I had only been in office here [at seminary] a short time when I received a phone call from a troubled visitor to our campus. This gentleman had been through the campus center, and called to tell me that we had an idol at Southern Seminary. This was of obvious concern to me, so I left my office to go find the idol. And I found it! It was as I had been told—an idol, a carved image, immediately recognizable for what it was, on display behind glass, in the campus center of Southern Seminary, a part of a missions collection that had been brought back from China.

Immediately, I recognized the quandary. This had been brought back certainly by those who meant to show the victory of the worship of the one true and living God over such empty and vain idols. But it was displayed like bric-a-brac! So I did what I felt it was my responsibility to do. I found out how to get into this display, and not knowing exactly what one does when one does find an idol on one's campus, I put it behind the display so that it would not be seen. I was planning to ponder and pray about how to handle this particular problem, when walking through the center the next day, it was back. I repeated my procedure of going into the display and taking the idol down and hiding it behind, only the next day to come back in to find it back in its place again. I was in a war over the idols with our housekeeping staff. They were wondering who was vandalizing this display; I was ready to declare myself Oliver Cromwell and take matters more into my own hands. The idol, dear friends, is gone, but the idols are always near to us. 

We read the second commandment together:

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

And thus we find ourselves at the second commandment (at least as will count for the series). As you may know, a part of the debate in terms of even the posting of the Ten Commandments is: How does one number of them? According to the Reformed tradition this is the second commandment. According to Roman Catholics and the Lutheran tradition it is still part of the first commandment. And the Lutherans and the Catholics split what we know as the tenth commandment into the ninth and the tenth. But I think there is a very clear distinction between what we call the first commandment and the second commandment. The first deals with the very clear command that we are to worship only the one true God. And the second commandment is that we are to worship him as he would be worshiped.

“You shall not make”—the very clarity of that declaration ought to strike us, because we are the being who makes things. And having made things, we take pleasure in them. We can build a house and we can live in it. We can build a boat and we can sail in it. We can build a table and we may eat at it. We make all kinds of things, material and immaterial, and find great pleasure in them. And therein lies the problem, the seduction, the allure. We are homo-idolater, the creature who would fashion our own god. This is the true perennial heresy. East of Eden is always close at hand. We are natural-born idolaters. And it is good that we admit that to each other today. 

Why are fallen, sinful human beings born idolaters? The reason is simple: We must worship. We will worship. Even as nature abhors a vacuum, so does the human soul. The human soul will find an object of worship, either on the shelf or on the altar or in heaven or in the mirror. Born idolaters! We confront this as Paul does in Acts 17, in this graphic picture of this inherent need. Paul is provoked in his spirit as he sees the Athenians and as he walks around that city and he sees so many altars. It seems that every god that is conceivable or has ever been heard of has in Athens an altar. There’s even an altar to an unknown god. We are natural-born idolaters and we will commit idolatry. We will worship even if we do not recognize that we are doing so. The atheist worships the concept of atheism, and all that inevitably follows. We are worshipers.

Now, the allure of idolatry certainly has something to do with our creativity and skill. We are prone to make objects of art and then to appreciate them. But this command is very clear: “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.” The two words there in the Hebrew—“image” and “likeness”—are different words, although very similar, reinforcing each other within this context. This is an object of worship; this is an item of devotion. This is something that is to attract the eyes in order to seduce the soul. “You shall not make a carved image, or any likeness of anything...” This is a categorical command against idols. Why? Because in this very passage God identifies himself as a jealous God. He is filled with zeal for his own name, for his own identity, for his own worship. A jealous God, who demands a worship that befits his own character and identity.

What is so dangerous about idols after all? Is the first command saying the same thing as the second commandment? In one sense yes, and in another sense no.

