The Second Commandment: The Basis of Worship tagged: , ,

The Second Commandment: The Basis of Worship

Posted by in Bible & Theology

One of my favorite resources (as I have shared before here) on the Ten Commandments is the work by Alistaire Begg entitled Pathway to Freedom: How God’s Laws Guide Our Lives (Chicago: Moody Publishers, 2003). I preached a series of sermons based upon the outlines provided by Pastor Begg (having gained his written blessing so I would not be in violation of the Eighth Commandment). Lately we have discussed here on IMPACT! several issues concerning worship. I believe that a review of the Second Commandment is an important issue that should be considered in true worship (I also need time to complete my thoughts about church and state).  Several themes and also some common words flow from Pastor Beggs thoughts in the following offering:

You shall not make for yourself a carved image – any
Likeness of anything that is in heaven above,
Or 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 fourth generation of those who hate Me,
But showing mercy to thousands, to those who love Me
And keep my commandments.
Exodus 20: 4-5

Thrown out from the Garden of Eden, our first parents Adam and Eve settled down, worked the earth, and began the first human family. The first son born to Eve she named “Cain” for he was the one she pined her hopes in overthrowing the scourge of the fall. “I have acquired a man from the Lord,” she said, the one for whom she prayed would “crush the serpent with his heel.” The second son born was named “Abel,” who was “the breath of life, a beautiful child” to his proud parents. Cain was a tiller of the soil, while Abel his brother was a herder of cattle and sheep.

God called upon each of the boys in turn to acknowledge Him as the One true God through the giving of a sacrifice. Cain brought an offering of his surplus, “the fruit of the ground” to the Lord. Abel for his part brought a first-born lamb, the best of his flock, to the Lord as an offering. The Lord accepted the offering of Abel. A sacrifice of blood from an innocent is what God had previously revealed to his parents would be an acceptable sacrifice, and thus would honor and glorify God. Cain’s offering, the fruit of Cain’s own hand and work was unacceptable, for it would merely affirm humanities desire to be self-reliant and self-righteous, and was thereby rejected by God. Let us not think that Cain was unaware of God’s demand of a sinless and humble sacrifice – Cain’s lack of humility in giving the gift of his own making was part of the rebellion that the “sacrifice” represented that God rejected. Because of his anger with God over the rejection of his offering, Cain slew his brother Abel in retaliation against God. Cain therefore became the first murderer in human history. What his parents had hoped from his life was dashed to pieces in that one instant when Cain, in an act of rebellion, refused to worship God in a way that God demanded, but preferred to worship a God of his own making instead.

The worship of God is foremost dependent upon in what manner God has revealed Himself to us. The absence of the many symbols of God in most Baptist sanctuaries is not because of neglect, but by design. The lack of a material altar is one example. The absence of an actual altar at the front, or a kneeling pad in the pews is primarily because our Baptist ancestors held that Christ’s one and only sacrifice of Himself is the only altar necessary in a New Testament church.

In fact, the general lack of “symbol overload” in most Baptist churches is a result of what historically Baptists have believed: we who are worshipers of God should not be visually distracted by artistic interpretations of mere humans in seeking that which should be worshiped “in spirit and in truth.” The only three symbols universally held to by most Baptist churches in the sanctuary is the following: the Lord’s Table; that which the Lord lays out in an invitation for all to come to Him and break bread for thus as it is written; “Come, Let us reason together, says the Lord”: the Bible on the Table; it is the “bread”; the “meat”, God’s Word, which shows humanity the futility of self-righteousness, of what sin is, and points humanity to the witness of the Savior who is the only one who can save humanity from the debt of sin; and the Pulpit from which God’s living Word is preached so that all men will be drawn to hear the Word of Life, and to drink heavily the Living Water. The heavy use of items such as paintings, statues, artifacts, banners, and other symbolic artifacts that are often displayed in the liturgical church have historically been avoided in Baptist circles because of our belief that God alone is to be worshiped without the use of visual aids of and about the LORD, thus being in obedience to the second commandment.

The first commandment, “There shall be no other gods before Me” arises on account of who God is and what He has done, in that He is both Creator and Redeemer. We can proceed to ask, “How should I be a totally devoted person so as to keep the first commandment?” The first commandment forbids the worship of any false god, and the second demands that we do not worship the true God in an unworthy manner. We must worship the correct God correctly!

Moses reminds the Israelites in Deuteronomy the following:

“Take careful heed to yourselves, for you saw no form
When the Lord spoke to you at Horeb out of the midst of the fire,
Lest you act corruptly and make for yourselves a carved image
In the form of any figure: the likeness of male or female,
The likeness of any animal that is on the earth
Or the likeness of any fish that is in the water beneath the earth.
And take heed, lest you lift your eyes to heaven,
And when you see the sun, the moon, and the stars,
All the hosts of heaven, you feel driven to worship them and serve them,
Which the Lord your God has given to all the peoples
Under the whole of heaven as a heritage.
But the Lord has taken you out of the iron furnace,
Out of Egypt, to be His people, an inheritance
As you are this day.
Deuteronomy 4: 15-21

Why this prohibition? As John Calvin noted in his commentary on the Torah, specifically on the second commandment:

“Whatever forms of God man devises are diametrically opposed to His nature; therefore, as soon as idols appear, true religion is corrupted and adulterated.”

