The second commandment prohibits making carved images or idols to represent God. It emphasizes worshiping God as He commands, not in ways we may feel comfortable with.
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Hello and welcome to Thinking About the Bible, and we continue in this series Thinking About God's Law. We've talked about the first commandment, you shall have no other gods before me. We now move to the second commandment, you shall not make for yourself a carved image. And in this law, again, the people of Israel were being called to act very differently than those who lived in the ancient world with them, lived around them, because it was common to make some sort of an idol, some sort of a visual representation of the God that a person might worship. But God was to be known to his people through his words. God, Yahweh, the one true God, is to be known to his people through the events that he brings to pass on a daily basis. He is the one who controls all things, controls history. He is the one who controls the changing of the seasons. He is the one who controls everything in this creation, and he is known to his people primarily through his word, but also through the things that he does in their life. And so they're not supposed to be making some kind of a graven image. And it comes back to something else we see in the case law, specifically we'll see later in Deuteronomy, or we would if we were gonna go through Deuteronomy, but you would see that God says he's to be worshipped in a certain way, to worship in a certain place, to worship in a certain ritual, and so forth. And so this was part of that, actually. Don't worship God in the way that you might feel comfortable, the way that you might think is acceptable. Just because other people are doing it, those nations around you, doesn't mean you're supposed to. Now this is not a prohibition against all art, for instance. Remember on the Ark of the Covenant there were cherubim who overshadowed the covenant seat, the mercy seat, and that was actually prescribed. God said do that, build it in this particular way. And in the temple there was, for the most part, there were representation of plants and trees and so forth in the temple. But again, there is no prohibition here against artwork that expresses even the physical form of the human form. I would go so far to say, now there's some folks who say, well this commandment prohibits the production of any picture of what Jesus, so-called, may have looked like. And I say so-called because, you know, we don't have really any idea what he looked like, other than he probably was a brown-skinned fellow, someone from the the Middle East, the Jewish people, a Halim, you might say, from the further east, the Hebrews, originally. But the point is, when we have pictures of Jesus today, we are not breaking this command. We're not prohibited from doing that, because the command is, don't make a physical representation of Yahweh, who has no physical appearance, who is not physically present, but is spiritually present. Jesus, on the other hand, was physically present. He's still physically present in heaven. Jesus, the man, and he continues and will continue in that state for all eternity. So, to have a picture of Jesus, although we don't really know what he looked like, is not breaking this command. There might be some other reasons not to do that, but the main thing here is, for us, is that we worship God in the way that he says we should worship him. Not in the way that we feel comfortable, not in the way that we have decided is okay or is best, but we worship him according to his commands, his demands, and in the Old Testament, in the ancient world, part of that was to not use any kind of a graven or visible representation of God. Alright, we'll see you again next time. God bless you, and be thinking about the Ten Commandments. Think about, is there any way in your life that you are trying to substitute something as a means of worship that God would prohibit?
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