The first commandment speaks clearly to the identity of the one true and living God and to the exclusivity of his identity. “Thou shalt have no other gods before me. Bring no other god into my midst. I will have no other god in your consciousness, in your worship.” But the second command, which has to do with how this one true God will be worshiped, also reinforces that first command, because we need to recognize a basic principle and that is this: our worship betrays our theology. To worship the right God in the wrong way is to testify to the wrong God. That is the danger in worship; it is that through our worship we will give testimony to the wrong God. We will give a false witness to his character and to his identity and to his purpose and to his will and to his glory. We must have this formula down, and we must have it inscribed upon our hearts and upon our ministries: Right God, right worship. There is so much more at stake here than may first appear. The wrong worship implies the wrong God.

So many times I've quoted the philosopher Roger Scruton, who in his work on philosophy and the great concepts, when he gets to God, says, “If you want to know what a people really believes about God, you may pay attention to their hymnals and to their Scriptures and to all the things that they say and all the things that they pray. But most quintessentially it is not their books on theology that will reveal what they believe; it is their worship.” If you watch a people at worship you will find out exactly what they believe. And it is so. The wrong worship implies the wrong God, and God himself here makes that clear. I want to suggest several reasons why the worship of idols immediately implies the wrong God.

Idols Imply Finitude⤒🔗

In the first place, idols imply finitude. An idol is a thing, and the very thingness of the thing reveals its limitation. It is here and it is not there. It is a finite thing; it is a limited thing. This is contrasted with God, who is indeed infinite in all of his perfections. There is no way that a finite thing can be worshiped as an infinite thing. The idol is inherently finite. Its finitude is grounded in the fact that it is created. All creation is finite; God himself is infinite. When we speak of an idol, we can say “There it is.” But when we say, “There it is,” we mean that in another place it is not. It is a thing, and the thingness of the thing reveals the contrast with the one true and living God who is no thing, but is “Immortal, invisible, God only wise, in light inaccessible hid from our eyes.” He does not invite us to gaze on him as a thing, but rather to listen to his voice.

Yahweh has given us no likeness of himself. He has spoken, he has revealed himself, and he has defined himself by perfections. This is why the “omnis” and all the other attributes of God revealed in Scripture are so important to us, because every single one of them points to the infinitude of God's perfection. He not only knows; he knows all things. All things! He is not only powerful; he is all powerful. He is not only holy; he is infinitely holy. He is not only merciful; he is infinitely merciful. He is not only just; he is infinitely just. And the very thingness of the thing that is an idol betrays its finitude.

Idols Imply Fabrication←⤒🔗

Secondly, idols imply fabrication. It is a made thing. Thus the commandment begins: “You shall not make.” And we love to make things. We inherently are makers of things. Put a kid in a sandbox and he will fashion something. We make things. Just put the Legos in front of a child and watch what she does. She will make something, and having made it, will admire it. “I have done this thing. This is the work of my hands.” We can even try to dignify it by saying we are doing it as an act of our worship. “We will build this. We will fashion this. We will bring all of our artistic ability to this challenge. We would not bring anything less! We will give this our very best, and having given it our very best, we will appreciate it and worship it.” Idols imply fabrication. We make things, and having made them, we love them.

But Yahweh is not a fabricated deity. There is no assembly required. There is no assembly possible. It is absolutely delusional. This is why again and again in Scripture the one true and living God will say, “I made you! You did not make me! And I made you as my image. You cannot make an image of me.” This issue of fabrication is very important, because this is what, if not in terms of stuff, this is what in terms of ideas and hopes and aspirations the skeptics believe religion is all about.

In his book The Essence of Christianity, the German philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach called God a “wunsch wesen”—a wish being. And he did so because he understands the very logic of idolatry. He spoke of those who make their gods, and he said, “Man—this is the mystery of religion—projects his being into objectivity, and then again makes himself an object to this projected image of himself thus converted into a subject” (1957). He has it perfectly right. He understands it perfectly well. That is exactly what happens here. When one makes an idol, he creates a thing, and having created it, acts as if it is watching him. He makes an object, turns it into a subject, and makes himself an object. He has it perfectly right. In speaking of idolatry, Feuerbach understands it perfectly! He is just certain that that is what we are doing when we speak of God. And if we are not careful, if we are not chastened and disciplined to speak of God only as he would be spoken and to worship God only as he would be worshiped, we fall right into Feuerbach's trap. We too make of God a “wunsch wesen,” a wish being.

