Summary 

The Second Commandment warns against creating any image of God that we worship or serve, whether physical or mental. While we may not carve wooden idols today, we often flatten God by making Him in our image, keeping Him static, oversimplifying His character, or treating Him like a cosmic vending machine. This flattening affects not only our relationship with God but also how we relate to others. God's jealousy is actually for our benefit - He wants us to know Him fully rather than worship a reduced version. The solution is diving deep into Scripture and looking to Jesus, who reveals God's true complexity and fullness.

Transcript

O Lord, teach us your ways, Guide us in your paths.
May your statutes, your commandments, your law be sweet to us like honey more does more to be desired than gold. Would we be like the one who sells all to find you the pearl's great price. To have life abundantly life with you. To know the father through the son.
God, we're thankful that you've given us your word. And we pray, Lord, that today we'd hide it in our hearts, that we would find in it life, life everlasting. Amen. All right, when. When Melissa and I first started, when we first went out on a date, we were living in Richmond, Virginia, and I was leading a campus ministry down there, reform university fellowship.
And she told her parents that she went out with this guy named Peter Rowan. And so they googled they were wise parents, and they did what parents do in that scenario, right? They Google Peter Rowan, Richmond, Virginia. And what they found, I'd only lived there eight months by this point. It's not like my face was going to come up.
But a face did come up, and it was because the great bluegrass musician Peter Rohn was having a show there just in a couple months. And so they googled, and that's what they found. And I don't know if any of you know this musician, but he's got big white hair, currently he's 83 years old, and he looks nothing like me.
Now, thankfully, they were correct in not thinking that was me, but what if, you know, what if for the rest of their lives, they treated me like they first saw me in that image? Right? They're constantly asking me, how's the concert? Why do you have so much hair?
You look pretty good for 83, whatever. Or, you know what they could have done? They also could have found out, I've mentioned this before, years ago, that the little boy on the front of the YouTube Boy album and war album, his name is Peter Rowan, too. I was not destined for music fame, but I thought I was at one point, and maybe they saw that. They're like, well, he's just a little kid.
And they all just treat you like a little kid. You know how sometimes that's what happens, is that people kind of get this picture of you and they simplify you. They kind of take you as this static kind of dynamic, is that that's how you are and that's how you will always be is how they kind of picture you right there. And it's just this kind of way of almost dehumanizing you, right? They don't engage with you as an actual person in a way, that's kind of how we engage sometimes with the Ten Commandments.
We have these ideas, we have these images in our minds of what they are and how Christians use them or misuse them. We see them as this list, right? A couple weeks ago talked about this, this list of do's and don'ts, primarily just list of do's and don'ts that we use in order to gain God's love. And oftentimes what we do out of that is we simplify them into a checklist that we can follow, that we can manage. So we come to the second commandment and we say, oh, do I have carved images of the cat God Bestet, which is one of the gods of Egypt that the people would have been saved, were saved out from, right, when they were in slavery in Egypt.
And we think now. Check.
Or we think, have I ever taken out my gold earrings and taken off my gold rings and along with my whole church community and throwing them into a fire for a cow or something to come out and dance around it? No, check. You know, we kind of. We kind of treat the commandments often as this list that we go, ah, do's, don'ts look at me.
And we know that this kind of approach to the commandments flattens them, right? And what it also often does is it creates Pharisees and hypocrites of us, people who look down our noses at our neighbors and yet our hearts are far from God and don't hear what I'm not saying, okay? I'm not saying that conversations around crafted images of gods or God don't have their place. They most certainly do have their place. There are some cultures that are full of carved images and people that bow down to them.
And in some ways we are right to join in with the psalmist who wrote Psalm 115 and laugh in a way. They have eyes, but they don't see. They have ears, but they don't hear. Hands, but they can't touch. And feet, but they can't walk.
But it's not like there aren't millions of people that actually do have those, right? It's undoubtedly true for countless folk and in many times, in many situations, and maybe completely images of Jesus can be no better. There are people that venerate those actually bow down, right? But if we flatten this text, not only will we tend towards the direction of checking off stuff, right? Checklisting hypocrisy, but also we will fail to heed the Heart commandment that is here.
And when we do so, we will flatten God.
Jesus tells us on the sermon in the Sermon on the Mount that we actually miss the commands if all we read is do not murder and think, well, I haven't literally taken somebody else's life. And we miss the commands if we think. We hear it say, do not commit adultery. And we think, well, we haven't done that. Jesus says, actually they're not just matters of outward performance and outward actions, that they are in fact matters of our hearts.
