Keep No Idols

Let me ask you a question this morning, if I were to give you paper and pencil and ask you to draw a picture of God how would you start? What would you draw? What would it look like?

IT reminds me of that old Joan Osborne song,

“If God had a face, what would it look like,

and would you want to see,

if seeing meant that you would have to believe

In things like Heaven and in Jesus and the saints

And all the prophets…

and yeah, yeah, God is Good

and Yeah, Yeah, God is great,

Yeah yeah yeah

What if God was one of us…”

And there’s some more there that probably isn’t the best theologically sound song, but it definitely makes me think about it.

But how would you even go about attempting to draw this picture of God, and that is a little bit of what we are talking about this morning. And its not hard to know the characteristics of God, there are tons of Bible scripture that will tell you about his characteristics and we see parts of him and his character all throughout scripture. In fact, the covenant he has created with his people and all the words we are describing here in the commandments are all based upon his character.

Remember, the first word we looked at last week was God telling us you should have no other gods in but me, or really more accurately it was probably more in addition to me. And we talked about how these words and especially these first two would be laying down the foundation for all the rest that would come, but these words were setting up the covenant for His people. It was to show them the way in which they were to live and to exist with not only God himself, but with people around them in a covenant relationship to allow us to have this life he expected us to have from the beginning. It wasn’t so much about guidepost for rules in we couldn’t do things but he was trying to give us life through these commands.

So the second word helps to set this foundation for the rest of the words, and will seem very similar to the first of the ten words. What we are seeing here is what in Hebrew is called a paratax, where they would place two similar ideas next to one another without some type of syntax introducing a new thought between the two. The meaning of doing this was to show the two ideas, or here, the two commands, are closely associated. So verse 4 gives us the 2nd word and says.

Exodus 20:4 ESV

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.

We hear this and we probably think, I got this one too, Adam you are starting out way too easy I don’t have to worry about this one either. And we can rather easily cut ourselves out of this if we start to think about actually creating small idols out of wood and carving them out to look like god, or some etching or something, we have most likely never created some type of totem to use for that.

There are a couple of dangers when we come to attempt to create idols to worship God. The first

1. Everything we attempt to create would diminish God.

The idea here is it would be completely ridiculous for us to try to make a image of God with something from the creation. Just think about it for a moment, the creator of everything in existence, if we attempt make an image of Him with something he has created it would never do any good; it couldn’t come close.

No matter what we tried to create it would fall short, there may be some parts of it that were accurate, but then it would fail in other areas and not come close to really depicting God - It would be a slap in the face to who God really is. When I think about painting and trying to create this image of God I immediately think about Michealanglo’s work on the sistine chapel. I think about the image of God reaching out and touching the finger of Adam to give him life. The problem is these portrayals of God are lacking. When we portray God as a human we miss out and throw our own weaknesses on God and miss out on who he is fully.

We have to remember in the culture in which they were speaking it was quite normal for people and cultures to create images of god. One popular image people used was this image of a bull to depict the strength and virility of god. While this could show the strength of God it misses out on many of his attributes and we miss out on so much. That’s why we see throughout history there are so many different cultures who have different gods to portray all of these different attributes of God because there is no image we can create that would be able to be all encompassing of who God is.

This in itself is the problem, when we get this partial image we have missed out on who he is fully; we have diminished some part of Him. This isn’t something that people do only with pictures we can do this today in the church when we start talking about just one part of God. For example, if we were to only talk about the love of God and nothing else we would miss out on the justice of God. If we were to talk only about the justice of God we may get this idea that God is sitting in Heaven waiting for us to mess up and get everything wrong just so he can smack us down.

The problem is when we create these images of God, whether it be in picture or in word we have relegated God to something he is not. He is so much more than all of these things and its not just the danger of us but it is almost as if God knew exactly what he was talking about because we see just a few chapters later the people of Israel doing this exact thing. Moses had went back to the top of Sinai to talk more to God and have the ten commandments inscribed in stone and we see this happening.

Exodus 32:1–4 ESV

1 When the people saw that Moses delayed to come down from the mountain, the people gathered themselves together to Aaron and said to him, “Up, make us gods who shall go before us. As for this Moses, the man who brought us up out of the land of Egypt, we do not know what has become of him.” 2 So Aaron said to them, “Take off the rings of gold that are in the ears of your wives, your sons, and your daughters, and bring them to me.” 3 So all the people took off the rings of gold that were in their ears and brought them to Aaron. 4 And he received the gold from their hand and fashioned it with a graving tool and made a golden calf. And they said, “These are your gods, O Israel, who brought you up out of the land of Egypt!”