This is exactly what brings out some of the most incredible satire in Scripture as found, for instance, in Isaiah 44. In this passage, Isaiah the prophet pours out his sarcasm upon the idolaters:

All who fashion idols are nothing, and the things they delight in do not profit. Their witnesses neither see nor know, that they may be put to shame. Who fashions a god or casts an idol that is profitable for nothing? Behold, all his companions shall be put to shame, and the craftsmen are only human. Let them all assemble, let them stand forth. They shall be terrified; they shall be put to shame together.

The ironsmith takes a cutting tool and works it over the coals. He fashions it with hammers and works it with his strong arm. He becomes hungry, and his strength fails; he drinks no water and is faint. The carpenter stretches a line; he marks it out with a pencil. He shapes it with planes and marks it with a compass. He shapes it into the figure of a man, with the beauty of a man, to dwell in a house. He cuts down cedars, or he chooses a cypress tree or an oak and lets it grow strong among the trees of the forest. He plants a cedar and the rain nourishes it. Then it becomes fuel for a man. He takes a part of it and warms himself; he kindles a fire and bakes bread. Also he makes a god and worships it; he makes it an idol and falls down before it. Half of it he burns in the fire. Over the half he eats meat; he roasts it and is satisfied. Also he warms himself and says, “Aha, I am warm, I have seen the fire!” And the rest of it he makes into a god, his idol, and falls down to it and worships it. He prays to it and says, “Deliver me, for you are my god!”Isaiah 44:9-17, ESV

It is insanity! It is self-delusion! He grew the tree. He cut down the tree. With half the tree he did that which makes sense: he made a fire and warmed himself and baked bread and cooked meat. But in his self-delusion he then carves out of the other half an idol and says, “You are my god.” And Feuerbach shows that there is a “wunsch wesen,” wish being. The idol implies fabrication, but the one true God is not fabricated. He is self-existent. One of the perfections of his being is that he is uncreated and self-existent and whole. 

Idols Imply Control←⤒🔗

Thirdly, idols imply control. Human control. We can pick an idol up and we can put an idol down. We can move an idol to this place and then we can remove it to another place. The idol is at our disposal. We can hide it from our sight or we can put it in the center of the room. We will devise our own worship because we have devised our own god. And here we see the issue directly that cuts at human pride. Not only are we told that God does not invite our artistic creativity (that hurts!), we are told that he will not forfeit his control. “You will not control me, not like some vain idol.” You can topple an idol over, you can destroy an idol, you can fashion an idol, you can move an idol, you can put a covering over an idol, but you cannot control God. He is the uncontrollable, the all-powerful. His hand will not be stayed. The god we can control is no god at all. The god we can conjure and the god we can create and the god we can construct is no god at all.

The very idea of fabrication reverses the control; the one who fabricates is the one who is in control. But we are not the Fabricator; we are the fabricated. We are not the Creator; we are the created. We are not the Creator; we are the creature. And our worship must make that abundantly clear. We are not the Maker, we are not the Controller; we are the created and we are the possessed. It is the reversal of true worship when you bring in idolatry. God cannot be represented in a picture or in a sculpture, said John Calvin, since he has intended his likeness to appear in us. Where do we find the image of God when we worship? It is not in a thing; it is in the fact that he has fashioned us as the only creature made in his image, who can consciously know him and adore him and worship him, and therein (and therein alone) is his likeness.

Idols Imply Need←⤒🔗

Idols imply need. Idols have to be fed and clothed and housed. In fact, most of the worship associated with idols has to do with their very neediness. All you have to do is go into a country where idolatry is rampant and there you will see those who give themselves to the service of their idols. They will bring in food, they will bring in gifts, they will light lamps, they will burn incense, they will create pagodas and temples and structures that will draw attention to the housing of this idol. This is the service, this is the liturgy, this is the devotion that the idol will demand. But our liturgy, our service, our devotion, the apostle Paul says (Romans 12) our “reasonable service,” our spiritual worship is not to bring a sacrifice to an idol, but is to be as a living sacrifice, which we are called to be by the mercy of Christ.

