Avoiding Idolatry

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All right, if you would, take out your Bibles and turn with me to Exodus chapter 20 tonight, Exodus chapter 20, and we’re going to look at the second commandment tonight. We started last week looking at the Ten Commandments, and I’ve been seeing, I don’t know if it’s more common in the last couple months or if I’m just noticing it more, paying attention, but I’m seeing people citing particular commandments from the Ten Commandments in questionable ways. And so I think it’s a good thing for us to look at the Ten Commandments, to look at them in context of the New Testament where we can, because there are several of these that Jesus addressed personally and said, here, let me elaborate on how to interpret this.

There are some of them that the apostles elaborated on that way as well. And so we want to look at these in light of the Old Testament. We want to look at what they would have understood them to mean in the Old Testament, how the New Testament elaborates on that, and what we’re supposed to do with them today.

Because the Ten Commandments are not a way to salvation, but they contain principles that we should follow, as those who have trusted Christ for our salvation, that we should follow then in response and out of gratefulness because we want to please God. And so we’re going to look at these. Tonight we’re looking at the second commandment.

And right before Christmas I saw, I couldn’t even tell you the man’s name now, but somebody posted a picture on Facebook, which is a great place to get your theology, posted a picture on Facebook of a house with its light-up nativity scene in the front yard, and then a quote of the second commandment. And his point was that all you people are engaged in idolatry because you have nativity scenes. And I thought, well, that doesn’t sound right.

And I looked to see just who is this guy and some kind of Baptist preacher. And I thought, that’s not exactly what the second commandment is talking about. So we need to clarify that.

Because I always want to make sure, is this what God’s word says? Is this what God’s word means? Because I love my nativity scene.

You all heard me talk about it. It’s the one my parents had when we were growing up, and now I have it, and it’s survived lots of falls and things, and there are cracks, and there’s paint wearing off, but I love it. It brings back memories, and so I put it up every year, but I love God more.

And if his word were to tell me that you don’t put up that nativity scene, then the nativity scene goes away. But we need to look and see what does God’s word say and what does God’s word mean. No, there’s no Buddha in the nativity scene.

But there are wise men who don’t actually belong there. So, you know, we play a little bit. .

. That’s what I’ll do next year. Put them off of far into the east. So we’re a little loose in our interpretation with the nativity scene.

But Exodus chapter 20 says in verse 4, here’s the second commandment, verses 4 through 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. That’s the entirety of the second commandment. A lot of times we’ll just cite the short versions of each of the commandments.

There are some of them that go on for quite some time in what they say. Some of them are very short. Thou shalt not kill.

Or the New King James says, you shall not commit murder. Pretty short because we’re supposed to understand what that means. There are some that God takes a while to explain.

The one about the Sabbath day is one we’re going to talk about. There’s a few verses there. Well, he takes some time to explain the second commandment here.

And again, we’ll cite them all short. You know, you shall have no other gods before me, the first one. The second one, you shall not make any graven image.

The third one, do not take the name of the Lord your God in vain. But there’s more to some of these that we need to look at. He says, don’t make any carved image, any likeness of anything.

He says, in the heavens above, the earth beneath, the water below, don’t bow down to them and serve them. And he says, because I’m a jealous God. And he says, I will visit the iniquity of the fathers to the children on the third or fourth generation.

We’re going to talk about that a little bit too, what that means. He says, but to thousands, not thousands of people, but thousands of generations of those that love me. So, what he’s saying here, we need to take in some more of the Bible to understand the context.

Because some people, like I said, will tell us that that means, oh, no pictures of anything. You know, it’s not just the Robert E. Lee statues that need to come down, it’s the statues of everybody that would need to come down.

If that’s what God’s talking about. That we’re not supposed to make any kind of images. But we can see from the rest of the Bible, we can even see from the Old Testament, that this is not a prohibition of all kinds of statues and carvings.

Because there are other places in the Bible where God told them specifically to make those things. One of the first examples I think of is when he explained in great detail the setup of the temple and the tabernacle before that, and the Ark of the Covenant that they were supposed to make. At the very top of the Ark of the Covenant, What they were supposed to put on top was the carved image, the likeness of two golden cherubim, two angels.

Well, wait a minute. Angels are created beings. Angels are not God.

They are created beings that you would find in verse 4 in the heavens above. There are things that fly. There are things that are up in the heavens above.

