The Old Testament reading is Exodus chapter 20, verses four through six, Exodus 20, verses four through six. And this is God’s inerrant and infallible word. Let’s hear the word of God.

You shall not make for yourself a carved 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 on the children to the third and fourth generation of those who hate me, but showing steadfast love to thousands of those who love me and keep my commandments.

And let’s turn now to Acts chapter 17 for our New Testament reading, Acts 17. In this passage, Paul is in Athens, and it was a city that was teeming with idols. One person who lived at that time said, in Athens, you are more likely to bump into a god than a person. And Paul is speaking here in this passage to the ruling council of Athens, the Areopagus. And he proclaims to them the truth of the gospel. So we’ll hear his sermon. This is chapter 17, verses 22 through 31.

So Paul, standing in the midst of the Areopagus said, “Men of Athens, I perceive that in every way you are very religious. For as I passed along and observed the objects of your worship, I found also an altar with this inscription, to the unknown God. What therefore you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you. The God who made the world and everything in it, being Lord of heaven and earth, does not live in temples made by man, nor is he served by human hands as though he needed anything, since he himself gives to all mankind life and breath and everything. And he made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth, having determined allotted periods and the boundaries of their dwelling place. That they should seek God and perhaps feel their way toward him and find him. Yet he is not actually far from each one of us, for in him we live and move and have our being. As even some of your own poets have said, for we are indeed his offspring. Being then God’s offspring, we ought not to think that the divine being is like gold or silver or stone, an image formed by the art and imagination of man. The times of ignorance, God overlooked, but now he commands all people everywhere to repent because he has fixed a day on which he will judge the world and righteousness by a man whom he has appointed. And of this he has given assurance to all by raising him from the dead.”

The grass withers, the flower fades, but the word of our God will stand forever. You may turn back to Exodus chapter 20 for our sermon text this morning.

I think we’ve all had the experience of visiting some place of incredible beauty and wonder, and we take a bunch of pictures, and then we go to show our friends or our family the pictures that we took of the place that we visited. And what we find there is that what’s depicted there in the picture is a very disappointing version of what we were so impressed with when we saw it in person. And so in our pictures, the Grand Tetons look like little hills off in the distance. The Grand Canyon doesn’t really seem all that impressive. Niagara Falls looks like just a big waterfall way off in the background. And so we end up saying to our friend, “You know, you’ve really got to see this in person. The picture just does not do this justice. You have no idea how amazing this is until you actually see it in person.”

And that is essentially the problem with making an image of God. No matter how impressive the image that someone may make of what they think God looks like, it cannot truly convey the infinite majesty and beauty and glory of the living God. And that’s the reason why God forbids making images of himself, because in one way or another, an image diminishes or obscures the glory of God. And there is nothing more important to God than his own glory.

There are many ways that physical images take away from God’s glory. And this morning, as we consider the second commandments, I want us to consider three aspects of God’s character or his nature that are either contradicted or challenged by making and worshiping an image of God. First of all, God is spirit. Secondly, God is sovereign. And third, God is jealous. And so those will be our three lessons this morning.

First of all, God is spirit. You’ll notice that there’s a close relationship between the second commandments and the first commandments. They both have to do with worship, worshiping God. The first commandment in verse three says, “You shall have no other gods before me.” This means that the Israelites, they were not to worship any other gods than the Lord, Yahweh, the true God. And then the second commandment says in verse four, “You shall not make for yourself a carved 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.” This means that the Israelites were not only to worship the true God and no other God, but they were to worship the true God. They were, well, they were not to worship the true God with an image or likeness.

So there is some overlap between the first and the second commandments. Both of them have to do with idolatry. But the second commandment isn’t primarily concerned with the worship of other gods in the place of the true God. Instead, the second commandment forbids worshiping the true God by means of any visible representation of him. And so with the first commandment, God tells us whom we are to worship, that is the Lord. And then in the second commandment, God tells us how, how we are to worship the Lord. One person put it this way, “The first commandment tells us to worship the right God, and the second commandment tells us to worship the right God in the right way.”

