Transcript
With my whole heart I seek Thee, declared the psalmist. Let me not wander from Thy commandments. I have treasured Thy word in my heart, that I might not sin against Thee. Blessed be Thou, O Lord, teach me Thy statutes. Come, let us worship God.
[congregational singing]
Let us pray. Let the good news come now, our Father, not only in word but in power, in the Holy Spirit, and with full assurance, through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen. Listen now to the reading of God's word from the book of Exodus, Chapter 32, beginning at the first verse. When the people saw that Moses delayed to come down from the mountain, the people gathered around Aaron and said to him, Come, make gods
for us, who shall go before us. As for this Moses, the man who brought us up out of the land of Egypt, we do not know what has become of him. Aaron said to them, Take off the gold rings that are on the ears of your wives, your sons, and your daughters, and bring them to me. So all the people took off the gold rings from their ears and brought them to Aaron. He took the gold
from them, formed it in a mold, and cast an image of a calf. And they said, These are your gods, O Israel, who brought you up out of the land of Egypt. When Aaron saw this, he built an altar before it. And Aaron made proclamation and said, Tomorrow shall be a festival to the Lord. They rose early the next day and offered burnt offerings and brought sacrifices of well-being. And the people sat down to eat
and drink and rose up to dance. And from Paul's first letter to the Corinthians, Chapter 10, from the first verse. I do not want you to be unaware, brothers and sisters, that our ancestors were all under the cloud, and all passed through the sea, and all were baptized into Moses in the cloud and in the sea, and all ate the same spiritual food, and all drank the same spiritual drink, for they drank from the spiritual rock
that followed them, and the rock was Christ. Nevertheless, God was not pleased with most of them, and they were struck down in the wilderness. Now these things occurred as examples for us, so that we might not desire evil as they did. Do not become idolaters as some of them did. As it is written, the people sat down to eat and drink, and they rose up to play. We must not indulge in sexual immorality as some of
them did, and 23,000 fell in a single day. We must not put Christ to the test as some of them did, and were destroyed by serpents. And do not complain as some of them did, and were destroyed by the destroyer. These things happened to them to serve as an example, and they were written down to instruct us on whom the ends of the ages have come. So if you think you are standing, watch out that
you do not fall. This is the word of the Lord. The story is told of a base chaplain who preached one Sunday morning on the Ten Commandments. She covered them all in one sermon. I cannot even imagine doing that, but for the sake of the story I will not press the point. Following the service as the troops exited the chapel, one soldier was overheard saying to another, well, at least I've never made a graven image. My
guess is that most of us here this morning would say the same. The other nine we may or may not have broken, but we are certain that we have never broken the second commandment. In its fullness it reads, you shall not make for yourself a graven image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. You shall not bow down
to them or serve them, for I the Lord your God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children to the third and the fourth generation of those who hate me, but showing steadfast love to thousands of those who love me and keep my commandments. Of all the Ten Commandments, the second seems the furthest removed from the world in which we live, from our life in the world today. Here at least we
are tempted to believe that we moderns have the edge on the ancients. After all, nothing appears more ridiculous to our way of thinking than the superstitious notion of an idol. We may have doubts about many theological matters, but of this we are absolutely certain. No graven image is our God. No idol carved of wood or hewn of stone is divine. But let's remember that our conviction is not uniquely modern. The prophets of Israel shared it completely.
Isaiah ridiculed the worship of idols. With biting sarcasm he observes that a man cuts down a tree, with part of the wood he builds a fire to warm himself, with part he kindles a fire to cook his meat, and the rest of it, he says, he makes into a god, his idol, and falls down to it and worships it. He prays to it and says, deliver me, for thou art my God. Jeremiah joins in the ridicule.
Their idols are like scarecrows in a cucumber field, he says, and they cannot speak. They have to be carried, for they cannot walk. Be not afraid of them, for they cannot do evil. Neither is it in them to do good. Even a modicum of fairness, however, compels us to admit that such ridicule is based upon the worst possible interpretation of idols. No doubt many ancient idolaters did believe that their idols were their gods, but that is
idolatry gone to seed. But if we give idolatry the best possible interpretation, a different picture emerges. In his Ten Words of Freedom, Professor Jay Williams points out that in order to understand the importance of the second commandment, we must first comprehend why ancient people created idols in the first place. These polytheists at their best did not look upon their idols as gods, but as objects which enabled them to communicate with their deities. Idols were simply the
visible representations of the gods, and that visibility is important to human beings. Like the story of the minister who was driving along one day with his five-year-old daughter, he asked her who the important people were in her life. Naturally, she mentioned mommy and daddy first, and then came her brothers and her sister. Next came the family dog and cat, and finally she mentioned God. Her father, trying to help her straighten out her theological priorities,
asked why she put God so far down on the list. Well, daddy, she replied impatiently, you know you can't see God. With the wisdom of a child, she spoke for us all. For who can deny that in our everyday living, the visible almost always has priority over the invisible? This priority is the foundation of such well-known maxims as seeing is believing, I'm from Missouri, show me, and out of sight, out of mind. Remember now what
we said last week about the other gods, which are forbidden in the first commandment. We noted that the Hebrew word for gods is Elohim, and that the root meaning of Elohim, this plural noun, is powers. The gods of polytheism are the powers that confront us in our life in the world. They are the powers of nature. They are the powers of human society and culture. They are the powers of our own subconscious minds. And they are
real. They actually impact our daily lives. They demand our allegiance and our service, and because they are so many, they fragment our human existence. Because ancient people viewed these powers as gods, they had a great need to visualize them, to objectify them in order to deal with them. Dr. Williams explained it this way. The idols of ancients were a way of putting existence in order and hence of achieving sanity. By creating idols and images of the
