Beyond Imagining
Introduction
Sherlock Holmes and his assistant Dr. Watson are camping. After enjoying a day of relaxation, they pitch their tent under the stars and go to sleep. Sometime in the middle of the night, Holmes wakes Watson. "Watson, look up at the stars and tell me what you deduce."
Hoping to please his boss with his own brilliant reflections, Watson says, "I see millions of stars, and if even a few of those stars have planets, it is quite likely there are some planets like Earth, and if there are planets like Earth out there, it is reasonable to assume that there might be life on other planets."
Holmes stares hard at Watson for a minute, then says, "Watson, you idiot, somebody stole our tent!"
Sometimes our most impressive reasoning doesn’t lead to the right conclusions.
This morning we’re looking at the second of the Ten Commandments:
Do not bow down to any idol or worship it, because I am the Lord your God and I tolerate no rivals.
This commandment is very closely related to the first commandment: “You shall have no other gods.”
In fact in some Christian traditions, the first and second commandments are rolled into one, and then the 10th commandment is split into two to make up for it.
But these two commandments are not the same.
As we saw last week, the first commandment requires that we worship only the one true God as He is revealed in the Scriptures.
And that sounds very much like, “Don’t worship idols.”
But this command doesn’t just say, “Don’t worship idols.”
It says, “Don’t make idols or images for your worship.
That includes both worshipping the image or a false god and making any kind of an image to represent the one true God.
But before I get what that means for us, I feel I need to address what’s most troubling about this commandment, which is the threat attached to it:
I bring punishment on those who hate me and on their descendants down to the third and fourth generation.
It seems that God is being utterly unfair, promising to punish one generation for the sins of another.
It also seems to contradict other Scriptures, where God commands that individuals should be punished for their own sins, as in Deut. 24:16:
Fathers shall not be put to death for their children, nor children put to death for their fathers; each is to die for his own sin.
Here we see that justice demands no one should be punished for the sins of their parents or their children.
So why doesn’t God appear to play by the same rules?
I don’t have a quick and easy solution for this, but here are some observations and suggestions
The most obvious may be something we are only too well aware of: that children have a tendency to imitate the behavior of their parents
There are many ways in which children can suffer because of their parents’ behavior.
If parents don’t honor God and don’t live by His commandments, there’s a good chance their children won’t, either.
But I don’t believe that this verse is saying that if a parent doesn’t worship the one true God, that God will punish the child for it.
The reason I believe that is because of what God says through the prophet Ezekiel almost a thousand years later.
It’s a rather long passage, so I’m not going to read the whole thing, but if you’d like to read it yourself, it’s found in Ezekiel 18.
At that time, the nation of Israel had been conquered and taken into exile by the Babylonians.
The people felt that they were being punished for the sins of their parents and grandparents – for the generations of sin that had preceded them.
They also figured that if they were “serving their parents’ sentence,” there wasn’t any benefit for them to be faithful to God.
The cards had already been played, and they knew they were going to lose.
But God challenges them, saying that
5 "Suppose there is a righteous man who does what is just and right… 9 He follows my decrees and faithfully keeps my laws. That man is righteous; he will surely live, declares the Sovereign LORD.
According to this, the man’s son should also be blessed, right? But the Lord asks them what would happen if this good man’s son is not so good. In fact what if he is as bad as the day is long?
Will such a man live? He will not! Because he has done all these detestable things, he will surely be put to death and his blood will be on his own head.
Just to make sure the people get it, the Lord speculates about the third generation, saying,
14 "But suppose this [evil] son has a son who sees all the sins his father commits, and though he sees them, he does not do such things:
What then?
… Since the son [i.e., the grandson of the first man] has done what is just and right and has been careful to keep all my decrees, he will surely live.
20 The soul who sins is the one who will die. The son will not share the guilt of the father, nor will the father share the guilt of the son. The righteousness of the righteous man will be credited to him, and the wickedness of the wicked will be charged against him.
We can trust that God is just.
In fact, he is more than just, he is merciful
Not only does he not punish us for more than the things we have done, but through Christ, he has taken the punishment for what we have done.
I think that we miss something when we read this, and that is that the emphasis is NOT on God’s punishment of the wicked, but his goodness to those who are faithful.
Verse 6 says:
I will show my love to thousands of generations of those who love me and obey my laws.
I hope some of what I’ve just said helps you to see that God is fair in his judgments, and that he is full of mercy.
But He is also a God who demands that we be faithful to Him alone and to worship Him alone.
Now we can get to the actual command!
The second commandment prohibits two things:
Worshipping false gods and
Making an image of the true God, particularly for the purpose of worship.
