Welcome to Anchored by Truth brought to you by Crystal Sea Books. In John 14:6, Jesus said, “I am the way, the truth, and the life.” The goal of Anchored by Truth is to encourage everyone to grow in the Christian faith by anchoring themselves to the secure truth found in the inspired, inerrant, and infallible word of God.

Script:

You shall not make … any image or any form that is in Heaven from above or what is in the earth … or what is in the water beneath the Earth: You shall not bow to them and you shall not serve them because I AM LORD JEHOVAH your God, a jealous God …

Exodus, Chapter 20, verse 4, Aramaic Bible in Plain English

VK: Hello! I’m Victoria K. Welcome to Anchored by Truth brought to you by Crystal Sea Books. We’re glad that you are able to be with us today. Today on Anchored by Truth we’re continuing our series on the Ten Commandments. In the studio we have RD Fierro who is an author and the founder of Crystal Sea Books. RD, you wanted to undertake this study of the Ten Commandment because you think that people either take the Ten Commandments for granted or dismiss them entirely. What do you mean by that?

RD: The Ten Commandments are clearly one part of the Bible with which even non-Christians have some familiarity. The Ten Commandments are clearly one of the most recognizable parts of the Christian faith. But as Shakespeare warned us “familiarity breeds contempt.” By that Shakespeare meant that when things are excessively familiar with them we can lose our appreciation or respect for them. And I think that’s the temptation that confronts many Christians with respect to the commandments. We hear about them so much – and many of them make so much common sense – that I think we start to miss the amazing revelation they contain. Conversely, unbelievers hear the first commandment about not worshipping any other god but the True God and they then dismiss the commandments are just being so much “religious nonsense.” But what happens with either view is that we want up not paying much attention to the commandments. Either the familiarity or the disdain winds up diminishing the commandments importance in our lives. But if we will just stop and take a few minutes to look at the commandments, what they say, why they were necessary to the Exodus generation, and what they still mean today we see a truly amazing body of expressed wisdom.

VK: And of course increasing our own wisdom is one of the principle reasons we need to become familiar with the Bible. We are certainly not discouraging familiarity with the Ten Commandments or any other part of the Bible. But what we are saying is we shouldn’t let our familiarity tempt us to look past the value that is in the commandments. As we’ve noted before on Anchored by Truth when you first hang a new poster or picture on your wall you see it every time you go into the room. But after weeks, months, and years go by you scarcely notice it. Probably the only time you really pay attention to it is when someone new comes to visit and tells you how nice the picture is. You see the picture then but you haven’t for weeks or months before that because it was just a part of the background.

RD: And that’s what we want to do with this series on the Ten Commandments. We want people to notice them again and maybe for the first time realize that the Ten Commandments contain evidence of the necessity for them and evidence that they were legitimate pronouncements by an almighty God to a people who were travelling to a new homeland after a 400 year sojourn in a foreign land – with the last several decades having been in slavery. And the 2nd commandment is a great example of those two observations.

VK: The 2nd commandment is found in Exodus, chapter 20, verses 4 and 5. We heard these verses in our opening scripture today from the version of the Bible called the Aramaic Bible in Plain English. Here are those same verses from the New International Version. “You must not make for yourself an idol of any kind or an image of anything in the heavens or on the earth or in the sea. “You must not bow down to them or worship them, for I, the LORD your God, am a jealous God who will not tolerate your affection for any other gods.” So, what is the first thing that you want us to notice?

RD: Well, first let’s note that the 2nd commandment and the 1st commandment are complimentary. The 1st commandment, “you shall have no other gods before me” establishes the bedrock principle that there is one and only One True God – the God of the Bible. The 2nd commandment begins the series of instructions that tells us how we are to incorporate that principle into our daily lives. And it is founded on a simple, plain, and practical observation about human beings.

VK: Which is ...

RD: That human beings are visual creatures. We have 5 senses – sight, touch, taste, smell, and hearing. But unless someone loses their sight the vast majority of people learn the most about the world around them through their sight. Or said, slightly differently – and a little ominously – our eyes can get us into more trouble than our other 4 senses put together.

VK: Well, that thought deserves a big “amen.” And the Bible even points that out. In the New King James version Proverbs, chapter 27, verse 20 says “Hell and Destruction are never full; So the eyes of man are never satisfied.” It’s pretty significant that the same verse that tells us that the eyes of man are never satisfied is packaged with the observation that Hell is never full.

