LAW HOMILY: The Image We Worship

The Second Commandment and the Call to Obey God

Every week we look at the law of God because we want to understand God's heart for his people, we want to understand what he says, we want to understand how can we obey. If we're children, or if you're parents here and you have children, how could your children obey you if they don't know what your expectation is?

They don't know what your standard is. If you give them nothing to obey, you will get nothing in return. So the Lord gives us these commands because he loves us, not because he's the eternal rule keeper in the sky, but because he loves us and cares about us.

So let us today look at the second commandment, a commandment that has the Lord's love all over it. You shall not make for yourself an idol or any likeness of what is in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the water under the earth, and 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 children of the third and the fourth generation of those who hate me, but showing loving kindness to thousands to those who love me and keep my commandments.

The False Images We Make of God

We all have a picture of God in our mind. Every single one of us does. A sense of who he is, of what he wants, of how he feels about you on any particular or given morning. And we carry that image with us everywhere we go.

You pray, in a sense, to that image. Your whole interior life with God runs through that image. The question is whether your image is biblical. Is it defined by who God has said that he is? Who God has declared in his character, righteousness, holiness, justice, goodness, truth, or is the image that you have out of alignment with who this God is?

And is it a creation that you have made in your own heart that actually is a false God? You see, we always think when we come to the second commandment that Aunt Betty's statue of Jesus is a no-no. Okay, fine.

Or we think about TV shows where Jesus is portrayed and we say, oh no, we can't make an image of God for anything in heaven above or earth beneath. We can't watch that show. Even more so than that, or equally so, they pervert the text and they twist the text and they say all kinds of things.

So, you know, we sort of land there. But we rarely ever do the introspection to say, is my view of God defined by the Bible? Is my view of God biblical? Is my view of God actually consistent with his character and his nature?

Repenting of a Shallow View of God

And we'll know that we actually have not done that work when we sin flippantly and think that God hasn't noticed. So now you are worshipping a God who's not omnipresent. Or when we sin in front of the face of God and we think that maybe God doesn't care.

So now we're serving a God who's not omnipotent, has no power to be able to execute you on the spot for your sin. Or we go through life and we're not mindful of him, which is saying something about who we think that he is.

It's funny, if I told any of you, guaranteed, that you could drive to a certain place this morning and dig six feet into the ground and you could find 100 pounds of pure gold and you knew it for sure, there's not, there's very few people here today who would be here today, right?

Especially if you knew someone else was racing you there, you'd be like, God doesn't care. Because you and I have placed a value on that thing that is higher and greater than being in the presence of God.

That's a false image of who God is because God is infinitely more valuable than shiny metal and what that shiny metal can do for us. What we have to realize is that all of us have not only fallen short of the glory of God in our behavior, we've fallen short of the glory of God in our understanding of who he is.

And we should repent of that. And we should ask the Lord, because I'm going to be honest with you, you're not going to repent today and have an epiphany and understand entirely who God is. Because you're not God and you're not omniscient.

But what we want is as we repent, we move an inch closer, a millimeter forward of understanding more of who he is. Our repentance should move us forward. So let's pray and ask the Lord to help us to remove our shallow view of who he is and to deepen it, even if it's just a.

Millimeter deeper than it was before we got here. So let's pray. Lord, it is a supreme gift to be.

Told that we are insufficient. It is a great grace to be told that we fall short. Our pride and our ego doesn't like that very much. All of us operate under a kind of delusion that we did our best and that we deserve some sort of credit for something that we did.

All of us have fallen short in that way. But to be told that we haven't met the standard, that we are fallen, that we have not attained any bar of performance is a great gift. Lord, I pray that we would see it as a gift.

And I pray that instead of it being a burden to us, that it would be a delight, that we would remember that in seeing the cancer on the x-ray, you now can have it cut out. So Lord, help us to see these moments where your spirit is cutting and sewing and x-raying and removing.

Help us to see them as getting rid of something that's deadly to us instead of seeing it as, you know, a sort of depression or an ego thing. Lord, help us in our worship to constantly be pushing ourselves to the scripture, to see who you are, to constantly be rejecting our own cartoonish illustrations of what we think you are.

Help us, Lord, to be biblical people, to be chapter and verse people, to be people who are defined by the scriptures. Lord, help us to be like iron that sits in the fire so long that the fire gets into the iron so that it can be shaped.

Help us, Lord, under the purifying fire of your spirit, to be molded and shaped for your purpose. It's in Jesus' name we pray. Amen.