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The Second Commandment

 

You shall not make for yourself a carved image, or any likeness of anything that is in the heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth; you shall not bow down to them nor 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 generations of those who hate Me, but showing mercy to thousands, to those who love Me and keep My commandments. Exodus 20:4-6

The Second Commandment goes straight to the heart of our relationship with our Creator. It handles several crucial questions : How do we view God? How are we to explain Him not only to ourselves but also to others? If idols are representations of false and non-existent gods, can we use pictures or other images to represent God? But above all what is the proper way to worship the true God?

The First Commandment taught us that we are not to anything or anyone above God. The second commandment differs somewhat in that it shows and explains that through our worship we must bring God into any likeness of a physical object. Doing so, even out of respect, is to mislead ourselves and others into doing something that unquestionably wrong in the sight of God.

We find in this commandment that nothing is allowable to represnt the Creator, for starters the Holy Word tells us,' but He said " You cannot see My face; for no man shall see Me, and live", Exodus 33:20 and John 1:18 , ' no one has seen God at any time. The only begotten Son, who is in the bosum of the Father, He has declared Him.'

No man has seen Him, therefore in what likeness might we make of Him. The Son did not say what God looked like, but rather revealed what the Father was like; His nature and being. What Christ revealed was ,' the hour is coming, and now is, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth; for the Father is seeking such to worship Him. God is Spirit, and those who worship Him must worship Him in spirit and truth.' John 4:23-24

Every man was given spirit when God foreknew him. It is the likeness in which He created man, and the spirit of a man may either be for good, or for evil. I for good, then it will be in truth, for by placing our faith in Christ we recieve the Spirit of Truth ( John 16:13), and this Spirit will guide us into all truth. But through the devices of the devil he has blurred the line of what is proper worship and what is not.

God wants to change the spiritual nature of mankind, and He sent Christ to aid us for Paul described Christ as ,' the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation' ( collosians 1:15). He describes Christians as those who have ,' put off the old man with his deeds, and have put on the new man who is renewed in knowledge according to the image of Him who created Him' ( Collosians 3:9-10).

We believe it is safe to say that if the physical likeness of Christ was to be important to us, then certainly God would have preserved in some way what He looked like, but no such image is found. What is found though, is the spirit in which He lived while on earth; the manner in which He conducted His teaching and the way He worshiped the Creator.

Man through his fallen nature, and through the fallibility of desiring to have things seen, had allowed himself to become decieved into thinking there is nothing wrong with creating or making an image or likeness of God and Christ that may be viewed with our eyes. There are paintings, drawings and sculptures, all beautiful works of art, depicting our Creator and our Redeemer; but are these appropriate, and is it a sin to acknowledge an importance to them?

We are to judge no man, lest we are judged. To say one is in sin, places us in jepordy of sin. We will not say it is a sin to have or own a cross, a painting of Christ etc... what we will say is, that if you place an importance on that symbol, and rely on that symbol in any fashion or form to help you in your walk with God, then you have created a crutch for your flesh, and have given a foothold to the devil, and have given him an avenue in which to work in your life. We would say if mankind would return to nothing but an astuere, no glitter, no glam worship of God, and adhere strictly to what the Lord has proclaimed in His word, then so many of the things that hinder our faith would melt away.

Being like God is our destiny - providing we surrender ourselves completely to Himj in obedience to His commandments. God will hold each of accountable for our words and deeds. Bowing before any type of idol to pay homage, or to give it the sightest degree of importance, no matter how much we may place devotion to it as being of God is to be ignorant of God's purposes for mankind. God expects worship of Him in truth and in an uderstanding of how to demonstrate our love for Him, and this is done by observing and keeping His commandments with the spirit Christ has imparted to us through His sacrafice, not by going through useless rites, or going through the motions handed down by generations past. And that is the reason for the latter part of this commandment -

for I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children to the third and fourth generations of those who hate Me, but showing mercy to thousands, to those who love Me and keep My commandments.

