The Ten Commandments, Part 2: Idolatry
In the first part of this series, I looked at the context for the ten commandments. What I want to do with the rest of this series is to take a closer look at one or two of the other commandments, to see if there is any meaning to them beyond the popular understanding. In this article I will be looking at the second commandment: Idolatry.
‘You shall not make for yourself a carved image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is on 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 fourth generation of those who hate me, but showing steadfast love to thousands of those who love me and keep my commandments.’
Deuteronomy 5:8-10
The first thing to mention is, there is an awful lot in those verses! Compared to the first commandment – a mere eight words long – this is much longer and more complex. I don’t want to go into the reasons behind that for the time being (mainly because I don’t actually know!), but I want to focus more on what is forbidden here.
The conventional view of this commandment – or at least, the one I was brought up with – was that it explicitly forbids idolatry, which is defined as “any thing which you worship instead of God”. So, for example, it is possible for money to be an idol, if you worship it rather than God. It is possible for good health to be an idol, if you worship it instead of God — the application of this commandment can be for ideas as well as physical things.
However, I’d always been a little bit confused by this in the context of the first commandment: “You shall have no other gods before me” seems to explicitly forbid idolatry anyway. Isn’t idolatry basically having another god before the one true God?
It is possible that this is a clarification of the first commandment, and God is just giving the people a more specific example of how it is to be worked out. I certainly don’t think the understanding of idolatry as I outlined above is wrong – it is definitely a sin to worship anything before God, whether it is forbidden by the first or second commandment!
Having said that, could there be anything else this commandment means?
Let’s take a look at what is forbidden: a ‘carved image … [that] you shall not bow down to’. It’s worth mentioning at this point that this doesn’t prevent all carved images and other similar sculptures or artwork – for example, in Numbers 21 Moses makes a bronze image of a snake so that the Israelites could look up to it and live, after being bitten by a poisonous snake. This is clearly not idolatry – in fact, Moses was instructed to make the bronze snake by God! It is clearly the worship which makes an image permissible or not.
But I think that would be missing an element out of this commandment. Earlier on in the article I said that idolatry could be defined as worshipping any thing which you worship instead of God. In the case of these carved images, they were created specifically as gods in and of themselves, e.g. the Baals and Ashtoreths of the Caananites that the Israelites were told (repeatedly) not to worship.
This is all true. However, I believe that we are also forbidden from creating and worshipping images of God – not just images of false gods. False gods are forbidden by the first commandment. Creating images of God is not.
In Exodus 32, while Moses is on Mount Sinai receiving the ten commandments, the people grow restless and ask Aaron to “make us gods who shall go before us”:
So all the people took off the rings of gold that were in their ears and brought them to Aaron. And he received the gold from their hand and fashioned it with a graving tool and made a golden calf. And they said, “These are your gods, O Israel, who brought you up out of the land of Egypt!” When Aaron saw this, he built an altar before it. And Aaron made proclamation and said, “Tomorrow shall be a feast to the LORD.” And they rose up early the next day and offered burnt offerings and brought peace offerings.
Exodus 32:2-6
Now this is a very interesting passage. What do the Israelites think that Aaron is creating? Is it an image of “a” god, or is it the image of “the” God? The Israelites saying “these are your gods” would seem to suggest that they think it’s not the same God, but Aaron saying “… a feast to the LORD” would suggest God himself.
If we look a little further back in Deuteronomy, God commands the Israelites:
Therefore watch yourselves very carefully. Since you saw no form on the day that the LORD spoke to you at Horeb out of the midst of the fire, beware lest you act corruptly by making a carved image for yourselves…”
Deuteronomy 4:15-16
The reason that God gives the Israelites for not making any idols is because he does not have a visible form. They are not to try and imagine what God looks like – because if they created an image of God and started worshipping it, that would be idolatry.
The New Testament also picks up this theme. In John 5:37, Jesus says “And the Father who sent me has himself borne witness about me. His voice you have never heard, his form you have never seen…” and in 2 Corinthians 5:7, Paul says “we walk by faith, not by sight.” I believe that in this commandment, God is telling the Israelites to “walk by faith, not by sight” – any images they made with their own hands were liable to become idols, because people would start worshipping the images themselves rather than the true and living God.
This leaves us with an interesting question: how helpful are images of God today, and at what point do they become idols? Also, if we don’t know what Jesus actually looked like, how helpful is it to have images of him?
I can’t claim to be able to answer those questions, but I do think we need to be careful that we are not worshipping a distorted image of God – a distorted image of our own creation. We need to worship what God has revealed himself to be in the Bible, and not just our own little picture of him. Of course, to an extent this is impossible – no-one has a full and complete view of God – but we need to try.
Practically speaking, I think this means we should be very careful about having any statues or paintings in our churches which depict Jesus or God: are they the kind of things which people might focus on during prayers, music etc? And following on from that – would people end up praying or worshipping the image directly, rather than God himself?
It’s impossible to tell, but I personally believe it is better to err on the side of caution. We cannot imagine what God is like physically, all we can do is worship who he has revealed himself to be through his own words in the scriptures.
I pray that God will reveal more of himself to us more clearly so that we can worship him “in spirit and in truth”.
Scripture quotations taken from the ESV unless otherwise stated.
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