Surely, if God was saying no statues of any kind, no carvings of any kind, then God wouldn’t have then told them to go out and put angels on the mercy seat of the Ark of the Covenant. There are plenty of other abstract things that they could have designed. There’s another that I’ve talked about just recently on a Wednesday night in the book of Numbers where God told them to make a statue of a serpent.

And if you’d like to turn there with me, it’s in Numbers chapter 21. I’m just going to look at two verses of it tonight to give you the basic idea of the passage if you haven’t been here for any of that discussion. It says, Then the Lord said to Moses, Make a fiery serpent and set it on a pole, and it shall be that everyone who is bitten, when he looks at it, shall live.

So Moses made a bronze serpent and put it on a pole, and so it was, if a serpent had bitten anyone, when he looked at the bronze serpent, he lived. So while the Israelites were wandering in the wilderness, they came to a place where they were afflicted with what the Bible calls fiery serpents. We don’t know exactly what that means, but it doesn’t sound like anything good.

It doesn’t sound like anything I want to find in my garden. So however you interpret fiery serpents, it’s nothing good. And it was biting these people.

It was biting the Israelites. They were venomous. And people were getting sick and people were dying.

And so God’s answer, when the Israelites cried out to him, God’s answer was to tell Moses, go build a statue. And not just any statue. Go build a statue of a snake.

Now they would have carved this out of bronze. So you’ve got a carved image here, and it would definitely be a likeness of something that is on the earth beneath. And yet God said, go make that.

Go make that. And the idea was, as it says there in the book of Numbers, that when that serpent was built and when it was put up on a pole, that those who would turn and look at the pole, those who had been bitten, who would turn and look at the serpent up on the pole, would be healed of their snake bite. Now, you and I both know there was nothing particularly magical about the bronze serpent.

It was a hunk of metal. Just like all these statues, just like the statues that the pagan nations around them worshipped, which is why God was so intent that they not make any images that they could worship, it didn’t have any more power than any other lump of bronze or any other piece of stone. It had no power of its own. What brought healing to the people of Israel was the fact that they believed God, that they believed his promises and were willing to act on them in faith.

So it wasn’t the fact that, hey, this serpent will heal you. It’s the fact that God says, if you’ll look at that, you’ll be healed. And those who believed him, those who had the faith to do what God said, even though it didn’t make sense, those who had the faith to do what God said are the ones that God healed.

And we see in the book of John, which is where this actually came into conversation on a Wednesday night. We see in the book of John chapter 3 when Jesus is talking to Nicodemus at night that he brings up the example of the bronze serpent as something that points to him. And he said in John chapter 3 verse 14, and as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.

And there are a lot of parallels. I mean, Jesus, it wasn’t just by accident that Jesus compares himself to the bronze serpent. There are a lot of parallels here, and I think that’s part of the reason why God set this up this way, was to be yet another picture in the Old Testament that would point people to the coming of Jesus Christ. Because Jesus said, just like the serpent was put up on the pole, and I’ve just told you that story, he said, so the Son of Man will be raised up.

And when the Son of Man is put up on that pole or on the cross and he’s raised up, he will draw men to himself. And we find the same thing happening in the New Testament that we found in the Old. That when Jesus is lifted up on the cross, those who have the faith in God to trust in this provision for their salvation will be saved.

We will be healed from what afflicts us, which is our sin. And just as the thing that afflicted them, the serpent was put up on the pole. So the thing that afflicts us, which is our sin, is put up on the cross with Jesus Christ. He bears it to Calvary on our behalf.

And so this whole thing is a picture of Jesus Christ. It wasn’t by accident. God said, go make the serpent. So we’ve got a couple of examples, and there may be others in the Old Testament, but we’ve got a couple of examples where God says, go make something that looks like something else.

And so already we can see God is not saying every statue and every carving is a sin. What we see instead is that this is a prohibition not on all carvings and all statues. This is a prohibition on things that people would worship.

It’s a prohibition on things that people would worship. God’s not concerned with how, in this commandment, God is not concerned with how they’re decorating their houses. God is concerned with the condition of their hearts and what they would worship.

And idolatry God spends so much time talking about idolatry in the Ten Commandments because idolatry was going to be one of the recurring problems for Israel throughout the next 2,000 years of its existence. You read through the Old Testament and from this point on, from the time they leave Egypt to the time they come back from Babylon, it’s just idolatry after idolatry after idolatry. And the nation as a whole will do well for a little bit.

