Sunday, February 26, 2023 PM

Alright, well, we're going to go ahead and get back to our study on the Ten Commandments, and we will be reading about the

Second Commandment tonight, so it would be helpful to turn in our Bibles to Exodus chapter, also turn to Deuteronomy chapter 5.

So Exodus chapter 20, verses 1 through 6, and Deuteronomy 5, verses 6 through 10.

Either one of those places would be a great place to start. Let's go ahead and pray together.

Heavenly Father, I thank you for the night. I pray that you would help us as we study your word, and please give us understanding of the text and light of Jesus.

We pray these things in his name. Amen. Okay, so Exodus, Exodus chapter 20.

Now, the first and second commandments, as we count them, are very closely related together.

And so it is helpful to read them together. So let's begin reading Exodus chapter 20, verses 1 through 6.

And God spoke all these words, saying, I am the

Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage.

You shall have no other gods before me. You shall not make for yourself a carved image, any 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 to them, nor serve them. For I, the Lord your God, am a jealous

God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children to the third and fourth generations of those who hate me, but showing mercy to thousands to those who love me and keep my commandments.

Similarly, almost exactly, we have the same reading in Deuteronomy 5.

Okay, so now it's interesting as we begin to read that and get into the second commandment.

Again, you'll see listed on the Ten Commandments that are posted on a wall, or perhaps graven into stone as a part of the edifice of a building, or perhaps you'll see a picture displayed on a screen somewhere of the

Ten Commandments. And, of course, they use Roman numerals. You know, Moses didn't use

Roman numerals, right? Rome wasn't around back then. If you have confusion about that, ask

Jacob. But the second commandment you read says,

Thou shalt not make graven images, or do not make an idol.

Now, when we read the text, boy, there's a lot more there than we normally get with that summary second commandment.

Now, if I didn't know any better, if I were not supposed to find two commandments here in Exodus 20, verses 1 through 6, and I knew that I was only supposed to find two,

I would probably find one commandment put in three parts, or I would find three related commandments just by reading it out loud.

I find that kind of curious, kind of taking it at face value. For instance, when we look at the text, in verse 3 it says,

You shall have no other gods before me. Verse 4 says, You shall not make for yourself a carved image.

And verse 5 says, You shall not bow down to them nor serve them. You hear the triple repetition of,

Thou shalt not, Thou shalt not, Thou shalt not. And so, if I'm just reading it for the very first time, and maybe nobody's told me that I'm supposed to only find two commandments,

I'm either finding one in three parts, or I'm finding three different commandments. So that's a curiosity to me.

Why do we say that there are two commandments then? Why is that what has been handed to us and taught to us down through the generations?

Now, there's an interesting debate that has a long history. There was a church split back in, well, when was that?

1 ,000 A .D.? Well, over 1 ,000 years ago, there was an official church split between East and West.

Of course, the split had been fomenting for some time already. But the Western Church, the

Roman Church, had a different point of view on some things than the Eastern Church, what we call the

Greek Orthodox Church, the Orthodox Church today. And one of the things they disagreed about, though it was not the main thing, one of the things they disagreed about was how to number the

Ten Commandments. The Roman Catholic Church looked at verses 3 through 6 and saw one commandment.

And so, if you were to look at a listing of the Ten Commandments in a Roman Catholic Church, the first commandment would be something along the lines of,

You shall have no other gods before me. And the second commandment is, You shall not take the name of the

Lord thy God in vain. Surprising? Did you all know that?

About the Roman Catholic numbering of the Ten Commandments? On one level,

I can maybe understand why, as I read through. They seem all related. They're either three or they're one, just kind of reading through it.

Now, the Greek Orthodox Church, the Eastern Church, remember the Roman Catholic Church is based out of Rome, the

Eastern Orthodox Church was based out of Constantinople. Now, when they looked at it, they said there's two commandments.

When we get to the Protestant Reformation in the 1500s, where Luther and Calvin and all the rest of them are breaking away from the

Roman Catholic Church, Zwingli and Knox and the rest of them, as they're moving away from the Roman Catholic Church, they also said, no, there's two commandments here.

It's not just one commandment, there's two commandments here. I find that interesting. Why is that?

Some of you are already thinking, well, if the Roman Catholic Church puts the first two commandments together, do they only have nine commandments?

