In His Image

In my Bible reading this year I have arrived at Exodus 20 and the Ten Commandments. In the first two commandments, God tells Moses:

“You shall have no other gods before Me.

“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 the fourth generation of those who hate Me, but showing steadfast love to thousands of those who love Me and keep My commandments” (vv. 3-6).

As it happens, a devotional book I’ve been reading also touched on these verses. I won’t name the book or author as I’ve become increasingly skeptical of his theology the more I read. He comments,

“…practices of hanging pictures of Jesus on the wall, plastering Christian symbols on our cars, and wearing jewelry with religious symbols is actually heresy. It violates a very specific command of God to make no images” (italics in original).

While I would generally agree with him about images of Jesus (none of us know what He looked like anyhow), I think he’s reading too much into the text to forbid all types of images and symbols. The command in Exodus has a specific application that is mentioned directly in the text: “You shall not bow down to them.” In verse 23 God repeats, “You shall not make gods of silver to be with Me, nor shall you make for yourselves gods of gold.” (See also Lev. 26:1.) Of course, we know that the Israelites immediately disobeyed by making the golden calf. “They have turned aside quickly out of the way that I commanded them” (32:8).

Just a few chapters after the Ten Commandments, God gave instructions for building the Ark of the Covenant, which included images of cherubs (ch. 25). And when Israel started building the Temple in 1 Kings 7, there were plenty of artistic decorations—pomegranates (v. 18), gourds (v. 24), and oxen (v. 25), along with a special place for the Ark of the Covenant. Clearly God was not prohibiting all carved images, but the worship of them. In Numbers 21, God commanded Moses to make the image of a bronze serpent on a pole by which people could be saved if they were bitten by a snake. It was later destroyed (2 Kings 18) because people were starting to worship it.

We do need to be careful that our manmade images are not becoming idols that we substitute for God. They can be reminders of God if they direct our attention to God, not to themselves. I was disturbed this week to hear a caller to the Christian radio station refer to her “plushy Jesus.” Just the way she talked about it made me say “That’s idolatry!” I don’t know who created such a thing, but I would bet it was a non-Christian marketing opportunist.

If no images are allowed at all, there are a lot of Christian artists who will be called to account. But that does not seem likely given the rest of Scripture. Most of us in Western culture are probably in greater danger of idolizing our money, family, and possessions than we are of worshiping the art and Christian symbols we have around us. Many things both good and bad can become idols, but not all of them do. “But take care that this right of yours does not somehow become a stumbling block to the weak” (1 Cor. 8:9).

“Beware lest you raise your eyes to heaven, and when you see the sun and the moon and the stars, all the host of heaven, you be drawn away and bow down to them and serve them” (Deut. 4:19a).

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PS: I found this image online and was dumbfounded at the error. What did they miss?

© 2023 Dawn Rutan. Unless otherwise indicated, all Scripture are ESV and all images copyright free from pixabay.com. The opinions stated do not necessarily reflect the views of my church or employer.

What’s Love Got to Do With It?

It is not uncommon these days to hear calls for tolerance and acceptance that say, in essence, “If you love me, you’ll let me do whatever makes me happy.” Although this isn’t a new idea, the voices are much louder than they used to be. Often this comes from a misconception of the biblical idea that “God is love.” C.S. Lewis wrote in The Problem of Pain:

“By the goodness of God we mean nowadays almost exclusively His lovingness… And by Love, in this context, most of us mean kindness… What would really satisfy us would be a God who said of anything we happened to like doing, ‘What does it matter so long as they are contented?’ …whose plan for the universe was simply that it might be truly said at the end of each day, ‘a good time was had by all’ …I should very much like to live in a universe which was governed on such lines. But since it is abundantly clear that I don’t, and since I have reason to believe, nevertheless, that God is Love, I conclude that my conception of love needs correction… If God is Love, He is, by definition, something more than mere kindness. And it appears, from all the records, that though He has often rebuked us and condemned us, He has never regarded us with contempt” (35-37).

David Powlison wrote something similar in Good and Angry:

“[God’s] mercy is not niceness. His mercy is not blanket acceptance of any and all. Mercy to us costs him—the blood of the Lamb. And mercy comes to us at the cost of our sins and pride. His kindness is an open invitation to turn to him in repentance and faith, to come to him in our need for mercies freely offered, and our trust in mercies freely given” (as quoted in Take Heart, Jan. 13).