And then they’ll forget about God and they’ll start to get tempted by the pagan gods. You know, we want to be like everybody else. What is that?

We’re God’s people always want to be like everybody else. God didn’t make us to be like everybody else. But they want to be like everybody else and they see, well, the Amalekites have their statues and the Moabites have their statues and the Egyptians have their statues.

We want to be like them. And so they’ll make statues. They’ll start worshiping them.

They’ll forget all about God and then they’ll get themselves in trouble. And when they realize their little statues can’t help them out of trouble, they’ll cry out to God who will rescue them, and they will serve him until they don’t. And it’s just a vicious cycle.

It went on from the time they left Egypt to the time they came back from Babylon. And Babylon seems to have broken, the 70 years of captivity in Babylon seems to have broken that cycle in the nation of Israel. Because from then on, we don’t see history or scripture recording the same kind of instance of idol worship that they had before.

But this is a regular theme throughout the Old Testament. God knew it was going to be a problem, and so he spent a lot of time talking about it. He knew that they were going to want to worship things.

And some of the things that they were going to worship would be that he’s prohibiting here, they were going to worship false gods. they were going to worship false gods in the book of 1 Kings chapter 15 we are going to do some jumping around tonight from different scriptures if you don’t have time to turn there and you’re taking notes don’t get all these let me know and I’ll give you the references later 1 Kings chapter 15 verses 13 and 14 it says and he removed Macha his grandmother from being queen mother because she had made an obscene image of Asherah and Asa cut down her obscene image and burned it by the brook Kidron. But the high places were not removed.

Nevertheless, Asa’s heart was loyal to the Lord all his days. And what this is, that’s just one scripture that I pulled out, not at random, but it’s one scripture of many that I could have brought you a list tonight of the places where the Bible talks about the people of Israel worshiping Baal, who was a pagan god, a fertility god, if memory serves correctly, of the Canaanites. they would worship Asherah, or Asherah, who was a pagan goddess.

And one of the ways that they would, it’s still, I find it amusing a little bit, the way that they would worship Asherah, they would have sacred trees. And they would go pray to the trees and around the trees. And I don’t know why, but I just find the idea of sacred trees to be funny.

And what would happen when there would be a revival in Israel? Revival began with the axe. And somebody would get an axe and they’d go out and they’d chop down the sacred trees.

And that’s one of the things that King Asa did here in the book of 1 Kings, that even his own grandmother had some of these sacred trees. And she was not alone. When Asa came to power, it was one of those times that Israel as a whole was worshipping these false gods.

They were worshipping Baal. They were worshipping Asherah. The people would worship Molech. Moak was one of the ones who expected child sacrifice and they were participating in all these bloody rituals.

And Asa came in and said, alright, here’s what God says and now let’s go get the axe. And he cut down his grandmother’s images. He cut down his grandmother’s sacred trees.

That’s the kind of thing. That’s one of the kinds of things that God was talking about when he said don’t carve any images. Is it wrong to make a little toy dog for a child to play with?

No, that’s not what he’s talking about. Is it wrong to build the statue of the bronze serpent? No, because God can’t lead us to do anything that’s wrong.

Is it wrong to carve angels for the top of the Ark of the Covenant? No, because again, God can’t lead us to do anything wrong. It is wrong, however, to carve a goddess out of a tree and bow down and worship it.

And so one of the reasons God was concerned about this idolatry is because he knew. He knew if we don’t keep the reins tight here, the people of Israel are going to go worship false gods. But there was another problem when it came to idolatry too.

It wasn’t just that they would go worship false gods. They would also worship false concepts of the true God. I’ve said this before about Aaron and the golden calf.

And I wanted to go back again this week and make sure that I was correct in what I’m telling you. But I always grew up, when I’d hear the story in Sunday school, I always grew up thinking when Aaron made the golden calf for the people of Israel, that they were wanting to worship a false god. that they were, I don’t know, worshiping the cow god or something.

When I was old enough and finally went and read this story for myself, it reads completely differently. Not necessarily that they’re wanting to, here’s our cow god, but that they’re wanting to worship the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. They just want to look at something to do it.

