LAW HOMILY: The "god" of our Imagining

Every week we go through the law of God because we want to understand what God has to say to his people. We want to understand what obedience is. We want to understand what it means now that if our root is in Christ, then what kind of fruit ought that produce.

Today we're going to be looking at the second commandment, and this is how it reads. For you shall not make for yourself an idol or any likeness of what is in heaven above or on earth beneath or in the water under the earth.

You shall not worship them or serve them, for I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the third and the fourth generation, those who hate me, but showing loving kindness to thousands, those who love me and who keep my commandments.

Now what I find so fascinating is the two commandments that have the longest amount of the most amount of words are the two that in the modern Christian Church we neglect the most. Commandment number two and commandment number four, do not make any images of God and honor the Sabbath.

The two that we struggle with the most. And we struggle in not just ways that we would think that we normally struggle. Like none of us, well, I don't think, have a six-foot tall statue of Jesus in your house with a shrine around it and every day you pray to the shrine.

We're not struggling in that way. I'm hoping no one has the statue of Baal or Moloch or you get the point. But our imaginations also create God's false images of the one true God and we've all probably done that even this morning and we didn't even notice.

We poured our coffee, we scrolled on our phone, we said a prayer maybe somewhere in the dark furnace of our heart, the foundry ran a full shift before breakfast. We took the lighting out of his hand and put a cup of warm milk in it.

We made a God and then we bowed down and what is that God? That I'm okay in my sin. That my sin is not that serious. That that relationship that's broken, I'll deal with it later. That that person that I've offended, I don't need to apologize because I'm justified.

We all make excuses like that and what we're saying is that God does not care about our obedience and our holiness. That is a false God. That every one of us create every day when we refuse to do what God has told us to do or when we refuse to stop doing what God has told us not to do.

And then when we raise our hands and we praise and we think that this God is pleased with us when we act that way, we're making a false God. And the only hope for people like us who craft false gods in our head and remember Calvin said our hearts are idol-making factories constantly making false images of the Holy God.

The only hope for us is Jesus Christ. The only reason why we stand, the only reason why we can worship, the only reason why we can come into his presence and be pleasing in his sight is that there was one who never made a false image of God.

One who never lived in a way that was inconsistent with God's character and holiness. So for all of us idols, idol makers and idolaters, for all of us covenant breakers and sinners, let us pray. Let us pray that our vision of who God is would not only be not the carved stone and the brass statue, but also that we would positively have a vision for who this God is to know him in truth and that we would live lives consistent with what that vision and that knowledge is.

Amen. And when we fall short, let us repent and let us pray together as we repent. There's so many ways that we can.

Craft.

Idolatrous images by even just the way that we treat you, your word, holiness,.

Worship.

We turn you into a benign grandfatherly-like figure who accepts just whatever we give and we forget that if we approach you, we have to remember that you are holy and that because you are holy, you've called us to be holy.

And Lord, because we are saved, it doesn't somehow throw out the command to revere you and honor you and worship you in truth. In some ways, it increases it. Lord, yes, you've covered over all of our sins.

Yes, Lord, even though we deserve to be struck down like the high priest who comes in inappropriately in the holy of holies in the Old Testament, even that's true of us and even though your grace has covered us, Lord, let us never use your grace and your forgiveness as a license to sin.

May it never be. And Lord, when we fall short of this, which we all do every day, Lord, let our entire life, as Martin Luther said, be one of repentance, ever-turning, ever-repenting, and always reforming.

In Jesus' name we pray. Amen.