God’s love is not benign approval of whatever we may love and enjoy. His perfect love means He puts divine boundaries on what is acceptable, because He knows what is best for us. We, in our sinful nature, often choose what is less than best—what is convenient, comfortable, and even corrupt. It is for this reason that we have His written Word to guide us, to help us understand what has been true from eternity, as opposed to what may appear true in our culture today.

The Apostle John wrote, “Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love. In this the love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent His only Son into the world, so that we might live through Him. In this is love, not that we have loved God but that He loved us and sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sins” (1 John 4:8-10).

God didn’t create the world so He could just smile down on whatever His creation wanted to do. He created us to be brought into relationship with Him. Because of our sin that relationship was broken, and so God sent Jesus to pay our debts, redeem us from sin, and make us right with God again. God’s love for us meant that He gave the ultimate sacrifice, not to simply make us happy, but to make us more like Himself, in the perfect righteousness that we’ll experience for eternity if we follow Him as Lord in this life.

So when we look to God’s model of love to guide us, we don’t choose indiscriminate niceness and acceptance of anything and everything our culture comes up with. It doesn’t matter whether the demand is from a child asking for unlimited cookies, or an adult wanting unlimited sex, or anything in between. In love, we should recognize that many things are off limits if we truly want what is best for one another. And we need to look at it from an eternal perspective—will today’s choices lead to ‘fullness of joy and pleasures forevermore at God’s right hand’ (Psalm 16:11), or will they lead to “weeping and gnashing of teeth” (Matt. 13:42 & 50)? True love should make us do all that we can to point people to eternal life, not eternal death.

“For God so loved the world, that He gave His only Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have eternal life” (John 3:16).

 

© 2023 Dawn Rutan. Unless otherwise indicated, all Scripture are ESV and all images copyright free from pixabay.com. The opinions stated do not necessarily reflect the views of my church or employer.

Breaking the Rules

Soon after the Israelites came out of Egypt, they were given the Ten Commandments. God told them through Moses:

“Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy. Six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord your God. On it you shall not do any work, you, or your son, or your daughter, your male servant, or your female servant, or your livestock, or the sojourner who is within your gates. For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, and rested on the seventh day. Therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy” (Exodus 20:8-11).

Forty years later, they were entering the Promised Land and God gave Joshua instructions on how Jericho was to be conquered.

“You shall march around the city, all the men of war going around the city once. Thus shall you do for six days… On the seventh day you shall march around the city seven times, and the priests shall blow the trumpets. And when they make a long blast with the ram’s horn, when you hear the sound of the trumpet, then all the people shall shout with a great shout, and the wall of the city will fall down flat” (Joshua 6:3-5).

Wait, didn’t God say no work on the seventh day? And yet He then gave them instructions for seven consecutive days of marching around the city. In the thousands of sermons I’ve heard in my lifetime, I’ve never heard anyone address this apparent exception to the command to keep the seventh day holy by not working.

The text doesn’t specifically say this, but I think a case can be made that the seventh day of marching around the city was probably the Sabbath day. One big clue is the fact that God was the One who brought down the wall of Jericho. Marching around the city and blowing trumpets didn’t accomplish that. (Some might argue for the resonance frequency of synchronized marching, but when have thousands of untrained men ever marched in unison?) The lesson for the Israelites was “The Lord has given you the city” (v. 16). It was not their work but God’s work on that day.

The Pharisees of Jesus’ day had no room for subtleties of interpretation when it came to the Sabbath. They added rules upon rules to avoid the risk of accidentally breaking the commandment. Jesus chastised them: “The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath. So the Son of Man is lord even of the Sabbath” (Mark 2:27-28). God showed His authority at Jericho, and Jesus retained that authority during His life on earth.

The Pharisees and many other Jews (and even some Christian groups) missed the whole point of the Mosaic Law. It was never about man’s perfect obedience, but about God’s work on our behalf. “We know that a person is not justified by works of the law but through faith in Jesus Christ… because by works of the law no one will be justified” (Galatians 2:16). Faith is not about trying harder to obey the law, but trusting in the One who has all authority over heaven and earth.

“Come and see what God has done: He is awesome in His deeds toward the children of man” (Psalm 66:5).

© 2021 Dawn Rutan. Unless otherwise indicated, all Scripture are ESV and all images are copyright free from pixabay.com. The opinions stated do not necessarily reflect the views of my church or employer.