A Survey of the Old Testament Law--Deuteronomy 7 (Part 1)

Deuteronomy 7:1-6—1 “When the LORD your God brings you into the land which you go to possess, and has cast out many nations before you, the Hittites and the Girgashites and the Amorites and the Canaanites and the Perizzites and the Hivites and the Jebusites, seven nations greater and mightier than you, 2 and when the LORD your God delivers them over to you, you shall conquer them and utterly destroy them. You shall make no covenant with them nor show mercy to them. 3 Nor shall you make marriages with them. You shall not give your daughter to their son, nor take their daughter for your son. 4 For they will turn your sons away from following Me, to serve other gods; so the anger of the LORD will be aroused against you and destroy you suddenly. 5 But thus you shall deal with them: you shall destroy their altars, and break down their sacred pillars, and cut down their wooden images, and burn their carved images with fire. 6 For you are a holy people to the LORD your God; the LORD your God has chosen you to be a people for Himself, a special treasure above all the peoples on the face of the earth.” 

The people of Israel were to be separate and unique from the tribes and nations around them. The Israelites were not to marry into their families, they were not to adopt their customs. Why? Because if they did, the pagans would lead them into worshipping their gods, and this was the worst thing they could do. Which is why Paul said in 1^st Corinthians 15:33 (ESV)—Do not be deceived: "Evil company corrupts good habits." It is easier for a moral and upright person to be influenced and led away by the immoral than for the immoral to be swayed by good habits. If you’ve read your Bible, which do you see happen more often? Do the Canaanites gravitate toward worshipping YHVH? Or do the Israelites begin to worship Ba'al? We human beings are a curious lot—we would rather chase after some fleeting pleasure that is no lasting good, than to wait upon something that will benefit us more in our later lives but will bring no immediate pleasure. Such was the mind of the Israelites (we see this in Numbers 25). 

2 “When the LORD your God delivers them over to you, you shall conquer them and utterly destroy them. You shall make no covenant with them nor show mercy to them.” It was not by their might or their power that they would conquer the tribes of the Promised Land—it was God who would deliver them. And when He would conquer these tribes, they were not to forget the fiery hot indignation which God had toward them. They were not to simply subdue their armies, but they were to completely and utterly (and literally) wipe them off the face of the Earth. They were not to leave one single vestige of these armies alive, but were to slay every man of these armies. They were not to enter league with them, they were not to do business with them, they were not to show any mercy toward them, for these were peoples who worshipped idols made with hands, who practiced all kinds of wickedness in their religious rituals, and who did all kinds of things contrary to the righteous requirements of God. So Moses instructs them to wipe out every member of these armies and to not leave a one of them breathing. 

3 “Nor shall you make marriages with them. You shall not give your daughter to their son, nor take their daughter for your son. 4 For they will turn your sons away from following Me, to serve other gods; so the anger of the LORD will be aroused against you and destroy you suddenly.” Moses commanded the Israelites to not allow their children to marry any of the sons or daughters of the people who lived in the land they were to possess. Why? “For they will turn your sons away from following Me, to serve other gods.” He knew that any intermarriage with these peoples would cause the Israelites to stumble into worshipping the idols these peoples worshipped and by doing so would lead them away from giving God the glory and honor due His name. And He would not tolerate that, for these people were a nation holy and set apart to God by God (see Exodus 19:6). If they mingled with these peoples, and worshipped the idols they worshipped, they would not be unique as a people, and would not be seen as any different from them. And that was not what God commanded—He commanded that they be different from the peoples around them. 

See, marriage is not something to be entered into lightly. When you marry someone, you are taking all that person is and joining it to everything you are. Genesis 2:24—Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and they shall become one flesh. When you get married, you and your spouse become one flesh. You are joined to her and she is joined to you. And when you take your vows you are saying that you accept everything that person is. Including their belief (or unbelief) in God. If you are in Christ, do you want to become one with a person who does not believe in God? Are you willing to say that you love this person—who denies the reality of God—that you can simply overlook their unbelief with a wink and a nod, and that this is attractive to you? 2^nd Corinthians 6:14-18—14 Do not be unequally yoked together with unbelievers. For what fellowship has righteousness with lawlessness? And what communion has light with darkness? 15 And what accord has Christ with Belial? Or what part has a believer with an unbeliever? 16 And what agreement has the temple of God with idols? For you are the temple of the living God. As God has said: "I will dwell in them and walk among them. I will be their God, and they shall be My people." 17 Therefore " ‘Come out from among them and be separate’, says the Lord. ‘Do not touch what is unclean, and I will receive you.’" 18 "I will be a Father to you, and you shall be My sons and daughters, says the LORD Almighty." 