As most of the reformers noted during the Protestant Reformation, when the church was strong and doctrine was pure, the church rejected images. When the gospel is no longer preached as strongly as it had been in the first church, then the incidence of superstitious rituals increases. Instead of relying on the holy protection of God, and steadfastly entering the throne room of grace for Holy Communion and Divine protection, there are many who merely place pictures of Christ, statues or pictures of the saints, angels, or various other religious artifacts as devices of protection. These are used as talisman (good luck charms) in hopes that the artifacts themselves can protect both the “believer” and their families from harm. Instead of lovingly and courageously preaching Christ as the crucified and risen one in both word and deed to friends and family, today’s Christians believe that having a bumper sticker or a religious symbol on a car, in their homes, or even carrying a cross on one’s neck need be the only witness they muster in sharing their personal faith to a dying world. Martin Luther, the father and “engine” of the Protestant Reformation, who as part of his rebellion against Rome railed against the deification of religious artifacts, would now be aghast at the movement that he began.

To whom, then, will you compare God?
What image will you compare Him to?
Isaiah 40:18

Since all things are created by God and are subject to Him, it makes no sense at all to think of fashioning anything that could ever represent the Creator of the Universe. Our imagination, even though itself is a wonderful gift, when it is used to conjure up an image of God could very well lead us astray. The problem with all of this is that God is defined by His revelation of Himself from His Word, and when we conceive of Him apart from that, the image will be misleading at best.

Take for example this story told to us from the Torah:

Now when the people saw that Moses was delayed coming down from
The mountain, the people gathered together to Aaron, and said to him,
“Come, make us gods that shall go before us;
for 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.”
Exodus 32: 1

It is at this point that Aaron can be the hero – he can admonish them for their impatience, unbelief, and disobedience and send them on their way. Yet, he tells them to go ahead and give him their gold so that he can make an idol (2).

And he received the gold from their hand, and he fashioned it with
An engraving tool, and made a molded calf.
Then they said, “This is your god, O Israel, that brought you out of the land of Egypt!”
So when Aaron saw it, he built an altar before it.
And Aaron made a proclamation and said,
“Tomorrow is a feast to the LORD.”
Exodus 32: 4-5

Upon hearing the proclamation of the people that the calf was the god who brought them out of Egypt, we might expect that Aaron would come to his senses, melt the whole thing down after realizing he had made a terrible mistake. On the contrary, he builds an altar and calls the next day a feast day before Yahweh! At the minimum, he was naïve. Did Aaron truly believe that a solid gold calf would remind the people of the One and only True God of Israel? The gold calf displayed nothing of the greatness of God or His glory, and did everything else to distort it. When humanity gets worship wrong, chaos ensues. Paul describes it this way:

Because, although they knew God, they did not glorify Him
As God, nor were thankful, but became futile in their thoughts,
And their foolish hearts were darkened.
Professing to be wise, they became fools,
And changed the glory of the incorruptible God into an image
Of corruptible man – and birds and four-footed animals, and creeping things.
Therefore God also gave them up to uncleanness, in the lusts
Of their hearts, to dishonor their bodies among themselves.
Who exchanged the truth of God for the lie,
And worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator,
Who is blessed forever, Amen.
For this reason, God gave them over to vile passions. For even
The women exchanged the natural use for what is against nature.
Likewise also the men, leaving the natural use of the woman,
Men with men committing what is shameful, and receiving in themselves the penalty of their error which was due.
Romans 1:21-27

In summary: to exchange the truth of God is a lie; to exchange the image of God into the image of mortal man and birds and reptiles leads to corruption; God then makes humanity susceptible to the sinful desires of the human heart, which springs forth into adultery, homosexuality, and every kind of wickedness. It was at the sight and sounds of sexual debauchery at the foot of the golden calf that Moses descended down the mountain with the Ten Commandments. Moses who had been in the Holy presence of Yahweh God now throws the stone tablets down in disgust with both anger and sadness at a people who had exchanged God’s image with one of their own. No wonder God warns those who break the 2nd Commandment of His anger against the 3rd and 4th generations that hate him.

Do you think that stuff like this does not happen today? Surely people are not changing the image of an incorruptible God for corruptible man? Think again. In November of 1993, two thousand women gathered in Minneapolis for what was the most bizarre and dreadful conference of the final decade of the 20th century. Representatives of all the major mainstream Christian denominations, such as Methodists, Episcopalians, Catholics, and even Baptists were present at the gathering. The conference, which was entitled “Re-imagine”, sought to construct a “new god” and a “new road” to salvation. They rejected the orthodox view of the incarnation and atonement of Jesus Christ as being nothing other than a patriarchal construct, which they blamed for the oppression of women. The attendees blessed, thanked, and praised in very creative and pagan ways the goddess “Sophia” as a deity who they claimed was with God during creation, which was a “re-image” of the Son, Jesus. The whole event is summarized from a quote of one of the attendees who said the following, “If we cannot imagine Jesus as a tree, as a river, and as rain, then we are doomed together.”

The final phrase, of course, is accurate, but not like she suggests. Rather, both they and we are doomed if we reject Him in whom all God’s fullness dwells in bodily form:

And we know that the Son of God has come, and has given us an understanding, that we may know Him who is true; and we are in Him who is true, in His Son Jesus Christ. This is the true God and eternal life.
1 John 5:20

He is the image of the invisible God, the first born over all creation.
Colossians 1:15