“Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any
likeness of any thing that is in the 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 am a jealous God, visiting the
iniquity of the father 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.” (Exodus 20: 4-6)
This is quite a curious commandment for current times. Some
churches have dropped it completely from their Decalogue and others don’t see
much application in their own existence. Most people don’t make idols for
worship any more, do they? And what of the section that says “any likeness of
any thing”; we make likenesses all the time. This is now especially
proliferative with the introduction of the “selfie stick”. The command begins “Thou
shalt not make”. Does this
prohibit artistic sculptures, painting, photography, videography, and other
forms of art?
Let’s think back to an event recorded in the Bible. The
children of Israel were on their sojourn through the desert and they began
complaining against God and Moses about not having bread and water. As
punishment God sent fiery serpents among them that bit them and killed many.
The people realizing their sin came to Moses begging for God’s forgiveness and
interception. Moses went to God with the people’s request and God instructed
Moses to make a graven image of a serpent and place it on a pole. When the
people looked at the image of the serpent they would live (Numbers 21:5-9). Now
did God instruct Moses to break His commandment in making this image of a
serpent? James 1:13 reminds us that God cannot be tempted with evil and neither
does He tempt us to do evil.
So how does this event jibe with the Law? When reading this
command, we realize that the issue is worship: ‘bowing down and serving’. God
did not instruct the people to worship the serpent, only to look at it (as an
act of faith in God’s healing power). Earlier in the Israelite’s journey
through the desert they made a golden calf and were bowing down to it and
worshiping it and engaging in all manner of degradation and evil in service to
the calf. This ignited God’s anger resulting in severe punishment (Exodus
32:1-8). And what of the brass serpent Moses made? Well, as is human nature we
like tangible things and over the years the people began to worship the
serpent. So during one of Judah’s times of reformation king Hezekiah destroyed
the serpent (2 Kings 18: 1-4).
In our lives we prostrate ourselves and live is service to
various things: blocking out hours of our lives for TV programmes, movies and
other forms of amusement, spending exorbitant amounts of money on art, music,
entertainment, fashion, etc., we worship at the shrines of knowledge, power and
influence. Our self-manufactured achievements have become our graven images.
The primary focus of our time, finances and physical strength are the ways most
of us ‘bow down to and serve’ likenesses of things in our world we’ve created
for ourselves.
In this commandment we learn something about the nature of
God. He identifies Himself as being jealous. Typically, we identify jealousy as
a negative emotion, mostly because we confuse it with envy. Envy is wanting
something that belongs to someone else. Jealousy is desiring something that is
your own. God created us for the explicit purpose of worshiping Him. All
worship belongs to Him because he is the I AM – He has all power, knowledge,
wisdom and is all thing to all people all the time. As a result, this is a
particularly serious commandment due to the consequences directly associated
with it. The consequences transcend generations. That alone ought to inform our
choices but along with the consequences there is hope. God always gives us
hope. If we choose to obey Him, no matter what happened in the past and what
our inherited tendencies are, He will show us mercy.
In Love
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