And they want all their hopes, they want all their devotion to God, they want all of this embodied in this calf statue. In their minds, they’re still worshiping. By the way, I’m not saying, oh, they were just fine and God overreacted.

Not saying that at all. What I’m saying is, in their minds, they thought they were doing right, but they were still doing what God had said not to do. So turn a couple chapters back with me, if you would, to Exodus 32.

We’re going to look at a few verses here. Exodus 32. Starting in verse 2, And Aaron said to them, Pick off the golden earrings which are in the ears of your wives, your sons, and your daughters, and bring them to me.

Because the people had come to Aaron saying, We want to worship with this golden calf. Come make us gods that shall go before us. And now they’re not saying make us a new god.

Like I said, this is the cow god. Make us gods in the sense of make us these statues, make us these idols that can represent us. They thought Moses was not coming back down off the mountain, and they wanted a form of their God that was going to be acceptable if they had to go marching back into Egypt.

So Aaron said, break off the golden earrings. I still have not found a satisfactory explanation, at least to my mind, of why Aaron went along with this nonsense. I don’t understand why Aaron went along with this, why he did this.

I don’t understand why God didn’t strike Aaron down. why God continued to let Aaron be the leader among the priests. And yet we see the mercy of God there, that he let Aaron live, and he let Aaron continue to serve, because some of Aaron’s sons lose their lives for the flippant way they participated in the sacrifices later on.

But Aaron tells them, break off the golden earrings, as we read in verse 2. Verse 3, so all the people broke off their 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. Now, they do not believe. Maybe I’m giving them too much credit.

I don’t think so. I think the text bears this out. They do not believe that this golden calf, this stupid statue made out of the earrings that they just ripped out of their ears.

They do not believe that this hunk of metal led them out of Egypt. they are looking at it as a representation of the God of Israel. But the problem is you can’t represent the God of Israel with a statue.

You can’t represent his eternal spirit with a hunk of metal that you’ve just pulled out of your ears and fashioned into something. This is your God, O Israel, that brought you out of the land of Egypt. They were looking at this as a representation of God.

So when Aaron saw it, he built an altar before it. Oh, good. Because we want to make sure we can take our idol worship all the way here.

He made an altar before it, and Aaron made a proclamation and said, Tomorrow is a feast to the Lord. They’re not worshiping the cow god in their minds. They’re worshiping the Lord.

What did I tell you last week when you see Lord in all caps like that in the Old Testament? What did I tell you it means? It’s his name.

If you all looked at me puzzled, I was about to tell you. I’m not expecting you to remember the name if that was new to you, but good on you for remembering that’s his name. When you see Lord in all caps in the Old Testament, it’s not a title.

They’re writing out, or that’s how they’ve chosen, for whatever reason, to translate God’s personal name, which in Hebrew is probably pronounced something like Yahweh. So they’ve built the calf. They’ve made an altar, and Aaron pronounces a feast to honor, the God of Israel.

Then they rose early the next day and offered burnt offerings and brought peace offerings. And the people sat down to eat and drink and rose up to play. And who had commanded them to give burnt offerings and peace offerings?

God had. So again, I’m not saying what they did was right. I’m saying it changes my understanding of what’s going on here.

That there’s more than one kind of idolatry. That there’s the kind of idolatry that says over here I’m going to worship the tree. I’m going to worship Baal. I’m going to worship the cow god.

There’s another kind of idolatry over here that says, you know what, let me take God and put him more in an image that I can understand. Maybe we’re distorting who he is a little bit, but that’s okay because this is an understanding of God that I’m more comfortable with over here. And that’s exactly what they did.

That is exactly what they did. There’s more than one kind of idolatry. And so they said, we’re not really comfortable with the idea of this all-pervading God that we can’t see, let’s bring him and put him in some form that we’re comfortable with.

And they made the golden calf. And they worshipped that. And so that image of the golden calf was a serious problem for Israel.

Because it was messing with their, it was distorting their perception of who God was. And that can happen, that can happen even with things that start out innocently. So we do have to be careful.

Because if you look at the book of 2 Kings chapter 18, just one verse here. 2 Kings 18. 2, Hezekiah removed the high places and broke the sacred pillars, cut down the wooden image, and broke in pieces the bronze serpent that Moses had made.

For until those days, the children of Israel burned incense to it and called it Nehushtan. The bronze serpent that God had told Moses to build, there was nothing wrong with building that. But somewhere along the way, some of the people decided it had magical powers.