Idols imply need. They need food, they need service, and they need care. The idol must be dusted; the idol must be cleaned. How sad it is to see those who bring food that could go to the hungry and place it in front of the idol who never chews and who never swallows, but by the very action of bringing the food implies that it needs. In Acts 17:24-25 Paul addressed this directly when he spoke to the Athenians. He said, “The God who made the world and everything in it, being Lord of heaven and earth, does not live in temples made by man, nor is he served by human hands, as though he needed anything.” Brothers and sisters, we are not here because God needs anything. We are not here because God needs us. We are not here because God needs our worship. He needs nothing. But he will glorify himself in his people. Not out of his need, but out of the natural outworking of his glory.

This is the jealous God who is jealous for his own name and jealous for his own character and jealous for his own glory. Who made whom? And who needs whom? Paul again, speaking to the Athenians, said, “Being then God's offspring, we ought not to think that the divine being is like gold or silver or stone, an image formed by the art and imagination of man.” Boy, that hurts! That explains why Paul was brought up on charges. You go to Athens and you notice, because you are provoked in your spirit, all the idols there. And you see all the attention given to these idols and you see all the priority that is devoted to these idols, and then you tell them, “You ought not to think this way.” And then you zero in on what you know is their point of pride and you say, “You ought not to think that God is an image formed by the art and imagination of man.” You ought not to think.

By the way, the neediness of the idols brings forth again some of the most bitter and biting sarcasm in all of Scripture. Those of you who understand the Hebrew understand this immediately. 1 Kings 18 is known as the “battle of the gods,” where Elijah stands over against the prophets of Baal and the followers of the Ashtoreth. When the priests of Baal have done all that they have done—they have been crying out to Baal for hours—and there is no answer, there is no voice, Elijah says, “Well, maybe he is occupied. Maybe he has turned aside.” We must not turn aside from the directness of Elijah's sarcasm: he says, “Maybe your idol has gone to the bathroom!” 

Procreation←⤒🔗

There is another problem, one we must speak of honestly, and this is the fifth point: idols imply procreation. If you look at a photographic dictionary or encyclopedia and you look at the pictures of the idols, you will find something grotesque and obvious. And that is that in the worship of idols there seems to be a direct connection between the perversion of sexuality. For many of the idols that had been worshiped (including Baal and Asherah) are idols of fertility and procreation. The statues and the images that were made are not only profane, they are pornographic. Exaggerated sexuality, exaggerated physicality, exaggerated procreative ability. These idols are worshiped for their procreative gift and their generative power.

But God does not give birth. He creates. God does not sire offspring. God is not a womb out of which emerges creation. This is the one true and living God who in the beginning creates heaven and the earth ex nihilo (out of nothing). There is nothing, absolutely nothing, physical or procreative about the God who is the one true and living God, Yahweh, Jehovah, the God of Israel, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.

Idols do imply procreation. So many of them do. That is how they proliferate. This is why in the worship of so many of the Canaanites there was involved pornography and sexual perversion. That is why Israel is warned not to do what is done in those sacred groves under the evergreen tree. Israel is not told that it can play with this; instead it is warned in the starkest and most honest terms that it must have nothing to do with this. No sacred prostitution, no twisted and perverse sexual rituals, no worship of genitalia or sexual power or potency.

Israel did not always keep this command. Look with me at 1 Kings 12:

So the king [Jeroboam] took counsel and made two calves of gold. And he said to the people, “You have gone up to Jerusalem long enough. Behold your gods, O Israel, who brought you up out of the land of Egypt.” And he set one in Bethel, and the other he put in Dan. Then this thing became a sin, for the people went as far as Dan to be before one. He also made temples on high places and appointed priests from among all the people, who were not of the Levites.1 Kings 12:28-31, ESV

Thus Jeroboam set up these two calves, referred to often as the two bulls. And it appears that this not only was Jeroboam’s attempt to keep his people in Israel from going to Jerusalem for worship, but that he also was confusing in the very form of the idol that he had made an idol of procreation in a calf that was male and would be called a bull.

