The Way of Worship

Summary: At its core, the second commandment is a prohibition against creating something with your hands or your heart that either replaces or reduces God

INTRODUCTION:

Okay - just for fun... Do you know how many Federal laws there are in the U.S. legal code? Let me give you a few hints:

- When the federal law was first codified in 1926, it could fit into a single volume, but by the 1980s, there were 50 vol. containing more than 23k pages

- On avg. the US Congress approves 125 new laws per year

- There a over 200k laws just on the use/ownership of guns

- The IRS code contains 3.4 mil. words. If printed at 60 lines per page - it'd be over 7,500 pages long

- All the laws combined address some 5000 federal crimes

Any guesses? 1 mil.? 5 mil.? 10 mil.? Are you ready for the answer? No one knows! According to multiple sources, it can't be known. Apparently, no one can count that high as the US has been creating, accumulating, and amending - and seldom removing laws, for nearly 250 yrs.

So why is it people get upset w/ God over the 10?

Let’s review the Commandments. Anyone up for quoting them from memory?

1. One God

2. No idols

3. Revere His Name

4. Remember to Rest

5. Honor Parents

6. No murder

7. No adultery

8. No stealing

9. No lying

10. No coveting

Exodus 20:4-6 “4 “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. 5 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, 6 but showing steadfast love to thousands of those who love me and keep my commandments.” \

Here are some observations.

•This command does not forbid religious works of art.

After all, there are two golden cherubim carved into the cover of the Ark of the Covenant and angelic images were also woven into the temple curtains.

There is nothing wrong with religious artwork unless the symbol becomes the substitute.

For example, God commanded Moses to make a bronze serpent in

Numbers 21:6-9 “6 Then the Lord sent fiery serpents among the people, and they bit the people, so that many people of Israel died. 7 And the people came to Moses and said, “We have sinned, for we have spoken against the Lord and against you. Pray to the Lord, that he take away the serpents from us.” So Moses prayed for the people. 8 And the Lord said to Moses, “Make a fiery serpent and set it on a pole, and everyone who is bitten, when he sees it, shall live.” 9 So Moses made a bronze serpent and set it on a pole. And if a serpent bit anyone, he would look at the bronze serpent and live.”

but later, according to 2 Kings 18:4, “4 He removed the high places and broke the pillars and cut down the Asherah. And he broke in pieces the bronze serpent that Moses had made, for until those days the people of Israel had made offerings to it (it was called Nehushtan).”

the people started worshipping it as an idol.

•This is one of the longest commandments.

•This commandment is repeated the most in the Bible.

•Most think this is the easiest one to keep.

By the time we’re finished, we’ll see we’re more likely to break this one more often than we think.

•God’s people broke this commandment throughout their history.

Even a cursory reading of the Old Testament reveals the battle between worshipping God properly and worshipping images of idols.

It was the sin of idolatry that eventually led to the exile of both Israel and Judah.

A case could be made that idolatry is the most punished sin in the entire Bible.

•This is the only commandment with both a punishment and a promise.

The second commandment is a prohibition against creating something with your hands or your heart that either reduces or replaces God.

This prohibition covers everything –

from the heavens to the earth to the sea.

That means we’re prohibited from worshipping the sun, moon, stars,

“mother earth,” birds, fish, crocodiles,

and the Pittsburg Steelers.

•The second commandment is similar to the first commandment.

The first word deals with whom we worship;

the second with how we worship.

Philip Ryken says it like this: “The first commandment has to do with worshipping the right God…the second has to do with worshipping the right God in the right way.”

The first word prohibits worship of anything other than God,

but the second prohibits worship of any version of God less than God,

specifically through images.

Right off the bat we see that the 2nd word says

HOW we worship matters as much to God as WHOM we worship.

So lets begin to unpack this commandment.

The Person of God:

Check out the middle part of verse 5:

Exodus 20:5 “5 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,”

This command is tied to God’s name –

He is Yahweh, your God. He is the self-existent One.

The prohibition is also tied to God’s nature – Because of who He is, we must do what He says.