It was some kind of representation of deity, and they were out there worshiping at it. And they might have, in their minds, been worshiping the Lord. But if they were, if they were out there trying to worship the Lord by burning incense to Nehushtan, then they were not worshiping him the way he had told them to, and they were worshiping a distorted image of God.

And when we try to take God and change him and distill him down into something that he’s really not but we’re more comfortable with, That’s idolatry. And that can happen too when we start to use images and carvings. If you have a picture of Jesus on your wall at home, it’s not necessarily a problem, I don’t think.

That’s not my understanding of Scripture. If you start talking to the picture of Jesus while you’re praying, it’s a slippery slope, my friends. Because even Jesus is the image of the.

. . We don’t need images of God.

We don’t need statues. We don’t need all these things because Jesus is the image of the invisible God. That’s what Colossians says.

He’s the express image of his person, Hebrews says. We don’t need images to bow down to. We’ve got Jesus Christ. Again, like I said, a picture of Jesus that you look at, and by the way, he probably didn’t look like that at all.

I doubt, seriously, that Jesus living in first century Palestine was a pale white man with blonde hair and blue eyes. It just seems like somebody would have mentioned that, that he would have stood out like that. That’s probably not what Jesus looked like, but having a picture, not necessarily a problem.

You start praying to the picture, start thinking God hears you better because you’ve got a picture in the room, and we start to have a problem. Part of that problem is because idolatry is so destructive. That’s why God says don’t make the images that people were going to bow down to, because idolatry is destructive.

When we look back here at Exodus chapter 20, God takes idolatry seriously. He takes it very seriously. He says to those who commit this infraction, this iniquity, that God was going to visit the guilt of that upon not only the fathers, but the children to the third and fourth generation.

Now I read that, and there’s something in our sense of justice that says, well, that’s wrong, that God would punish somebody’s children for what they did. All right, a few things that we need to understand here. A lot of times what we do in moderation, our children do to excess.

Our children tend to learn from our sins and perfect them apart from the grace of God. And I can trace that back through generations of my family when it came to, well, all sorts of things, but when it came to drunkenness. And what each generation did with drunkenness, the next generation did a little better.

And the next generation did it even better than that. And thank God that his Holy Spirit got a hold of my dad in the 1970s. And dad committed his life to Christ. So I’m not doing that.

Because I wonder where I might be if that hadn’t been the case. And thank God that his Holy Spirit got a hold of my grandfather years later. But what we do in moderation, our children tend to do to excess.

And I think, I heard my pastor say that all the time growing up. And now I think about it when I see my own sin and I think, oh golly, I don’t want my kids following in those footsteps. I want my kids to be godlier than I am.

And there is a tendency. There is a tendency. I mean, God can change anybody.

God can change anybody individually. God can change any family. But we can look and see that if somebody was practicing idolatry and their children grew up watching them practice idolatry, they were probably going to continue in idolatry.

And probably the grandchildren would grow up in idolatry. We see the same thing with all sorts of behaviors in our world today. That with some exceptions, please understand, I’m not trying to paint with a really broad brush here, but with some exceptions, what we grow up in, we tend to follow in those footsteps, unless something happens to shake us out of it.

And so it’s not here that God’s saying, I’m going to punish your children who’ve done absolutely nothing wrong because of what you did. What God is saying is that this is going to be a curse, this is going to be a problem in your family for generations if you go this direction. That you can’t just flirt with idols and think that it’s not going to affect anybody else.

Because their children were going to see it and follow suit. Their children’s children were going to see it and follow suit, and it was going to bring judgment on the whole group of them. You say, well, what about the kids who didn’t participate in idolatry?

Look at what it says in verse 6. Verse 5 says, he visits the iniquity of the fathers on the children to the third and fourth generations, but look at verse 6, but showing mercy to thousands, again, not thousands of people, but thousands of generations who love me and keep my commandments. kid in ancient Israel grows up in a family that commits idolatry, but he loves the Lord and says, no, I’m not doing this.

I don’t think God curses him and God condemns him because of what his family did. I think he’s counted in one of those that God shows mercy to. And if you notice, God’s mercy lasts a lot longer than our iniquity.

Our iniquity has the power to corrupt three or four generations. God’s mercy has the power to change thousands.