In 2 Kings 10, Jehu reigns in Israel, and he wipes out the Baals and the followers of the Baal:

Thus Jehu wiped out Baal from Israel. But Jehu did not turn aside from the sins of Jeroboam the son of Nebat, which he made Israel to sin—that is, the golden calves that were in Bethel and in Dan. And the Lord said to Jehu, “Because you have done well in carrying out what is right in my eyes, and have done to the house of Ahab according to all that was in my heart, your sons of the fourth generation shall sit on the throne of Israel.” But Jehu was not careful to walk in the law of the Lord, the God of Israel, with all his heart. He did not turn from the sins of Jeroboam, which he made Israel to sin.2 Kings 10:28-31, ESV

And that is what you would call a reformation stopped in its tracks. He went so far as to remove Baal, but he did not destroy the golden calves.

This procreative danger in idolatry is also present in feminist theology. It is one of the reasons we have to watch it and avoid it with such care. In the 2006 General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church USA, held in Birmingham just a matter of weeks ago, the General Assembly received a report on the Trinity in which the denomination and its churches were encouraged to adopt new triads for worship. No longer just Father and Son and Holy Spirit. Now: Overflowing Font, Living Water, Flowing River; Fire that Consumes, a Sword that Divides, Storm that Melts Mountains. Many were suggested, including this one: Compassionate Mother, Beloved Child, Life-Giving Womb. That is idolatry. That is bringing in the Canaanite fertility gods to replace the Trinity of Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

Idols Imply Physicality←⤒🔗

Sixth, idols imply physicality. There is shape and there is form and there is location. And God makes clear in Deuteronomy 4 and in John 4 and in so many other passages that he has no likeness and will not in this way be worshiped. In Deuteronomy 4, when Moses is bringing them back to Horeb, he says this:

And you came near and stood at the foot of the mountain, while the mountain burned with fire to the heart of heaven, wrapped in darkness, cloud, and gloom. 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.Deuteronomy 4:11-12, ESV

Idols Imply the Visual←⤒🔗

Seventh, idols imply the visual. But again, this is a God who is heard and not seen, whereas the idols are seen and not heard. This is the speaking God who commands that we hear his voice, not that we attempt to represent his image. We need to admit to ourselves that we live in a day, even much like the day of the Canaanites, in which we are attracted by the allure of the visual, and given our fallen state, it is probably always. So we need to remind ourselves that when Eve was tempted in the garden, when she saw the fruit that was forbidden, it was unto her a delight to her eyes. We like to say to ourselves, “Seeing is believing.” No, it is not! Seeing is not believing. As a matter of fact, the most important things are the things not seen. After all, what is faith? “It is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things unseen” (Hebrews 11:1).

Over and over again the Scripture prioritizes and privileges the verbal over the visual. As Jesus himself said to Thomas in John 20, “Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.” This privileging of the verbal over the visual is so important to us as we recognize why this ties right into our understanding of the authority of Scripture. Why this ties directly into the centrality of preaching. Why our trust is in the fact that we have heard God, and we hear him when we do not see him.

Just a couple of weeks ago I wrote an article on the state of preaching. And in it, as I listed some of my concerns, I mentioned the loss of confidence in the power of the word that seems to affect so many pulpits and so many preachers. I cited the author Mitchell Stephens of New York University, who says this: “The image is replacing the word as the predominant means of mental transport.” He wrote that in his book The Rise of the Image, the Fall of the Word. We are living in one of those days when the primary, the preeminent means of what he calls mental transport—the exchange of ideas—is indeed the visual rather than the verbal. And it is to our starvation, not to our enrichment.

Neil Postman, in his wonderful book Amusing Ourselves to Death written twenty years ago, said much the same thing:

Our politics, religion, news, athletics, education and commerce have been transformed into congenial adjuncts of show business, largely without protest or even much popular notice. The result is that we are a people on the verge of amusing ourselves to death.

[Amusing ourselves to death] with the visual. He dared even to speak of the Second Commandment.

