The Speaking God
January 16, 2022
Preached by Benjamin Vrbicek
Scripture Reading
Exodus 20:1-2, 4-6
1 And God spoke all these words, saying,
2 “I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery….
4 “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. 5 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, 6 but showing steadfast love to thousands of those who love me and keep my commandments.
Last week, at the very end of the sermon, I assigned homework due this morning. I know that’s not fair. Almost two-thirds of our church was gone last week because of the ice. I don’t want you to feel left out or behind, so I will tell you the assignment. Last week we began our sermon series on the ten commandments. For homework I assigned you to figure out the difference between the first and second commandment. Now, the Roman Catholic and the Lutheran traditions combine what most people consider to be the first and second commandment into one larger commandment. But whether you group them or not, the issue still remains. The same words are still there, and two things are still prohibited. So what’s the difference between the two things that are prohibited? And more importantly, why does it matter, and how could it be for your good? Stay with me thirty minutes to find out. Let’s begin in prayer. “Dear heavenly Father . . .”
Introduction: God Wants to Be Known
Last year I was able to meet in person two people I’d met before but only briefly. Most of my interactions with each person had been through impersonal means: books, Twitter, email, and text messages. I don’t want to make too much of this because I could have caught one of them on a bad day, but it seemed to me after spending time talking with each of them, one person wanted to be known, and the other didn’t. Here’s the question: which one do you imagine is more like God? Do you suppose God wants to be known? Now, I’m asking you something of a trick question. I intentionally worded the question, which do you imagine and do you suppose because later we’ll talk about the phrase “I like to imagine God as . . .” But for now, I’ll tell you that we don’t have to guess; we don’t have to suppose or imagine what God is like. God speaks.
Throughout the book of Exodus, the book we first find the ten commandments, God has said something over and over. In fact, the phrase is so central to the book, so often repeated, so weighty and prominent, that theologians, as I’ve said before, have given the phrase a name. They call it the “recognition formula.” The recognition formula goes like this: “then he will know” or “then they will know” or “then you will know.” God says, “When I do this, and when I do that, then you will know.” Know what—what will we know?“Then you will know,” God says, “that I am God.” Everything God does in the book of Exodus is so that you would recognize that God is God. All of the events in Exodus—from the baby in the basket floated down the Nile River, to a fiery bush that doesn’t burn, and to Moses and to the plagues and the angel of death passing over the homes with door jambs painted in blood and to the parting of the Red Sea and the closing of the Red Sea, the food on the ground called Manna, the pillar of fire, and the building of all that would be built for the proper worship of the God who is who he is—all of this was done so that people would know God is God. The recognition formula occurs nearly twenty times (e.g., 6:7; 9:13–16; 14:18).
And what is true of all of God’s action in Exodus, is also true of his law: the ten commandments express God’s desire for you to know him. The preface to the commandments begins, “And God spoke all these words” (Ex. 20:1). God speaks his law to you because he wants you to know him.
Last week we talked about the law of God as a pocketknife, that is, a tool that does many things at once. This week, I want you to see this commandment is about God’s desire for you to know him and that in knowing him—the real him, the real God, the God who IS WHO HE SAYS HE IS—is better than knowing an imaginary god. Left to your own, you would fashion God in your image. Left to your own, you’d make God into your likeness, projecting all of you on all of him. And when you make God into your own image, God becomes as weak, wounded, and wayward as you are.
God Prohibits You from Making Physical Images or Mental Images of Him
So, I’ll come back to the homework but let’s read the text of Exodus first (p. 57).
And God spoke all these words, saying, “I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery.
“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.” (Ex. 20:1–6)
It is possible to read the second commandment as prohibiting you from making all art because it literally says, “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.” But there is something important to notice. Author Jen Wilkin points out that this commandment “portrays idol worship as progressive: do not make, do not bow down, do not serve” (Ten Words to Live By, 34). That’s the key. You make it for yourself, as the passage says, and then you move from making, to bowing down and serving. The problem is not so much the making of art; the problem is making art for worship. In fact, throughout Exodus God commands his people to make beautiful art. In the spring we’ll spend a whole sermon on Exodus 35 about two people who are specifically said to be gifted by God’s very Spirit to “devise artistic designs, to work in gold and silver and bronze, in cutting stones for setting, and in carving wood, for work in every skilled craft” (Ex. 35:32–33). In other words, God’s very Spirit helps people make beautiful art. So, the second commandment is not merely about art.