I know that's a distracting, loose thread. Just to be clear, what they do is they take the tenth commandment about coveting, and they break that into two commandments, saying that coveting your neighbor's wife is a commandment, that you should not do that, and you should not, therefore, covet anything else that is your neighbor's.

They split those into the ninth and tenth. That's how they get to ten. Why do we know that there's ten?

Well, that's the way it's described in the Bible. We actually have, being told, the ten commandments, the ten words, so we know there's ten.

Now the question is, out of all of these commandments listed, which ones are the ten, and how do we number them?

I think that it's important, as we read, when we look at the coveting section, and we look at this section at the beginning, we can see there's a lot of related instructions.

Both of them could be seen as a multi -part commandment. So part of what is required is to think about why there are two different commandments living within the batch, the first batch, verses three through six, but not in the last batch.

Now here's the proof of it. You ready for the proof of it? When we have the first commandment, it says, you shall have no other gods before me.

Follow that up with, you shall not make for yourself a carved image to bow down and worship it. The second commandment is not against artists.

Thou shalt not be an artist. Thou shalt not sculpt anything from clay, period.

That's not the second commandment. The second commandment is not about making graven images.

In fact, God instructed his people and blessed them with his

Holy Spirit to skillfully make graven images for the tabernacle in the shape of flowers and vines and pomegranates and all kinds of shapes of beautiful things that reminded everybody of the beauty of the

Garden of Eden. So that was not the issue. The graven image thing wasn't the issue.

It was making graven images so as to bow down and worship them and serve them. That was the second commandment.

Don't do that. Now the proof of these two functioning as separate commandments is that you can break the first commandment without breaking the second.

And you can break the second commandment without breaking the first, although generally they go together.

So proof of this is in Exodus 32. So if you're in Exodus 20, it doesn't take too much to get over to Exodus 32.

And we have a story that is closely related to the giving of the Ten Commandments.

So God is giving the Ten Commandments to Moses. One through ten. Here's the first one.

Have no other gods before me. Here's the second one. You should not make for yourself any garved image, any graven image to bow down and worship it.

Third image. Do not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain. Okay. So he gets the

Ten Commandments. And we look at Exodus 31 and verse 18.

And when he had made an end of speaking with him on Mount Sinai, he gave

Moses two tablets of the testimony, tablets of stone written with the finger of God.

Ah, God gives to Moses two copies of the

Ten Commandments. On this tablet you have all ten written. On this tablet you have all ten written.

Why? He ever signed any legal paperwork? Is there ever only one copy of it?

No. You know, and people back then weren't dumb either. When there was a legal agreement, you had more than one copy, and each side got a copy.

So in this case, the plan was for a copy of the Testament or a copy of the covenant to be placed within the ark in the tabernacle when that was constructed.

So there was God's copy, and then the other copy would be in the hands of the Levites to hold before the people and say,

Hey, this is who we are and how we're supposed to live. So again, when you have a little cartoon of the

Ten Commandments and you have five on that one and five on this one, that's not what happened.

All ten were on each tablet. Or if you have a more theological rendering of it from perhaps the

Westminster Confession and the first and second tables of the law, and you have the first four on one about how to love

God supremely, and the last six on the other one about how to love others rightly. That's not exactly what was said in the text.

Now what happens now? Moses has got the two copies. He's got the whole covenant here.

He's got the two copies. He's heading down the mountain. Verse 1, Now when the people saw that Moses delayed coming down from the mountain, the people gathered together to Aaron and said to him,

Come, make us gods that shall go before us. As for this before us for this

Moses, the man who brought us up out of the land of Egypt, we do not know what has become of him.

What does it mean to make gods? Well, it means to make idols. It means to make graven images.

And Aaron said to them, Break off the golden earrings which are in the ears of your wives, your sons and your daughters and bring them to me.

So all the people broke off the golden earrings which were in their ears and brought them to Aaron. Where did they get all that gold from?

I thought they were slaves. God gave them that gold as they plundered

Egypt and they left in victory because of his doing. Well, verse 4,

When he received the gold from their hand, he fashioned it with an engraving tool and made a molded calf.

Now, this is the very definition of a graven image. This is exactly what the second commandment is talking about.

Then they said, This is your God, O Israel, that brought you out of the land of Egypt.

Hello. Now, Aaron does not make a golden calf and then say,

This is Bob. And Bob is the God of the wilderness in which you now exist.

