20:4-5a (HRV) “You shall
not make unto you a graven image, nor any manner of 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 unto them, nor serve them;”
This used to be a confusing commandment for me because I
saw no real difference between this and the first commandment of having no
other gods before Him. After all, if
you’re not worshipping any other gods, then you’re not going to make any graven
image to another god, so why did YHWH feel the need to include this
commandment?
Because there is a difference. This commandment doesn't mean what I first thought it meant. While the first commandment says that you
will worship YHWH and YHWH alone, this commandment essentially says that you
will not put God in a box. You will not limit him to anything you can see and understand, and then call that God.
We need to see this commandment from the viewpoint of the
people of the world at that time, because YHWH was giving them this commandment
in a way easy to understand to them. The
people of the world were making images of their gods all the time. It gave them a way of feeling like they could
understand their god by defining the characteristics of their god in an easy to
recognize way. This is what YHWH was
telling us not to do. You have no right
to define Him according to your preconceptions about who God is or should be. He is not limited to what you can comprehend. He is, and always will be, so much more. By limiting him to what you can understand,
you are placing yourself in a position of being able to decide who God is and
is not. Even if what you do understand
is a correct piece of God, it’s a small piece of God and not a true complete image of
Him.
YHWH is not definable by any standard of ours.
Yes, He gives us explanations of Himself in small bits and pieces so we can slowly grow in understanding of who He is, but He is not limited to what we see or know. He merely compares Himself to things we can see and know in order to assist us in the process of understanding. He is bright like the sun, but He is not the
sun. He is as gentle as a lamb, but He
is not limited to being only a lamb. He gave us physical
examples to help us understand aspects of Himself, but He is not limited to
those aspects. We need to allow Him to
define Himself. We cannot tell Him who
or what He is like. When we make a
physical graven image, or, translating that into modern ideas, when we place a
religious system around Him that defines exactly how He acts and what He looks
like, we define God and thereby claim some sort of authority or control over
Him.
We break the second commandment when we establish a
religious precedent of our own or create our own rules about who He is and how
He acts. God said that we were not to add to or remove one jot or tittle of what He gave us. "Jot and tittle" translates literally into "Letter and punctuation mark." Most people understand that God told us not to do that because what He gives us is perfect, and obviously any changes we make to it make it imperfect, but another reason is because if we say that we have the
ability to define, or redefine, God, and then bow down to that image of who He
is, we may claim that we’re bowing down to Him, but we’re really bowing down to
ourselves.
I know of several people who do not take photographs
because they feel it’s breaking the second commandment. There are others who feel that artwork of any
kind, whether it’s drawing, sculpting, engraving, or doing what Paul and I are doing by making this comic is breaking the second
commandment. This is not what the second
commandment is forbidding us to do. Take
your photo. Carve your sculpture. Draw a picture from your own
imagination. These are not evil actions. The impetus of this commandment is “Do not
limit God by your own limited and faulty understanding of His reality.” In short, if I draw a picture of an eagle and say that it's a wonderful creation of God's, that's ok. If I draw a picture of an eagle and say that that's God, even if I have true reverence in my heart for Him, that's wrong. I've limited YHWH to the mere attributes of a single creature.
Exodus 20:20 (HRV) (In the NKJV this verse is 20:23) “You shall not make with
Me—gods of silver, or gods of gold, you shall not make unto you.”
Exodus 20:22 (HRV) (In the NKJV this verse is 20:25) “And if you make Me an altar of
stone, you shall not build it of hewn stones; for if you lift up your tool upon
it, you have profaned it.”
In conjunction with the second commandment are these two
verses later in Exodus twenty. We are
not to make gods WITH Him. This means
that making false gods doesn’t necessarily mean we think we’re turning from
Him. We can believe that we’re doing it
in conjunction with Him and that it has His blessing and still be wrong. If we redefine God according to our own
system of beliefs, we have created a false god, even if we name it Jesus and
say that we did it for Him. We are not to shape
Him, He shapes us. We are not to use our “tools” on Him. If he gives us a "stone" to work with, then that's the stone He designed to use in that way.
Human history is littered with religious leaders, whether they call themselves Jewish High Priests or Catholic Popes or Protestant Pastors, altering what God has given us about Himself because they didn't approve of the way He wanted things done. The child always wants to change the parent's wishes because the child is selfish. Sometimes we put our "tools" to His "stones" because we're are deceived into thinking it's His will, but usually we know that we simply don't like what He has said and we want to redefine it.
YHWH's worship, instructions, details about Himself, and everything He's given us is of His design, not ours. We are not to adjust it according to our
whims, desires, or limited understanding.
Doing so gives us a faulty understanding of who He is and severs our connection with Him in some way. Is that really what we want?
Scott Snyder