RD: Yes. We take in a lot of information through our vision, through our eyes. So, it makes perfect sense that when God began telling people how to avoid violating the 1st commandment He gave a command that had a strong visual component. God prohibited His people making any representation of Him for a wide variety of reasons but certainly one of the most important was because it is so easy for people to get misled by things they see. The widespread scourge of internet pornography is graphic evidence that an appeal to the eyes is the source of a lot of mischief. And one form of mischief that has plagued mankind for thousands of years has been rampant idolatry. Let’s remember that God gave the Ten Commandments to His people during the period of the Exodus when they were just emerging from living in a culture that worshipped, by some counts, over 2,000 different gods. Egypt was awash in gods and goddesses and certainly the Hebrews were well familiar with that religious system and with how those gods and goddesses were represented.

VK: Pretty much anyone who has ever watched a movie or TV program about ancient Egypt knows that the Egyptian pantheon of gods was represented visually. And these representations were not just limited to temples or religious settings. The Egyptians put pictures of their gods and goddesses in all kinds of settings and buildings and even in hieroglyphs. And they know that one of the most common motifs for representing their gods was with figures that had the body of a human but the head of an animal.

RD: Quite right. Horus was a falcon-headed man. Sekhmet was lioness-headed woman. Anubis was a jackal and Hathor was a cow. But sometimes the Egyptians just used human figures to represent a god. Amun-Re, the sun god and king of the gods, was quite often just represented by a male figure. But the use of images as part of pagan worship was by no means limited to the Egyptians. Most of the pagan religious practices of the other nations around the Israelites used iconography as part of worship. Iconography just means making an image or totem for use in worship. Often the images or totems were human type figures but the use of animal images was quite common. The Babylonian god Dagon was a fish-god and Heqet, an Egyptian fertility goddess, was represented as a frog.

VK: So, when God prohibited the Israelites from making images He was prohibiting a practice that was commonplace in Egypt, Canaan, and the vast majority of the Middle East. Making and using visual idols is far less common today, though it is not unknown. Even in our day and age Satanic figures are often represented as human figures but with the head and horns of a goat and often with eagle-type wings. But, still, today we don’t see nearly as many god-type idol images as the ancient Israelites would have.

RD: Correct. So, today we might almost think that the 2nd commandment is unnecessary but it certainly is not. Because one of the other functions of the 2nd commandment is to remind us that God must not be represented by any image because God cannot be represented by an image, statue, or anything tangible or visual. It would be impossible for any human being to create an image of God because no human being ever has or ever will see God – at least until after Christ returns and we have a new heavens and earth as described in Revelation, chapters 21 and 22.

VK: The first reason human beings cannot make a representation of God is covered by 1 Timothy, chapter 6, verse 15. The New International Version of that verse says, “the King of kings and Lord of lords, … is immortal and … lives in unapproachable light, whom no one has seen or can see.” So, Paul tells us that no one has ever seen God or can see God. This is particularly significant coming from Paul who at one point in his life had been “caught up to the third heaven.” We learn that from 2 Corinthians, chapter 12, verse 2. A common interpretation of the term “third heaven” is that the first heaven is the sky where birds fly, the second heaven is what we call “outer space” where the stars and stellar bodies exist, and the third heaven is the heaven which contains the throne of God. So, if Paul, who had been transported either by vision or physically, to the third heaven said no one can see God Paul would know what he was talking about.

RD: Furthermore, we know from John 4:24 that God is “spirit.” The New Living Translation put it this way. “For God is Spirit, so those who worship him must worship in spirit and in truth.” So, we add to the fact that anytime we might want to create an image or a sculpture we would have to have some kind of a physical image to work from. In God’s case there is nothing physical to work from to begin with. God is spirit. Now, a word of caution here. We sometimes use the word spirit like we use the word “ghost.” And we think of ghosts or spirits as being sort-of wispy, flimsy bits of semi-transparent puffs of smoke. To us ghosts or spirits are insubstantial. So, when we hear that God is spirit we can somehow get the impression that God is like a hologram that you might see but you could put your hand through. Nothing could be further from the truth.

VK: We think of the universe we can see and touch and our world as being solid. In actuality most atoms are small bits of matter separated by a lot of space. But to us our world is “real.” And we think of the spirit realm as somehow being unreal. But Hebrews, chapter 11, verse 3 reminds us that “we understand that the entire universe was formed at God’s command, that what we now see did not come from anything that can be seen.” That’s from the New Living Translation. Or at you put in your book, Doors of Destiny, “the unseen created the seen and someday will lay claim to its own.” While the words become difficult the truth is that God and the angelic realm is more “real” than our physical realm. The point is we must guard against the temptation to think of God, who is spirit, as somehow being less substantial than our tangible world. God is immeasurably more substantial than anything that exists in our universe.