Now, you better make Bob happy or we're going to have a rough time out here. He didn't say that this was some other

God. Aaron made a golden calf and said, Behold Yahweh. Behold the

God who brought you up out of the land of Egypt, who did all those mighty signs and wonders. Do you remember the locust?

Do you remember the hail? Do you remember the Passover? Do you remember the destruction of Pharaoh and the armies of Egypt in the

Red Sea? Behold your God who delivered you. You see, in this particular instance,

Aaron and the people are not breaking the first commandment and saying we're worshiping

Baal or Asherah, Molech, Chemosh and so on. No, they're not. They're not worshiping a different God.

They're still saying we worship Yahweh who delivered us from Egypt. But we're going to do so by revering and venerating this idol that we have made.

So you see how you can keep the first commandment while breaking the second when it comes to the

Old Covenant. See how that works? That's how we know there are two different commandments living within these first six verses.

Because you can keep one while breaking the other. Now the reverse is true as well.

You can avoid making a graven image. You can avoid making a carved image to venerate and to revere and to consider to be

God and still worship a false god. You do not need to create an idol to worship a false god.

Jesus pointed this out. This is one of his complaints against the Pharisees and the Sadducees, the chief priests and the scribes, that they were worshiping falsely.

Also the Samaritan woman. He points out, you worship what you do not know.

The Samaritans didn't have idols up on that mountain that they worshiped on, but they were still worshiping a god that they didn't know.

They weren't worshiping the one true God. So that's why when we read the text and think about how it works for the rest of Scripture, we find two commandments here, not one.

Now this of course, if this being the case, why would this be troublesome to a Roman Catholic perspective?

They do worship Mary. They say they are venerating Mary. But the point is that they have lots and lots of graven images representing a variety of saints whom they venerate, they revere, they bow down to in worship in various ways, hoping to implore that these saints will speak upon their behalf to the angry

Jesus. I'm not making that up. They pray to Mary so that they don't have to pray to Jesus because Jesus is not approachable, but Mary is.

If you catch any of the prayers to Mary that you can hear on the radio, on the Catholic channel, on the

Catholic radio signal, or you can read them online, look how they pray to Mary.

They say everything about Mary that the Bible says about Jesus, and they look at Mary as a savior so they can avoid coming to Christ.

In this case, they have made a graven image. They have pictures of Mary and statues of Mary, and they venerate

Mary and pray to her. This is a breaking of the second commandment. But when you count the commandments as a

Roman Catholic, that number two commandment is niftily disappeared so as to not prick the conscience.

Looking at this commandment, this is having to do with making a carved image to worship.

That seems a little bit foreign to us, that anybody would take the time or spend the money to buy an image or a statue or something, or take the time and carve out something and then bow down to it and venerate and worship it as a god.

But for generations and generations, and what they still do today in Hindu culture and so on, is that they do not think that the god is one and the same as the bundle of straw.

They do not think the god is one and the same with the ceramic figure, but that it is a portent or a portal to get them to the god.

That the god or the goddess will imbue that item if they do the right kind of ritual, and all of a sudden it's like Wi -Fi.

You get the right access code, you're in. And so now we can connect to that god or goddess through this

Wi -Fi router, through this idol. And God says that is exactly what we are not to do.

He says that to Israel, he says don't do that. That was going to be a huge temptation. They had just been delivered from bondage in the land of Egypt where there was a lot of idols, and they are in the wilderness and going to be encountering all kinds of nations that worship gods using idols and idolatry.

They're heading into the land of Canaan, where everything is about idolatry, and it was extremely important that they not be engaged in that practice that would lead them astray.

Now let's think about how this commandment, the second commandment, why is it so important that they not make a graven image to worship?

How is this related to the way that God made the world, the way that God made us in his own image?

Why is it so important? Well, when you go back and you look at verse 4 in Exodus 20, you might be able to discern the connection between the commandment and the creation.

In Exodus 20 verse 4, you shall not make for yourself a carved image, any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth.

What is the connection between the commandment and the creation? Any ideas?

It's kind of pointing at everything that God made, you know? And well, the likeness of anything that is in heaven above, on a nice clear night, or in a crisp spring day.

When you look up, what do we see? We see stars. Some of them are moving around, wandering around.

The Greek word plano means to wander. We get the word planet from. We have constellations, and then there's the moon, and then there's the sun.

All of these things the pagans worshipped. All of these things they would draw and craft and make idols of to worship.

Okay, anything in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath. Okay, so look around on the land.

