Galen Call's Sermon Library
"The Ten Commandments: Make No Idol" - September 20, 1998
You came beautifully played, simply trusting, trusting Jesus. That is all. Let's open our Bibles together, please, to exit this chapter 20. When God gave His people the Ten Commandments, He did not take a poll to see if it pleased them. He gave them the Ten Commandments because that's what they needed, and because it was an expression, not of the cultural values of the day, but of His own character. Nations since then have flourished by basing their values upon the Ten Commandments. George Henderson, the British commentator of another generation, quotes an unknown author who said, "Like the granite rocks of the mountain on which they were given, these precepts formed the immovable basis of the moral life of men and nations." The Ten Commandments are like a granite foundation for a society or for the life of an individual. God knew when He imparted the Ten Commandments that the values represented there in these moral and spiritual standards would, if followed, make Israel the greatest nation in the world. The Ten Commandments would build a strong society. By the way, the greatest, most critical strength of any nation is not found in its military. It is not found in its economic system. It is not found in its political system. The most critical strength of any nation is found in the morality of its people. God knows that, and that's why He gave the Ten Commandments to the nation of Israel, at least in part, so that they as a people would be strong. The Ten Commandments reflect His holy character, and they resonate, actually, with the universal moral order that God established when He created the world. Obeying the Ten Commandments produces a harmony in one's life and community. On the other hand, transgressing them produces discord and destruction. Why? Let me repeat, because the Ten Commandments reveal the character of God, and thus the moral order that He has woven into the very fabric of the universe that He has created. There is great benefit in our study of the Ten Commandments in these coming weeks. As a result, hopefully we will know God better ourselves. But in addition to that, we will understand His righteousness, and will be brought into a personal recognition of our need for a Savior. We have to be clear regarding this in the Ten Commandments. God did not give the Ten Commandments, so that by obeying them, we could somehow earn our salvation. God didn't give the Ten Commandments as a sort of stairway to heaven. This is not a ten-step program to improve yourself, so that God will accept you. That is not the purpose of the Ten Commandments. The Ten Commandments, in fact, have just the opposite purpose personally, and that is to destroy us in our tendency to depend upon self-righteousness, and to show us we have nothing in ourselves that can be called righteous compared to the righteousness of God. The apostle Paul recognizes this, of course, when he writes Galatians chapter 3 verse 24, and he says the law has become our tutor to lead us to Christ, that we may be justified by faith. The word tutor there means basically a nanny kind of responsibility. He says the Ten Commandments are like a nanny delivering us to school. The Ten Commandments deliver us to learn about justification by faith, and we understand that Christ died for our sins, rose again from the dead, and we believe in that message, and we trust in that Savior, and as a result of it then, the law has done its work. It has brought us to the end of ourselves and to the Savior so that we can find salvation by grace. Now after establishing the singularity of the worship of the people of Israel, they were to worship the Lord, their God, he now instructs them how they are to worship the Lord, their God. I'm going to pick up the reading in verse 4 of Exodus 20, "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. You shall not worship them or serve them, for I the Lord your God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children, on the third and the fourth generations of those who hate me, but showing loving kindness to thousands to those who love me and keep my commandments." What we're going to see today is this, that how we worship, how we worship is as important as whom we worship. There is a way to worship God, and there are many ways not to worship God. I want us to notice first the statement of God's command. You really ask three parts, look at them briefly. He says, "You shall not make for yourself an idol," that's the first part. An idol is something that is carved out of wood or stone or formed by forging some sort of metal or precious material. It is the forming of a figure that is stood up and declared to be divine. He says, "You shall not make for yourself an idol." Number two, he says, "You shall not worship them." The word worship means, "You shall not bend before them. You shall not make yourself prostrate before them. You shall not invoke the name of God and fall down before this idol." And he says, "Thirdly, you shall not serve them." That is, "You shall not worship them by means of sacrifices or of ceremonial rituals of some sort." Now, let me just express for a moment what this command is not about. This command is not condemning art, whether it be sculpture or painting or pottery or any form of art, nor does it forbid the representation of something. In fact, God Himself ordered the representation of the cherubim in the fabric of the tabernacle. There are a few rather extreme religious sects that would take this command to mean that you should never have your picture made, or that you should never put a picture in your home of anyone, or that you should never have art. That is not what this command is about. What is God's point here? Because He certainly has a point. It is that we are to make nothing that is