RD: So those are two simple reasons why human beings are incapable of creating any kind of a representation of God. No one has ever seen or will see God and we have no way of portraying a spirit meaningfully. The Hollywood versions of ghosts and spirits may be fine for movies but they would be entirely inaccurate and disrespectful when it comes to God. The 2nd commandment was given to us in part to guard us from treating God lightly or disrespectfully by trying to employ our imaginations in creating some image of Him. The 2nd commandment reinforces our awareness of the spiritual nature of God by steering us completely away from doing something it would be impossible to do in the first place. But there is another one of God’s attributes also shows that the 2nd commandment makes perfect sense.

VK: I already know what you are going to say. One of God’s most fundamental, and obvious, attributes is that God is infinite. 1 Kings, chapter 8, verse 27 puts it this way. “The heavens, even the highest heaven, cannot contain you.” That verse comes from the dedication speech that Solomon gave at the dedication of the temple he built in Jerusalem. Solomon, the wisest man who ever lived, felt compelled to acknowledge God’s infinitude even as they had just built a magnificent building to honor God’s majesty.

RD: Yes. God is infinite. That’s a way of describing God by saying what He is not. God is not finite. But if you tried to make an image whether by drawing, sculpting, or any other way the first thing that you must decide is where to start. And the moment you drew your first line or chose a block of marble you’re automatically working with a limit. But doesn’t have any limits other than those that come from His own righteous character and those have nothing to do with anything physical. As human beings our minds can’t really even conceive of the infinite. We are finite and we can’t escape or finitude. So, to keep us from making any sinful attempts to drift into sinful ways of thinking God just said, “Don’t. Don’t try to make an image of me. It’s impossible to begin with and any attempts you might make would only demean my majesty.”

VK: And God also wanted to prevent another temptation which was common in the ancient world which was to assign a form of divinity to an object or creature. Many of the ancient cultures worshipped stellar objects such as the sun or moon. Among the Canaanites Shemesh was the sun god and Yareah was the moon god. Baal was the storm god and Yam was the sea god. And we have already talked about the fact that some cultures used living creatures as representations of their gods or goddesses. But, again, doing anything like this would make all of the same errors that we have already discussed.

RD: Yes. In man’s limited mind you can see how someone might envision the sun, which is an impressive and life giving body, as somehow being divine. And that’s how some ancient peoples viewed it. But in the Bible the sun is just another created object fully subject to God. God certainly didn’t need the sun for His creation. He created both light and life before He made the sun the source of light to illuminate earth. In many pagan mythologies the sun was the master but in the Bible the sun is always just another one of God’s servants. The 2nd commandment helped the Hebrews coming out of a pagan culture with hundreds of gods to not bring their pagan errors with them. That’s one of the reasons God gave the Israelites the commandments at the start of their journey to the Promised Land. He wanted them to begin the new stage of their national development on the right foot.

VK: The Ten Commandments are initially contained in chapter 20 of Exodus which is the 2nd book of the Bible. Then, they are repeated almost identically in chapter 5 of Deuteronomy which is the 5th book of the Bible. The Bible has 66 books so both the giving of the commandments and their reinforcement are fairly early in the revelation of scripture. And it is interesting to note that throughout the rest of scripture you never see the 2nd commandment violated. We have several descriptions of incidents where men were given visions that included some sort of divine encounter or even a divine figure on a throne. But there is never any attempt in any of those inspired reports any attempts to describe the Being on the throne. As Paul said the most we ever get is some kind of an image of a person that is obscured by transcendent light.

RD: Yes. We have descriptions of what you might call the throne of God in Isaiah, chapter 6, Ezekiel chapters 1 and 10, Daniel chapter 7, and Revelation chapter 4. But in none of the descriptions of those encounters is there ever the least attempt by the inspired writer to describe the person they see in their vision.

VK: Daniel, chapter 7, verses 9 and 10 are good illustration of what we’re talking about. “I watched as thrones were put in place and the Ancient One sat down to judge. His clothing was as white as snow, his hair like purest wool. He sat on a fiery throne with wheels of blazing fire, and a river of fire was pouring out, flowing from his presence. Millions of angels ministered to him; many millions stood to attend him. Then the court began its session, and the books were opened.” That’s from the New Living Translation. And you followed that pattern when you wrote your throne room scene for your allegorical adventure book The Prodigal’s Advocate. Here is what you wrote. “There was a royal figure on the throne. At least that’s how I thought of what I saw. Of the royalty I had no doubt; but to call the One I saw a figure is another injustice. The Person I beheld was so infinitely glorious that He overwhelmed my mind merely by His presence. I suppose you might say He appeared in some ways to be in the center of a cloud of radiant white light; but that would be like comparing a candle flame to the sun.”