Right. Say we have the second commandment. And what does the second commandment say? Some of you are familiar, but let me read it to you. You shall not make for yourselves a carved image or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above or that is on the earth beneath or that is in the water under the sea.
I know it keeps going, but I'm going to stop there. I want to say first, what this cannot mean is that we can't have sculptors. Ted, Sorry, it's very hard to say that what this means is that we can't have sculptures even in worship settings. Okay, let me justify that statement. Now, 15 chapters later, if we were just to kind of turn in the book of Exodus, 15 chapters on Moses gathers together, he instructs the whole gathered people.
Gather together. I'm going to read this list. Gold, silver and bronze, blue and purple and scarlet yarns and fine twin linens, goats hair, tanned ram skins, goat skins, acacia wood, oils, precious stones. It's longer. I'll stop there.
And he then calls all the skilled craftsmen, led by Bezalel, who all of you Bible trivia people will remember, is the very first person in the Bible who is said to be filled with the spirit of God. A sculptor, a craftsman, he gathers all this fine material and all these skilled craftsmen. Why?
For the sake of creating things that represent things of heaven and things of earth for the tabernacle, the place of worship.
You may remember, you all remember that if you went inside the tabernacle, the linens that were finely crafted out of all that yarn that was collected was in the image of cherubim, right? Y' all remember that? Okay, if you don't, maybe you remember that the Ark of the Covenant had two cherubim with their wings coming out, hovering over the Ark of the Covenant, an image of something from heaven. Maybe you remember. Tim, I'm going to walk away from this, all of you, online.
I hope that you'll just be able to picture this in your minds. Maybe remember that actually at the Hem of the high priest's garment. There were two things. One was pomegranates. Okay?
I have no idea why, but there are pomegranates, a fruit of this earth. An image of pomegranates and bells.
Pomegranates and bells. And then you'll remember that there was a lamp stand there in the place of worship, and the lampstand was fashioned with branches. Some people connect that with the tree of life. These are all images of Eden in a way. I'm not going to go into that, though you've heard me say it at some point in more detail.
What I'm suggesting to you is that what this commandment can't mean is that images or any likeness of anything in heaven above or on the earth beneath her, in the waters under the earth have no place in worship. It would just be contradictory within the same short chapter frame. Right? Can't mean that. So what does it mean?
Well, I cut off our text. So what does it say next? What does it say? You shall not bow down to them or serve them. You cannot make an image to worship or to serve.
Which is to say in a way that any image that we make of God, or even the God, not just God's, but the God as to say this is God, is going to give us something that is a false God, invites us into an idolatrous engagement with God himself. And this is a prohibition, because there is always a problem with projecting a false idea of God. And that false idea of God always also affects our relationships. What did Psalm 115 say? But those who create them, those who worship them, become like them.
You become like what you worship.
And what I want to suggest to you today is that this image creating does two things, okay? It flattens God and it flattens others, okay? It flattens God and it flattens others. And we are all prone to do it. Nobody's off the hook.
Nobody gets to look down their noses.
The prohibition to make an image, to worship or to serve. Wait, I'm sorry. Hold on a second. Let me get back here.
All right, hold on. All right, I think I found my spot. Hold on.
So this prohibition to make an image, to worship or to serve is followed up with these words, right? It says what specifically? For I, the Lord, am a jealous God. He says, you can't do that because I'm a jealous God. And I'm going to get to this.
But this jealousy is a proper jealousy. God is jealous for us to actually know him rightly. He actually desires to be known by us and for us to be in relationship with him, which is to say that his jealousy is for us to know him fully, to love him properly, and also to worship him rightly. And all acts of creating a God or even images of the God are a way of flattening Him. Okay, what do I mean by this?
I mean that to create an image, whether physical or in our minds or in our hearts, to worship and to serve, okay? To worship and to serve. An image to worship and to serve will never, ever contain the true God. You cannot do it. It's not possible.
Okay? It will always flatten God into something other than his fullness. And therefore, we will not worship him or know him or serve him for who he truly is, which is what he desires, he longs for. And I think. I think that this flattening idea makes.
In some ways, it's not a hard idea to get if you're thinking of, like, the idol bestet, right, that cat God.
We kind of know, like, there's no way God can be contained in a cat image, right? Well, we kind of go. We laugh at that. That's kind of silly.
And so in some ways, I think, because we do that we think this. This command is a little bit irrelevant to us.
