TEN 2: The Second Commandment
TEN: A Look at God's Unwavering Commands • Sermon • Submitted
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B: Exodus 20:4-6; Isa 44:12-20
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Opening
Opening
Good morning, and welcome to Family Worship here at Eastern Hills! Thanks to the praise band for leading us this morning. For those of you who are on the stream, you may have noticed over the last couple of weeks that we’ve added another camera view. That’s probably about as far as we’re going to go as far as streaming equipment for the time being, but we’re excited to be able to offer a couple of different angles now. If you want different angles and you’re here in the room, you can just close one eye, and then open that one and close the other. =o) Anyway, it is always a joy to be together as the church family, gathered to worship the Lord. I’m glad you’re here.
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World Hunger/Disaster Relief Offering coming up. We take it through July, and our goal is $5,500.
Last week, we started our new sermon series, walking through the Ten Commandments, what the Hebrew people call the Ten Words. This series will take us through the rest of the summer, as we look each week at another of God’s commands to us in Exodus 20 and connecting those to instructions to the rest of Scripture and to our lives today. This morning, we are in the Second Commandment, so let’s stand and read Exodus 20, verses 4 to 6:
4 Do not make an idol for yourself, whether in the shape of anything in the heavens above or on the earth below or in the waters under the earth. 5 Do not bow in worship to them, and do not serve them; for I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God, bringing the consequences of the fathers’ iniquity on the children to the third and fourth generations of those who hate me, 6 but showing faithful love to a thousand generations of those who love me and keep my commands.
PRAYER
I don’t know about you, but I can sometimes have kind of an addictive personality. I admit it. I have a tendency to overdo things. Ask Mel. If we start a movie, I really struggle stopping it in the middle because it’s time to go to bed. If I learn a new skill, I want to practice until I feel like I’ve totally mastered it. If I hear a new song that I like, that thing will be on repeat until I know every word and can play it on my air drums. These are all pretty silly, but this tendency can play out in more serious ways as well:
For example, probably 25 years ago now (sometime in the mid 90’s), Mel and I were a DINK (dual income no kids) couple. We could just up and do whatever we wanted to, basically. Well, one time, we up and went to Las Vegas. I had never been to Vegas, had never really gambled, had never been in a casino, and honestly I had no business doing any of these things that night. But I did. I played blackjack at a $5 table at the Mirage. And at first, I did well. And I was hooked. Even when we changed casinos and I started losing. Even when I was down a couple hundred dollars… the comeback was always going to be the next hand, the next pull of the slot machine’s arm…
When we were in the airport getting ready to fly back home, Mel and I reflected on our Vegas experience, and I had to decide right then and there that I can’t gamble any more, because it just took over. I gave myself to it, and for the time, it was all I could think about. Gambling was something that I bowed down to, an altar that I worshiped at, a god that I let control me for a time.
Last week, when we looked at the First Commandment we saw that God reminded Israel of her history, and how God had shown His people that He loved them through how He had worked in their lives. We saw that the First Commandment, and in fact all of the Ten Words, were connected to who God IS and what He says and does: His proclamation, His person, His people, His position, His power, and His provision. The Lord determines reality, and there are no other real gods for us to worship, so to worship any other god than the Lord is to worship a lie.
It’s easy to see that the First Commandment: “Do not have other gods besides me,” is very closely related to the Second Commandment: “Do not make an idol for yourself…do not bow in worship to them, and do not serve them.” What I want us to see there is that the First Word speaks to who God is, and the Second speaks to who God is NOT.
What immediately comes to a lot of our minds when we talk about not making an idol is what happened just after the giving of the Ten Words, while Moses was back up the mountain with God, and God was making the tablets that had the Commands written on them.
1 When the people saw that Moses delayed in coming down from the mountain, they gathered around Aaron and said to him, “Come, make gods for us who will go before us because this Moses, the man who brought us up from the land of Egypt—we don’t know what has happened to him!” 2 Aaron replied to them, “Take off the gold rings that are on the ears of your wives, your sons, and your daughters and bring them to me.” 3 So all the people took off the gold rings that were on their ears and brought them to Aaron. 4 He took the gold from them, fashioned it with an engraving tool, and made it into an image of a calf. Then they said, “Israel, these are your gods, who brought you up from the land of Egypt!” 5 When Aaron saw this, he built an altar in front of it and made an announcement: “There will be a festival to the Lord tomorrow.” 6 Early the next morning they arose, offered burnt offerings, and presented fellowship offerings. The people sat down to eat and drink, and got up to party.
And we look at the Israelites and say, “How could they do such a thing? God had just spoken to them directly, and given them these Commands to live by… how could they almost immediately turn and make some new god to follow?” And we think to ourselves, “If I had been there, I wouldn’t have bowed to that silly gold calf.” Maybe not. But what if we are more capable of making and worshiping idols than we realize? The truth is a little scarier than we might want to admit, and it’s what God was getting at when He gave the Second Commandment as He did: He knows that we can make an idol out of just about anything. So what is an idol?
1) Idols are created things that take the place of God.
1) Idols are created things that take the place of God.
The simplest definition I can think of is this. When we start using terms like “idols” regarding worship, the images that this conjures up in our minds is decidedly pagan. Like both the passage we just read, as well as things the Israelites discover in the land of Canaan later, and even into the New Testament with Paul’s address to the Areopagus in Acts 17 that we looked at a couple of weeks ago or the riot in Ephesus that we read about in Acts 19, our first perspective on idolatry is this “worshiping a statue at a shrine” kind of idea, and so we a kind of mentally reject that we might be idolaters, because we don’t do that. But this isn’t exactly what God had in mind when He gave the Second Commandment:
4 Do not make an idol for yourself, whether in the shape of anything in the heavens above or on the earth below or in the waters under the earth.