Those who are in Christ have the Holy Spirit—that is, God Himself—dwelling within them. Will that person join themselves to one who hates God? Will they become one with a person who worships a god of human invention? And if so, why? Sometimes believers think “Oh, if I love them enough, and I show how genuine my faith is, then eventually they will believe as well!” This is called “conjugal evangelism”, and is a popular notion that the unbelieving will grow towards God when in truth, it leads the follower of Christ further away from God. In an interview about his book “Surviving a Spiritual Mismatch”, Lee Strobel said:

 

Conjugal evangelism is trying to convert someone through marriage. It’s knowingly dating a non-Christian; the hope and belief that you will influence that person to become a Christian. Through interviewing lots of people for this book, we’ve found it’s more likely the woman is the Christian in these situations. She is more likely to lose her faith than the man is likely to gain faith. Often you have a reverse evangelism taking place. That’s a dangerous position. A Christian shouldn’t want to put themselves in to. We think conjugal evangelism is very dangerous. You deceive yourself into thinking the other person might be more spiritually receptive than they might be because your judgment might be clouded by romantic feelings or chemistry with the other person. Our counsel is that Christians should not even consider that. I’ve found even after we speak on this topic and we talk about all the turmoil, pain and conflict Leslie and I had when I was an atheist and she was a Christian, people will still come up afterwards and say, “I understand that. That’s really important, but I’m dating this guy and we’ll be married soon and he’s really close to becoming a Christian and I think if we just get married I’ll be able to influence him.” I want to shake them and say, “Read my lips: Do not become unequally yoked with a non-believer!” The bible says it for a reason; to protect us from the kind of pain and heartache Leslie and I endured for two years of our marriage.

(https://www.marriagetrac.com/lee-strobel-interview-2/) 

It is a dangerous thing for the Christian to even date someone who is not a Christian. You are becoming intimate with one who has no interest in God, and will (more than likely) drag you away from Christ, rather than you bringing the unbeliever closer to Christ “But isn’t that kind of thinking showing a lack of faith in God? Who’s to say the unbeliever won’t be converted?” My friend, I did not write the words of 2^nd Corinthians 6:14-18, the apostle Paul did. And he got those words from none other than the Holy Spirit himself. He said again, in another place, 15 Do you not know that your bodies are members of Christ? Shall I then take the members of Christ and make them members of a harlot? Certainly not! 16 Or do you not know that he who is joined to a harlot is one body with her? For "the two," He says, "shall become one flesh" (1^st Corinthians 6:15-16). If you are in Christ, every single part of you belongs to God. Shall you then become one flesh with a harlot, one who does not believe in God but rather openly mocks God? Is that the message you want to be showing the world? Would it not rather be more beneficial—for you and for the body of Christ—to become one with a person who knows God and loves Christ? To take as your own flesh and blood one who knows what it is like to walk the paths of righteousness with God as their guide? If you take one who does not know God, and something happens and you need godly guidance, will the unbeliever be able to help? Can two walk together, unless they are agreed? (Amos 3:3). But the one who knows God can help you up, bring you close to God when you need Him, and help you limp along until you are back on the path and standing strong again. You are one flesh with your spouse, and if you are walking with God, and your spouse is walking with God, then you and your spouse—being one flesh—and God, could rightly be called the two spoken of here in Amos. 

5 “But thus you shall deal with them: you shall destroy their altars, and break down their sacred pillars, and cut down their wooden images, and burn their carved images with fire. 6 For you are a holy people to the LORD your God; the LORD your God has chosen you to be a people for Himself, a special treasure above all the peoples on the face of the earth.” How many times did some of the kings of Israel and Judah depart from worshipping God and turn to worshipping idols? Jeroboam, Nadab, Baasha, Elah, Zimri, Omri, Ahab, Ahaziah, Joram, Jehoash, Jeroboam II, Zechariah, Shallum, Menachem, Pekiah, Pekah, and Hoshea in the northern kingdom of Israel; Rehoboam, Abijam, Jehoram, Ahaziah, Athaliah, Ahaz, Amon, Jehoahaz, Jehoiakim, Jehoiachin, and Zedekiah in Judah. All these did wickedly before the LORD, and built altars and high places and images to Ba'al and Ashtoreth. (Even some of the “good” kings weren’t always good. Nevertheless, God did not wipe out the people for the sake of His servant David (see 2^nd Kings 8:19).) 