But I think when we start to think of, okay, all of the different images, not just sort of outward, but also inward and in our hearts, are to a degree, flattening of God, then it makes us completely relevant to us. It's not just relevant to Christian traditions that, say, venerate idols, but relevant to us or icons, but relevant to us. So I want to suggest to you that this flattening of God has all kinds of relevance to us and that we flatten God in all kinds of ways. And I just have a few ways for us this morning, okay? One way we flatten God is that the images that we have, the primary image that we have of him is similar to us, okay?
We make him into our likeness, right? We are not made in the image of God. He is made in the image of us. So, you know, it's true. God goes before his people as a cloud by day and a pillar and fire by night.
And he actually says, I'm going before you, right? There's images of things, earthly things that kind of represent God. And In John chapter 3, Jesus actually refers to the snake that was lifted up as an image of him being lifted up, right?
But the truth is that we tend to make image of God an awful lot like ourselves. We make God to Think like us to love like us, to hate like us. So he loves the things that we love. He loves our causes. Our causes are his causes.
And our image of him is often our image of ourselves.
Of course, there's horrible ways this has been taken in history. You can think of an Aryan Jesus, what was done in the name of an Aryan God. He loves us, which means he's not really like you. Some particular race owns him as their own. But we do this too.
We, as individuals, do this too.
Isn't it so often the case that God becomes the God of the Republican cause or the Democratic cause? And let me just suggest to you, if God agrees with you in everything, you have flattened God massively.
If he agrees with you in everything, something's amiss, okay? And that's for all of us.
You're worshiping and serving another God. I'm just saying that we project an image of our own making onto God. And often we find that the God of our making is an awful lot like us. He's so similar to us. We flatten him in this way.
And what I'm not saying is God did not take on flesh and dwell among us. That is true. But our temptation is for us to make him into our image, not for us to be made into His. Okay? So that's one way.
Another way we flatten God is we have kind of a static dynamic with God. And this is kind of what I was getting at the beginning, where you kind of go, oh, this is who you are and this is who you will always be. I have this picture in my mind of you, and this is the fullness of who you are. We can't imagine him being any different. And so we go through His Word and He cannot challenge us because we already had this idea of who he is and how he communicates and how he acts.
There's no challenge to us because he's static. Now oftentimes, you know, we have the God who's only and always one way. He's only and always only accepting. Or let's put it on the other side. He's only and always.
He's always austere. He's very serious.
But it's only one thing. It's like a carved image that is static. It's not dynamic. It doesn't have depth of being.
And of course, this static idea that we have in our own hearts moves out into our own lives because those who worship them become like them. So we think in order to be like God, we must only ever, always be accepting or we must only ever always be very austere. And, you know, plenty of churches that fit into those categories. A third way we flatten God is that we just have a simplistic understanding of him, an overly simple way of engaging with Him.
All right, I'm going to talk about the elephant in the room or the images in the room. When I was studying for this sermon, of course, I had to come up here into our sanctuary, right? Because, of course, our mothers and fathers in the faith, in this church, our historic church that's been here since 1862. It's the first church of our neighborhood. And it's actually.
Our church is actually the only church in our neighborhood that is still worshiped by the congregation that founded it. Kind of interesting history, but I have. Well, I have no desire to not be grateful for the gifts that we have been given.
And I have no desire also to be overly critical. And yet. And, well, I'll say this, too, part of me just wants to evade the whole subject. But as I sat here and I'm thinking of this sermon, I'm looking around and I thought, at the very least, I can say that we have a very simple depiction of Jesus in our. In our stained glass.
And up here, we've simplified him. If you look around, he always looks so gentle there. He looks a little green there. He looks a little. I'm not sure what's happening in that one.
He's a little disappointed, maybe, but meek and mild.
Have any of you ever gone into a church, a church building, and you saw a stained glass window of Jesus taking out the whip and tossing the tables over in the temple and driving out the merchants?
I have not.
Have any of you walked into a church and you looked around and you saw Jesus cursing? A fig tree is the image of unbelief and the rejection of him.
I have not.
No. We tend to want to take Jesus meek and mild, and we simplify him. You know, it's a flattening out. It's a simplifying.
Or maybe we make Jesus to be the God who wants purity. He's got a lot of passion, power, but you know what I'm saying, We simplify him. Our images of God, our external images and the images that we make in our hearts are always and can only be simplistic.
The fourth way we flatten God is by making him, I'm going to say into the Stepford God. Okay, Some of you have probably heard Tim Keller talk about this, because I did.
