Okay, Romans chapter 1 verses 18 to 23. This will help us think through how the pagans worship and why we don’t want to worship God in the way of the pagans. We’re thinking tonight of the second commandment, no graven images. And so Romans chapter one, beginning at verse 18 says, the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth for what can be known about God is plain to them because God has shown it to them. for his invisible attributes, namely his eternal power and divine nature have been clearly perceived ever since the creation of the world in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse for, although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking and their foolish hearts were darkened. Claiming to be wise, they became fools and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and reptiles. And then just one verse from John chapter four.
This is that passage where Jesus meets the woman at the well and they talk about worship at Jerusalem and worship at Mount Gerizim for the Samaritans. And in verse 24, God says to this lady, God is spirit and those who worship him must worship in spirit and in truth. Uh, several years ago, uh, there was a worship pastor at a church in Chapel Hill. Uh, I think this man went to be with the Lord probably like 15, 20 years ago, but he sent out, um, Every week this email, remember back when AOL and dial up and all was a thing, he would send out these emails with worship quotes, worship quote of the week, I think it is.
In fact, I’m looking at this printout and it is, his is a AOL.com email address. Yes. So that was, remember when you used to get on the computer? I don’t think anybody climbed up on it, but that was the, that was the verb we use. I’m going to get on the computer. Yeah. So, uh, here’s this interesting quote.
It’s called the God I want the God I want, uh, left to myself. The God I want is a God who will give me what I want. He, or more likely it will be a projection of my desires. At the grosser level, this will lead me to one of the more obvious pagan gods or goddesses who offer their devotees money or sex or power, as Marx and Freud and Nietzsche pointed out. All idols start out life as the god somebody wanted. At a more sophisticated level, the god I want will be a god who lives up to my intellectual expectations. A God of whom I can approve rationally, judiciously, and after due consideration and weighing up of theological probabilities. I want this God because he or it will underwrite my intellectual arrogance. He will boost my sense of being a refined modern thinker. The net result is that I become God. And this God I’ve made becomes my puppet.
Nobody falls down on their face before the God they wanted. Nobody trembles at the word of a homemade God. Nobody goes out with fire in their belly to heal the sick, to clothe the naked, to teach the arrogant, to feed the hungry because of the God they wanted. They are more likely to stay at home with their feet up.
Pretty interesting, isn’t it? I guess thinking on it, it’s probably correct. little bit lighter note here this this answer I’m looking for is the kids catechism answer what is God God is a spirit and does not have a body like men okay so the whole image thing we’re talking tonight about images but we’re we’re looking at it from the perspective of the Heidelberg catechism Uh, if you were to look up the larger catechism, Westminster, larger catechism, uh, it is way more wordy and it is way more prohibitive.
In fact, um, this is my printout of the larger catechism and it’s just long. I’m not, I’m not going to read it tonight, but I want to point that out to say this, uh, we are a church. and part of a denomination. So both our local fellowship here and our denomination are what we call confessional. And the confession that we hold to is our doctrine. So the Bible is our ultimate standard, but we have a confessional theological identity happens to be Westminster confession, larger and shorter catechisms. Our Westminster larger catechism is very strict on images. like zip, zero, nil, none.
In fact, if you want to come see how that works out, come to our called Presbyterian meeting this Thursday night that we’ll be hosting down the hall in the fellowship hall. We will have two candidates come before us and they both separately will be asked about images. One of them is going to a church that has images in the sanctuary. Now, My thinking is the Presbyterian should probably say, Hey, y’all, you know, you shouldn’t do that.
Let’s take them out. We’ll pay for it. You know, it’s expensive. We’ve just done it here. Uh, some of, you know, uh, grace reform, Darren stone, they just paid to have theirs taken out. It’s not cheap. Um, but our Presbyterian said, we’ll put our money where our mouth is. If we’re a denomination that prohibits it in a church, uh, can’t afford to change it out. We ought to, we ought to help them. But anyway, it’s become a pretty big issue in the life of our Presbytery.