Now all the pagan peoples that surrounded the people of Israel, or that would surround them when they ended up in the land of Canaan, the pagan Egyptians out of whose land that they came, not only did they serve a vast number of gods, but they made images of all their gods. They made all kinds of physical representations of the gods that they worshiped. And just as the Lord in the first commandment demanded something of the Israelites that was very unique, that is that they were to worship Him alone and no other gods, they were to have exclusive allegiance to the Lord alone in their worship. So with the second commandment, the Lord demands of the Israelites that they are to worship Him only according to His will, only as He has commanded them. That means, first of all, that they were not to make images of God or of God rather.

And the most obvious reason for the second commandment is that we cannot make an image of God. God’s nature transcends everything in creation because he is the creator. He is uncreated. He has no form. Jesus said in John chapter four, “God is spirit.” Our confession says he is a most pure spirit. And for that reason, no one has seen God, no one can see God in such a way that they could capture his likeness or they could capture his appearance in a likeness or image of him. First Timothy 6:15 and 16 says, speaking of God, “the blessed and only sovereign, the King of kings and Lord of lords, who alone has immortality, who dwells in unapproachable light, whom no one has ever seen or can see. To him be honor and glory or eternal dominion. Amen.” So the Lord is invisible. He cannot be seen. He does not have any kind of form that we can, that we could represent in an image.

Even when the Lord came down to the Israelites here on Mount Sinai, although he came with these terrifying signs and wonders, the trumpet sound, the smoke, the fire, the earth trembling and all of that, he did not appear to them in any kind of visible form. Moses later in Deuteronomy, he’ll say this about the Lord’s coming down to the people of Israel on Mount Sinai, Deuteronomy 4:15 and 16, “Therefore, watch yourselves very carefully, since you saw no form on the day that the Lord spoke to you, at Horeb out of the midst of the fire, beware lest you act corruptly by making a carved image for yourselves.”

So they saw no form of God. We saw in our New Testament reading in the book of Acts that when Paul spoke to the Athenian philosophers at the Areopagus or before the Areopagus, after God or after Paul had seen all the idols and the images that the people of Athens had set up all over the city. You’ll notice that Paul doesn’t tell the Athenians, “Look, you are guilty of breaking the first commandments. You shall have no other gods before me.” Now that was true, of course. The Athenians were guilty of breaking the first commandment. They had all kinds of idols that they served. But rather Paul focused on the second commandment. He focused on the impossibility of reducing the true God into an image or an idol. He says in verse 29, Acts 17, “Being then God’s offspring, we ought not to think that the divine image or the divine being rather is like gold or silver or stone, an image formed by the art and imagination of man.”

In other words, what Paul was saying to the Athenians is this, “You idol makers, you are attempting to do what is impossible.” And you’re making all of these idols out of gold and silver and stone. You are trying to reduce or diminish the true God who is uncreated, who has no form. You’re trying to reduce them into this image. You’re trying to take the creator and portray him by something in creation. And you cannot do that.

And the problem with this kind of image making is that though it tries to represent God and to convey something that is true about God, an image or an idol actually does the very opposite. It says what is untrue about God, it proclaims what is false about God. Phil Reichen, put it very well, he said this, “An idol makes the infinite God finite, the invisible God visible, the omnipotent God impotent, the all-present God local, the living God dead, and the spiritual God material.” Because of God’s nature as God, as the creator, because he is spirit, because he is invisible, He is infinite. He is living. He is all powerful. Any man-made representation of God is by necessity a misrepresentation of the true God. The Puritan Matthew Henry said this, “An image is a teacher of lies.” And for that reason, God has forbidden us to make an image of Him and certainly to worship an image of Him.

When Jesus spoke to the Samaritan woman at Jacob’s well in John chapter four, when his conversation with her turned to the topic of worship and where God was to be worshiped, Jesus said this to the woman. He said, “The hour is coming and is now here when the true worshipers will worship the father in spirit and truth for the father is seeking such people to worship him. God is spirit and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth.” Those who worship Him must worship in spirit and truth. And as we consider the second commandment, we can say this, that the Father, that God has always sought worshipers who will worship Him in such a way, worshipers who will worship Him in spirit and in truth. And yet up to the coming of, up to the time of the coming of Christ, that seeking of worshipers was limited to the people of Israel.