RD: Yes. It wouldn’t just be wrong to try to describe God in His essence, it would be blasphemous. That was something I definitely wasn’t going to do. But God has obviously felt that was important as He unfolded His revelation through scripture to give human beings enough of a glimpse of His majesty and glory to let us know that there was an awfully good reason to put the 2nd commandment in place to begin with. And it’s interesting to note that even when the 2nd Person of the Trinity took on a human nature and body, which obviously could be seen, that there are still no descriptions of that body in scripture. We have 4 gospels about the life of Jesus and others like Stephen and the Apostle Paul saw the risen Christ but not a single writer or reporter ever attempted to describe what Jesus looked like.

VK: That’s something we don’t think about. In just about every book you ever read the first thing the author does is tell us what the hero or heroine, or villain for that matter, looks like. We’re always told whether they are tall or short, blonde or brunette, skinny or fat, or whatever. But no Bible writer throughout the gospels or New Testament ever tried to tell us anything about the appearance of Jesus.

RD: And I think that takes us back to the fact that human beings are easily tempted by sight and image. If the Bible told us how Jesus looked I have no doubt that throughout church history some people would have tried to adjust their appearance to try to look more like him. If Jesus had been tall and we knew that, tall people would feel better about themselves. If we knew he had a particular color eyes, we would have been fascinated by that. Our eyes and imaginations get us into lots of trouble. God knows that. So, right after He told the Hebrews not to worship anyone or anything other than Him, he began telling them how to guard their hearts. Don’t try to create any images of me.

VK: This, of course, does not mean, as some have asserted, that God is opposed to art or visual beauty. God commanded that some images such as cherubim and certain kinds of fruits be used as part of the decorations in the temple itself. Some people have taken the 2nd commandment to such an extreme that they try to condemn all art. But God wasn’t telling us not to create images of created things or angelic beings. He told us not to worship those images and not to imagine that somehow that His spirit or nature would ever be part of any created thing. God was guarding the nature of our worship to prevent us from drifting into idolatry and sin. And as we discussed last week God gave us the 1st commandment to prevent us from worshipping lesser things or beings. Because if we worship the lesser we will only injure ourselves.

RD: Absolutely. God has made it plain that we to come boldly before His throne, the throne of grace. That’s Hebrews 4:16. Why, if are invited to enter the grandest throne room of all, the grandest throne room possible, would we ever want to settle for anything less. God is the only source of power anywhere and He wants to be available to us. That doesn’t mean that God gives His children anything and everything they ask for. That would be silly and dangerous. We often ask for things that aren’t good for us. God is not a heavenly vending machine.

VK: A heavenly vending machine, really?

RD: Well, that’s how we want to treat Him sometimes. At any rate, God wants what’s best for us and that’s the thrust of the 1st, 2nd, and all the commandments. God is trying to get us to start thinking correctly about Him and how we are to relate to Him because if we do that our lives will be built on an unshakeable foundation. But to think correctly about God, and to correctly relate to God, we must obey God and that starts with only worshipping Him in truth as well as spirit. If we follow the commandments faithfully that will happen automatically.

VK: God gave us the 1st commandment to remind us of some very important truths. God is the Creator. He made everything that we see and He upholds it through His own power. Because He made everyone and everything He is the righteous sovereign and we must guard against giving praise or glory to any imitators or lesser things. God gave us the 2nd commandment to ensure that we don’t succumb to the temptation that is so common to people by letting our eyes and imaginations lead us astray. This sounds like a great time to go to God in prayer. Today let’s listen to a prayer for the renewal of the church so the church may once again be the light of truth to a world desperate in its darkness. People are hungry for the truth and God’s people possess the truth but we must be steadfast enough to share it during trying times like these.

---- PRAYER FOR RENEWAL OF THE CHURCH

VK: We’d like to remind our audience that a lot of our radio episodes are linked together in series of topics so if they missed any episodes or if they just want to hear one again, all of these episodes are available on your favorite podcast app. To find them just search on “Anchored by Truth by Crystal Sea Books.”

If you’d like to hear more, try out crystalseabooks.com where “We’re not perfect but our Boss is!”

(Opening Bible Quote from the Aramaic Bible in Plain English)

Exodus, Chapter 20, verse 2, Aramaic Bible in Plain English