But where the rubber meets the road, you go to a barbecue restaurant just down the road, one I’m thinking of, and they have a little bucket at the cash register, and it’s a little bucket full of Jesus’s. And what does it say on the bucket? Everybody needs a little Jesus. Okay, so, Do we take one? Or does our heart have a little conviction that says, absolutely not.
I’m going to keep my mouth shut, but Lord help these people. Those little Jesus’s are everywhere. How many of you grew up with the flannel board? Remember in Sunday school, the little green board or red board, and you could put the tear outs, the Sunday school teachers would tear it out and stick it on the flannel board, the flannel graph. And you had the disciples and Jesus. You know, all the little things. Or how about manger scenes?
Boy, this anti-Catholic bunch of Protestants. Isn’t that what we are? Aren’t we Protestant? Aren’t we anti-Catholic? Aren’t we anti-Orthodox? I mean, we’re Orthodox, but anti, like Greek Orthodox, Russian Orthodox, right? And we say, oh, they’ve got their images. They’ve got their icons. Uh, they’ve got their statues ever been in a Greek Orthodox church. It’s beautiful, but it’s full of images and icons. Uh, but what about us Protestants? We got little Jesus in our pocket, right? We, we, we, we got it all over the place. Um, there’s a joke about every church I’ve been in and every Christian school I’ve been in.
There’s always a picture of Jesus, right? And at the kids’ school in Mebane, there’s a picture of Jesus. And four years ago, the kids nicknamed the picture of Jesus Ron, because they heard that you’re not supposed to have images. And so they said, that’s not Jesus, that’s Ron. And so down at the kids’ school, the picture of Jesus in the Baptist church is affectionately known as Ron. It’s just a thing. interesting, but he’s blonde haired. He’s blue eyed. He’s very European looking. He doesn’t have olive skin. He doesn’t have features from the Middle East and all.
So the rubber meets the road in all kinds of settings and scenarios. Maybe you’ve bumped into the Mennonites. They, not being God, just humans, won’t even have their pictures taken. They take this to the extreme. They say, oh, no one should have an image made of them. So this image thing, this idol thing has become something of a new reformation perhaps in our day. Let me just say kind of generically before we dive in, God says don’t make images. Nothing else would have to be said, right? No further explanation, just don’t make it. But what do we do as sinful human beings? We say, well, he didn’t really think through it.
And kids really need videos. I mean, VeggieTales just sanctifies my children, right? And to portray Bible characters as vegetables, that’s a, I mean, who, Jesus, God didn’t even think of this, right? That’s sort of the ridiculous place we have landed.
But it’s an absolute no. When you read the first four commandments related to God, there is a structure in the Hebrew language. It’s an absolute no. It’s a never, ever don’t even think about it. No. Maybe your parents told you don’t sneak in the cupboard and get cookies, but they weren’t going to kill you over it. But there were things you could come within an inch of your life if you did, right? There are things that it was just never, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever do.
And that’s the way we should think of the language of the commandments. You shall never, ever, ever have any other gods. You shall never, ever, ever, don’t even think about it, make a graven image. You shall never, ever, ever, ever for any reason, take God’s name in vain.
And then of course there’s the Sabbath day, but what have we done really with almost all the commandments except murder? Well, wait a minute. Jesus kind of got us on that one, didn’t he? If you’ve had anger and you’ve hated your brother, you have committed murder in your heart. So we really can’t get off the hook on any of the commandments, but we’ll fudge the Sabbath. We’ll fudge the, You know, the little Jesus thing. We’ll fudge. But what I want to point out is the commandments are very cut and dry, crystal clear.
And remember the context the Israelites received them in. They were coming out of Egypt where Pharaoh himself was considered to be a deity. They were coming out of Egypt where the sun was a God, the moon was a God, the stars were gods. There was a fertility God. There was a God for every single thing. And you remember when God sent Moses and Aaron to tell Pharaoh to let the people go.