And while Moses is still on the top of the mountain God tells him to return to his people because they have been corrupted. It was God’s idea to completely blot them out of the earth and just make Moses great, but Moses talks him out of completely wiping them out. And so they have created this image that is not even close to the greatness of God and who he is, and they have defiled God.

The second problem with creating these images, is 1, we diminish who God really is

2. We may try to take the power of God to ourselves.

What can happen when we create these images or totems for God that aren’t really him is we can think the image is what holds his power because its the real image of God. We get this idea that because our image of God is so much better than everyone else’s ours must be the real image of God so we can’t imagine how anyone else’s can be real it has to be mine. So everyone else should step lightly around our imagine, maybe even bow down to it. This is similar to what happened with the Ark of the Covenant in 1 Samuel 4, the Israelites have been defeated in battle and they are beside themselves wondering why God would let this happen and instead of seeking God and his heart, they start to think the real power of God is the Ark, and so they decide the way they can win is by bringing the Ark to to where they are to save them look.

1 Samuel 4:3 ESV

3 And when the people came to the camp, the elders of Israel said, “Why has the Lord defeated us today before the Philistines? Let us bring the ark of the covenant of the Lord here from Shiloh, that it may come among us and save us from the power of our enemies.”

And I know what you are going to say, Adam, the ark is where God lives so they were really wanting God to save them, but that’s not correct, because they didn’t say so that God may come among us and save us from the power of our enemies, but allow the ARK to come among us and save us from our enemies. They had replaced God with the creation here as well.

So let’s go on with the rest of the verses in the ten words.

Exodus 20:5 ESV

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,

When we read this often times it doesn’t come out the same way it would to the Hebrew people because when we read the word jealous it has this really negative idea in our culture. When we think of jealous we think of wanting what someone else has and wanting to take it for our own almost. Really, the word we translated here is the hebrew word Qanna and it may be better translated as zeal, or he is a zealous God. And it isn’t the human emotion we think of as jealous but its showing his heart for us in the sense of he is fully devoted, and protective of the ones he has this covenant relationship.

Then there are those that say surely God isn’t going to punish my offspring all the way to the fourth generation for the choices I have made, how is that just? The truth of the matter is when we lead our children away from God and lead him to other gods we have started them down a road that will have implications for not only our children but all those who come after them. If you find this hard to believe, just think about how quickly things have changed in the country we are living in, not even 50 years ago the things being celebrated this month were thought to be a mental disease. This isn’t even 4 generations removed and we can see what happens when we start to take our eyes off of God and his ways.

The other side of that is look at verse 6, Exodus 20:6

Exodus 20:6 ESV

6 but showing steadfast love to thousands of those who love me and keep my commandments.

When we keep his commandments it spreads to the thousands and goes so much further.

And you think I just don’t understand why he would get so mad and not give us some image to hold on to, something we could look at and see to worship. Whats the big deal?

Have you ever just been scrolling on facebook and you see someone you went to high school with, or maybe someone closer than that, a person you worked with, or a person you are close to, and you see their posts and think, “Man that’s nothing like them.” You know, without being too judgmental you just know that everything they post is not the whole of the person they have behind that post but they are making themselves out to be something they are not. And it may not be in a deceitful way, but we tend to just show the best parts of ourselves publicly when we know people are going to see it. You just know that’s not really who they are, and this is the problem when we try to create this image for God, its not up to par. It doesn’t display with clarity who he is, so we shouldn’t really attempt it.

So you say, I have got it, I have all of this under control, I don’t keep false idols, but the way most of us mess this up is when it comes to living for each other. We become bad image bearers of the Lord and are portraying this false image to the world around us. We are supposed to show the world who he is.

Look at what Jesus told us in Matthew 5:14-16

Matthew 5:14–16 ESV

14 “You are the light of the world. A city set on a hill cannot be hidden. 15 Nor do people light a lamp and put it under a basket, but on a stand, and it gives light to all in the house. 16 In the same way, let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father who is in heaven.

And that is why in his letter to the Corinthians Paul tells us 2 Cor 4:6

2 Corinthians 4:6 ESV

6 For God, who said, “Let light shine out of darkness,” has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.

Ad Peter doubled down on this idea in 1 Peter 2:9

1 Peter 2:9 ESV

9 But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for his own possession, that you may proclaim the excellencies of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light.

So church, this morning, while you may not have any idols sitting at home that you bow down and worship, because we know there is no way we could create anything that comes close to portraying him for who he really is. The Bible gives us his attributes and speaks to his character but we could never accurately make something that would even come close. The real question is, are we living a life that allows people to see the God of the universe through us? Are we living in a way that brings light to the darkness, are we shinning the true God into the world.