Leviticus 26:1: “You shall not make idols for yourselves or erect an image or a pillar, and you shall not set up a figured stone in your land to bow down to it, for I am the Lord your God.”

I see two characteristics about God

He is passionate for His people

God refers to Himself as a “jealous God.”

While we tend to view jealousy with negative connotations,

the Hebrew refers to “warmth of feelings, ardor, zeal, or heat.”

Biblically understood,

God has a burning, passionate love for His people

and does not want to see us bail on Him or fall into disbelief.

His jealousy is right and righteous.

He is fully committed to us and expects us to be fully committed to him.

He is jealous for our undivided attention, for our whole-hearted allegiance to Him.

Because He is intensely zealous for His people, He is jealous to protect His property!

When we give our love to another person or possession, His passion is ignited. Exodus 34:14: “For you shall worship no other god, for the Lord, whose name is Jealous, is a jealous God.”

Psalm 78:58: “For they provoked Him to anger with their high places; they moved Him to jealousy with their idols.”

In the Bible, God is pictured as being married to Israel.

As such, He has every right to be jealous for their affection and to long for their uncompromising commitment to Him.

The Almighty sees idolatry as spiritual adultery.

Time and again, He refers to His people as “adulterous” because of their unfaithfulness.

For example, in the Book of Hosea, God commands the prophet to marry an unfaithful woman in order to convey how God feels about Israel’s spiritual infidelity.

Secondly

God reveals Himself with words, not images

In the Bible, especially on this side of heaven, we see by hearing.

As Deuteronomy later made clear,

the Sinai experience was a paradigm for God’s self-revelation.

When the Lord appeared to the people on the mountain out of the midst of fire, Moses reminded them,

“You heard the sound of words, but saw no form; there was only a voice” (

Deut. 4:12 “12 Then the Lord spoke to you out of the midst of the fire. You heard the sound of words, but saw no form; there was only a voice.”

And because they saw no form,

the Israelites were commanded not to corrupt themselves by making visible images (4:15ff.).

Deut 4:15-16 “15 “Therefore watch yourselves very carefully. Since you saw no form on the day that the Lord spoke to you at Horeb out of the midst of the fire, 16 beware lest you act corruptly by making a carved image for yourselves, in the form of any figure, the likeness of male or female,”

We make no apology for being Word-centered and words-centered.

Faith comes by hearing

Rom. 10:17 “17 So faith comes from hearing, and hearing through the word of Christ.”

That’s how God designed it because that’s how he has chosen to reveal himself.

Christian worship is meant to be wordy and not a breathtaking visual display.

If God wanted us to see him in worship,

he would have presented himself differently in the Sinai theophany.

The way God “showed up” to give the Ten Commandments

says something about how we are to keep the Ten Commandments.

This is one reason why a protestant church is arranged as it is. Pulpit is center and above everything else- because to worship God begins with His word...

The Prohibition of Idols

This unconditional prohibition is quite clear in verses 4-5

Exodus 20:4-5 “4 “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. 5 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,”

The phrase “shall not” means, “Don’t ever do it.”

The words “you” and “yourself” are emphatic,

meaning each and every one of us,

individually, must avoid making images.

Some translations use, “graven images,” which simply means “carved,” “chiseled,” or “cut” and has the idea of being man-made. T

his is reinforced in Exodus 34:17: “Do not make for yourself any gods of cast metal.”

Whenever you surrender to an idol, you will eventually serve it.

Notice how progressive idol worship is:

“Shall not make…shall not bow down…or serve.”

Once you build an idol, you will bow down to it;

when you work at making an idol, you will end up worshipping it;

You think that it serves you it is for your freedom and for your enjoyment

but you end up enslaved to it.

You serve it insured of it serving you.

Illustration:

Romans 6:16 “16 Do you not know that if you present yourselves to anyone as obedient slaves, you are slaves of the one whom you obey, either of sin, which leads to death, or of obedience, which leads to righteousness?”

Christian counselors often talk about four “core idols” that dominate our hearts—

power, control, approval, and comfort.

Which one of those speaks loudest to you?

What is your idol of choice?

Which replacement god has your ear?