And Pharaoh’s question was, well, who sent you? This is a joke. I mean, I’m Pharaoh, I’m a God. We’re the biggest, baddest nation on the face of the earth. Who has sent you? Well, Yahweh has. Tell him to show up himself, tell him to prove himself. Well, we got the 10 plagues and eventually who won? The true and the living God. And so it’s in that context that God gives these absolute laws. He gives these absolute commandments.
And so, uh, I wanna think for just a second about God. God is a spirit, does not have a body like men. No one has seen God. It’s impossible to see God and to live. And so if we’ve not seen God and he does not have a form, how then can we make an image of him, to make an image of something not seen? It’s not possible. And then if we did make an image, because we saw him, just say we did, it would be an insufficient image. And it would do them no justice.
We’ve been cleaning out mom and dad’s stuff. And my sister made a bucket for each of us kids. And it’s got the stuff that would be important to each of us. And so I’ve been looking through it. And you know, second grade, third grade, fourth grade? I think it’s about those three years. Every school picture, guess what yours truly has?
Bedhead. How did I make it to school with a mom like mine and have Bedhead in my school pictures? But there it is, Burlington Christian Academy, the early 1980s. There’s Brian with Bedhead. And I would love to be able to have Bedhead, because it’s hard when you don’t have much hair.
But those images did not do me justice. That was not mommy’s little boy. It was me with a bad hair day. It’s an image insufficient to who I was and who, you know, did my parents know justice as their kid. But just think about that on an infinite scale. If you could see God, if he had a form you could see, we could do him no justice. Even a crystal clear HD picture would still be just that. God is too majestic.
And one day when we do see him, what will be our response? Will we get out our iPhones and snap a picture and say, Hey, look, God, I’m going to Instagram him. Well, I think we’ll take a cue from Isaiah. I think we’ll take a cue from John, the apostle on the Isle of Patmos. I think we’ll take a cue from Moses when he was hit in the cleft of the rock. Uh, we will fall on our face as though dead. We will say, Whoa, onto us. We are unclean and God is too majestic. The apostle Paul, you’ll remember, caught a glimpse of heaven and God had to give him a thorn in the flesh to keep him humble.
The last thing any of us would want to do, I think, is misconstrue God. We would not want to do something that would misconstrue who he is, what he’s like. Now, I mentioned the larger catechism is really picky. It’s really specific. And so it says we should not make an image of God. That’s clear from the scripture. And it even prohibits us from having mental images of God. It’s not just that we make one and fashion it out of something that can be seen or touched or looked at with our eyes. But it goes so far as to say, we should not even make mental images of what God is like. Now, a lot of people will make a distinction.
And you’ve probably heard this maybe in the reformed church. We don’t want to have images where we worship because worshiping the actual image or with the aid of an image, that’s what God is prohibiting. But then we’ll fudge and we’ll say, but we need pictures of Jesus to teach the children. We need pictures of Jesus to teach what Jesus is like.
And then it’ll go a little bit farther and they’ll say something like, Well, Jesus really did appear in the form of a human. And so therefore they make this logical leap. If he appeared in the form of the human, it’s therefore okay to have a picture of him.
Well, you gotta be careful not to become a Nestorian, right? The Nestorians separated Jesus’ humanity from his divinity. And so to say it’s okay to make an image of his humanity And to separate him from his deity, that’s kind of bad, right? Wouldn’t you say? Yeah. Yes, that’s bad. We don’t want to be Nestorians. They were heretics. And so we don’t want to make images of any form or fashion of God. And if Jesus, the eternal son of God became man and remains deity. We don’t want to fool around with that.
Well, what’s the catechism teaching us? What’s the commandment teaching us? First commandment says the object of our worship is God have no other gods. Second commandment is teaching us the manner of worship. We worship him as he prescribes and think about the old covenant and now the new God revealed himself He revealed what he is like in his word, but also in the sacraments. And when he reveals himself in the word and in the sacraments, and we say, well, that’s not enough, we need some lesser things to help. Those lesser things won’t help, they will hinder. And I think the catechism is wise to say what it says in that third question, we should not try to be wiser than God.