For every generation that gets away from God, then the generation following it will become worse; history has proven this point beyond a shadow of doubt. God has, throughout His word given us glimpses of His ways through - shadows, or types - that serve as forerunners to the end in which He foreordained. The tabernacle and the temple were forerunners of His glorious residence in heaven, the priesthood of Aaron and the duties of the priests were the forerunners of what Christ would do for His followers before the Father; the sacrafice of blood for the remission of sins was a forerunner of His work on the cross And some would say that these commandments which we are study, were themselves a shadow given to man until Christ came; if one is to assume this stance, then they would have to declare that all sin has been removed from the face of the earth,' I was alive once without the law, but when the commandment came, sin revived and I died,' Romans 7:9. Paul is saying here that with the law sin is revealed in us, giving us a guideline to what sin is. (for a better understanding see To Obey,Or Not To Obey or Was The Law Nailed To The Cross).

God wants us to remember that we are to worship Him as Living, not as an idol or an object. In the idlatrous religions of the ancient world, the worship of idols was intricately linked to the fertility of animals, land and plants. They associated human fertility with the natural forces their idols represented - such as the sun, moon, rain, and soil - they developed fertility rites that included sexual origies and temple prostitution. Immorality became the focus of their temple worship. They intiated young females into womanhood by enlisting them to serve as honored temple prostitutes. Males were expected to frequent the temple brothels in worship of their local dieties. Immoraliy and degeneracy were dressed in religious garb and considered virtuous.

This is why idolatry and immorality are linked together in the Bible. And it good to note here since the society we live in has degenerated to this point, that abortion is a form of idolatry, it is the worship of self and the Bible aquaints this with the worship of Ba-al aka Satan; Peter links this self-gratification to idolatry," for we have spent enough of our past lifetime in doing the will of the Gentiles,(sinners), when we walked in lewdness, lusts, drunkeness, revelries, drinking parties and abominable idolatries. In regard to these, they think it strange that you do not run with them in the same flood of dissipation, speaking evil of you' ( 1 Peter 4:3-4).

Idolatry in any shape is soundly condemned in the New Testaments as well as the Old Testament. Paul praised Christians who had ' turned to God from idols to serve the living and true God' ( 1 Thessalonians 1:9) and warned others ' therefore, my beloved, flee from idolatry' ( 1 Corinthians 10:14)

Far more important, the same apostle explained why using images of dieties as aids in worship is also wrong,' what am I saying then? That an idol is anything, or what is offered to idols anything? Rather, that the things which the Gentiles sacrafice they sacrafice to demons and not to God, and I do not want you to have fellowship with demons' ( 1 Corinthians 10:19-20)

Buried deeply in icons and other imagery, the unseen hand of Satan is at work,' but even if our gospel is veiled, it is veiled to those who are perishing, whose minds the god of this age has blinded, who do not believe, lest the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God, should shine on them' ( 2 Corinthians 4:3-4)

Satan has conditioned people to use our limited understanding to come to rely on visulization; going so far as to in our mind's eye we put the Son of God up as a lifeless, inanimate image ( recall He is the living God), Satand object is to divert attention, no matter how slight, from Jesus Christ as the vibrant and perfect living image of the Living God who is described in the four Gospels. By blinding most of mankind ( Revelation 12:9) to the importance of God's commandments, Satan has successfully deflected much of the Christian world's professed adoration for Christ toward icons and pictures and buildings - all contrary to the crystal clear instructions of this, the Second Commandment.

This commandment is a constant reminder that we only, of all creation, are made in the image of God. Only we can be transformed into the spiritual image of Christ, who, of course came in the flesh as the perfect image of our heavenly Father. This commandment is to protect our special relationship with our creator, who made us in His likeness and is still molding us into His spiritual image.

The Second Commandment reminds us that God is far greater than anything we can see or imagine. We must never let that knowledge be pushed aside by the use of some image or likeness in our worship of God.

 

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