But now that God has sent His Son, Jesus Christ, into the world, God has taken that search for true worshipers who will come to Him through Christ and worship Him in spirit and truth. He has taken that into all the world and He is seeking throughout all the world through the preaching of the gospel, those who will come to Him by faith in Jesus Christ to worship Him in the true way that He has commanded, not with images, not with idols, but in spirit and in truth, and whoever comes to Jesus Christ by faith, whoever bows before the Lord Jesus Christ and acknowledges that he is the Son of God, he is Lord, he is Savior, and worships the Father through him, he has become a true worshiper of God. And that is the worship that God desires from you and me, a worship that is by faith, A faith that does not respond to, a faith that is not informed by an image, an idol, this false representation of God, but a faith that responds to the proclamation of the word of God, the proclamation of the scriptures.

According to Romans, true faith, saving faith, is faith that comes not by seeing, but by hearing, and hearing through the word of Christ. If we could put a twist on a common phrase, a picture is worth a thousand words. When it comes to salvation, when it comes to worship of the true God, a thousand pictures of God are not worth one preached word of God. And so this is the worship that truly brings God the glory that belongs to him, not bowing down to an image of God, not thinking of God in terms of a form or an appearance that comes to us through an idol, through a representation, an image, But true worship that brings God glory is that when you, by faith in Jesus Christ, with your whole heart and mind, thank Him and praise Him and magnify His name for all who He is, for all His works, His works of salvation, especially in the Lord Jesus Christ. That is the true worship that honors God for who He is. And to make an image, to make an idol, to say this is what God is like, that is the false worship that God condemns here in the second commandment. And so God is spirit.

Secondly, God is sovereign. There’s more to the second commandment than just the fact that God is spirit and therefore he cannot be imaged or represented in any form or any idol. However, it would be a mistake for us to take that truth from the second commandment. And it would be wrong for us to say that therefore God has nothing to do with images whatsoever. God does encourage us to think of Him in terms of metaphors that use very vivid imagery. For example, in the benediction in Numbers 6, Moses says, “The Lord make His face to shine upon you.” So we think of God in terms of His face shining upon us. We don’t picture in our minds what that might look like, but we use that metaphor to know that God is personal. He knows us. He loves us. His face looks upon us. His face shines upon us. Psalm 91:4, “He will cover you with his pinions, and under his wings he will find refuge.” Here’s an image of a bird protecting her young, and this is the way in which God protects us. We sing the hymn, “Leaning on the Everlasting Arms.” Of course, God does not have arms like we have arms. Nevertheless, we use this image to picture the care that God has for us. In the Lord’s Supper, God gives us representations of the body of Christ broken for us, the blood of Christ shed for us, and the bread and the wine that we take part in in that communion. And as we’ll see, God has given us the supreme image of himself in the person of his son, Jesus Christ. So it’s not as though, although God is spirit, that he has nothing whatsoever to do with images in making himself known to us, but we are not to make an image and to worship an image of him.

But there’s another important reason why God has given us the second commandment, and that is God is sovereign. God is sovereign. And to understand why this is so, we need to understand something about the nature of idolatry. People don’t make representations, whether it’s out of wood or metal or stone or whatever, people don’t make idols of their gods because they think that they are depicting or portraying what that God actually looks like. For example, the God Baal, he was often depicted in the likeness of a bull, but that’s not because anybody thought that Baal actually looked like a bull, but rather the bull was a symbol of strength and fertility, which was associated with Baal. And it was that strength and power of fertility that the worshipers were seeking to capture, to contain in the image that they would make of their God, of Baal or whatever God it was. And once the presence and power of a deity was localized that way in an image or in an idol, in whatever shape it took, then the idea was that you could then have control over that power, that you could make God do your bidding, that you had some control over the, the power, the fertility, whatever it was you were seeking for from that God.

In a similar way, you see something along these same lines, for example, in a vampire movie. What is it that always overcomes the vampire? It’s the cross. And it’s not because of the particular shape of the cross, but in the movie at least, The power of God is supposed to be contained in that cross. And when it’s shown to the vampire, he backs away. And this was the exact reason why the Israelites were tempted to make images of God. And sometimes the Israelites did make images of God. King Jeroboam, you’ll remember from the Old Testament, he made two golden calves. And he made golden calves not because he thought that the Lord resembled a calf, but because he didn’t want everybody in the northern kingdom going south to Jerusalem to worship God in Jerusalem at the temple. And so he made these golden calves so that he could localize the presence of the Lord and keep his presence there in the northern part of Israel so that people would not flee to the south.