Notice that none of those four idols are bad things on their own.

It’s when they become ultimate in our lives—

commanding our obedience and ruling our emotions—

that they displace God as our Master and become wicked.

As John Calvin said, evil is not typically desiring something bad, but desiring something good too much. It’s not loving a bad thing, but elevating a good thing to a God thing.

Paul doesn’t just say that we all serve someone.

He says that whatever master we choose leads to a certain destination.

And every master besides God leads to death.

If your offer yourself as a slave to approval,

your life will be plagued by constant self-pity, envy, hurt feelings, and inadequacy.

If you are a slave to comfort,

you won’t be able to say “no” to the pleasures of food, or sex, or drugs, or pornography.

If you are enslaved to power,

you’ll become domineering, harsh, even abusive.

If you are enslaved to control,

you’ll worry all the time; you’ll lose your temper a lot; or you’ll manipulate others to get your way.

The irony of serving idols is that they promise so much and deliver so little.

They promise freedom and life, but the wage they pay out is captivity and death.

As Tim Keller says, “Sin is a master that always pays, on time and in full.” Sin starts fun. It never ends that way.

Jesus, on the other hand,

is the fountain of freedom and life itself.

He is more reliable than money,

more satisfying than any romance,

more worthwhile than any victory,

more enduring than any earthly honor.

In his excellent book on the subject of power (Playing God), author Andy Crouch describes the connection between idolatry and addiction:

In modern, secular societies perhaps the clearest example of idolatry is the pattern we call addiction.

Addictions begin with essentially good, created stuff;

even the chemicals that become addictive drugs are part of God’s good creation

and often have beneficial uses in the right context.

But in the throes of addiction, we invest that created stuff with transcendent expectations.

It begins to hold out the promise of becoming like a god.

The most powerfully addictive substances, like crystal meth, are the ones that can deliver the most dramatic sensations of godlike freedom, confidence and abundance—in other words, power.

A behavior like gambling promises to give us a sense of mastery over the random forces of nature and the ability to bring something out of nothing, to create wealth without having to work.

God forbids any images that replace God.

How many of you have a statue in your house that you pray to our bow down to.

Let me ask you another question does this commandment forbid

a nativity set?

a picture of Jesus?

Watching the Chosen?

As we’ve just seen, the second commandment is about more than obvious Baal worship. It’s about the freedom and jealousy of our invisible God.

We must avoid infusing any created thing or anyone with divine immanence and spiritual efficacy.

This doesn’t mean we have to trash all our nativity sets and angel ornaments and artwork on the wall.

But it does mean that using pictures or icons to focus us in prayer,

let alone kissing or kneeling before an image or statue, is misplaced.

I want to just briefly think about two images that we see in religious life that we all would be familiar with.

The statue of Mary - Many people venerate or pray to Mary ( a form of worship. why is it wrong.

In this light, we see that the saints—as faithful disciples of Jesus—are his collaborators, not his competitors in interceding for us. Consequently, because Mary is the Mother of God and the disciple par excellence (see Luke 1:28, 38), we should not be surprised that she is our preeminent intercessor among the angels and saints.

It replace Holy Spirit as our intercessor with Christ.

To pray to Christ you must go through Mary

But The Bible tells us that HS is the mediator to Christ to the Father.

The Crucifix.

The crucifix with Christ still on the cross replaces the work of redemption.

Jesus is no longer on the cross but was buried and rose victorious over sin and death.

This changes the message of the Gospel, we are still trying to pay for our sins because Christ is still on the cross.

That is really not a problem for us today,

but idolatry is still a problem,

because today the idols that we worship are not the ones we make with our hands,

but the ones we make with our heart.

They are not primarily metal.

They are primarily mental.

God forbids any ideology that reduces Him.

Ezekiel 14: 6-7 “6 “Therefore say to the house of Israel, Thus says the Lord God: Repent and turn away from your idols, and turn away your faces from all your abominations. 7 For any one of the house of Israel, or of the strangers who sojourn in Israel, who separates himself from me, taking his idols into his heart and putting the stumbling block of his iniquity before his face, and yet comes to a prophet to consult me through him, I the Lord will answer him myself.” -'

Ezekiel was talking about idols of the heart.