What impressive things do we find? Oh, there's mountains, isn't there?

Those are impressive. What else? Yes? God's creation, yeah.

But you could ask Henry back there, what's his favorite animal? Gorilla, yeah.

Boy, howdy. You look at something, some impressive creature, and you might get so impressed that you might begin to think that it's the shape or the form of a god, some sort of mysterious thing.

And so nothing that is on the earth, or that is in the water under the earth. And of course, this is even more mysterious, especially for Israel, who is not a seafaring folk at all, don't really like it much, and always had bad experiences with it.

You know, the great sea creatures, oh my. Nothing that God has made is to be construed as God, or as a god, to be venerated or worshipped.

And when we read the story of creation, how God made everything in six days, and thus structured how time works, here are seven days, in six days he made everything, evening and morning of the first day, evening and morning of the second day, and the

Jews kept that practice. Their new day began in the evening and concluded on the following.

So they had these seven -day weeks, and we're still operating like that all over the world.

God ordered everything in its time, and then

God made light before he made the stars, and God made light before he made the sun and moon.

Interesting, right? Because the ancients worshipped the sun, moon, and stars as the giver of light.

God says, no, I'm the giver of light. That was always the way it was, and he makes sure that his people knows it.

And then he makes the objects in the sky, and although there is a great

Hebrew word for sun, and there's a great Hebrew word for moon, and there are great ancient words for stars and so on,

God does not use those terms in this text.

Why not? Because God is the creator. God is the one true

God, and he's just making a greater light and a lesser light, because the words for sun and moon were often used as the names of gods themselves.

And so God just puts it plainly. When he made the sun and moon, he just made them the greater light and the lesser light.

So everything we read about in the story of creation is stating that God created and owns everything, and there's no one who deserves worship except for him.

That's like rooted in the very nature of the creation. So if we reduce the creator to some item or figure of his creation, if we reduce the creator to some element of his creation to kind of get at worshiping him, that's called idolatry.

And even worse, if we combine a breach of the first and second commandment and grab some item out of creation to venerate and worship as another

God, the problems keep on stacking up. So is

God against art? Is he against beauty?

Is he against images in and of themselves? God is not an iconoclast.

He is not iconoclastic as they say. He is for beauty.

He is for images, but properly used and applied and appreciated.

In fact, we read in the text that God actually did make an image.

Interesting. Verse 26 of Genesis 1. Then God said, let us make man in our image, according to our likeness.

Let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air, over the cattle, over all the earth, over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.

So God created man in his own image. In the image of God, he created him.

Male and female, he created them. And then God blessed them. And God said to them, be fruitful and multiply, fill the earth and subdue it.

Have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air, over every living thing that moves on the earth. So not only does

God make an image, but he wants to spread that all over his good creation. You see,

God did not make an image to be worshipped. He made an image that does worship.

You see the difference? He didn't make an image to be worshipped, but an image that does worship.

God made us a mediating creature, unlike any other creature that he has made.

And we stand in this very important juncture between God and one another in the created order.

And we are in this mediating position. It's not that we stand in our own authority.

We mediate the authority of God into every situation. It's not that we are holy in and of ourselves, but we mediate the holiness of God in all of our relationships into the created order.

It's not that we have our own truth, but we mediate the truth of God to every situation.

It's not that we have our own wisdom, but we mediate the wisdom of God. So we receive all that from him and give him praise for that.

And ultimately, hopefully we can see how this is directing us ultimately to Jesus Christ, who was called the image of the invisible

God, who as king and priest and prophet and counselor mediates all of the authority and holiness and truth and wisdom of God and restores the image of God in us so that we would be right worshipers of God.

That's where we're going to leave it for now. We're going to come back to those themes as we consider what happens in the fall.

How does the second commandment relate to the fall in Genesis 3? The importance of the second commandment, the principles behind it in the covenants that God makes with Noah, Abraham, Israel and David and ultimately the new covenant in Christ and how the second commandment matters for everyday life as we live.

All right. Well, with the absence of a choir, I think we'll suspend the doxology until we get a few more people in here.

I'm not going to be able to carry us all, folks. Let me pray for us and we'll close.

Heavenly Father, I thank you for the night. Thank you for the blessings of your word. I pray that you would keep us all safe with the coming storms.

Lord, we thank you for hearing our prayers and for loving us and giving us your son, Jesus. It's in his name that we pray, amen.