to represent the true and living God to us. We are to make nothing that we would call an aid to the worship of God. Now, I use that phrase because that is a phrase that has been given to me in times past as I have discussed with people why they have statues in their churches. And they say these are aids to worship God. That is specifically what is forbidden in the Second Commandment. We are not to make anything that is to represent the true and living God to us. What God says here is not merely a repetition of the first commandment, it builds upon it. It is a command against worshiping the true and living God, which is commandment number one, using any form or likeness of some thing or someone, we are not to do that. I am going to take just a moment to turn with you, if you will, please, to Deuteronomy chapter 4, where we have an elaboration upon this. This is 40 years or so later, as Moses speaks to the children of Israel. And he reminds them of this very occasion that we are studying in Exodus 20. He says in verse 10, Deuteronomy 4, "Remember the day you stood before the Lord your God at Horeb, when the Lord said to me, assemble the people to me, that I may let them hear my words so that they may learn to fear me, and all the days they live on the earth. And they may not teach their children. When you came near and stood at the foot of the mountain, the mountain burned with fire to the very heart of the heavens, darkness, cloud, and thick gloom. And so he recounts this awesome physical manifestation of God at Mount Sinai. Then the Lord spoke to me, or to you, rather, from the midst of the fire. You heard the sound of words, but you saw no form, only a voice. So he declared to you his covenant, which he commanded you to perform, that is, the Ten Commandments. And he wrote them on two tablets of stone. And the Lord commanded me at that time to teach you statutes and judgments that you might perform them in the land where you are going over to possess it. So watch yourselves carefully, since you did not see any form on the day the Lord spoke to you at Horeb from the midst of the fire, lest you act corruptly and make a graven image for yourselves in the form of any figure, in the likeness of male, female, animal, a bird, anything that creeps on the ground or a fish, and he warns them about using the stars for worship in verse 19. But he says, "The Lord has taken you and brought you out of the iron furnace from Egypt to be a people for his own possession as today." Verse 23, "So watch yourselves lest you forget the covenant of the Lord your God which he made with you and make for yourselves a graven image in the form of anything against which the Lord your God has commanded you. For the Lord your God is a consuming fire, a jealous God." And so God clearly means in the second commandment that we are not to make an image representing him. Why is that? Because God is spirit. And he has no material form. That is the theological reason that is behind this. Anything that is made is inherently limited, it's finite, it's created. Therefore, it is a false representation of the God who is infinite in every respect and who has uncreated, Kyle and Delich, two commentators in the Hebrew language say, "Whenever Jehovah, the God who cannot be copied because he reveals his spiritual nature to no visible form is worshiped under some visible image. The glory of the invisible God is changed, or Jehovah changed into a different God from what he really is." A.W. Pink, another commentator, says, "The design of the commandment is to draw us away from carnal conceptions of God and to prevent his worship being profaned by superstitious rights." Jesus said that God desires worshipers who will worship him in spirit and in truth, not by forms, not by images, which do in fact appeal to the carnal sensibilities of a person. They do appeal to that religious flesh that is in us. He likes something tangible, but God forbids it because it cannot possibly represent him in his majesty and glory. Now, there's a practical reason, besides a theological reason, for God giving this commandment, a practical reason for the nation. And one nation destroyed another nation in those days. They would seek to destroy any images or idols or temples to the gods of that destroyed people. This had a terribly demoralizing effect. You remember when the Philistines stole the Ark of the Covenant and they put it in their temple to day gone, the false God, and this silly God kept falling on its face. It wouldn't stand up. And finally, they got so discouraged by the situation that they sent the Ark back to Israel and said, "Take this thing." Now, why? Because they were demoralized. Because their God kept falling down before the Ark of the Covenant of the Living God. Cyrus Gordon is quoted by John Davis in his book, Moses in the Gods of Egypt. He says, "It is worthy noting that the defeated nations on seeing their idols dragged off and smashed tended to become demoralized and lose their identity. Assyria, Babylonia, the solusids in Rome could not destroy the Jewish religion partly because God and his people's allegiance to him were incorporeal and therefore indestructible." What he's saying is that their God was not represented in an idol, that these conquering nations could destroy. He was invisible. He was spiritual. He was in their hearts. And so he goes on to say, "The second commandment thus paved the way for the historic survival of Yahwism, that is the worship of Yahweh." So that was a practical reason that God gave to the nation, but there's also a practical reason for the individual, it's personal, and it's this. The false belief systems represented by the idols lead to false behavior. We become like what we worship. And so God wanted to take away the tendencies of Israel to put up idols like the rest of the nations, because the worship of idols