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All right, we're gonna continue
our Heidelberg Catechism study. If you would need a book, you
raise your hand, Quentin will get one for you. We are looking at Lord's Day
35, which is questions 96 to 98. That's on page 95 of the
books for you. We are in that third section
of the Heidelberg Catechism. Who can tell me what the three
sections of the catechism are about? Sin, salvation, and service,
or? guilt, grace, and gratitude.
So we're in that gratitude or service section where we talk
about how we respond then to what God has done for us. And
right now we're going through the Ten Commandments, and we
did the first commandment last week, or last time. So kids,
what is the second commandment? What'd you say, Lydia? Don't
make any graven images, right? So we talked a lot last time
about idols. We talked about idolatry and
worshipping things, both literal, physical idols, and also all
kinds of things that become more important in our hearts than
God. And so we have already looked at the idea of idols in the first
commandment. We've already talked about not
worshipping anything other than God. But then you have this commandment
that says, you shall not make any graven images, you shall
not bow down to them nor serve them. By the Lord your God, I'm
a jealous God. Some people look at that and
they just lump the first two commandments together. If you
remember from a few weeks ago, the Roman Catholic Ten Commandments
lumps these first two together and make them one commandment,
and then they split the commandment about coveting. And in Judaism,
they also split, or they also combine one and two, but they,
I think they make the preamble a commandment by itself, saying,
I am the Lord your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt,
is one of the commands. So anyway, both in the Jewish tradition
and in the Roman Catholic Church and Lutherans, this is combined
with the first commandment. And so we need to think about
whether that's right. Is this different from the first
commandment? Is there something else going on in the second commandment?
Or is it really just explaining what it means not to worship
other gods? And the question would be, why
would God include another commandment here if it's just the same as
the first commandment? So to help us see the difference here. I'll ask you a question. What
commandment did Israel break when it worshipped the golden
calf? Okay, so they worshipped an image
and bowed down to it. So that's breaking the second
commandment. Did they break the first commandment
when they worshipped the golden calf? Right, that's the key. They were
supposedly worshipping Yahweh. When Aaron made the golden calf,
he said, today is a festival, I think it's today, he says,
to Yahweh. He says, oh I have it here, he
says, tomorrow shall be a feast to the Lord. But he also says,
these are your gods, plural, these, plural. So I wouldn't
say they weren't breaking the first commandment. And we'll
actually see a little bit here that if you break the second
commandment, you end up breaking the first commandment. But in the second
commandment, the problem, or in the Golden Calf, the problem
was that it was the way in which they were worshiping God. They
were worshiping God through an image when God had told them
that that's not how they were supposed to, they should have
known that that's not how to worship God. And so I hope you'll see
here that the first commandment is about who you worship, whom,
should it be whom, is that right? Whom you worship. And the second
commandment is about how you worship. So if you get nothing
else from today, that's the thing to remember. The first commandment
is about whom you worship. The second commandment is about
how you worship. And so, that's what we see here
in this first question in this section, question 96. It says,
what does God require in the second commandment? Answer, that
we in no way make any image of God, nor worship him in any other
way than he has commanded us in his word. That we in no way
make any image of God, nor worship him in any other way than he
has commanded us in his word. So as you think about the second
commandment, think through the wording of it, or if you have
it in front of you, you can look at it, and see if you see any mention
of other gods. It doesn't actually mention worshipping
other gods. It says, you shall not make a
graven image. of any likeness, and then it gives you all the
different types of likenesses, you shall not bow down to it or serve
it, bow down to them or serve them. For I, the Lord your God,
am a jealous God. And so it's not the same as the
first commandment. And it's really, as I've said
already, it's really talking about how we worship God. And
one of the clearest passages that helps us understand that
is in Deuteronomy 4, it's that first passage in your book there
under Question 96. And I want to read this here
for you. Deuteronomy 4, 15-19 says, This is speaking to Israel,
by the way. lest you act corruptly and make
for yourselves a carved image in the form of any figure, the
likeness of male or female, the likeness of any animal that is
on the earth, or the likeness of any winged bird that flies
in the air, the likeness of anything that creeps on the ground, or
the likeness of any fish that is in the water beneath the earth.
And take heed, lest you lift your eyes to heaven, and when
you see the sun, the moon, and the stars, all the hosts of heaven,
you feel driven to worship them and serve them, which the Lord
your God has given to all the peoples under the whole heaven
as a heritage. So you see in that passage, it's
very clearly connecting the idea of graven images with worshiping
God himself. He says, you didn't see any form.
