The Image Of God

Two weeks ago, we looked at the first commandment and how God is revealing two truths for us to understand as we are joining Him to set people free.

First, we saw, that in freeing Israel from slavery, He identified Himself with them. As a result, they also shared His identity.

We need to understand that truth because we, in declaring ourselves to be believers, also share identity with God.

The way we live and interact with people reveals to them the character of God.

Therefore we must be vigilant in our pursuit of knowing Him.

The time we spend with God and obeying what He says is what transforms us into His likeness.

As we dug into the first commandment, you shall have no other gods before me; we saw that God is setting Himself apart from cultural norms.

This instruction to worship Him only also sets Israel apart from all the other people groups around them.

Again, God is sharing His identity with them. He is the only God, and they are his people.

Today we are going to move into the second commandment, which is an extension of the first. We are going to see some of these ideas developed a bit more so that we can understand why it is so important that we worship God alone.

Exodus 20:4–6 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. 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.

I want to break these few verses into two different main points today and break them down a bit so we can see both God's intention behind them and also, what that means for us in joining His call on our lives to set people free.

God wants to be known by who He is, not His image.

Why does it matter to God if think of his image rather than who He is?

God wanting to be known by his action is a pretty straight forward idea.

But let's think about this a little bit.

Consider our culture, and it's the emphasis on the outward appearance of things.

If you think about how obsessed our world is on other people's perception, it becomes clear why God didn't want His people focused on an image.

The people of our time putting more value on the appearance of a thing than the thing itself.

We are putting more value on how we look than how we are.

If our value found itself in how we looked, we would have been created to all look the same.

Adam and Eve, as soon as they sinned were concerned with what? How they looked. They realized their nakedness and were more worried about that than they were about their relationship with God.

There is a deep rooted issue in all of us that causes us to obsess over what something looks like.

That is exactly why...

God did not appear in a form when He revealed Himself on the mountain.

God did not reveal himself in a physical form because He understood our flesh nature and that if allowed to do so, we will put that form in His place.

Look at what Moses says to Israel just before they cross into the promised land.

Deuteronomy 4:15 ESV

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,

God knows us.

God wants us to have a relationship with Him, not a relationship with an image of Him.

Deuteronomy 4:16–19 ESV

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, 17 the likeness of any animal that is on the earth, the likeness of any winged bird that flies in the air, 18 the likeness of anything that creeps on the ground, the likeness of any fish that is in the water under the earth. 19 And beware lest you raise your eyes to heaven, and when you see the sun and the moon and the stars, all the host of heaven, you be drawn away and bow down to them and serve them, things that the Lord your God has allotted to all the peoples under the whole heaven.

We are born with a sin nature, and therefore, we tend to focus and even obsess on the physical.

Because God knows this about us, He is setting us up for success rather than failure.

If given the opportunity, we will choose to objectify whatever is in front of us because it is easier than allowing God to develop our faith.

If you have ever been objectified, how did it make you feel?

How do you think it affects your relationship with God when you objectify things/people?

We are all familiar with what objectifying means.

There is a lot of negative connotations that accompany that word.

By idolizing ourselves, another person, or a thing, this is what we are doing.

God did not give us an image because He knew that image would become the object of our worship.

Another danger of identifying an object with God is that we begin to believe that His presence is only in that object.

God wants us to understand that His presence isn't localized. Creating an image of God implies that He is only in that place.

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.”

In this passage, Israel went to battle against the Philistines and was defeated. In response, they asked to go and retrieve the Ark because they thought that God's presence would be with them. They idolized the Ark and viewed it as God himself.

The result of this misstep was the Ark is captured by the Philistines.

Israel fell into the trap of thinking they could count on an object to save them instead of listening to and obeying God.

They had equated the Ark with God Himself.

We fall into the same trap.

Culturally we often speak about the church as if that is where God is.

You may not think that is particularly true, but consider how different people act when they are at a church or around a pastor.

They are entirely different people.

God understands, far better than we do, that we are always looking for something to idolize.

It is true in our culture, though it may look different, and it was true for theirs.

Mesopotamian idol-making rituals went through rigors steps to show that man did not create their idols.

They would select the very best craftsman, hire them to create an image of a god.

When the idol was completed, they would take it to the sacred garden and leave it there overnight.

They would come back the next morning and proclaim that the gods had given them this new image to worship.

The craftsmen would take all the tools and molds used to create the image, stuff them in a sheep's belly, and throw it in a river.

The craftsmen would then cut off their hands to prove that they could not have created the image because they had no hands to do so.

Deep down, they knew that if a man could build it, it was not a God.

By God not allowing Israel to make images of Him, He is taking away any opportunity for anyone to say He isn't real.

God is righteously jealous.

I don't know about you, but being jealous doesn't seem righteous to me.

That's because I didn't fully understand what all the word means.

It can mean that a person is disposed to suspect rivalry or unfaithfulness.

This is the definition that I think of when I hear the word jealous.

It can also mean intolerant of rivalry or unfaithfulness.

This is how the word is used in the context of our passage.

