- 00:00
- Since the Christian life is seeing God by faith, since this is a spiritual scene, first and foremost now, and not physical, we should not make physical images of God.
- 00:17
- Because the life that the Christian lives now is not of sight, but by faith.
- 00:26
- Too often this is violated by well -meaning Christians. They, not in a desire to be disobedient, they're not actively thinking, most
- 00:35
- Christians I know of, they're not actively thinking, I want to break the second commandment, I don't want to think about faith,
- 00:41
- I want to think about sight, and they put up images of Jesus. There's a few problems with this,
- 00:48
- I'm just going to list three. The first is, in relation to our text, this replaces the spiritual eyes of faith with the physical eyes of our body.
- 01:02
- So we don't want to try to outsmart God here. We want to see God with the eyes of faith.
- 01:08
- We want to even teach our children. I understand that it's a difficult concept, and it's easier just to put an image in front of our children and say, look, there's
- 01:15
- God. But no, that's not what we want to teach our children. We want to teach our children, first and foremost, the pure in heart must behold
- 01:23
- God with the eyes of faith. Another issue I'll mention is, no matter how one conveys the
- 01:31
- Lord Jesus, the most beautiful artist, the best artist in the world today, they're going to get it wrong.
- 01:40
- So I have a couple of issues with the chosen or whatever. One issue is, I think it's some of the things that I've heard and read seems to be theologically problematic.
- 01:52
- That's number one. Number two, like, that ain't Jesus. And I think it's problematic for us to try to look at that and be like, oh, yeah, but he's just, let me ask you this.
- 02:05
- What benefit does the church get from watching physical reenactments of Jesus?
- 02:12
- What benefit do we get? What is it that you're saying that we need from something like that that we don't have in his work?
- 02:18
- Do you remember in Luke 16 when Abraham is dialoguing with the rich man? The rich man has gone to Hades, and he's going to Abraham, and he says, listen, no, listen, send someone back from the dead.
- 02:30
- Send them back from the dead. And my brothers, they'll believe. And what does
- 02:35
- Abraham say? You got Moses and the prophets. If you don't believe them, you're not going to believe even if someone comes back from the dead.
- 02:46
- Now let me make an application here about movies and shows and stuff that portray the Lord Jesus.
- 02:55
- What is it that you think that someone will benefit from that if they don't benefit from the word of God?
- 03:02
- If someone rising from the dead won't encourage their faith, if someone rising from the dead won't move them from spiritual death to spiritual life, then why do we think a reenactment of the
- 03:14
- Lord would do so? To see an image of Jesus tempts us to see Jesus with physical eyes now.
- 03:19
- That's not what we're to do. That's not the church's call today. And why would we want to put up a likeness of our
- 03:26
- Lord that was in error? So let me just give you an example about me. Let's say, what would you think about a picture of me that was grossly distorted, right?
- 03:39
- Like someone brought you a picture. Have you ever seen a caricature? But a caricature that was just grossly distorted.
- 03:48
- You'd be like, hey, don't draw one of our pastors like that. That's kind of rude.
- 03:55
- That kind of makes us feel like you're disrespecting one of our pastors to draw this funny -looking caricature of him.
- 04:03
- Well, that's what we do when we're drawing and portraying the Lord. We cannot match
- 04:09
- His glory, right? We cannot match His resplendence. And so consider these things.
- 04:17
- And I know some people just haven't thought through those, and we need to be patient. We need to be patient and loving with them, and I understand that.
- 04:24
- But I just want you to consider this point. This is a tangent, I know. Thirdly, I would just mention that God has told us in the second commandment not to make images.
- 04:33
- But the overarching point that I'm trying to draw out of the text for just a moment is that we see God now, but not with our physical eyes.
- 04:42
- We see God now through the eyes of faith because we've been given a new heart, a heart that now sees