When God spoke to Israel out of the fire, out of the smoke
at Mount Sinai, he says, you didn't see any form. You shouldn't
make any form, any visible form that you worship as God. But
then interestingly, by the time you get to the end of what I
just read, he's talking about worshiping other things. He says, thus you
turn your eyes up and you worship the sun, you worship the moon. It's making the point that if
you make an image of God, you actually end up worshiping something
that isn't God. And so it ends up bleeding into
the first commandment, like I said. But the origin of the command
about graven images is about how you worship God himself,
whether you worship him in the way he's commanded or in our
own innovative ways. And so it says here, and I believe
the Catechism is correct, that we may not make images of God. And there are all kinds of artistic
representations of God that have been made, but this command is saying we
should not make images of God. You sometimes see images of God
the Father as an old bearded man or something like that. Even
in comical, you know, people have in cartoons and things like
that, you'll have God show up. And we may be so used to that
idea, because we see it happening around us, particularly with
pictures of Jesus, we may be so used to seeing pictures of
Jesus that we just don't even think about it. But this command
says, you shall not make an image of God. You shall not, because
we worship God. And if we have an image of God,
we will worship, we will worship him through those images. Those
images are in our minds. But why in particular, if the
command is about worship in general, why particularly does it pick
on carved images? Why does God, choose this way
of worshiping him as the thing to prohibit and the command?
Why would he not state it more generally? And the reason is
that this was the way that most people worshiped in those days.
Right? Most religions, and still most
animistic polytheistic religions around the world still have some
kind of image that they worship and some kind of image that they
pray to. And so they have some kind of visual representation
of their gods. And so the Israelites were used
to that. Right, if you have studied ancient
Egypt at all, I think most of you kids have probably studied
Egypt in school because there's all kinds of information about
it, right? And you know just how many images of their gods
they had. just all over the place. And so this is the culture they
were coming out of. They knew that so well, and they
thought, you know, this is a good way to, this might be a good
way to worship our God, which is what you see them doing with
the golden calf. But there's a great passage in Deuteronomy
12 that helps us see, or helps us see that this shouldn't be
the way that we do things. Deuteronomy 12, it's on your page 96 there,
verses 30 and 32. This is God, or this is Moses
speaking to Israel. It says, take heed to yourself
that you are not ensnared to follow them after they are destroyed
from before you, and that you do not inquire after their gods,
saying, how did these nations serve their gods? I also will
do likewise. You shall not worship the Lord
your God in that way. And if you can, if you want,
if you're underlining things, underline in that way, in that passage.
that the temptation that Moses is talking about is that you
go into a place and you look at the people around you and
you say, hey, look at the way they worship their God. Isn't
that neat? Doesn't that look nice? Maybe
we should worship our God in that way. And so he's not talking
about, he's not just talking about not worshiping their gods.
He's saying you shouldn't take your cues in what to do in worship
from other religions or from the culture around you. That
our idea of how to worship God shouldn't just come from the
people around us and what's popular or what's easy, but should come
from what God himself commands us to do in worship. And so you
can think maybe for a little bit about how the Second Commandment
might have been worded today. If the focus then was carved
images because that was such a temptation for them, you think
about what ways are we tempted to worship like the world around
us? What ways are we tempted to express
devotion in the way that we see people around us doing it all
the time? And as I've thought about this, I thought about the
worship of pop stars, and the worship in the concert experience,
and of celebrities in general, and that we have a type of worship
that happens in our so-called secular culture, where you have
this person on the stage, and you ramp up, you have opening
acts, and you get this person who finally comes out, and there's
all of this work to be done to amp up the crowd, through the
throbbing bass and the smoke machines and whatever else, the
lighting and everything like that. That's our culture of worship
that's going on around us. That when we're focused on someone
and we think they're really great, that's what we do. We amp up
all of this energy and this sort of emotional manipulation to
get you to feel like devoting yourself to this person who's
on the stage. And the sad reality is that if you look at the churches
around our country, that is what we have started doing in our
worship. We have started following the
cues of our culture of how to worship, and we use these sort
of amp-up kind of emotionally manipulative ways of doing things,
and we use the same stages and the same lights and the same
smoke machines. And our worship leaders have to be good looking,
and we have this sort of culture that looks a lot like how devotion
and worship happens in the culture around us. And so we have to beware that
we're not just following the cues of the people around us.
And the reality is that that's not the only way to corrupt worship.
