Merredin Uniting Church

Exodus 20:1-20:17 READ TOGETHER

And God spoke all these words:

2 “I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery.  3 “You shall have no other gods before me.

4 “You shall not make for yourself an idol in the form of anything in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the waters below.  5 You shall not bow down to them or worship them; for I, the LORD your God, am a jealous God, punishing the children for the sin of the fathers to the third and fourth generation of those who hate me,  6 but showing love to a thousand generations of those who love me and keep my commandments.

7 “You shall not misuse the name of the LORD your God, for the LORD will not hold anyone guiltless who misuses his name.

8 “Remember the Sabbath day by keeping it holy.  9 Six days you shall labor and do all your work,  10 but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the LORD your God. On it you shall not do any work, neither you, nor your son or daughter, nor your manservant or maidservant, nor your animals, nor the alien within your gates.  11 For in six days the LORD made the heavens and the earth, the sea, and all that is in them, but he rested on the seventh day. Therefore the LORD blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy.

12 “Honor your father and your mother, so that you may live long in the land the LORD your God is giving you.  13 “You shall not murder.  14 “You shall not commit adultery.  15 “You shall not steal.  16 “You shall not give false testimony against your neighbor.

17 “You shall not covet your neighbor’s house. You shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, or his manservant or maidservant, his ox or donkey, or anything that belongs to your neighbor.”

When we read the second commandment our immediate temptation is to arrogantly dismiss it. Christians today don’t have a problem with little wooden or stone idols so why not move on to something a bit more relevant. Technology and scientific explanation have made idol worship something you read about in History books.

We know better than to worship the Egyptian sun god, we can flip a switch and get all the light we need.

We now know that rain is caused by the evaporation of water. Winds blow these clouds of water vapor over the land mass where the vapor condenses and falls to the earth. The storm god, no longer gets credit or blame for the weather.

So at first look the second command seems unnecessary. Of all the temptations we struggle with, having little idols is well down the list if it makes the list at all. And yet the Bible seems to obsess on this subject. Biblical writers mentioned idolatry more than they mentioned any other commandment.

Why does the Bible spend so much time condemning such an apparently weak sin?

One answer to that question is that the Old Testament is a cycle of the Children of God following God, prospering, turning to idols, being captured, following God, …

But the appeal of idols wasn’t the only reason the Bible worries so much about idolatry. Perhaps more than any other commandment, the second law of God illustrates the powerful connection between what we believe about God, and how we live. What people think about God shapes their behavior. If we reduce God down to a manageable form, we not only diminish His stature, we shrink ourselves.

No one explains the connection between bad theology and bad living better than Paul in Romans 1: 18 – 25. (Read)

18 The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of men who suppress the truth by their wickedness,  19 since what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them.  20 For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse.

21 For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened. 22 Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools  23 and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images made to look like mortal man and birds and animals and reptiles.

24 Therefore God gave them over in the sinful desires of their hearts to sexual impurity for the degrading of their bodies with one another.  25 They exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and worshiped and served created things rather than the Creator—who is forever praised. Amen.
The text goes on to show that failure to obey the second command leads to a lifestyle that violates every other command. Because people worshipped created things rather than the creator, because they exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images made to look like mortal man and animals and reptiles, they became people who were incapable of keeping any of the other commandments.

The Bible spends so much time condemning idolatry because not only is it our favorite sin, it is the Pandora’s box which unleashes every other sin.
You are probably thinking right now, “This is not our problem. We know better. Our sins are much more sophisticated, much less superstitious.” Aha! So then let’s talk about the Second Commandment itself. What did it actually forbid?

The first commandment forbids worshipping anything other than God.

The second commandment takes that one step further by forbidding us to worship God under any false form.

This is exactly what the Israelites did when they manipulated Aaron into fashioning the golden calf.

In Exodus 32:1-4 we see the whole story.

When the people saw that Moses was so long in coming down from the mountain, they gathered around Aaron and said, “Come, make us gods who will go before us. As for this fellow Moses who brought us up out of Egypt, we don’t know what has happened to him.”

2 Aaron answered them, “Take off the gold earrings that your wives, your sons and your daughters are wearing, and bring them to me.”  3 So all the people took off their earrings and brought them to Aaron.  4 He took what they handed him and made it into an idol cast in the shape of a calf, fashioning it with a tool. Then they said, “These are your gods, O Israel, who brought you up out of Egypt.”
Notice that they said, “These are your gods who brought you out of Egypt.” In vs. 5 Aaron says, “Tomorrow there will be a festival to the Lord.”

It isn’t that they were not giving God the credit for their Egyptian deliverance. Their sin was in reducing god to the form of a calf. For four hundred years the only authority they had known was an authority they could see.

First there was Pharaoh, who was considered a god by his own people and by his own decree.
Second to Pharaoh there had been a host of idols in the land of Egypt. They had been surrounded by symbols and structures of authority that they could see with their own eyes and experience with their own senses.