There’s actually another example of this in the Bible that doesn’t even involve making an image of God, and yet the same dynamics of idolatry were very much in play. And that’s in 1 Samuel 4, when the Israelites, they’re about to go into battle against the Philistines, and they come up with the idea that if they only take the ark of God with them, they are sure to defeat the Philistines because the power of God will be present with them. And so they were trying to use God for their own purposes, to control his power, to manipulate God. And of course the Lord taught the Israelites a very, very hard lesson that day. They learned from their utter defeat at the hands of the Philistines that the Lord will not, he cannot be manipulated in that pagan idolatrous kind of way. But that’s really at the heart of idolatry, seeking to capture the power of a God in order to use it for one’s own purpose. And the problem of doing that is that it denies the absolute, the free sovereignty of the true God.

And the question really comes down to this. Is God under our control or are we under the control of God? The answer is obvious. It is God who is omnipotent. It is God who created all things. It is God who created us. He gives us life. It is God who commands us to obey His will. It is God that uses us to accomplish His purposes. He is not there to accomplish our purposes. And so making an image of God in effect is to try to put God on a leash. One theologian said this, “God will not be captured, contained, assigned or managed by anyone or anything for any purpose.” And that’s really what’s at the heart here of the second commandment.

Now, today in our culture, we may not be tempted to make a visible representation of God and to try to harness God’s power in that way, but there are some teachings out there that essentially amount to the same thing. For example, from time to time, the idea will become popular that if you only say a particular prayer, over and over, kind of like a mantra, then God will bless you. He’ll be forced, in a sense, to bless you. Or if you just can muster up within yourself enough faith, then God promises that He will do what you want Him to do. He will heal you, He will prosper you, He will make you rich. But this is the very same kind of idolatrous idea that is behind making an image of a God or of God, to try to control Him, to manipulate God. But because God is sovereign in his power, he is sovereign in his will, anytime we seek in some way to harness or to control him or to have him serve our purposes, we are breaking the second commandment.

Another aspect of God’s character that is challenged by image-making is that God is jealous. He is a jealous God. This is what he says in verse five. He says, “I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God.” Now, when we see the word jealous, it usually brings up for us a negative connotation. We think of envy or covetousness, I’m jealous of that person’s car or whatever. But with God, jealousy is a completely positive trait because it refers to the zeal that God has to guard, to keep, to protect, to preserve, that which is good, that which he values, that which he loves. There is a human analogy to this. A husband loves his wife. He is jealous for his wife. He does not want his wife to give herself to another man. And we would not condemn that. That’s a good jealousy. That is a righteous zeal that a husband has for his wife, that she belongs to him alone and not to anyone else. And that is what is meant by the word jealousy here in the second commandment.

Well, what does God have jealousy for? What is his zeal for? Well, mostly God is zealous for his own name. Isaiah 48:11, “My glory, I will not give to another.” But God is also jealous for his people. God loves his people. And his love for his people is an intense divine love. It is a jealous love, a love that is zealous, just like a husband is jealous to have the exclusive love of his wife. So God wants nothing to come between him and the people that he has chosen for himself. He wants his people to worship nothing other than himself. And so, therefore, to make idols, to make an image of God and to worship it is really spiritual adultery. It is unfaithfulness to the Lord. And that’s why God attaches this strong warning to the second commandment for those who would make images.

Look at verses five and six. The Lord says, he says, “I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children to the third and fourth generation of those who hate me, but showing steadfast love to thousands of those who love me and keep my commandments.” Now, what we read this morning that’s attached to the second commandment, we might misunderstand it. We might think that God here is a God who acts in a way that is capricious, that is unjust, arbitrary, that he chooses to punish the future generations of those who sin against him, and it’s sort of, unfair way, but we know that God is fair and just in all of his dealings with us.

In Deuteronomy 24:16, it says, “Fathers shall not be put to death because of their children, nor shall children be put to death because of their fathers. Each one shall be put to death for his own sin.” And so what does it mean here that God will visit the iniquity of the fathers upon the children to the third and fourth generations? It means that God in his sovereign rule over all things, he brings it about that when a father, or we might by implication say a parent, father or mother, when they break the second commandment, when the father fails to worship God according to his commandments, according to the revelation he has given us in his word, more often than not, that sin will be imitated by his children. And that sin will be imitated by his children’s children. And so, although each one of us is responsible for our own sins and not for the sins of others, including our parents, parents who break the second commandment, or we might we might just extend that to any of the commandments of God, but parents who break the second commandment, they set their children along a path in which they also will transgress in the same way, and so receive the same judgment, and it’s in that way, in that sense, that God visits the iniquity of the father upon the generations that come after him.