I’m so thankful for the beauty of this building, first the work we did in the renovation project when we moved in, and, second, for the way one woman at our church beautifully decorates the building each season and another woman cleans the building for hours and hours each week to keep it beautiful. I’m thankful for the artistic quality of the testimony videos made for this series by another church member. I’m thankful for the watercolor painting of our church building hung by the front door, painted by a man at our church who has spent years honing artistic skill. We have an award-winning Christian novelist in our church who writes beautiful, artistic prose and tells stories that matter. There are others, too. And would that we had more and more of these in our church and in this world. So it’s not about art, per se, but worship, specifically false worship. You make it for yourself, as the passage says, and then you move from making, to bowing down and serving.
So, let’s come back around to our homework question: The first commandment says have no other God. The second commandment says don’t make an image or idol. What is the difference between the two commandments?
Here’s the answer: The first commandment prohibits you from having any gods besides the real God; the second commandment prohibits you from claiming the real God and changing him. I’ll say that again. The first commandment prohibits you from having any gods besides the real God; the second commandment prohibits you from claiming the real God and changing him. And representing God in a physical image changes him because the real God can’t be reduced to one image. Let me share it to you in the words of an author named J.I. Packer from his classic 1973 book Knowing God, in which he devotes an entire chapter to the second commandment. “The second commandment,” he writes, “thus deals, not with the object of our worship, but with the manner of it; what it tells us is that statues and pictures of the One whom we worship are not to be used as an aid to worshipping Him” (Packer, Knowing God, 39).
So, should we never have images of anything, even especially Jesus? One of our pastors has a painting of Jesus by the Italian painter Caravaggio. Is that wrong? Or what about television series about Jesus called The Chosen? You might really like the series The Chosen, and I know lots of people who do. I don’t want to take that away from you. I don’t want you to stop watching it. And organizations like Campus Crusade, now Cru, have been showing some version of a Jesus movie for decades, and it’s helped millions of people come to know God. But here is what I want to say in light of the second commandment: a responsible Christian should be able to find benefit in the series, and for that matter, paintings and Children’s books that have images of Jesus, but at the same time realize that those images and videos are not the real Jesus. And when you think of Jesus, the images you have should not overwhelmingly cause you to think about a certain actor or a certain book illustrator or painter. If they do, they might cross a line that should not be crossed.
Sometimes images of Jesus imagine him as having blue eyes and blond hair. Perhaps that helps some people realize that when Jesus became one of us, he became one of us. But I don’t have blue eyes or blond hair. And I think we can be sure, since Jesus came as a Middle Eastern man, he doesn’t have blond hair and blue eyes—and his skin is certainly darker than mine. Therefore, when you compress the real Jesus down into one image, it might reveal part of who the real Jesus is, it also, at the same time, conceals far more than it reveals. (This is a concern J.I. Packer sees behind the commandment.)
When pastors and authors talk about the second commandment, they almost always leap over to another story in Exodus where the people of God made an idol. Incidentally, at the same time Moses is on mount Sinai receiving the ten commandments, the people of God created an image of God to worship. Their leader, Aaron, made it for them. Aaron made a golden calf and said it was the God who brought them out of Egypt (Ex. 32:4). Aaron was not trying to have other gods before the real God. Instead, while Moses was away and talking to what they imagined to be a distant God, Aaron tried to give the people an image of the real God. But Aaron did so by changing the real God into one image for worship, the image of a golden calf.
It’s true that the calf may have communicated something of God’s strength, but, again, it concealed far more than it revealed. Note what author Jen Wilkin has to say about this. She writes, “Think about the enormity of the lie the golden calf tells: It is small, but God is immense. It is inanimate, but God is Spirit. It is location-bound, but God is everywhere fully present. It is created, but God is uncreated. It is new, but God is eternal. It is [not powerful], but God is [powerful]. It is destructible, but God is indestructible. It is of minor value, but God is of infinite value. It is blind and deaf and mute, but God sees, hears, and speaks” (Ten Words to Live By, 38).
And with the thought about speaking, we widen out. The images you make of God are not merely physical. The images you make of God can be, and often are, mental. This is why I had those lines at the beginning about what we suppose God to be like or what we imagine God to be like. Listen again to what Packer wrote almost fifty years ago.