Even Moses, their new authority figure, was visible and audible. He was flesh and blood. Now he was on the mountain and had been out of sight for a month. With all the fire and thunder and smoke he was probably dead. As far as they were concerned any authority that you couldn’t see was no authority at all. They craved something tangible, visible, and manageable so they persuaded Aaron into casting the calf.

I always thought that when the Israelites bowed down to the golden calf they were worshiping the calf. But according to Exodus 32 they were worshiping God as a calf.

So the sin of idolatry isn’t limited to just calling a statue God and bowing down to it; It is any attempt to shrink God to a manageable, controllable, predictable form and we are all guilty. Let me suggest two ways in which we practice idolatry today.

1. Secular Idolatry
Secular idolatry has little or no religious devotion. There are no rituals to sustain it, no ceremony or service, and it lacks any clear structure. People are involved in secular idolatry when they search for meaning, success, happiness, security, peace or wholeness in anything other than God himself.

We assume that a physical, material object or person will do for us what only God can do. We turn to these physical things because we can see them; to touch them, control them. We trust them because they are available to our senses in a way that God is not.

In Colossians 3:5 Paul says, “Put to death, therefore, whatever belongs to your earthly nature: sexual immorality, impurity, lust, evil desires and greed, which is idolatry.”

All these things are “idolatry”. They declare that the invisible God is not enough. They offer something we can touch and see and, ultimately, control. All of these are sensual desires – they pander to our senses and while we think we can control them, they actually control us – they become our god.
When we equate financial success with personal worth we have pushed the abundant life Jesus promised to a number at the bottom of our bank statement. Salvation is no longer freedom from sin, but freedom from financial problems.
God’s promise of contentment gets replaced by the world’s promise of abundance. Financial success becomes a desirable objective and we ease our consciences by claiming that God wants his people to prosper.

Secular idolatry turns a house into a modem day status symbol and a vehicle into a chariot of the god who drives it.

Of course we know it is God who sends the blessings, but we turn the blessing which we can see and touch and taste into an idol. And then, when we lose the tangible things we also lose our faith in God. It is the gift we love and trust and turn to, in secular idolatry, not the giver.

2. Sacred idolatry.
Where the secular form of this sin has no religious flavor, sacred idolatry is flooded in the language and structures and trappings of spirituality.
Remember we said that idolatry is nothing more than an attempt to reduce God to a manageable size. For the Israelites, immature as they were from 400 years of Egyptian religious and cultural propaganda, God had to be made as small as a calf. But our spiritual idolatry is more elaborate. God is reduced not to the crude image of a cow, but to a sophisticated system of doctrine and tradition.

Our churches and theology today are not heaven on earth. They are a misguided attempt to grasp holy things by means of the hints earthly things can provide, and by the misinterpretation of the words of Scripture in order to suit a secular religion.
We reduce God to our culture, our system, our church, our tradition and in doing so we have walled Him in within the confines of a man-made temple we call truth. And the very doors which are intended to invite others into the truth of the Gospel now keep God locked outside..

God was too big to be represented in the golden calf.
He was too big for the traditions the Pharisees had built up like a hedge around the law.
And he is too big to be confined to our particular way of expressing our faith. The only physical thing that was big enough to perfectly represent the image of God on earth was Jesus Christ. He is, Paul said, the exact representation of the Father.

Perhaps that why the Bible spends so much time condemning idolatry? God didn’t want us trying to figure out what he looked like. He wanted to reveal Himself in the person of Christ. Jesus was God’s self-portrait. Any human effort to depict God is doomed to be a crude, inadequate representation. God is just too big to be confined to any human idol, no matter how spiritual it may seem.

We can talk about this in theory, but until it becomes uncomfortably personal we have not yet begun to understand the second commandment. Remember, the pronoun “you,” in each of the commands is singular. God means for these commandments to be taken personally. So let me ask two questions….
1. What is the source of your sense of worth?
If your answer refers to anything that can be bought, sold, owned, driven, lived in, worn, or held in your hands, you’ re looking to the wrong god.

If it can be inscribed on a plaque or stenciled on the door of your house or etched on a piece of paper; if it has a birth date or will die on some unknown future date, if it is subject to the effects of time, if it is limited by space, you have shrunk God to a manageable size.

2. What is the source of your security?
If your answer refers to any thing that cannot survive the fire, which God will send at the sound of the last trumpet, you have placed your confidence in an idol.
If your source of security is membership in a particular church or how well you follow a system of doctrine, however rooted in scripture it may be, you have reduced the infinite, indefinable, omnipresent God to a limited, describable, parochial deity.
If God is contained within the structures of our theology and doctrines he is too small to offer any eternal security.

Try to understand why we do this…We try to make God manageable so that we can serve him.

But that just leads to idolatry. God is huge, scary, and like nothing on this earth, but it is only when we try to seek Him out. Really seek him out can we begin to understand the matchless love of our Father for His children.