But this was not what God commanded, and certainly not what He wanted. “You shall destroy their altars, and break down their sacred pillars, and cut down their wooden images, and burn their carved images with fire.” Just as they were to obliterate the armies of the peoples they were to encounter, so they were to obliterate the idols these peoples worshipped. God will not tolerate the worship of false gods (Exodus 23:13, 34:14; Jeremiah 44:5). And either in this life, or in eternity, God will punish those who do so. Because there is but one God over all creation, and He will not acknowledge the existence of other gods. This was the first command in the Decalogue, “You shall have no other gods before Me” (Exodus 20:3). He and He alone is God (Psalm 86:10), and should be worshipped as such. When we dabble into looking at other gods and being fascinated by them, we are on a road that can lead to our destruction. The same thing happened to the people of Israel. Moses, in Deuteronomy 32:15-17, would call to their minds the time when they provoked God by worshipping other gods. And why did they do that? Because they had grown as a nation, they thought that it was because of they themselves that they had thus grown. They forgot that it was God who made them grow bigger—that it was God who had supplied their needs, and that they had done nothing of themselves to make themselves more than they were. Deuteronomy 32:15-17—15 “But Jeshurun grew fat and kicked; you grew fat, you grew thick, you are obese! Then he forsook God who made him, and scornfully esteemed the Rock of his salvation. 16  They provoked Him to jealousy with foreign gods; with abominations they provoked Him to anger. 17 They sacrificed to demons, not to God, to gods they did not know, to new gods, new arrivals that your fathers did not fear.” (Note: “Jeshurun” is a poetical name for Israel, and is rendered ἠγαπημένος [egapemenos, “the beloved one”] in the Septuagint. It carries the same sort of connotation as Αββα [Abba, “Dad”] in the New Testament). Notice in Verse 17 he calls them “demons”. The Psalmist uses the same language in Psalm 106:37—They even sacrificed their sons and their daughters to demons. All who believe in and love God should also consider anything that exalts itself as God, but is not God, to be nothing more than a fabrication of Satan, and a demon. For who is the liar, and father of it (John 8:44)? Who told the first lie in Genesis 3:1? Who is it that wants to destroy everything about God, to lead His children away from the truth, and to keep them in chains forever? It is this same Satan. 

Today, however, we have a new demon to beware of. It is not Ba'al or Ashtoreth, which are no more. It is not Dagon, who is nothing more than a whisper of a thought today. And yes, we do have the false gods like Allah or the “God” of Mormonism. But this god is more crafty than these, for it is one we use every day, and need to use every day. That god is money, more specifically the love of it. Now, money may not seem to be a god or something people worship, but it can be. If one stores up for themselves more money than a thousand people can spend in a lifetime, for no other reason than to say they have it, that is when it becomes an idol. 1^st Timothy 6:9-10—9 But those who desire to be rich fall into temptation and a snare, and into many foolish and harmful lusts which drown men in destruction and perdition. 10 For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil. Can a person have a billion dollars when not originally intending to do so? Well, yes. I don’t think Jeff Bezos or Mark Zuckerberg thought their businesses would become as lucrative as they have become. But when one sets out to have a billion dollars and that is their main goal in life, it distracts them from the one thing that is more important than anything else—God, and the worship of Him. “So I’d like to have a billion dollars, what’s the harm?” Ah, but how would you go about getting that billion dollars? And would that pursuit of that billion dollars take your mind away from God, and cause you to want to defraud your neighbor? That, my friend is covetousness, which is idolatry (Colossians 3:5). Jesus even warns us about coveting wealth, first in Matthew 6:19,21—19 “Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy and where thieves break in and steal…21 For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.” A few verses later He tells us in Matthew 6:24 (repeated in Luke 16:13)—“No one can serve two masters; for either he will hate the one and love the other, or else he will be loyal to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and mammon.” In other words, is your heart with stuff and things and money, or is it with God? Will you serve God or wealth? 

Forbid it, Lord, that I should boast/save in the death of Christ, my God!

All the vain things that charm me most,/I sacrifice them through his blood.

Were the whole realm of nature mine,/that were a present far too small.

Love so amazing, so divine,/demands my soul, my life, my all.

