IDOL WORSHIP
By Jim Murriner
Ex 20:1-6
"And God spake all these words, saying,"
"I am the LORD thy God, which have brought thee out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage."
"Thou shalt have no other gods before me."
"Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth:"
"Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them: for I the LORD thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me;"
"And shewing mercy unto thousands of them that love me, and keep my commandments."
The all sovereign God who has every right to demand obedience from us, first of all because He is the one who has made us, and also because of who He is, has in the first commandment demanded that we keep His face clear, that absolutely nothing is to come between His face and our face. There is to be no lesser power between God and us, that becomes the reason that we do the things which we do, even if those things are good and Godly things.
Keeping in mind the demands of the Almighty that He be our cause for doing as we do, we then need to look at this next verse, and this next commandment, which tells us to never try to make an object or picture or building or anything else to represent God. We are never to try to represent God as what we think He looks like. He prohibits us from describing Him with physical means, other than those illustrations which He uses in His word.
We are not to represent Him in our terms because of what He is, and who He is. He is not reproducible, or duplicable down here. There was and is only one who could represent The Most High God, and that is the Lord Jesus Christ.
Hebrews 1:3 speaks of Christ being the express image of God the Father.
"Who being the brightness of his glory, and the express image of his person, and upholding all things by the word of his power, when he had by himself purged our sins, sat down on the right hand of the Majesty on high;"
II Corinthians 4:3-4 also speak of Christ being the image of God the Father.
"But if our gospel be hid, it is hid to them that are lost:"
"In whom the god of this world hath blinded the minds of them which believe not, lest the light of the glorious gospel of Christ, who is the image of God, should shine unto them.
Because Jesus Christ is the only one who can picture God in the way that He is, and all attempts by man to picture Him will fall far short of who He really is, we then are never to make any kind of a graven image.
This second commandment because it is based upon the necessity of the first commmandment has a tremendously broad application for us today.
We have become so accustomed to ignoring what the Bible tells us and interpreting it in the light of our own experience, that we do not begin to understand the significance of what God is telling us here in these verses.
Ex 20:4-6 "Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth:"
"Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them: for I the LORD thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me;"
"And shewing mercy unto thousands of them that love me, and keep my commandments."
This second commandment a very strong exhortation that we do not reproduce any thing that to us would be reproduction of God, or that would picture Him or that would be a symbol of what He is like in our minds
Because of God's Sovereignty and His Majesty and who He is, He will not tolerate disobedience to this second commandment.
God is telling us here "Don't try to do anything in the association of worship with Me that involves your effort to craft something beautiful.
This was Cain's mistake; he tried to worship God with something he had done. Whether it is in adoration of God, or something presented to Him as an offering, He will not tolerate our presentation of our own works.
Notice what we are told in Acts 17:24-25 "God that made the world and all things therein, seeing that he is Lord of heaven and earth, dwelleth not in temples made with hands;"
"Neither is worshipped with men's hands, as though he needed any thing, seeing he giveth to all life, and breath, and all things;
We can also see in Exodus 20:23-26 that the Old Testament Jews were not to become craftsmen in the way that they built the alter on which they offered their sacrifices.
"Ye shall not make with me gods of silver, neither shall ye make unto you gods of gold.
"An altar of earth thou shalt make unto me, and shalt sacrifice thereon thy burnt offerings, and thy peace offerings, thy sheep, and thine oxen: in all places where I record my name I will come unto thee, and I will bless thee."
"And if thou wilt make me an altar of stone, thou shalt not build it of hewn stone: for if thou lift up thy tool upon it, thou hast polluted it."
"Neither shalt thou go up by steps unto mine altar, that thy nakedness be not discovered thereon.
This is an instruction unto us that we are not to build something that will cause us to be in awe, by its impressiveness. We are not to do any thing, which will lift up a work of humanity, when we worship God.
Yet as we look around us today, there are all kinds of things which we as religious people do which is in violation of this commandment.
We build majestic temples, tabernacles, and church buildings, and we set out to develop an environment that is somewhat awe-inspiring. We love to impress others with the things we build, and the things we do in our service for the Lord.
Do you have things which you would hold in reverence in a religious sense? Do you have a picture that represents to you Jesus Christ: If you do it is a direct violation of this commandment. Do you have an alter, a place that you feel closer to God, and a place that you go to pray, because it is held in reverence: This is an idol, and is in direct violation of this commandment. Do you hold the cross, to be something to be held in reverence: What about angels, or perhaps the church building, or even the Bible? While the cross is to be important to us we do not need little crosses. The important thing about the cross is that Christ died upon that cruel thing that He might purchase my eternal salvation. While we are to conduct ourselves within the church service with decency and with respect, and while things are to be done in an orderly fashion, the building itself is not to be held in awe. While angels are messengers of God, we are even warned in His Word to not worship them. While the King James Version of the bible is God's Word for the English speaking people of today, we are not to hold the book itself in great awe. I have known of organizations which teach their young men to kiss the bible, yet at the same time they do not bother to open the bible to see what God has for us within its covers. We are not to hold these objects in reverence, but only God is to be held in reverence.
This second commandment is an exhortation that we are to worship God in His way, and not in just any way that we may choose. We must worship Him according to His Sovereign decrees.
John 4:24 tells us how that we are to worship Him.
"God is a Spirit: and they that worship him must worship him in spirit and in truth."
Things which are physical cannot represent God. The all Sovereign God of the bible is beyond our experience.
Isaiah 55:8-9 reminds us of this
"For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, saith the LORD."
"For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts.