Now, of course, God is merciful, God is gracious, and he does make mercifully exceptions to this rule. Sometimes God intervenes in this pattern of generational unbelief in order to bring someone to himself, someone who comes from a family in which there was no faith in Christ, in which there was no true godliness. But God does want us to take this warning to heart. As parents, especially as fathers, where our heart is, where our faith is, our walk with the Lord, our faith or our unbelief will have consequences for our children. And this warning is especially for fathers. The father exercises an outsized influence in the spiritual life of his children. This is not to deny or to diminish at all the importance of the role of mothers, especially of godly mothers. Mothers are obviously influential as well. The people who have studied these things will tell us that spiritually speaking, in general, as the father goes, so go the children. If the father leads his family in the worship and service of Christ, his children tend to follow. If a father does not, even if his mother is a godly woman, the children often do not grow up to be highly committed to their faith.

Now, again, this is a pattern, a rule that has been recognized. There are exceptions to this. This doesn’t mean that every father whose children have gone astray means that they have been ungodly or unfaithful. It doesn’t mean that at all. It doesn’t mean that God cannot use a godly mother to bring children to faith in Christ, but there is a pattern that the father is the one who sets the tone and his faithfulness or lack of it will have an outsized influence on his children. And so as fathers, we especially need to take this warning to heart that our sins will be passed along in a sense to our children.

But there’s not just a warning here in this commandment, but there’s also a wonderful promise as well. Look again at verse six. The Lord says, he shows steadfast love to thousands of those who love me and keep my commandments. Your version may read the thousands generation, to the thousandth generation. But notice how the promise is so much greater in its scope than the warning. With the warning, God says he will visit the iniquity of the fathers to the third and fourth generation, but then with the promise of God, with God’s steadfast love, he will bless the descendants of those who keep his commandments to the thousandth generation. And so what this means is that God will honor and bless the faithfulness and worship of his people to a far, far greater degree than he will bring judgment upon those who are not faithful, who do not offer him acceptable worship by faith in Christ.

And this is part of the wonderful character of God, that yes, he is just, he is strict in his application of his commandments, his justice. And yet when it comes to his mercy, when it comes to his grace, his love for his people, he is generous, he is extravagant, he is overflowing in grace and mercy towards us. And so God is jealous for his people.

God is also jealous for his own worship. Let me read to you from our Shorter Catechism, the Westminster Shorter Catechism, number 51, the question, “What is forbidden in the second commandment?” The answer is, “The second commandment forbiddeth the worshiping of God by images or any other way not appointed in his word.” And so what the confession or the catechism is saying here, rightly, is that the implication of the second commandment, what is meant by the second commandment is not just a prohibition against the use of images to worship God, but that God has not commanded in his word, or that we are not to worship God in any way that he has not commanded in his word. Any way that God has not positively revealed to us as the way that we are to worship him is forbidden.

Notice how verse six ends, God shows steadfast love to thousands of those who love me and keep my commandments. And that has to do with worship, to keep his commandments and worship. And so what the second commandment forbids then is that we would worship God in any way that he has not commanded us in his word. And to do so is tantamount to making an image of God or an idol of God. For example, you remember the tragic story of Nadab and Abihu, the sons of Aaron and Leviticus, how they were consumed with fire from heaven, that the Lord destroyed them with fire in a moment because they had worshiped him in a wrong way. Well, what was their sin? What did Nadab and Abihu did? Did they make an image of God? Did they make an idol? No. Did they blaspheme God? No. But listen to what the scriptures say. Leviticus 10:1, “Now Nadab and Abihu, the sons of Aaron, each took his censer and put fire in it and laid incense on it and offered unauthorized fire before the Lord, which he had not commanded them.”