He talks about the book, the Stepford Wives and maybe some of y' all saw the movie, okay? But the story goes like this. Joanne Eberhardt and her husband and her kids, they move from New York City and they go to Stepford, Connecticut. And what happens is that she's kind of amazed, and she's also really perplexed by the women that are in this town. Because as she gets to know them, she learns that the women, the wives in this town of Stepford, Connecticut, they don't have any interests of their own.
They don't have any thoughts of their own, they don't have any desires of their own, they don't have any loves of their own. They do housework, they care for their families, and they agree with whatever their husbands say. And of course, this strikes Joanne as odd. Wouldn't it strike you as odd?
And it wasn't just because this isn't just some big critique of trad wives, right? That's not what's going on. But it strikes her as odd because it's so two dimensional. These aren't real people. Of course, as the story unfolds, she finds out that there's a good reason for this, because the women are not real people.
They aren't, right? Instead, the wives, the true wives, were replaced by robots built in an image of the wives. Turns out that some of the men in Stepford were savvy with computers. And what were Jessica? Animatronics.
Right? I don't know why. Somehow the music team was talking about animatronics before the service. I was like, I'm going to use that word in my sermon. What a weird word to also be talking about.
Anyway, and they combine their skills and they're able to make this robot wife who just does what she's told.
And so when finally you decide, you know, you get this robot wife made to be like your wife, and you do away with the real one.
Now, what I'm suggesting to you is that so often, actually, what happens with our flattening of God is not only just to make him too similar to us or too simplistic or static, but really, a lot of times what we're doing is we are controlling. You do my bidding, right?
The God that we come, we offer something to, we say, you know, I'm offering this to you so that blah, blah, blah, blah, you do my bidding.
Make God out to a Stepford wife. False God talking about wives invites us back to the idea of jealousy. Said that God is jealous in this passage. That's what it says from a jealous God.
And he's jealous for us to know him fully and to love him properly and to worship him rightly. And you will know, if you know your Bibles, that oftentimes this jealousy of God is related to the jealousy between a husband and a wife, marital jealousy, which is to say proper jealousy. There's a proper affection and a proper knowledge that is due in that relationship. And if you think about this with me, the same flattening of God is what harms so many of our relationships because those who worship them become just like them. So flattening of God always invites us into a flattening of others.
It always moves out relationally. How we engage with God is how we often will be invited to relate with others. So we want the other to be just like us, similar to us.
Some of you have heard, because I've done counseling with you, that I kind of joke around, but not really, that you are probably going to get into a fight about where the serving utensils go in your kitchen. You know, they go to the right of the stove. No, they go in a little canister next to the stove, to the left. Right. And as silly as it is, that is a lot of marital disputes.
And what's happening, of course, what happens, of course, is that we're like, you know, if you just saw the world as I saw it, if you were just me, we'd have a great marriage.
Similar. Right. Engage with the other is if you just need to be like me.
And we also treat our spouses as though they are just static, that if they treated us one way, they're going to definitely do it again. You know, so we don't extend grace. We don't have much curiosity for the dynamism of another person.
And we know this as humans. We are dynamic. We have different moods and different emotions, and we have different responses sometimes to the exact same event. You know, there's a liveliness about it. Of course there is.
We're made in the image of the living and true God. Of course there is. And yet we do this to one another all the time. And of course, we simplify one another. We are more focused on the image that we have in our minds of the other than actually engaging with them in all of their complexity.
It's so common, so common.
And of course also what we do in our marriages and so many others is that we just want to control others.
We do that with God, but we do that with others. We don't want just a yes sir God, but we want a yes sir wife. We don't want a honeydew God, we want a honeydew husband. Right? Just do the list.
Just do the list. I mean, jealousy is a hard word for us because I think most time what we think of it as is negative. We think of it, maybe we think of it like the 10th Commandment, not coveting. Jealousy is more connected with our ideas of coveting, maybe more negative. But in the Bible, jealousy is often positive, and it's positive here, which is to say there is a good and right jealousy, because there's a good and right relationship that we're invited into with the Lord.
A desire to be known and to be loved and to be in a living relationship. It's right for a husband to desire the soul affections of his wife. It's right for a wife to be angry when her husband is giving undue attention to another woman. That is. That is right.
That is good.
Think about this idea. How awful would it be for a husband to be sitting on the couch with his wife, Kids have gone down or whatever, they're sitting there, and he turns away, and he's just looking at his phone. And she says, what are you looking at? Well, I'm looking at pictures of you.
And, you know, in that instance, you'd be like, well, I am right here. Like, you can literally look at me. I'm here.