Whenever we try to describe God, or shape Him or build something around Him that we can feel religious in, God tells us that we are violating the very concept of who He is.
God is so great and so awesome that when the natural man sees Him, he has no desire to be near Him.
We can see this in the following scriptures.
Ex 20:20 "And Moses said unto the people, Fear not: for God is come to prove you, and that his fear may be before your faces, that ye sin not."
21 "And the people stood afar off, and Moses drew near unto the thick darkness where God was.
Ro 3:11 "There is none that understandeth, there is none that seeketh after God."
1Co 2:14 "But the natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God: for they are foolishness unto him: neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned."
God not only phohibits us from having graven images, He also tells us what He will do to those who have them.
Isa 44:9 "They that make a graven image are all of them vanity; and their delectable things shall not profit; and they are their own witnesses; they see not, nor know; that they may be ashamed."
When God said"Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven images:, when He told us to not try to reproduce Him in any way down here. In telling us this, He is not just talking about pagan worship of an idol, or a little god, but rather He has told us that He is so concerned that nothing distort our thinking of Him as He is ,that He does not want any kind of an effort made to make something to look like Him. He does not want anything to get between Himself the All Sovereign God, and us.
Ex 34:1 "And the LORD said unto Moses, Hew thee two tables of stone like unto the first: and I will write upon these tables the words that were in the first tables, which thou brakest.
2 "And be ready in the morning, and come up in the morning unto mount Sinai, and present thyself there to me in the top of the mount."
3 "And no man shall come up with thee, neither let any man be seen throughout all the mount; neither let the flocks nor herds feed before that mount.
4 "And he hewed two tables of stone like unto the first; and Moses rose up early in the morning, and went up unto mount Sinai, as the LORD had commanded him, and took in his hand the two tables of stone."
5 "And the LORD descended in the cloud, and stood with him there, and proclaimed the name of the LORD."
6 "And the LORD passed by before him, and proclaimed, The LORD, The LORD God, merciful and gracious, longsuffering, and abundant in goodness and truth,
7 "Keeping mercy for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, and that will by no means clear the guilty; visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children, and upon the children's children, unto the third and to the fourth generation.
God is so great and majestic that there is no way that we can express or reproduce who He is by physical means.
As we read the words we tend to say that we do not do these things, but as Paul spoke to those who at Mars Hill made other gods by the work of mans hands, we should learn that anything which we try to make which is to represent God is wrong.
Acts 17:22 "Then Paul stood in the midst of Mars' hill, and said, Ye men of Athens, I perceive that in all things ye are too superstitious."
23 "For as I passed by, and beheld your devotions, I found an altar with this inscription, TO THE UNKNOWN GOD. Whom therefore ye ignorantly worship, him declare I unto you."
24 "God that made the world and all things therein, seeing that he is Lord of heaven and earth, dwelleth not in temples made with hands;"
25 "Neither is worshipped with men's hands, as though he needed any thing, seeing he giveth to all life, and breath, and all things;"
26 "And hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth, and hath determined the times before appointed, and the bounds of their habitation;"
27 "That they should seek the Lord, if haply they might feel after him, and find him, though he be not far from every one of us:"
28 "For in him we live, and move, and have our being; as certain also of your own poets have said, For we are also his offspring."
29 "Forasmuch then as we are the offspring of God, we ought not to think that the Godhead is like unto gold, or silver, or stone, graven by art and man's device."
30 "And the times of this ignorance God winked at; but now commandeth all men every where to repent:"
31 "Because he hath appointed a day, in the which he will judge the world in righteousness by that man whom he hath ordained; whereof he hath given assurance unto all men, in that he hath raised him from the dead.
We today are too sophisticated for things like birds, and animals, yet we often try to represent God to be like man. We keep saying things like "If I were God I would do this or If I were God I would do this. We often hear people say "My kind of God would not allow cruelty or evil. My kind of God would not allow little children to die. My kind of God would not have war". When we say such things, we are making God into an image like unto man, we are creating an idol when we do this.
Romans 1:25 in speaking of some evil people tells us that this was one of the things which they did.
"Who changed the truth of God into a lie, and worshipped and served the creature more than the Creator, who is blessed for ever. Amen."
God tells us to not put Him in terms of our thinking, but to put our thinking in His terms.
When men begin to understand just a little bit about the greatness of God, yet have not been made alive to understand, they begin to be religious and go about to make their own god.
Some of the Old Testament Jews were interested in a god of pleasure.
1Co 10:5-7 "But with many of them God was not well pleased: for they were overthrown in the wilderness."
"Now these things were our examples, to the intent we should not lust after evil things, as they also lusted.
"Neither be ye idolaters, as were some of them; as it is written, The people sat down to eat and drink, and rose up to play.
We must be careful the we do not become idol worshpers in that we too desire the god of pleasure.
You may think that you do not disobey this second commandment, but you had beter WATCH OUT.
1Co 10:8-12 "Neither let us commit fornication, as some of them committed, and fell in one day three and twenty thousand."
"Neither let us tempt Christ, as some of them also tempted, and were destroyed of serpents."
"Neither murmur ye, as some of them also murmured, and were destroyed of the destroyer."
"Now all these things happened unto them for ensamples: and they are written for our admonition, upon whom the ends of the world are come."
"Wherefore let him that thinketh he standeth take heed lest he fall."
We understand who God is by what His word tells us He is, and not by some thing that we have shaped in our minds.
If the Holy Spirit has shown you that you are a violater of this and other commandments, your need this day is that you might trust that Jesus Christ died for your sins.