deities, they could place these forces at arm's length so that they could be addressed and placated. Idols, then, are an expression of a conviction that though people are motivated by the powers, they can also transcend them. They not only express the reality of the powers represented, they also covertly express the reality and independence of the human ego. Today, we moderns have the same human need to order our lives and to achieve some semblance of sanity for
our lives in a fragmented world. The fact that we do it differently than the ancient polytheists, the fact that we do it with greater sophistication than they did it, the fact that we do it without benefit of graven images, does not remove us from the temptation to do it. For the truth is that images need not be graven in order to be idols. Images can be intellectual as well as material. John Calvin never tired of reminding
people that the human mind is the factory of idols. The products of this factory we no longer call idols. We call them ideals. We call them ideologies. But idols are idols by any name. In his book, "The New Demon", Jacques Ellul argued that our modern secular age is the most religious age in all of human history. Not, of course, in the traditional sense of religion, yet deeply religious in the sense of worshipping the ideologies that create
order out of our chaos and provide us with a sense of sanity. Thorstein Veblen tells us how to recognize an ideology as an idol. He says it always comes with the English suffix ism. Ism. And ism always represents an absolute. In philosophy we have idealism, the absolutizing of ideas, or materialism, the absolutizing of matter, or existentialism, the absolutizing of human existence. In psychology we have behaviorism, the view that our behavior is determined absolutely by our heredity
and our environment. Or volunteerism, the opposite view that behavior is determined absolutely by free will. In political and economic ideology we have communism and socialism and capitalism. And to the list we could add racism and nationalism. Yes, and sexism. Each one represents the absolutizing of something that ain't absolute. The absolutizing of the relative. The absolutizing of the relative is the heart of idolatry. In other words, our modern idols are our isms, graven or otherwise. I do
not pretend to know what the idols may be in your life, but I know that you can find out. Martin Luther put it something like this. He said, Christians are duty bound to say that God is first in our lives. But if you want to know what rivals God in our lives, ask yourself what is the second most important thing to you. And the answer will tell you where the idol lurks. Idolatry, you see, is not
the antiquated practice of ancient people. It's the very modern practice in a different form. Nor is it the exclusive temptation of pagan men and women. It has always been an in-house temptation for the people of God. The story of the golden calf in Exodus is but one example of the struggle of Israel with its idolatry. They melted down their gold and made themselves a god. Some of us do that without even bothering to melt the
gold down. Paul's exhortation to the Corinthians tells us that even Christians continue to struggle with the allure of the idols. And I'm trying to help you see this morning that we too struggle with the idols of the modern world, with the isms that offer us an ordered and sane world, with relative matters that we are ever tempted to absolutize. The second commandment speaks to us today with compelling power. It not only prohibits the worship and service
of idols, it calls us to a life in faith without idols. And that applies to our worship and service of the God who gives us the second commandment. The second commandment forbids us to make an image or a likeness of the living God, of the power who transcends all the powers of nature and of culture and of our unconscious minds. But if we keep this commandment, how then can we worship a God we cannot see? How
can we serve a God we cannot even conceive? And the answer is that God has provided us with his own image and likeness in the world. Remember the Genesis story of the creation? And God said, let us make them in our own image after our likeness. So God made them in his own image, in the image of God he created them, male and female he created them. We are the image bearers of God within God's creation,
not because we look like God and not because we are God, but because we are created to act like God. The God of whom the Bible speaks, the God who gave Israel the ten commandments, is the God who is known in his acts. And we can love as God loves. We can forgive as God forgives. We can show mercy as God shows mercy. We can be faithful as God shows faithfulness. And yet who among us actually
does? Sin has marred our behavior and has tarnished the divine image beyond recognition, which is why God sent his only begotten Son into the world. He made our humanity his own. He took upon himself our flesh. He stood with us in the conflict of the powers. And here in the flesh he acted toward us as God acts. He loved us for God, even unto death, death on a cross. He forgave us for God and healed us
for God and reconciled us to God. In the New Testament Jesus is called the second Adam, the firstborn of God's new humanity. And for that reason he is also called the image of God. The Apostle Paul speaks of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God. He goes on to explain that it is the God who said, Let light shine out of darkness, who has shown in our hearts to give the
light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ. Of Jesus, he says, he is the image of the invisible God. How then do we know this Christ? Calvin put it so beautifully when he said, Christ comes to us clothed in his gospel. Do you want to know the Lord your God? Then look to Jesus. Read the gospels. They will not tell you what he looked like, but they will tell you how
he acted, what he did, and what he said. And in his actions you will discover how God acts in the world for you and toward you. One of the words Jesus spoke is this, You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And what it means to love God that way, according to the second of the Ten Commandments,
is simply this, You shall not make for yourself an image, graven or otherwise. Let us pray. We give you thanks, O Lord, for this liberating word, for the word that assures us that we need not create a God in our own image, that we need not look to the relative for the absolute, that we need not find any of the powers of this world, whether of nature or of culture, to be the living God, the Creator,
and the Redeemer of all. We give you thanks for your commandment and for your Christ who fulfilled it. For the one who acts as you act, who does what you do, who says what you say, that in him we might know the firstborn of the new creation, that in him we might see the likeness of God. Draw us to him. Through your gospel may we hear your law afresh. In your law may we hear the promise
of your gospel. For we pray these things in Jesus' name. Amen.
[congregational singing]
And now go in peace, and the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit be with you all. Amen. [music]