We can be tempted to prioritize other things maybe that God has
not commanded. Maybe for you it's more the incense and the
robes and the high church kind of thing that we see in other
religions, that maybe we wish we had that in our worship and
we incorporate that. Or maybe for you it's just, old,
really traditional-sounding good organ music, and I don't know,
whatever your temptation is of something that is brought in
that is extra from what God has commanded in His Word, that's
the equivalent of graven images in their day. It's something
that is not clearly in Scripture that God has commanded us to
do in worship, that we bring in because we think it's a good
idea and because we think it helps us to worship, just like
they thought that worshiping graven images would help them
worship God. And so we should expect, in a
sense, that our worship, we should expect to be tempted to worship
like the people around us. We should be tempted, we should
expect it to be a little bit hard to be careful and right
in what we do in worship because it's not what comes naturally
to the people around us. What came naturally to them then
was graven images and I think what comes naturally to us now
is particularly that sort of emotionally driven pop star style
of worship. But I also want to say and clarify
clearly here that emotion in worship is not wrong, and it
in fact should be there, and we should expect to be moved
by the truth of God's Word, and even by singing. God has commanded
us to sing. We should have music in our worship,
and music is emotionally linked and is emotionally driven, and
we should work hard so that our music is still fitting for the
emotion of the psalm. So we have some freedom within
that command to sing the psalms and to sing together, to be emotionally
engaged in that. But we have to be so careful
to protect against the influence of the world around us to corrupt
our worship or to make us take on the way that they do things
instead of doing what God has commanded. And so we have to
That's a difficult thing, and we need to keep even checking
ourselves, and we can get on our high horse sometimes as RPs
that we have the way to do it, and we need to be watching ourselves
and say, are we worshipping God properly? Whether or not we're
doing it the traditional way. So the focus here is on images
in this question and answer, and so it goes on then, you know,
if we're not supposed to have images of God, does that mean
no visual artwork of any kind? And that's the question there,
question 97. May we not make any image at all? Answer. God may not and cannot be imaged
in any way. For as for creatures, though
they may indeed be imaged, yet God forbids the making or keeping
of any likeness of them, either to worship them or to serve God
by them. And so you have this question
here, and often, if I tell someone that I don't want to have images
of God, and then the Second Commandment still holds, they'll say, well,
you know, then you're not allowed to make any pictures of any kind.
And there are Christians who believe that. There are many
in the Mennonite tradition, and the more conservative end of
things, who don't believe you should have any pictures of any kind.
They don't want their photograph taken. They don't believe there
should ever be images of living things, of creatures, or human
beings. And you see some of that in the
Muslim world. In Islam, there's this tradition
of the artwork of Islam being primarily geometric, or the letters
of the Arabic alphabet done in a really beautiful way. But they
refrain from doing images of living things as well, for the
most part. But the question is, is that
really what this command is all about? The answer here does say, right
at the front, like we've already been saying, God himself may
not and cannot be imaged in any way. So we reestablish that point. And I'll say, I want to emphasize
the words, and cannot be imaged. Because that's important here.
It's not that we know what God looks like and we're not allowed
to reproduce it. It's we don't know. We cannot. produce an image
of God. And so any image that we produce
is going to be false. It's going to be communicating
an untruth about our God because we don't know what he looks like.
And so if you, like I said before, if you make an image of God and
you're worshiping through it, you ultimately end up worshiping
something that's not God because it's not an image of the true
God. He has not revealed a visible image of himself. And the question
then is, well, what about Jesus? Because Jesus did have a visible
countenance, right? He appeared in the flesh, and
people saw him face-to-face, and Thomas fell down and worshipped
him in person. And so he was worshipped. His
image, in a sense, was worshipped. His body, he was worshipped in
his physical form when he was on this earth. But I think it's
significant and important that God has not preserved for us
what Jesus looked like. Yes, Jesus appeared in visible
form, but we have not been told what he looked like. And pictures
of Jesus are always then a result of our imaginations. And so we
end up worshiping something that, someone who is not Jesus. And
you can see this so clearly with all of the blonde-haired, blue-eyed
Jesuses out there. Jesus was, and he always looks
like a supermodel. I mean, he looks, he's the most
good-looking, strong, again, blonde-haired, blue-eyed, so
often, person you can imagine. And the reality is, Jesus was
a Middle Eastern Jew. Isaiah 53 tells us he had no
form or majesty that we should look at him. He was not a good-looking
man, particularly, as far as we know. And it's significant
that the Bible gives us zero physical description of Jesus.
Outside of Isaiah 53 saying He had no former majesty, we are
given nothing about His height or His hair color or anything
like that. And if God intended for us to
be making images of Him, then He would have provided some of
that. And when you do have an image of Jesus, we we are making
an image of the one that we worship. And you might say, well, I don't
sit and pray to my painting of Jesus. I don't sit and pray to
my storybook Bible that has pictures of Jesus in it. But if you have
a picture of the one whom you worship, you are worshiping,
that image is in your mind and it becomes part of whom you worship.