(Isaac Watts, “When I Survey the Wondrous Cross”) 

Let not your heart be set on this worlds or the things of it. Think of Christian in John Bunyan’s “The Pilgrim’s Progress”, how he set down his burden when he came to the cross:

 

He ran thus till he came to a place somewhat ascending; and upon that place stood a cross, and little below in the bottom, a sepulchre. So I saw in my dream, that just as Christian came up with the cross, his burden loosed from off his shoulders, and fell from off his back; and began to tumble, and so continued to do so until it came to the mouth of the sepulchre, where it fell in, and I saw it no more. 

1^st Timothy 6:8—And having food and clothing, with these we shall be content. Philippians 4:11-12—11 Not that I speak in regard to need, for I have learned in whatever state I am, to be content: 12 I know how to be abased, and I know how to abound. Everywhere and in all things I have learned both to be full and to be hungry, both to abound and to suffer need. Friend, if God has given you the things you need, do not go chasing after the world or the things the world says you need. For we need nothing other than Christ. He is the only thing we truly need. Let our prayer rather be like the words of Proverbs 30:7-9—7 Two things I request of You (Deprive me not before I die): 8 Remove falsehood and lies far from me; give me neither poverty nor riches—feed me with the food allotted to me; 9 lest I be full and deny You, and say, "Who is the LORD?" or lest I be poor and steal, and profane the name of my God. (You probably won’t hear Kenneth Copeland or Paula White preach that passage!)

 Part 2 next week

 

Jesus Christ is Lord.

Amen. 

A Survey of the Old Testament Law------ "You shall not make any graven image"

Before we get to this commandment, I want to talk a little bit more about the 1st Commandment. God and God alone is worthy of our worship because God and God alone is God. We saw that He created all things through His mighty hand and through His Word—that Word (big-‘W’) that took on the form of human flesh and walked the earth and whom we know as the Lord Jesus Christ. It that idea that must be made clearest when one preaches or teaches. Even this pitiful little blog has, as its purpose, to make known the truth of God and salvation through the Lord Jesus Christ. One way to determine if a preacher or teacher is faithful to his calling, that,

“When we have gone from them, there must be no beauty in us that makes them long for us, the only remembrance must be, ‘That man was true to God’”
(Oswald Chambers, If Thou Wilt Be Perfect, p.31).

That is, when we listen to someone teaching or preaching, they have done their job if, instead of saying “Oh, what a wonderfully talented and gifted man he is”, the people walk out afterwards with all their thoughts being what they just learned about God and God’s glory. That is the truest mark of a teacher of God. I found a little pamphlet called “The Godhood of God,” by A.W. Pink. Mr. Pink was a very dedicated teacher and preacher of the Bible, and when you get done reading anything he wrote, you will have a better sense of who God is, and the last thought you will have will be about God and God’s glory. Well, listen to what he says in the section entitled ‘The Absolute Godhood of God is Seen in Creation’—

“With whom took He counsel in creation? Whom did He consult when He determined the various and manifold arrangements, adjustments, adaptations, relationships, equipments of His myriad creatures? Did He not do everything after the counsel of His own will? Did He not decide that birds should fly in the air, beasts roam the earth, and fishes live in the sea?...Did He not determine to create the exalted seraphim to stand before His throne throughout endless ages, and also to make another creature which dies the same hour it is born? Was He not undisputed Sovereign in all His creative acts?...Why should God take counsel? Could man add to His knowledge, or correct His errors?...God never consulted man about a single member of His body, or about its size, color, or capacity; instead, ‘God set the members everyone of them in the body, as it hath pleased Him’ (1 Corinthians 12:18).”

Amen! In fact, the only duty God gave to Adam was to name the creatures. But He did not ask Adam’s advice concerning how big the earth should be or how many stars there should be or how long a day would last. God said, “This is how it’s gonna be.” PERIOD. He didn’t ask our advice about these things. He did it—and that was that. And that is the God we worship. One whose knowledge and wisdom and power are infinite—but even more than that, the beauty of His Holiness is perfect.

To say that God is “holy” is to say that He is completely separate from His creation—and that there is nothing to compare Him to. Some people try to say that “God is like…” or “The love of God is like…” or anything about God “is like…” There is nothing that is like anything about God. His love is not like anything we could imagine. His power is not like anything we could imagine. His wisdom, His justice—nothing about God is like anything we could imagine. No one is holy like God is holy.

