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.