attribute of the god. The bull images strength and fertility, but the God who created the universe is so much more; he is more than anything that humans can imagine, and is invisible—invisible because he is spiritual, and creates the light (along with everything else), and fills the universe. The idol-worshipper is always reducing God. Even the person who worships the sun or the moon or the stars confuses God with a part of his creation, and brings him down. That is why, along with idols, God forbids the worship of the heavenly bodies. They are mindless gas clouds.
I was at a student conference in Durban and was approached by a young Indian couple who asked how I thought of God. They were new Christians and were struggling with their prayers. I guessed they were accustomed to having something visual before them when they worshipped or prayed. They knew now that it was wrong to worship a statue, but how did I picture God in my mind? I was able to take them to Deuteronomy 4, where God reminds the Israelites that when he came to them at Mt Sinai they saw no form. Rather, they heard a voice of words. That is the positive message; idols are the negative. We know God through what he tells us—his word. We cannot know him as he is in himself, only what he reveals to us, and he does not reveal himself visually. We do not need even a mental picture.
There is another problem with images: when you worship with an image, you inevitably localize God in a special place. You come to the place and he is there; you leave the place, and you leave his presence. This has moral consequences. It is the reason I do not bow when I come to the front of the church. Some people do, I know, and I don’t know why they do, but for me, if I did, it would mean I thought God was more here in the “sanctuary” than elsewhere. True Christianity knows no holy places and no holy times. For every place and every time is holy, because there is nowhere that God is not—I am quoting a famous Anglican bishop of the nineteenth century.
In the world of the ancient Israelites idolatry was universal. The Canaanites, Egyptians, Phoenicians, Greeks, Cretans, Romans, all made images of their Gods. God called his people out of that, revealed to them his true character, and called them to exclusive allegiance. From the time of Moses (1500 BC) and for the next thousand years they struggled with this second commandment. You know the story of the Gold Calf, the image of the bull Aaron made to help them with their worship. They may not have thought of this as a different God; it was just a familiar way of visualizing their own God—but it soon led to moral disaster. For the next thousand years, again and again, they were enticed to serve the idol-gods of their neighbours; it was the sociable thing to do. Only after the horror of captivity in Babylon did they see sense, and accept that the creator God was invisible, and wonderful, and could not be represented by any physical form. So, by the time of Jesus, the Jews were known as a peculiar people, who were even thought of as “atheists,” because their temple had no God in it. When the Roman general Pompey strode into the Holy of Holies to see for himself, he was disappointed that he found no God.
There is another kind of idolatry. You may not have a visual image, even just in your mind, but you may have a false concept of God. This was my problem when I was young.
I used to believe in God, and I prayed. But I did not like to think he would exclude anyone. Most people treated me well, so I rejected the Bible’s teaching about sinfulness. People were basically good. “My God would never judge anyone,” I heard one woman say, and that was how I thought. I disliked the narrowness of Christians. Particularly, I disliked the idea that it was necessary to believe in Jesus. I could pray without him. God was nice: he liked what I liked and disliked what I disliked; Jesus was an unnecessary complication. Only later did I realize that my God was a product of my imagination. He was everything I wanted him to be. He was an image of me, and totally harmless. But suddenly he started making demands on my life, and this I could not handle. I eventually saw that the true and living God could only be known, if he made himself known; you can’t make him up. And then I saw that the way he had made himself known was by becoming a man in the person of Jesus. Jesus is the true image of God, and he is a living person, not an idol.
What about making a statue of Jesus, then—or a picture—and using that to help you in your worship? Many people do that. But nowhere in the New Testament is there anything like a description of Jesus. This is weird; biographies of the day mostly included a physical description. Was he short or tall, was he fair or dark, was he bald? We don’t know anything about his physical appearance. So, all these pictures we see of the handsome man with the long hair and beard are someone’s imagination, and you can be sure they have it wrong.
Because of the commandment, and perhaps because of my own early experience, I have a horror of these attempts to represent him. But Paul in Second Corinthians says we see the glory of God in the face of Christ. What does he mean by “the face of Christ,” when he nowhere tells us what he looked like?
When we were in Pune, Lorraine and I were invited to the home of an Indian Christian leader. I noticed immediately that he had two pictures of Jesus on his wall, with the unmistakable face, and crown of thorns. I kept well away from them. But then our host called me over and drew my attention. I felt uncomfortable. Then he explained to me—and up close I could see it—they were composites like you sometimes see from computers, where the image appears from the light and dark of the print. He explained to me that the first had been done by a prisoner-of-war from the Korean War. He had copied by hand the whole of Mark’s Gospel so Jesus’ face emerged from the tiny print. The second picture was the whole of the New Testament. Yes, that is where we see the face of Christ—not his physical appearance but his person, his character, his profile—it emerges from the Gospels, and the pages of the New Testament, and indeed, from all the Scriptures. So, once again, we meet God in his word. Several times in the New Testament Jesus is referred to as the image of the invisible God. In the Gospel of John we read: “No one has ever seen God; the only begotten God, who is in the bosom of the Father, he has revealed him,” but John says nothing of his appearance.
Christianity—true Christianity—is about knowing God. “This is eternal life,” says Jesus, “that they may know you, the one true God, and the one you have sent, Jesus Christ.” And where may I find this God? You will find him in the person of Jesus Christ, whom you will find in the Bible. Attempts to visualize him will lead us astray.
[1] When we talk about idols we are not meaning the pictures and momentos people hang on their walls as decorations. The question is whether they are used devotionally.