The Shorter Catechism question this week is, what is forbidden in the Second Commandment? The answer is, the Second Commandment forbiddeth the worshipping of God by images or any other way not appointed in His Word. And so the Second Commandment, of course, forbiddeth the worshipping of God by things that we devise. images here is not just those graven, carved things that many people throughout the ages, throughout history, have made either to worship directly as if it is God in itself or as a picture of what they like to think of or how they have thought of the one true God which if you make a picture of how you think of him you have just made a infinite reduction of who he is, because who God is in himself is the real God, and what we think of him is far beneath, and so the only way to have right thoughts about the real God is to think his thoughts after him, to be taught by him from his word. And so the language of forbidding the worshiping of God by images means really anything that comes from us, anything that is an imitation or a copy. God has not actually given us what He looks like. The most He has done, of course, is his divine son, who is the exact imprint of his nature, and he has added to himself a human nature, but the human nature by itself is not the divine son. The divine son is now the God-man, and he is God from all eternity. And you can't make a picture, of course, of the divine son if you were to make a picture just of his humanity. That would be an ancient church history called Nestorianism, in which the nature of the human nature of Christ is separated from the divine personhood or the divine nature of the Lord Jesus Christ. So sometimes you'll hear people say, well, there is a real human Jesus, so we could use images of him. Well, the real human Jesus, neither in his life before his death nor in his resurrection, gave to his church to worship him by use of any image of himself, for one. Number two, We do not have any actual images of the Lord Jesus Christ, so any purported images are a lie. And number three, of course, is Nestorianism. Even if we had photos of the Lord Jesus Christ, it would be Nestorian to use the photo in the worship because the photo can capture reflections of light off of the body that the divine son has in his human nature. And so it's kind of this tiny little component, and we would put ourselves entirely out of proportion if our idea of the sun is affected by these photos or is affected by pictures, which may be one of the reasons why when we hear a sermon like the one we heard, in the Lord's Day Morning Sermon, and we hear about the divinity of the Son. In our particular context, we have much difficulty in the churches grasping the utter divinity of Christ, that He is very God of very God. Of course, the flesh resists that idea to begin with, but in our context, We're riding hundreds of years of gross violations of the Second Commandment, and the pictures have only gotten more detailed, more vivid, producing more disproportion in how people think of the Savior towards the human side, separating, in that Nestorian way, the human nature of Christ from his divine personhood and from his divine nature. And of course, any other image that we Have in our mind you should not think of or or make pictures of the Holy Spirit either using flames of fire or Wind which you can't see and Jesus makes that point in in John chapter 3 or even Doves When the scripture says, he alighted upon Christ as a dove, it's making a theological comment about the Holy Spirit, not saying that there are these pneumatophanies where the Holy Spirit shows up like the Ahsoka bird in in moments in history and takes on physical form as a dove, that's utter rubbish and would indeed harm our understanding of God the Holy Spirit as well, so that we would be idolaters with respect to that person of the Godhead. And of course, God is not just in any one of the persons. And so if we make a picture that we are using to represent any one person, we have blasphemed the Trinity, the triune God, the one living and true God. is in himself three persons. And so we must not make any images of any one or of all three of the persons. But then there isn't just the picturing of God that the second commandment forbids. It's also the worshiping of God in any other way not appointed in his word. God has given us his statutes. He has given us his word that stands for us, that has its official place as the only way that we can come to worship him. And if we add anything to his word, if we, and we can use the redundant word, it'll help us hear where the words are coming, if we super add to his statutes, that becomes superstitious. And so the idea of superstition is that we may be able to draw near to God in any way that God hasn't written for us, in any way that God has not established for us in his word, established for us in writing. So any way of drawing near to God, or any way of gaining spiritual knowledge, or any way of gaining spiritual power, other than that which God has given us in His Word, which is Himself in His Son, by His Spirit, according to the Scriptures. Any way of drawing near to God, any way of thinking about spiritual things, especially about God himself, but gaining spiritual knowledge at all, any attempt of having spiritual power at all, apart from God has revealed in his word, is superstitious. It is a violation of the second commandment. It would put us in the category, or at least our actions in the category of the actions of them that hate me. which is how he speaks about it in the second commandment, which should break our hearts. The last thing we would ever want to be, and the last ones like whom we would ever want to act, are them that hate. our God, the Lord our God, who has delivered us, so that he may be called for us, Yahweh your God. And we should be jealous for him, even as he is rightly jealous for himself. So what is forbidden in the second commandment? The second commandment forbiddeth the worshiping of God by images or any other way not appointed in his word.