inevitably led to moral and spiritual corruption and abominations before God. And so there was a personal reason, and it is that false gods tend to remake men in their image. And so God wanted the false gods removed, no idols. Now I want to talk about the statement of God's character that we see, and God tells us what his character is going back to Exodus chapter 20. The statement that we see that begins in the middle of verse 5 actually refers back to both of the first two commandments, the worship of the Lord, their God, and explains why he gives this commandment as to how God is to be worshiped. He says in the first place that he is a God who is jealous, that's the kind of a God he is, that's his character, he's a jealous God. Now when we see the word jealous, we immediately jump to some negative conclusion because we see jealousy so often mentioned in the Bible as sinful and fleshly, and it is coming out of our corrupt natures. But also is there not a righteous jealousy that can be observed? For example of a husband or a wife for his or her spouse, if there's a challenge there? Yes, that is a good kind of jealousy. We ought to be jealous for our marriages, jealous for the covenant that we've made in marriage with that very special person that God has brought into our life. It is that kind of jealousy in its human dimension that we see in its perfect revelation in God. This adjective jealous is found six times in the Old Testament only. There are two other similar words in addition to that that are found that are translated jealous, but it's not a common word in the Old Testament, but it always refers to God. And what it's saying is that God is not a tolerant God, now I'm sorry, if you're politically correct, you're going to struggle with this a little bit, but you need to know something. God is not a God who is tolerant of what offends him. God is not tolerant of what offends his holiness. You see, God is holy. He is different than we are. That's why he makes the commandment. Don't make an image that represents me because you can't do that. I am holy. I am so different than you. I am above you. So don't make an image like that. That makes me jealous. I am not tolerant of that because it offends my holiness. It offends who I am. Again, I quote Kyle Endelich who say that the Lord quote, "will not transfer to another the honor that is due to himself nor tolerate the worship of any other God." You see, and that's the point. Isaiah thundered in the 42nd chapter of his book, the Word of the Lord. I am the Lord. God is my name. I will not give my glory to another nor my praise to graven images. God is jealous that his glory, his holiness, his, if I may use the term, his absolute uniqueness, his uncreatedness, his self-existence as the supreme eternal personal being. He is jealous that all of that not be perverted by some idol. That is to represent him. God is jealous. We learned that about his character. Secondly, we see that God punishes. He says, "I visit the iniquity of the fathers on the children." He is a God who punishes. There is a warning here to Israel and to all people. The heat of his anger is felt by those who hate him. Now, what does it mean to hate God in this context? Well, it means not to do what he says. What did he say to do? Don't make an idol. So to hate God here means to make an idol. And God is saying that those who follow idols, those who make idols, will be punished to the third and the fourth generation. Now this does not mean that God punishes the children for the sins of their parents without any fault of their own or that a child must repent for the sins of his parents or be bound by the sins of his parents. But what it does mean is this, the false worship is very likely to be transferred to succeeding generations by example so that the children tend to fill up the sins of their forebearers, their ancestors. Then when judgment finally comes, when the cup of iniquity is filled as it were, it is the result of that generation's sins, but also the preceding generation's sins that led them to it. That's what God is saying here. We don't have time to look at illustrations but let me just give you a couple of texts to look at. Genesis 15 verses 13 to 16, Leviticus 26, 39, Daniel 9, 16. You will see this principle in action. Now there's a third statement regarding God's character that he gives us here. It is that he is a God who shows loving kindness. Now the preceding one was a warning. This one is an assurance and it is directed toward those who love him. He says, "I show loving kindness to thousands, to those who love me, and keep my commandments." So again, love means to worship God the right way, to worship the right God in the right way. Let's put it that way. God is kind. He is loyal in his love to thousands of generations of those who obey him, who love him. She Campbell Morgan says, "If a man sweeps the idols away and gets into living connection with God, worshiping him without anything between." The result will be that his child's child will most likely sow worship. So you see, just as false worship tends to follow from generation to generation, so does true worship, only much more so. The warning is to three and four generations, but the grace of God abounds far beyond that to thousands of generations, he says, is this positive tendency for the worship of the true God to go on. It seems to me that this is something of an Old Testament statement of that principle of Romans where Paul says, "Where sin abounds, grace does much more abound." Now, I want to close with some applications for our lives in the Second Commandment. I want to begin by saying this, how we worship makes a difference to God. Boy, do we need to write that in our hearts. How we worship makes a difference to God. Worship has been trivialized, writes Douglas buyer, buyer, because people have no