That’s made more clear in some of the other translations, like the New American Standard which says:
NAU Exodus 20:4 "You shall not make for yourself an idol, or any likeness of what is in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the water under the earth.
The first part – worshipping false gods – is also included in the first commandment – You shall have no god except the one, true God, revealed in the Scriptures.
But the second part prohibits God’s people from trying to capture him with graphic images.
Last week I said that the First Commandment made Israel unique among all the nations of that time – none of the surrounding nations worshipped only one god.
They all had multiple gods that they tried to keep happy in order to make their lives easier.
If the first commandment set Israel apart from their neighbors, the Second Commandment made them seem even more strange.
All the nations had images and idols to represent their gods.
When you walked into the temple of a god, you would see the idol standing in the front at the altar.
That’s how you knew what god you were worshipping.
Pagans didn’t necessarily think that their god looked like the image in the temple.
But they image gave them a sense of who this god was.
When you walked into the tabernacle, or later the Temple, of Israel, there was no god up front.
It would seem absurd to their neighbors – like they were worshipping nothing at all.
Why is it that God told them that they should not make an image of him?
We like to say, “A picture is worth a thousand words,” right?
Which means, One good image can communicate things that words just can’t!
So we have a Bible full of words inspired by God
So why didn’t the Holy Spirit inspire a couple pictues while he was at it?
It seems like it would’ve really helped!
Images have tremendous power.
And that is exactly the reason God commanded that we NOT make images of Him.
One commentator said the reason was –
… to prevent Israel from identifying the true God with any created thing. To identify God with any created thing is merely one step from thinking of God in terms of that image.
And no matter how good or how powerful or how beautiful the image might be, it could never contain all that God is.
All images of God are inadequate, because God is so much greater, and more powerful, and more full of love, and more gracious, and more merciful, and more holy than we could ever imagine.
No matter how long you have been a Christian, no matter how well you know the Bible, no matter how deep your relationship with God may be, you have only scratched the surface of knowing Him.
I read a story this week about a woman who was the only English teacher in a small rural school. She described what she called “the mixed pleasure of teaching my own three sons.” They begged her not to call on them in class, use them as examples, or tell any family stories— rules to which their mom agreed.
On the first day of class, they would choose a seat in the far corner and refuse to make eye contact.
But she was a popular teacher, and the other students were eager to participate. As her sons began to see their mom through the eyes of others, they struggled to put together the image of their mom as, well – THEIR MOM!! – and their mom as a teacher who was well-liked and respected by their peers.
One day the oldest asked in puzzlement, "Mama, do they know who you are?"
She knew he was referring to the fact that I was "just" a mother. She responded, "Son, do you know who I am?"
Those boys had lived their whole lives in close contact with their mom – but they really didn’t know who she was.
They had one image of her – she was “Mom”
And that had always been an adequate description of her.
But when they saw another part of her, there was this confusion, a mental disconnect.
The person they thought they knew suddenly was displaying a side they didn’t know.
They knew one part of who she was, but they didn’t really KNOW her.
Conclusion
A number of years ago, J. B. Phillips wrote a little book called “Your God is too Small.”
In it he looks at many of the mental images that we have of God, including
God as Resident Policeman.
God as “Parental Hangover” – that is, we tend to imagine that God is like our parents
God as the “Grand Old Man” – the “big guy in the sky”
Or God in the form of Meek-and-Mild Jesus
All of these images are destructive – because none of them is complete.
God’s greatest desire for you is that you would know Him, that you would live in an intimate relationship to Him.
What that means is, that our relationship to God should ALWAYS being GROWING.
Our understanding and knowledge of God should ALWAYS be GROWING.
We can never hold to an unchanging view of God, but seek to know Him better.
Some time ago I had a conversation with someone, not from our church! – who said that he had been going to church all his life, so there really was nothing anybody could tell him about God.
He already knew it all.
I don’t know this person well, but those few words told me that he really doesn’t know God at all.
What is your image of God?
Is He harsh, cold & distant?
Then you don’t understand the love and mercy of God.
Your God is too small!
Or maybe he’s a blonde, blue-eyed Jesus, who carries little lambs in his arms.
Well, the Romans didn’t crucify people for carrying lambs around.
If that’s your image of God, your God is too small.
Is easy-going, doesn’t really care too much about sin, because he’ll just forgive you no matter what?
You’ve missed out on the holiness of God,
and your God is too small.
Your image of God determines so much about who you are and what you value.
And if your image of Him is not constantly growing, it will stunt who you are as well.