In the gospels, Jesus commands us, saying, “The first of all the commandments is: 'Hear, O Israel, the LORD our God, the LORD is one. And you shall love the LORD your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength.' This is the first commandment. And the second, like it, is this: 'You shall love your neighbor as yourself.' There is no other commandment greater than these” (Mark 12:29-31). Notice something. We are commanded to love our neighbor as ourselves. The love we have for our neighbor should be equal to—in fact, greater than—the love we have for ourselves. But, when Christ talks about the love we are to have for God, what does He compare that love to? Nothing! He does not say “You shall love the LORD your God as you love…” anything else! Because the love we are to have for God should be infinitely greater than the love we have for anything. We should even count the love we have for our family as being worthy of throwing in the dumpster compared to the love we have for God. John 12:25—“He who loves his life will lose it, and he who hates his life in this world will keep it for eternal life.” The apostle John tells us, in 1st John 2:15—Do not love the world or the things in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him. We are to value and cherish God more than even our own life. But we don’t always do that. It’s easy to make other things our ‘god’. We put other things ahead of God, and we would rather serve those things that to serve Almighty YHVH. And that is actually a subject we will discuss more next week, in part 2 of our look at the 2nd Commandment.

That said, let’s move on to that 2nd Commandment. We are in Exodus 20, and let’s go ahead and read Exodus 20:4-6—“You shall not make for yourself a carved image—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 nor 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 generations of those who hate Me, but showing mercy to thousands, to those who love Me and keep My commandments.” The command here is quite simple—do not use statues of anything in worshipping God. The people had just come out of Egypt, where they saw all kinds of statues and pillars that had been built to honor their various little-‘g’ gods. And they very well may have in fact been forced into carving and erecting these things. So God obviously does not want the people making statues to worship pagan gods. But God is also prohibiting them from using statues—period. Not just to set them up as idols in the worship of false gods, but God was also telling them to not use statues to worship Him either. We see a couple passages that offer proof of this.

The first is in Exodus 32. Setting the stage. God is still speaking His Law to Charlton Heston, and before He can even finish giving it Edward G. Robinson has already convinced the people that God has forsaken them. They say, “God has forgotten us, Moses is dead for all we know. Let’s make our own god!” Exodus 32:1-6—Now when the people saw that Moses 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.” And Aaron said to them, “Break off the golden earrings which are in the ears of your wives, your sons, and your daughters, and bring them to me.” So all the people broke off the golden earrings which were in their ears, and brought them to Aaron. 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.” Then they rose early on the next day, offered burnt offerings, and brought peace offerings; and the people sat down to eat and drink, and rose up to play.

Their thought was, “Yeah, we know that YHVH brought us out of bondage—but that was then, this is now. And we’re all about the here and now.” Aren't we all? God does something wonderful and miraculous for us, and what do we find ourselves saying not too long after? “What has He done for me lately?” Not only that, we are a visual people. We need results we can see. We don’t want to have to simply believe something is so—or is going to be so. “Show me! Prove it!” And that’s what the people do here. Now, they weren’t forming a statue and making a new god—they were building this thing, and saying “This is YHVH! This is the god that brought us out of Egypt!” And God sends Charlton Heston down the mountain to put a stop to it. We’re gonna talk about this incident some more when we get to this particular passage. But we can already see that God is forbidding us from making any kind of carved image and saying “This is God!” For one thing, it reverses the order God wants. Man was created in the image of God—but we create a god in the image of man. Whenever we reduce God down to a statue or trinket, we are fashioning an imperfect image of the perfect God from imperfect materials. And we are fashioning a visible image of the invisible God.

Another reason I believe God gave this prohibition is because He wanted the people to be ready for when he would send His image to walk the earth. Which He did about 2000 years ago. Colossians 1:15—[Christ] is the image of the invisible God. Hebrews 1:1-3—God…has in these last days spoken to us by His Son…being the brightness of His glory and the express image of His person. 2nd Corinthians 4:3-4—But even if our gospel is veiled, it is veiled to those who are perishing…who do not believe, lest the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God, should shine on them. If I am making some little statue and saying “This is what God looks like” then I am denying Christ because the Bible says that the only thing that “looks like” God is Jesus Christ. But, until God sent His Son, He would not appear to the people in any form, except He would cover Himself in clouds and thick darkness. Which is exactly what Moses tells the people in Deuteronomy 4:11-18—“You came near and stood at the foot of the mountain, and the mountain burned with fire to the very heart of the heavens: darkness, cloud and thick gloom. Then the LORD spoke to you from the midst of the fire; you heard the sound of words, but you saw no form—only a voice. So He declared to you His covenant which He commanded you to perform, that is, the Ten Commandments; and He wrote them on two tablets of stone. The LORD commanded me at that time to teach you statutes and judgments, that you might perform them in the land where you are going over to possess it. So watch yourselves carefully, since you did not see any form on the day the LORD spoke to you at Horeb from the midst of the fire, so that you do not act corruptly and make a graven image for yourselves in the form of any figure, the likeness of male or female, the likeness of any animal that is on the earth, the likeness of any winged bird that flies in the sky, the likeness of anything that creeps on the ground, the likeness of any fish that is in the water below the earth.” He’s saying, “You saw no form when YHVH spoke to you from the cloud that rested on Mt. Sinai—neither shall you carve anything and say, ‘This is what God looks like.’” Because, as we talked about at the outset, God is not like anything we could imagine—so how could we ever build anything that even allows us to come close to saying “This is what God looks like” since God does not look like anything we could ever imagine.