And it's not just that, but of the photos that he's looking at, he's photoshopped just a little bit more into his light, and his wife is right there. Is she not properly jealous? Absolutely. 100%. And of course, we know that those do not just have to be physical images, though that, I think, illustrates the point.
We have all kinds of ideas that we think this is you. And we're not even open to the dynamism of a real relationship.
You see, we are all, all of us tempted to create images of God.
And I know that y' all are not tempted to, like, probably none of you are actually making idols, but you are. We are, in our hearts and in our minds, making images of God that do not contain the fullness of Him. We're always flattening him, and it's always affecting how we relate to others. So, of course, the commandment does move, right? Doesn't moves to saying that this is a great iniquity.
You know, he visited the iniquity of the fathers to the third and fourth generations, which say it's a gross injustice, it's a wickedness. And this affects our relationships.
If we're not willing to receive God as he reveals himself. The truth is that we will not receive others as they are revealed to us slowly, gently, over time. And as we're not known and loved for who we are, and as we do not know and love others for who they are, we will often treat them in these same kinds of ways, right? Ways that we can control, ways that just fit our liking. A family in the ancient world would often live together, not just the mom and the dad and the kids, like we often do it, but often it would be like the grandparents.
And a lot of times you'd actually have up to, like, the third and fourth generation living together. You know, all these people living together. And what is the text saying? This is going to be detrimental because you learn to relate to others, even how as you relate to me. And this will create such harm.
Matt, I don't see Maya here anymore. Matt, one of the best things that you can do for Everett is to receive him as a gift from God, with curiosity, seeking to love him as he grows and changes, right? And accept him and hold him and receive him that way, but receive him as a part person that's outside of you, that can affect you. And that's one of the best things we can do for all of us. And they will create actually so much of a healthier family life and societal dynamic.
And instead, what we do, right, instead what we do, we make the God into our image and we simplify him and we think he's static and we use him. And so what we do is we say, if you're not following this and this and this, I can write you off. God's a Republican and we can create, or, sorry, we can treat our political rivals as devils. Is that not what happens? God's a Democrat.
Then can't we speak about our political rivals however we want? We all know this happens all the time, but it's not just out there. It's here because it's in our hearts and our minds.
If God is willing to do our bidding, then why not our kids? Force them to do it. The way you will treat those made in the image of God is often how you treat God.
Flattening God always flattens others. So what's the cure? Just really quickly, two suggestions. Okay. The first, I want to encourage you, brothers and sisters, dive into the word of God.
Isn't it wild how complex the Bible is? That's part of why it's so hard to read. You've got poetry and old poetry. Poetry is hard enough in the 20th century, 21st century. Now you're talking millennia ago.
It's hard. You have poetry, you have history, you have wisdom, literature, and of course, the gospels that tell us about Jesus. But then we have letters that are written in different kinds of ways than we write letters. I mean, it's apocalyptic stuff. It's so big and so expansive, and there's such a big fullness to it.
And interestingly here, the command. There's not a command. There's not a commandment in the Ten Commandments that says thou shalt not read. Right? No.
You're invited. Dive into the Word and see the various ways that God presents himself as a pillar of, you know, fire and cloud and. And the cross. These images. Right.
But of course, the second is don't just dive into the Word, but live with the Word made flesh.
I mean, that's wild. That's what Jesus is called, the Word made flesh. And what we heard in John 14 is if we see Jesus, we've seen the Father. We've had the fullness of the revelation of God put before us in Jesus.
How can I not include in this sermon? Look, images about images. Look to Jesus, the author and the perfecter of your faith. Gaze upon him. He's the image of the invisible God.
The fullness of God made, revealed, not a flattening of God. But the fullness of God is found in Christ. If you look to Jesus as he's revealed in the Word, there's no way you can say that he's just like you.
You can't look at God and say, oh, he's just so simple. I can guess what he's about to say or do next. Surprising us. Certainly not a Stepford God. No way.
In fact, what happens is in the Scriptures, most of the time, the people that thought they knew God had flattened him so much that when he was standing right there in front of him, they rejected him.
Instead, brothers and sisters, look upon Christ because there you will see the true God who is worthy of all of our worship and who is worthy to bow down to and to serve. Let me pray. Lord, pray your guidance upon us as we seek to follow your ways. Lord, we want to walk in them in our best. We want to walk in them.
Sometimes we want to reject it and push it aside. Or we confess that we want to walk in your ways. God, I pray that we this morning would look to Jesus and find in. In Christ the fullness of. Of your breadth and your beauty and your glory, that we'd fall down and worship and serve the image of the invisible God in Christ Jesus our Lord, Amen.

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