God is intolerant of us creating anything that we can worship in His place.

Creating and worshiping idols breaks the covenant that God established with us.

Compare the marriage example.

Worshiping an idol is the same as cheating on your spouse.

Tell the story of being cheated on in high school.

I had been dating her for a couple of months.

A good friend told me he saw her cheating on me.

I was devastated by her actions.

I dropped her like a bag of hammers.

"Like 'love' and 'hate' in the Old Testament (Mal. 1:2, 3), 'jealousy' does not refer to an emotion so much as to an activity, in this case an activity of violence and vehemence, that springs from the rupture of a personal bond as exclusive as that of the marriage bond.

This is not, therefore, to be seen as intolerance but exclusiveness, and it springs both from the uniqueness of God (who is not one among many) and the uniqueness of his relationship to Israel. No husband who truly loved his wife could endure to share her with another man: no more will God share Israel with a rival." -Cole, R. A. (1973). Exodus: an introduction and commentary (Vol. 2, p. 164). Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press.

What he is saying is that God will not allow us to share our affections with any other god.

We need to understand that when we think of God's jealousy, He is acting out of pure and holy love.

God's response to our breaking of the covenant is a serious issue, and there are real consequences.

How does thinking of the consequences of sin make you feel?

How has God’s grace changed your understanding of how God deals with your sin?

Don't let your mind immediately go to God with a magnifying glass. He isn't sitting around waiting for us to mess up so he can jump on us.

Two weeks ago, I made the statement that we are "Motivated by God's grace."

Explanation of what I mean. This is not a quid-pro-quo relationship. We are moved to action not out of obligation, but out of the overflow of what God is doing in our lives. Action is always motivated by love and never by duty.

I bring this out now because most of us in this room have had some well-meaning people try to motivate us to correct behavior patterns using guilt and condemnation.

Remember that the reason God is giving Israel these commandments is to restore the relationship he created us to have with himself.

He is saying that if we choose to put something or someone else in his place, it isn't going to go well for us.

Not because He is going to smack us, but because we are walking away from Him.

Eddie was my bodyguard in school. This is not a perfect illustration, but I think it will get the main idea across.

To my knowledge, Eddie was never in a fight. However, the idea of Eddie was enough to keep people from messing with scrawny little Will.

When we choose to put something else in God's place, we are walking away from all that God brings to the relationship.

God doesn't punish subsequent generations; however, they do have to live under the consequences of their parent's disobedience.

"Since this is God's world, and since we are all involved with one another, breaches of God's law by one generation do indeed affect those of future generations to come. Slavery, exploitation, imperialism, pollution, immorality are all examples of this principle." - R.A. Cole

Every choice we make has an impact on the people that are in our lives.

Some are good and some are bad, but all have an impact.

God isn't going to punish my children because of my mistakes.

However, they do have to live in the results of my disobedience.

Share the story of Aaron buying the bull.

He went to buy a bull and spent a few hours looking at and talking to the owner about this bull.

It was beautiful, and it's EPD's were terrific.

As Aaron was writing the check, he felt like the Holy Spirit checked him up about buying the bull.

But, because the bull was so nice and he had just spent this guy's time, he explained it away and bought the bull.

Fast forward a few days, and Will has to vaccinate the bull to get him ready for the breeding season.

We eased him into the catch pen, and he immediately goes crazy and jumps over the six-foot-tall fence and runs off into the pasture.

So, we saddled up the horses and went after him.

We tried to herd him back to the catch pen, but the more we worked him, the crazier he becomes.

After an hour or so, it became evident that we were going to have to rope him to get him back inside the pen.

I roped the bull and worked him on the rope until my horse was so tired she could barely stand.

To make a long story shorter. We ended up tying the bull off to the trailer and then dragging the bull into the trailer with a tractor.

After we finally get him back to the pen, I called Aaron and said, "I don't know where you got this bull, but he needs to go back.".

I replayed the story for Aaron, and he told me about the check he got when paying for the bull.

When have you experienced having to live in the consequences of someone else’s disobedience?

How has that experienced changed the way you think about the choices you make?

God wasn't punishing me.

I did, however, have to live in and deal with the consequences.

Aaron chose to give more weight to what this other man thought of Him than to what God was telling him.

From a nonspiritual standpoint, the bull was what he wanted. But God knew what Aaron didn't.

Okay, so we have said a lot today. Here is the whole thing in a nutshell.

God loves us and is doing the work of restoring to us the relationship that we lost due to sin.

The purpose of these commandments is to show us what it is going to take to get us there.

He knows that if left to our own devices, we are going to look around us and try to be like everyone else.

He knows that whatever is popular at the moment is going to grab us and draw us in.

He wants us to desire Him, not things He created.

He is setting us up to succeed by showing us where we are going to mess up, giving us the resources to realize it, and allowing us to pursue Him instead of our flesh.

Pray

Affirmation of Deacons and Deaconesses:

Michelle Palmer

Mike Upshaw

Debi Upshaw

Craig Austin

Melinda Draper

Wes Draper