In studying the Bible as a young man, I found intimations of the idea that forms of media favour particular kinds of content and therefore are capable of taking command of a culture. I refer specifically to the Decalogue, the Second Commandment of which prohibits the Israelites from making concrete images of anything. The God of the Jews was to exist in the word and through the word and unprecedented conception requiring the highest order of abstract thinking. Iconography thus became blasphemy so that a new kind of God can enter a culture. People like ourselves who are in the process of converting their culture from word-centered to image-centered might profit by reflecting on this Mosaic injunction.Amusing Ourselves to Death, 1985

As well we might! What is the problem with the visual? As Mr. Postman recognized, the visual replaces the verbal. Once we see, we no longer hear.

A Warning and a Promise←⤒🔗

This passage comes with such a warning, such a clear threat against us as well. It is a commandment that is followed by this statement from God: “You shall not bow down to them or serve them, for I the LORD your God am a jealous God.” He is filled with zeal for his own name. To understand this, you have to understand the marriage metaphor which is already present. Not only will it be present with Christ and his church, it is already present in the Old Testament between God and his people, as Ray Ortlund Jr. makes so clear in his wonderful book about spiritual adultery in Israel. The big problem here is that Israel will commit spiritual adultery. This is a jealous God, and the threat is very clear: God's judgment will inevitably fall upon the idols and the idolaters.

Brothers and sisters, we need to be always mindful of the fact that theology has consequences. That is exactly what this commandment instructs us of today. Theology has consequences. And not only consequences for us, but consequences that are transgenerational. Getting the worship of God wrong, which implies the wrong God, has transgenerational impact of spiritual death. Just look at those lands that have given themselves for so long to idolatry. Just look at those churches and denominations that have given themselves to false doctrine. Just look at our society that has so given itself to false gods. We can see the judgment of God from generation to generation to generation.

But there is also a promise here. The promise is just as clear. Not only does God “visit the iniquity of the fathers on the children to the third and to the fourth generation of those who hate him,” he says (verse six), “but showing steadfast love to thousands of those who love me and keep my commandments.” Judgment and hesed—steadfast love. Obedience and disobedience. Right worship and wrong worship. Consequences.

What do we do with this? Well the first thing is we had better understand that we are natural-born idolaters. It is absolutely true that our hearts are idol-making factories, and that is as we are born in our fallenness and in our sinfulness. It is rooted in the depth of who we are. But we have been warned about this and we have been instructed, and now we know better. I think Augustine got to the very heart of this when he said there are at the end only two loves. That is all there are! Everything else is pointing in one direction or the other towards one of these loves or another of these loves. Augustine said there are only two loves—there is the love of God and there is the love of self. And in the end, every idol comes down to a love of self. We fabricate it, we fashion it, we feed it, we control it, we admire its beauty and its finitude, for it in the end is us. There we are, as idolaters.

What does it say about our worship? We must be very careful that the visual never eclipse the verbal. We must be very careful not to allow things of visual beauty to become the objects of our worship. Because they lie. They lie because they cannot represent the infinite beauty of God. We are to make no image of him. We should paint no pictures of him. If we were to know the visual image of Christ he would have left us his visual image. He did not! And every picture or portrait of him is a lie. And as a lie, it robs him of his glory. The worship of icons is just wrapped up in the foolishness of the same lie. It is not true that the means of connecting with God is through the meditation on the visual. It simply is not true!

But it is true that even as we are to avoid icons, we do have an icon. It is true that there is one icon that is the object and the focus of our worship, the means of our worship indeed. And that is the icon that is Jesus Christ. As we read from Colossians 1:15-16, “He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation. For by him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities—all things were created through him and for him.” And thus Christ is in the second commandment, and thus Christ fulfills the second commandment, because he, the image of the invisible God, is the icon whom we ponder.

But even as that icon, he is not a visual image for us. He is so much more than that. And thus this commandment is also for us, lest we turn our worship of Christ into another form of idolatry. We preach Christ crucified. We point to Christ and his glory. We preach the cross. We teach and preach all the things concerning the Christ. And we use words. Paul says that these things, including all the law, the Torah, all the writings of the Old Testament, are given to us for our good, so that by reading them we may be instructed and encouraged (Romans 15:4).