It becomes part of how you're worshiping that God. And this,
again, this is so, It's such a minority position in the Christian
world these days. It seems so strange to not have
pictures of Jesus. But if you have a picture of
your God, you can't separate Jesus' natures. People say, well,
Jesus is a man. I'm just drawing a picture of
a man. But Jesus is God and man. He is never just one or just
the other. And so when you make a picture
of Jesus, you are making a picture of your God, and it is the one
whom you worship. And I would really, I would urge
you to think through this. It makes life difficult as a
parent when you're trying to come up with materials to teach
your children, and a story Bible that's not chock full of pictures
of Jesus, but But I am very thankful for a childhood where that was
a priority, and I don't have a particular, when I see pictures
of Jesus, it doesn't seem, that's not Jesus to me. It is not what
I grew up with, and I don't, I'm thankful not to have that
image in my head all the time when I think of who Jesus is. So, I'd be happy to talk more
about that, but we need to be really careful not to be making
pictures of Jesus. And Nicole asked me beforehand what that
means for nativity scenes. And, of course, you've got a
little baby Jesus there, often quite nondescript, sometimes,
you know, depending on how detailed the nativity scene is, maybe
not even really be particularly represented. And that's something
I've been wrestling with this week. And I will say, I don't have
it very clearly figured out in my mind yet. I do think there's
that danger of worshiping, especially if it's a sculpture, you know,
often, of the God-man, even in an infant form. So, I'll just,
I don't have a great answer today, I'll just plant that seed and
let you guys deal with that this week. But I would just encourage
you, especially this season, there's so much with Christmas
that has pictures of Jesus, and I would, as uncomfortable as it may be
to take seriously the second commandment and think it through.
And you may not end up exactly where I am, but I think this
is what scripture is teaching here. But then it goes on here
in the answer to talk about other pictures. It says other creatures
may indeed be imaged. How do we know that this is true
from scripture? What examples of scripture do
we have that we can make images of creatures or other things?
Nicole. The snake on the pole, right?
And that's a great example because it comes up, it's actually in
your books. Let's see, in 2 Kings 18 verse four there on page 97. It talks about how that serpent
eventually had to be destroyed because they were worshiping
it, they were burning incense to it, and had given it a name.
But God commanded that to begin with. He commanded Moses to create
a bronze serpent. Are there any other examples
in scripture that would tell us we can make pictures and images
of other things? Robert? Yes, the cherubim in the Ark
of the Covenant, right? There are two cherubim over the
top of the Ark in the mercy seat, and they extend their wings out.
Interesting fact, though, the people of Israel never would
have seen them, because they were in the Holy of Holies, and
they were covered whenever it was carried, contrary to most
picture books. When the Ark was carried, it was covered with
a blue cloth, so they never got to see those. But there are even more
than that, because there are cherubim in the temple, guarding
the way into the Holy of Holies. They stand with their wings,
one wing touching the wall and the other wing touching the other
cherubim's wing. So there are these images, even in the place
of worship. There are pomegranates all over the place there. There's
lots of visual artwork, but they're not to be worshipped. They're
not created for the sake of being worshipped. So there's the cautionary
tale of the bronze serpent that we can end up worshipping these
things, but we aren't forbidden from drawing pictures. We're
not forbidden from making sculptures. We just should not be worshipping
them or using them as a way to worship God. But then people
always, you know, The response I always hear from people when
we talk about this is that pictures are so helpful, right? They just
make things so real, and especially kids, for the kids. You've gotta
do it for the kids. There's gotta be pictures of Jesus, and you've
gotta have these things. And so that's what question 98
deals with. It says, but may not pictures
be tolerated in churches as books for the people? Answer. No, for we should not be wiser
than God, who will not have his people taught by dumb idols,
but by the lively preaching of his word. And just a note for
you kids, dumb there does not mean stupid. That means dumb
as in not speaking. So it's not just calling idols
dumb. But this question was a common
argument from the Roman Catholic Church. This was a day when there
was a lot of illiteracy. So the vast majority of people
couldn't read the Bible even if they had one, and the Roman
Catholic Church kind of liked to keep people from reading the
Bible. And so they would say, well, the people are illiterate.