awareness of how it matters to the great Yahweh. We are so casual in our approach to God, often thoughtless in the way that we come to worship and present ourselves to him in worship. I can hear someone say, "Well, you know, as long as the person is sincere, isn't that what counts?" Well, certainly sincerity counts for something, but I remind you that Cain was also sincere and God rejected his worship. If you look at the Old Testament, you will find that worship of God is a perilous business. Moses nephews, Nadab and Abaiheu, who were priests, were killed by God because they took coals from the wrong altar and offered them to God an incense that was offered and apparently also at the wrong time of day. Now, there is some indication because of what follows there in Leviticus chapter 10 that they were also drunk when they did this. But that isn't the reason they died. They died because they worshiped God in the wrong way. Uzziah was fearful that the ark of the Lord was going to fall off the card. He touched it and what happened, God struck him dead immediately because no one was to touch the ark of the covenant and anions and safira in the New Testament were hypocritical about what they put in the offering plate. God struck them both dead. Here in Exodus in the 32nd chapter, there were 3,000 people who died in one occasion simply because they made a golden calf to represent Yahweh but God had said, "Don't do this." Now, I'm not saying that God is going to strike us dead if we don't cross all of our T's and all of our I's just perfect, God is a gracious God, he is merciful, he is loving, but folks, let us remember that the God that we come to church to worship is this same Yahweh that we see in Exodus chapter 20 and he is a God who is a jealous God and he cares how we come to worship. If we come to church and we were mad at somebody and we have a grudge against another person and we have a sour attitude about something that's happened, what are we to do before we get to church? How ought our hearts to be prepared before we come in here and lift our voices and choruses singing to God? What ought to say about our demeanor in church? I don't think it means that we have to sit rod straight and stone-faced in church because God is holy and as they did in the colonial days, but it does mean that our demeanor ought to be respectful of the holy presence of God. Sometimes I wonder when we're singing, if we realize what we're singing, we'll sing a chorus for example and we say, "I lift my hands into your name," and we're standing there like this. Well, it might be better for me not to sing that phrase than to sing it and be disconnected and to lie about it. There's an integrity problem there. I don't want to press that too hard, but you understand my point that we need to see that our demeanor is appropriate and worship. How ought it to affect our dress? Did you know that God was very particular how people dressed, who served him in the priesthood in the Old Testament? God was very particular about that. God hasn't told us exactly how we ought to dress. We shouldn't dress like the priests of the Old Testament, but we ought to come to church I think in our best and not come waddling in and cut offs and thongs. Why? God cares how we worship, you see how we come to worship says something about what we think of God. Now the best somebody has may be cut offs and thongs, and if that's the case that's fine. And certainly there are cultures where that is the case. That's exactly how they dress and that's fine, but that's not our culture. Secondly I want to say how we worship exposes whom we love. If we love God we will worship him as he commands us to. We'll put aside our tendency to say well I prefer this or I prefer that, no. We will say here's how God wants me to come and I will come and worship God that way. That means that I love God when I keep his commandments. Now obviously there are allowances for cultural variety, but there is no allowance for anything that compromises the truth of who God is in this character. There's no compromise there. And the third thing I want to say in closing is this how we worship affects future generations. First our own kids. If we come to worship ill-prepared, insincere or hypocritical, don't think for a moment that that will not translate to our children, it will. On the other hand if we come to worship with our hearts right with God, if we come to worship sincerely, if we come in spirit and in truth, then the blessing of God will multiply to our children and to our children's children and for generations to come. That's what God is saying here, still applicable today. How we worship God affects future generations. How we worship is as important as whom we worship because we become like what we worship. And that's why even the age of Apostle John, writing with his old hands, that's why he says as he closes out the book of 1 John, little children, guard yourselves from idols. Let's pray. Father, our prayer is that you will help us to see the idols in our lives. Because we often imagine that this commandment does not apply to us because we don't set up gods of stone and wood. But Lord help us to see the invisible gods that too often are there, and which cloud the worship of you and your glory. Which caused our lives eventually to be perverted and twisted because we become like what we worship. Oh Lord, free us, I pray, from idolatry. Free us from any kind of idolatry that our worship of you may be sincere and right. And with our heads bowed, just allow the Spirit of God to focus your mind for a moment. On some idol that may be upon the throne of your life. And whether that be some attitude or a carelessness about worship, a demeanor, a failure, whatever it be, rip that idol off the throne right now and break it in the presence of the Lord. Let's stand together. [BLANK_AUDIO]