And so the object of our worship is God, the manner of our worship, is as he prescribes. And we have typically in the reform church understood that as the, uh, regulative principle of worship, whatever God commands for us to do in worship that we should do.
So we’ve kind of got it biblically in our heads. We should read the word, sing the word, pray the word, preach the word. And yes, we should even see the word and touch and taste the word in the sacraments. When the water is poured on the person being baptized, when we hear the trickle of the water, when we see it touch their body, that’s, that’s a site. We touch the bread, we touch the cup, we taste it, we put it into our bodies.
John Calvin, who would have ministered in the 1500s, during the Protestant Reformation was known for saying the only images of God that we should ever see are baptism and the Lord’s Supper. Those are the images God has given. We live in a media-driven world. In fact, I think it was Claudia brought me a postcard today of a church she says I should go to, right? And they do the movie thing. You come watch these movies, you’ll learn about God. Well, I love what the catechism here says. We are to be instructed as a Christian community by the living preaching of his word and not by idols that cannot talk. So where, where do we land on this? The catechism says, uh, what is God’s will?
We make no image and we don’t worship it except how he’s commanded us to worship. And then it says, can we, can we not, or may we not make any image at all? God cannot and may not be visibly portrayed. And though creatures may be portrayed, even the Mennonites, God forbids making or having images in order to worship them or serve God through them.
I asked a friend one time, we were, we were at a church in our Presbyterian that had images and we were just chit chatting. And I said, I said, what do you think about the whole thing? He says, I think we should never have it because the images will etch something in our mind.
And when we get to worship, that will come up. And he says that will then become an aid in our worship. Now this, this was a very smart, very logical person. And I took that as kind of, he was older than me. So that was good counsel, I thought. So in order to worship or serve God through them, it’s hard to get around it. It’s very hard, I think. And then question 98 may not images as books for the unlearned be permitted. We should not try to be wiser than God. He wants to be instructed by the lively or living preaching. Think about this.
The Christian faith is a word centered faith. The Christian faith is a preaching faith. It’s a teaching faith. Uh, the church was sent out in the world with nothing but the word, nothing but eyewitness accounts of the true things that will change our lives. And so the more word based we are, read the Bible, sing the Bible, pray the Bible, preach the Bible, show the Bible, touch and taste the Bible, all that.
The more we do that, the better off we are. But I think a good place to land, I have been, I’ll just be honest. I’ve been in different places on the images thing. I’ve done the separate it. Well, we don’t worship, but it’s okay. Sunday school, whatever. It’s not the end of the world. I think I have landed on kind of the more no side of both. Maybe, maybe that’s a maturing thing. Maybe I’m getting old and grumpy. Well, I am getting old and grumpy, but, but maybe old and grumpy on this subject.
Uh, but I want you to consider, uh, at least for, for your own thought, um, has God sufficiently made himself known in the world that he made and in the word that he’s given that we can adequately know him. And we can adequately by his spirit grow in his knowledge and our faith to be strengthened. And we can still live, uh, not by sight, but by faith. And we can even with the apostle Paul think on that phrase, uh, though we have not seen him, we love him and think that that is sufficient. That is what God in his wisdom has given to us. and we can be content with that.
That’s a good challenge for us to think of. I think it’s way better than all the wishy-washy, you know, squirming and saying, well, or, you know, well, I’ve got good friends that are just hard hammer no. And I really respect that. It’s a good place to land. Let’s pause and ask that God would give us wisdom. Lord, we thank you for the chance to think about a commandment that is so confused.
Even our own camp, our own reformed faith. So give us clarity on how it is that you are to be worshiped. Give us clarity on how we are to think and to know you. Let us trust in your word and rely on your spirit alone to teach us what you are like. We can’t wait till we get to heaven when we behold your face. And so until then, keep us fed by your word. Let’s, we ask all this in the name of Christ. Amen. We have number 467 cast down. Oh God, the idols.