They can't read the Bible. They need pictures. We need our
cathedrals full of pictures so that they can understand who
God is. Habakkuk 2, I hadn't actually
thought of this as a connection before, but I think it's well
connected by the authors of the catechism. But Habakkuk 2 is
there in your book on page 97. It says, what prophet is the
image that its maker should carve it? The molded image, a teacher
of lies, that the maker of its mold should trust in it to make
new idols. Woe to him who says to the wood,
awake. To silent stone, arise, it shall
teach. Behold, it is overlaid with gold
and silver, yet in it there is no breath at all. So Habakkuk
says an image can't teach. As helpful as we may think it
is, an image teaches lies. And God in his wisdom has chosen
that we not learn from images, but that we learn from speech,
we learn from hearing. And that's what Romans 10 says
there in your book. If you flip the page over, Romans
10, 17, faith comes by hearing and hearing by the word of God.
God has intended, in his wisdom again, that we learn about him
through the written word and the spoken and preached word
of God. And that's, at the end of the
day, even if we think images would be really helpful, this
answer, I think, is right to say we shouldn't try to be wiser
than God. We shouldn't try to think, well, we know better than
he does. It'd be better to have images and better to communicate
that way. There are many times that part
of faith is trusting that God's way is best even when it doesn't
seem best in our eyes. And that's true in all kinds
of moral dilemmas that we face. When it seems like it wouldn't
be to our advantage to do what's right, that we choose to do what's
right. Trusting that his way is best. And the issue of images in worship
is still... It wasn't just an issue for them. Just think of how much visual
aids in worship have become so common and how often, whether
it's slides with pictures or video clips during worship or
whatever it is, that we're such an image-driven culture that
we're sort of following suit and saying, well, look, images
communicate to people. They really grab people. We should
have more images. We should have more pictures of things. You
even see people having the visual arts happening in worship. It's
kind of, I don't know if you've seen this before, but in a big
sort of stage worship production, you'll have somebody off to the
side painting a picture as if that's part of worship because
of this idea that certainly we glorify God with the use of our
gifts in the arts, but there's this idea that creating visual
art is part of worship now that you see often in contemporary
worship. And so we have to be To ask ourselves,
does that matter? Is that a good idea? Is that
a bad idea? It may seem practical sometimes, but we have to trust
that it is better for us to learn to communicate verbally and to
listen to verbal communication, because that is how God has chosen
for his gospel to be communicated. that you all have had to learn
to sit here and listen to me, when I preach in the mornings
or even when I give a lesson like this, where we usually don't
have any visual aids, but in God's wisdom, that is the best
way for his gospel to be communicated. And we have to kind of train
ourselves for that. We have to train up our children for that.
And we have to be a community that encourages the preaching
of the word of God and listening to the preaching of the word
of God. So this is a sensitive topic. It's one on which if you
just start out in a conversation with somebody and say, you shall
not have pictures of Jesus, you're probably not going to get very
far in discussing this. And so I think it's good to... to think
through this yourself, obviously, and then to start with the second
commandment and say, okay, so what does the second commandment
really mean? And stop and think through what we've been talking
about today. It's about how you worship God. And try to work
through some of the things we've been talking about this afternoon,
and don't just go straight to throwing out the picture books
or things like that. Talk through it and figure out what's the
best way to honor God and to honor His command, which is one
of the Ten Commandments, part of the moral law. One of the
things that we have, I think we have a responsibility to do
in our current Christian culture is just to get people to start
realizing that how you worship matters. that it's not just a
question of who you worship, that how you worship matters,
and that's the age-old sort of emphasis for us as Reformed Presbyterians,
but it's just something that so many of our brothers and sisters
in Christ haven't thought about, and we can start by just planting
some of those seeds. And then, in our own worship,
I would just encourage you to throw yourself into what you
know is right. We know that the preaching of
the word is good. It is good to speak the gospel
and to read the word of God and preach it. We know that we should
pray. in worship together. We know that we should sing,
and I think we can, whether you're fully committed to exclusive
psalmody or not, that every Christian should be able to agree that
scripture does command us to sing the psalms. And to sing
them, and with the example of the church, through most of its,
for the first thousand years after Christ, and based on instruments
being part of the old covenant way of worshiping, that worshiping
a cappella is a good thing as well. And so if we know that
those are good. Even if you wonder about some
of these other things, throw yourself into what you know is
good, and train yourself to do it well and better all the time,
and to gain more out of that, and to give God greater glory
through those ways that we know we should be worshiping Him.
So that's my encouragement to you, is to keep, when in doubt,
do what you don't doubt, because you can know that these are the
things you should do.
Heidelberg: 96-98
Series Heidelberg Catechism
| Sermon ID | 1112016447233 |
| Duration | 31:26 |
| Date | |
| Category | Sunday - PM |
| Language | English |
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