Imaging God in our heads can be just as real as a breach of the second commandment as imaging Him by the works of our hands. How often do we hear this sort of thing: “I like to think of God as the great Architect (or, Mathematician; or, Artist).” “I don’t think of God as a Judge; I like to think of Him simply as a Father.” We know from experience how often remarks of this kind serve as the prelude to a denial of something that the Bible tells us about God. It needs to be said with the greatest possible emphasis that those who hold themselves free to think of God as they like are breaking the second commandment. At best, they can only think of God in the image of man—as an ideal man, perhaps, or a super-man. But God is not any sort of man. We were made in His image, but we must not think of Him as existing in ours. (Knowing God, 42, original emphasis removed)
Packer goes on to show that this kind of mental remaking of God will, in the end, make you ignorant of the real God, that is, wrong mental images hinder your from knowing God. Packer concludes, “We cannot know [God] unless He speaks and tells us about Himself. But in fact He has spoken” (43).
Therefore, it is not the secular world who is in the greatest danger of breaking the second commandment but those under the broad umbrella of Christendom. The way I’m using Christendom to speak of everyone everywhere who in some way makes a claim to Jesus. So all true Christians fit in Christendom, but so do Mormons, and Jehovah Witnesses and extreme versions of liberal or progressive Christianity. Christendom is everyone who in some way makes a claim about Jesus. And it’s Christendom who has the greatest danger of breaking the second commandment.
What I mean is this: God has revealed himself. He wants to be known. And we are not free to change him from how he has made himself known. If you tell me your name is Steve and your favorite color is Red, you would not like it if I introduced you to others by saying, “Hey, this is Joe; his favorite color is blue.”
Let me take one religious group within Christendom to illustrate more. Let’s talk about the more extreme versions of liberal or progressive Christianity. More extreme versions of liberal or progressive Christianity shouldn’t be called Christianity. It doesn’t teach the bodily resurrection of Jesus; more extreme version of liberal Christianity teaches that Jesus didn’t rise from the dead. As well, it doesn’t teach a bodily, physical return of Jesus at the end of time. The return of Christ is something, instead, that happens in the hearts of believers, and in this way, Jesus only “returns” to earth in believers’ hearts and in their actions. More extreme versions of progressive Christianity believe that salvation is found in other religions. It teaches that the Bible can’t be fully trusted to mean what it says, but rather, you must be the one to decided what is true, and if what you believe is true shows up some places in the Bible, then you can believe those parts, but not the others. And I haven’t even gotten to the sexual ethics of progressive Christianity yet, which are ethics refashioned not in the way God spoke them but in the way people want them to be.
Go back a few hundred years with me for a minute. Many years ago a great many religious people in America broke the second commandment by saying that the real God endorsed the kind of slavery that America committed. It was a great evil. But that great evil happened—the second commandment was broken as people said God was okay with American slavery—because, in large part, there were tremendous economic and cultural peer pressures to do so. It was culturally and economically advantageous to say that God endorsed American slavery, which of course he does not (1 Tim. 1:10 and many passages). That is one way in the past religious people broke the second commandment. Now, come back to today. Today, there are tremendous economic and social and cultural peer pressures for you to say that God endorses same-sex marriage as equivalent to heterosexual marriage. But to do so becomes a violation of the second commandment, a taking of what the real God has said and changing him. God is the same yesterday, today, and forever, and we should not change him.
Now, I want to be careful. Likely many of you have sincere questions about what the Bible really says on issues of sexuality, and I haven’t taken the time to show that this is what God has actually said. And I can’t in this sermon because of time, so I’ll just suggest one book, the one by Kevin DeYoung about this topic. It’s in our bookstore.
This leads to something broader I want to say. I read an article recently about institutions such as schools and churches (Brett McCracken, “We Used to Ask Institutions to Form Us. Now They Must Affirm Us,” The Gospel Coalition, November 19, 2020). The author tried to describe the cultural shift that has taken place in recent decades, which I think relates to why breaking the second commandment is the thing even professing Christians can do without thinking it’s a big deal. The shift, as the author put it, is from the desire to be shaped by an institution to the desire that institutions affirm us. So, in the past, someone might have joined the military to submit to the fire and forge that is the military, that is, to be shaped by the military. Or someone might have gone to a certain university so that they could be shaped by the fire and forge of that institution. But now people want institutions to affirm them. And this happens in the church all the time. People do not choose a church and a pastor to preach to them truth, but they choose a church that will affirm the belief they already have. Which leads me to suggest that if your version of God affirms everything that culture affirms, you should ask yourself if you might have broken the second commandment. And if your version of god has the exact same politics as you, you should wonder if perhaps, in some way, you have changed the real God.
Instead of you picking and choosing which commandments you think are valid, the commandment are supposed to, as one author put it (Jen Wilken), be like engraving tools that chip away at you. We are not to engrave the real God; he engraves us with his Word. God’s Word is supposed to fashion you into the image of the real Jesus, not you fashion Jesus into your image (Cf., Col. 3:10).