We must also guard against mental images of God.

I’m not talking about the picture of a shepherd popping into your head when you read that Christ is the Good Shepherd.

I’m talking about some strands of evangelical piety where we are told to picture God running to you.

Or we are instructed to close our eyes and imagine God’s arms around us.

To be sure, we may want to compare God’s love to a warm embrace or imagine God is like a father running to greet his prodigal son, but we ought not make images of the invisible God, even if they are only in our imagination.

As the Westminster Larger Catechism puts it, the second commandment forbids “the making any representation of God, or all or any of the three persons, either inwardly in our mind, or outwardly in any kind of image or likeness of any creature whatsoever”

Today, our idols are more inside ourselves than on our shelves.

Our struggle is more with mental images, not images made of metal.

One commentator refers to this as “ideaolatry.”

We simply take the God of the Bible and treat him according to our preferences, by placing emphasis on one of his (more palatable) attributes to the neglect of others.

We speak incessantly of his love, but we grow silent about his wrath.

We meditate on his grace, but we avoid contemplation of his justice for our sin.

Or we trumpet his justice selectively, to suit our personal or political agendas.

Perhaps we diminish his triune nature,

choosing one member of the Trinity as our favorite in our prayers, our thoughts, our preaching, and our song,

and forgetting the other two.

We turn him into a mascot for our own ends.

Any time we do this to God to make him more palatable and less threatening,

more accommodating and less thunderous,

we produce a graven image.

We whittle down his transcendence,

we paint over his sovereignty,

we chisel away his omnipotence until

he is a pet-like version of the terrible pagan god we would never be so foolish as to bow down to.

Take, for example, the God of the prosperity gospel.

Who among us would worship wealth

when the Bible speaks so clearly of that dangerous idol,

and when we see our unbelieving neighbors spend their lives chasing the almighty dollar, never to be satisfied by it?

But instead, we go right ahead and fashion Yahweh into a benign, benevolent form of Mammon.

When our finances are tight, we ask,

“What lack of faith has withheld God’s bounty from me?”

When our bank accounts are full, we think, “It is because my faith has pleased the Lord.”

The problem with idolatry is that we elevate what we like about God and eliminate what we don't like.

Treat God like a Mister Potato Head -

we have all the parts and attributes

but we arrange them how we want to suit our fancy or need at that moment).

The old liberal church wanted a God of love without justice;

so they denied fundamental doctrines like the wrath of God and the substitutionary atonement.

Now many evangelicals are downplaying the same doctrines.

Modern feminists see the idea of God the father as chauvinistic and oppressive so

They prefer a god more in the image of woman.

When people say, “I like to think of God as …” they are usually remaking God in their image.

For example, let me give you some idols that people worship today. There is the…

- ''man upstairs'' god.

We all hear about the man upstairs.

He is a man,

just like us,

and he just lives one floor above us;

not really a big deal.

Then there is the ''doctor'' god.

That is the god that always wants us to be healed;

never ever wants us to be sick.

If you are sick and you stay sick,

it is not god's problem,

it is your problem.

Then there is the ''lovey-dovey'' god.

That is the god that would never ever allow anyone to go to hell,

doesn't matter whether you believe in Jesus Christ or not,

doesn't matter whether you obey God or not.

In the end, this lovey-dovey god is going to take everybody to heaven.

Idolatry is the worship of a god we create instead the God who created us.

There are only two kinds of gods you can worship.

You can either worship the God who made you

or you will worship a little god you have made.

You will either worship the creator God or a created god. (Merritt)

I am convinced that this is the idolatry of our day in our churches.

We have constructed a God in our minds who is remarkably like us.

We have misrepresented God and made Him more palatable to our modern sensitivities.

Punishment or Promise, your choice

What are we to make of the threat in verse 5 to visit the iniquity of the fathers on their children?

This warning is repeated elsewhere in the Old Testament (Ex. 34:6–7; Num. 14:18; Jer. 32:18).