Think about it like this—suppose someone told you that they were going to make a statue of you, and that it was going to look just like you and they were going to bring it here next week and give it to you. Being humans, we wouldn’t have a problem with it. We’d be thinking that it was going to be some carving made out of wood or stone or whatever. But then they bring it in next week, and what you see is this big, honking lump of half-eaten chicken bones and chewed-up gum and bailing wire and lemon peels and mud. It’s a big ugly disgusting mess. And they look at you and say, “It looks just like you!” We would be appalled! That’s what God says we are doing when we try to make a ‘graven image’ and say “This is God.” Only with Him, it’s on an infinite scale.

Because as much as we would be disgusted with that clump of chicken bones and lemon peels, God is infinitely disgusted with anything we might make and say “This looks like God.” No matter how beautiful it may be in our eyes, and no matter how sincere we may be—there is nothing we could ever make that we could point to and say “This looks like God.” In fact, we have a perfect example of this thought in Judges 17:3—Now there was a man from the mountains of Ephraim, whose name was Micah. And he said to his mother, “The eleven hundred shekels of silver that were taken from you, and on which you put a curse, even saying it in my ears—here is the silver with me; I took it.” And his mother said, “May you be blessed by the LORD, my son!” So when he had returned the eleven hundred shekels of silver to his mother, his mother said, “I had wholly dedicated the silver from my hand to the LORD for my son, to make a carved image and a molded image; now therefore, I will return it to you”…In those days there was no king in Israel; everyone did what was right in his own eyes. Momma was gonna have the silversmith make a molten or graven image of YHVH in the name of her son. She did, and that son served that image. Now, he was serving the image—but was he serving God? No! He was serving this abomination that he called YHVH. Much like anybody does when they set up statues and say “We are worshipping God by giving reverence to this statue!”

John Calvin once said,

“Moses…had no other object than to rescue God’s glory from all the imaginations which tend to corrupt it. And assuredly it is a most gross indecency to make God like a [block of wood] or a stone. Some [explain the commandment as meaning], ‘Thou shalt not make to thyself a graven image, which thou mayest adore;’ as if it were allowable to make a visible image of God, provided it be not adored…as soon as any one has permitted himself to devise an image of God, he immediately falls into false worship.”
(John Calvin, Commentaries, Commentary on Deuteronomy 5:9)

He goes on to say, in that same section,

“They have always alleged the same [excuse] which now-a-days is [present] in the mouths of the Papists, viz., that not the image itself was actually worshipped, but that which it represented…they will immediately reply, that they offer to God that honor which they pay to pictures and statues. But this frivolous excuse comes to nothing; because to erect the idol before which they prostrate themselves, is really to deny the true God.” (ibid.)

Now, let’s say someone were to walk into your garden-variety Roman Catholic church. Not that I'm recommending it! But, suppose we do, what do you suppose we will see when we walk in? Statues. Statues of Christ; statues of…somebody else. Who might that someone else be? Mary! Gotta have our statues of Mary! Hmmm…now, the way your average Roman Catholic will try to get away with this is by saying (A) The 2nd Commandment is only a prohibition against making idols to false gods (we’ve seen already this is not true) and they will say (B) Oh, we don’t worship the statues, we use them in our worship (we’ve seen from Judges this is not true either). But when you ask them, why the Pope bows down to statues of Mary—when the Commandment says “You shall not make for yourself a carved image—any likeness of anything that is in heaven above [that would be Christ], or that is in the earth beneath [That’s Mary]…you shall not bow down to them nor serve them” they will come back with “Oh, the Pope does not bow down to statues of Mary”—well, below are pictures of John Paul II and Benedict XVI bowing to statues of Mary. We’ll stop right there, and pick up next week talking about God being a jealous God.







Jesus Christ is Lord.
Amen.