Yesterday we had our church book club and discussed the book Fahrenheit 451, a science fiction novel about a time when books are almost burned to extinction. When the main character happens to stumble upon a Bible, he shows it to a former English professor who has been cowardly hiding for decades. The English teacher takes the Bible, thumbs through some pages and says this about the way Jesus had been changed, “I often wonder if God recognizes His own son the way we’ve dressed him up, or is it dressed him down? He’s a regular peppermint stick now, all sugar-crystal . . .” (Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451).
The idea of calling Jesus a peppermint stick is a way of saying that Jesus has been made so syrupy sweet, he no longer is imagined to have a backbone or an ethical center. Jesus is just therapeutic medicine to make me feel good when I need a pick-me-up, rather than the Second Peron of the Trinity who in the beginning “was the Word . . . was with God, and . . . was God,” the one through whom “all things were made . . . and without him was not any thing made that was made” (John 1:1, 3). Consider how the author of Hebrews opens his letter and speaks of the real Jesus,
Long ago, at many times and in many ways, God spoke to our fathers by the prophets, but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son, whom he appointed the heir of all things, through whom also he created the world. [Jesus] is the radiance of the glory of God and the exact imprint of his nature, and [Jesus] upholds the universe by the word of his power. (Heb. 1:1–3a)
The letter of Hebrews goes on to praise Jesus as better than angel, better than the Old Testament high priests and Old Testament sacrifices, and better even than Moses.
The Real God Is Jealous for You—And that’s a Good Thing
And if Jesus is all of that, then when you make an image for worship of Jesus, whether a physical or mental image, that is, something less than who he really is and thus breaking the second commandment, that is a really big deal. Look again the wording.
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. (Ex. 20:4–6)
God takes who he is seriously. I don’t want to be overly crass or provocative, but I do want you to feel the weight of this. There’s a type of pornography that puts the face of known celebrities on the bodies of people doing things that those celebrities have not done, a way of taking a real person and changing them. This is wrong and a great evil. And if it’s evil for us to do to another human, how much more so to change God.
But notice, won’t you, that in addition to the seriousness of this all, you’ll notice his desire for grace. You can see this reflected in the statement about generations. On the one hand three or four, and on the other hand, thousands. You can see God’s desire to give grace and to be known and loved for thousands of generations. Indeed, he’s jealous for you to know him.
I’ll close talking about the word jealous. I know that probably catches some of you off guard, Like why would God be jealous—isn’t that always bad? And isn’t there a commandment about that, thou shall not covet, which is basically thou shall not be jealous?
I think this is part of how we see the gospel, the good news in these commandments. You see, when you have an imaginary friend, that friend does everything you want. (I’ve heard Tim Keller make similar points before.) When you want to play at the park, they play at the park. When you want to watch a movie, your imaginary friend watches the movie. Imaginary friends always give you their lunch money when you need it because they do whatever you want them to do. But an imaginary friend or an imaginary pastor or an imaginary God is not so helpful to you when you drift off into things you shouldn’t, like when you go to the park to meet up with someone who isn’t your wife or watch movies that you shouldn’t be watching. Real friends, real pastors, and most importantly, the real God can’t be shaped to affirm everything you do. And that’s a good thing. Because we are often weak, wounded, and wayward, and the real God is not. The real God is jealous for a relationship with you.
In the video we played before the sermon, Mariana said, “This was different. I was starting to feel curious about who God was, more than who I would say he was and who people said he was. I wanted to see who God said he was.” The good news of the gospel is that these same desires are also God’s desires. He wants you to know him too. Indeed, Jesus is jealous to know you the way a faithful husband is jealous to know his bride.
Before I pray and we have communion together, I’ll mention that next week pastor Ben will be teaching the third commandment about taking the Lord’s name in vain. I’d love for you to give some thought about what this means. I’ll tell you that, likely, there is no commandment that we typically have a shallower understanding of than the third commandment. The real understanding, the deeper understanding is so much better. And if this sermon picked on the Christendom out there, the third commandment shines the spotlight on us, the people who say we take God at his Word. Let’s pray . . .
Family Discussion Questions
Can you list all of the ten commandments without looking? If you missed any of them, which ones did you miss? Why?
Can you re-say in your own words the first and second commandments? What is the difference between them?
Pastor Benjamin talked about how the passage says God is “jealous.” What is he jealous for and why is this a good thing for us? How is the good news story of Jesus an outworking of God’s jealousy for relationship with people?