But what does it mean?

It’s not a reference to generational curses, hexes, or demonic oppression.

Nor does it mean that a righteous child will be punished unfairly for the sins of his wicked father.

That’s a common misunderstanding from verse 5, so common, it seems, that Ezekiel 18 means to correct it.

Ezekiel 18:20 “20 The soul who sins shall die. The son shall not suffer for the iniquity of the father, nor the father suffer for the iniquity of the son. The righteousness of the righteous shall be upon himself, and the wickedness of the wicked shall be upon himself.”

God does not say to a righteous child,

“Tough break, kid, your dad was wicked,

so I’m going to really let you have it.”

The book of Ezekiel will not let us take that view of the second commandment.

So what does the warning mean?

This warning is about God’s judgment on those who walk in the wicked ways of their parents and grandparents and great-grandparents.

Look at verse 5 carefully. God says he will visit “the iniquity of the fathers to the third and the fourth generation of those who hate me.”

The children share in their father’s punishment because they share in their father’s sins.

Ezekiel teaches that if you turn away from your father’s sin,

you will not face your father’s punishment.

But Exodus says, if you keep on sinning as your father did,

you will not escape your father’s punishment.

You can’t say, “I’m only doing what my parents taught me.”

You can’t excuse your disobedience by pointing to your upbringing or culture or personal history.

God will punish the next generation if they continue in the sins they learned from the previous generation.

That’s the point of the warning.

Promise

And don’t forget there is a promise alongside the threat. God will show mercy to thousands (or to a thousand generations) of those who love him.

This is not a precise math formula, as if Moses’s obedience meant that his children twenty thousand years later, roughly one thousand generations, would automatically be holy.

The promise of steadfast love is for those who “keep my commandments,” just like the threat of punishment is for “those who hate me.”

How can we worship God the right way? What can save us from our own private idolatries? The answer is very simple:

Principles for proper worship.

Rather than remaking God into our image, we need to be remade into his image.

God does this by bringing us into a personal, saving relationship with his Son Jesus Christ.

Here is a deep mystery. When God first created the world, he made men and women in his image (Gen. 1:26, 27).

We were made to be like God, to reflect his glory.

And this is another reason why God tells us not to make images.

He already has an image! We are God’s image.

As Calvin said, “God cannot be represented by a picture or sculpture, since He has intended His likeness to appear in us.”

Or as Christopher Wright has written: “The only legitimate image of God … is the image of God created in his own likeness—the living, thinking, working, speaking, breathing, relating human being (not even a statue will do, but only the human person).

We are not allowed to make God’s image but only to be God’s image.

Our ability to do this was badly damaged by our fall into sin.

The image of God in us has been defaced,

like so much graffiti on a mirror in a roadside gas station bathroom.

In our fallen and sinful condition,

we are no longer able to reflect God’s glory as he intended.

But God has sent his Son Jesus Christ into the world to repair his image in us.

Jesus is the true image, “the image of the invisible God” (Col. 1:15; cf. 2 Cor. 4:4), “the exact representation of his being”

Heb. 1:3 “3 He is the radiance of the glory of God and the exact imprint of his nature, and he upholds the universe by the word of his power. After making purification for sins, he sat down at the right hand of the Majesty on high,”

We ought to recognize that Christ has uniquely fulfilled the second commandment.

John 14:9 “9 Jesus said to him, “Have I been with you so long, and you still do not know me, Philip? Whoever has seen me has seen the Father. How can you say, ‘Show us the Father’?”

To look upon Christ was to look upon the face of him who could not be seen on Sinai.

Jesus did the seemingly impossible.

He allowed humans to see the God who cannot be seen.

That’s the mystery and majesty of the incarnation.

We don’t need pictures.

We don’t need statues.

We don’t need icons.

We have the icon: Christ is the image (eikon) of the invisible God (Col. 1:15).

In order to come to God in true worship,

we don’t need to make some kind of idol;

all we need to do is come to him through Jesus Christ.

And when we come to Christ,

then God lives in us by his Holy Spirit.

He works in us to repair his image,

so that we can live for his glory.