Now, scriptures don’t tell us what’s going through the minds of Nadab and Abihu when they do this, but I think we can safely assume that they had good intentions, that they wanted to honor God, to give glory to God, but they came up with this way to do it that God had not commanded them. And so they used this unauthorized fire. But because the Lord had not commanded His people to worship Him in that way, He struck them down. They had broken the second commandment.

And so what the second commandment means for our worship of God is simply this, that we need to follow the scriptures in seeking how we are to worship God. We don’t just go to the scriptures and say, “Okay, if God has not forbidden this, we can do it.” But we go to the scriptures and say, and ask, “What has God commanded us to do in worship?” There’s a reason why we do the things we do here on Sunday mornings and Sunday evenings at Mount Rose. And it’s not just because Presbyterians have always done it that way, so we do it that way too. No, we believe we do what we do because God has commanded us to do this in Scripture. And so our worship service includes the Word of God, the reading and preaching of God’s Word, prayer, singing praises to God, taking part in the sacraments. We believe that these are the ways that God has positively commanded us to worship Him in the Word of God and acceptable worship that pleases and honors God includes these things, these things that He has commanded.

And I think it’s good to add this, that true worship of God is not just seeking to include the things that God has commanded us, but it means that all that we do in worship, that we give God glory and praise to Him from the hearts, from the hearts. To go back to the illustration of a snapshot of Niagara Falls, It doesn’t do justice to the majesty of it when you see it in person, but anything less in our worship of God, anything that is less than what God has commanded, but anything that is less than a worship that comes from the heart, that gives thanks to God for his grace to us, comes into his presence with true faith, with reverence and awe, giving glory to God for who he is as our creator, our redeemer. Anything less than that really also doesn’t do justice to who God is, to his greatness, his glory, his grace. And that is the kind of worship that God is jealous for from his people. That is the kind of worship that he desires for us to offer to him. Of course, we can only do so by the grace of God. But when we make an image of God, we provoke that jealousy.

So according to the second commandment, we are not to make images of God and all that that means. But isn’t it wonderful that God has given us an image of himself. We don’t make an image of God, but he’s given us an image of himself, a living image. And that is in his son, Jesus Christ, the incarnate son of God, the Lord himself who came to us in the flesh. Colossians 1:15, “He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation.” 2 Corinthians 4:4, Paul writes of “the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ who is the image of God.” Hebrews 1:3, “He is the radiance of the glory of God and the exact imprint of his nature.” John 14:9, “Whoever has seen me,” Jesus says, “has seen the Father.”

And Jesus came in order that we might become as he is, that we might become true image bearers of God. Now, since we already are image bearers of God, just by virtue of the fact that God created us as human beings, every single human being bears the image of God, simply because God created us that way, and that is not completely taken from us. Genesis 1:26, “Let us make man in our image after our likeness.” But in another sense, we have defiled God’s image because of our sin, because of our rebellion, our pride, our self-love, because of the evil of our thoughts and our words and our actions. We do not reflect God’s image. We do not faithfully, truly, express or reflect the righteousness, the holiness of God. And in that sense, we fail to bear his image.

And so if we are to be what God created us to be, if we are to be the true bearers of his image and his likeness, we need to be remade. We need to be recreated without sin, renewed in righteousness, renewed in holiness. And of course, that is what Jesus Christ came into the world to do. He came into the world for that purpose, that by His obedience to suffering and death, that the guilt of our sin might be taken away from us, that we would no longer be condemned by God. He came to take away the uncleanness, the pollution of our sin, and He came to take away the power of sin over us, so that by His Spirit, as He works in us, we can die to sin, we can live to righteousness.

And He does this gracious work in us. The Lord Jesus Christ, by His Spirit, He does this work in us to form the image of Christ in us as we look to Him by faith, as we set our eyes by faith, not on a physical image, but on the Christ who is revealed to us in His word. 2 Corinthians 3:18. “And we all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image, from one degree of glory to another, for this comes from the Lord, who is the Spirit.” And so by the grace of God, the more that you look to Christ by faith, the more that your eyes of faith behold the glory of Christ as he is made known to us in the scriptures, the more you are changed into his image by the Spirit, And the more that you will worship the Father, not by an image, but as an image, as a true image bearer, and the more and more in that way will God be glorified through you. And that is the goal. That’s what it’s all about in our worship, the glory of God, that He would receive all the praise and the honor through us as those who by His grace now bear His image in Christ.

Let’s pray.

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