He starts clearly enough: He tells His people that they were not to make a idol, literally a “divine image,” that looked like anything at all: not like anything in the heavens or on the earth or in the waters. To put it as succinctly as I can: Nothing created is to be used as the object of our worship at any time.
So the question then is this: What does it mean for us to “create” something that we worship? Is it always something physical, tangible? Or can it be something else?
Pastor Tim Keller calls idols “counterfeit gods” and says that they are:
“Anything more important to you than God, anything that absorbs your heart and imagination more than God, anything you seek to give you what only God can give. A counterfeit god is anything so central and essential to your life that should you lose it, your life would feel hardly worth living.” (Tim Keller, Counterfeit Gods: The Empty Promises of Money, Sex, and Power, and the Only Hope that Matters)
In his book on the Ten Commandments, titled like our series (not intentionally) TEN, J. John wrote this about the concept of idols:
Ten: Laws of Love Set in Stone Two: You Shall Not Make for Yourself an Idol
Idols do not have to be figures made of stone or precious metal; they do not have to be things that you can touch and hold at all. In fact, I suspect that some of the most powerful idols exist only in the mind. Human understanding is a workshop where idols are continually being crafted. Idolatry has always been around, and it always will be. The only thing that changes is the nature of the idols.
I would define an idol like this:
When anything other than God becomes ultimate in our lives, when anything threatens to take God’s rightful place in our hearts and minds, then that is an idol.
Of course, we get this when it’s something ”bad.” But even good things can become ultimate things. And the reason good things can become ultimate things is precisely because they are good. They don’t lose their attraction just because we follow Jesus.
Idols can be things that we replace God with, or they can be things that we try to worship alongside God. Either situation is idolatry. We see both pictures in the passage of Israel’s failure in Exodus 32. First, the people decided to replace God with the golden calf:
4 He took the gold from them, fashioned it with an engraving tool, and made it into an image of a calf. Then they said, “Israel, these are your gods, who brought you up from the land of Egypt!”
They declared, “Israel, these are your gods, who brought you up from the land of Egypt!” A foolish, idolatrous, erroneous statement for sure. Even with what they have seen, and what God has done in their midst, Israel attempted to replace the Lord with this calf. And for us, when we look back on it and consider it from our vantage point, it’s ludicrous! I mean, the calf was just made in front of them out of the earrings that they gave to Aaron. They saw Aaron fashion this lump of gold into a calf. It didn’t even exist when they came out of Egypt. It didn’t go before them day and night in the pillar of cloud and the pillar of fire. It didn’t actually DO anything. It certainly had no power to save, no authority in their lives. But they were willing to replace the Lord with it anyway. It’s completely ridiculous:
12 The ironworker labors over the coals, shapes the idol with hammers, and works it with his strong arm. Also he grows hungry and his strength fails; he doesn’t drink water and is faint. 13 The woodworker stretches out a measuring line, he outlines it with a stylus; he shapes it with chisels and outlines it with a compass. He makes it according to a human form, like a beautiful person, to dwell in a temple. 14 He cuts down cedars for his use, or he takes a cypress or an oak. He lets it grow strong among the trees of the forest. He plants a laurel, and the rain makes it grow. 15 A person can use it for fuel. He takes some of it and warms himself; also he kindles a fire and bakes bread; he even makes it into a god and worships it; he makes an idol from it and bows down to it. 16 He burns half of it in a fire, and he roasts meat on that half. He eats the roast and is satisfied. He warms himself and says, “Ah! I am warm, I see the blaze.” 17 He makes a god or his idol with the rest of it. He bows down to it and worships; he prays to it, “Save me, for you are my god.” 18 Such people do not comprehend and cannot understand, for he has shut their eyes so they cannot see, and their minds so they cannot understand. 19 No one comes to his senses; no one has the perception or insight to say, “I burned half of it in the fire, I also baked bread on its coals, I roasted meat and ate. Should I make something detestable with the rest of it? Should I bow down to a block of wood?” 20 He feeds on ashes. His deceived mind has led him astray, and he cannot rescue himself, or say, “Isn’t there a lie in my right hand?”
And we see that it’s ridiculous! But don’t we keep those same lies in our right hand? In the book I mentioned earlier by Jay John, he has a section that I found helpful, a means of considering whether something in our lives has become or is becoming an idol:
A Christian could make the following statements:
• God gives purpose, meaning, and fulfillment to my life.
• God governs the way I act.
• God is the focal point around which my existence hangs.
• I spend a lot of time thinking about God.
• God is my comfort when I am down.
• I desire more of God.
He then suggests that if something—anything—takes the place of God in each of these statements, then that thing is an idol. Try it with whatever you’d like. If something can fit every one of these statements instead of God—especially those first three statements—something or someone is out of place. But somehow, this doesn’t seem quite as ridiculous to us as the golden calf, or the stone or wood or metal statue, does it?
So on one hand, they attempted to replace God completely. But on the other hand, we also see something a little more sinister: trying to worship an idol alongside God, or to use an idol as a part of worshiping God:
5 When Aaron saw this, he built an altar in front of it and made an announcement: “There will be a festival to the Lord tomorrow.”
Did you catch it? He said, “There will be a festival to the LORD tomorrow.” His plan was that they would somehow, by worshiping the golden calf be worshiping Yahweh, or at the very least, they would worship Yahweh alongside the calf, as if they are similar. But the calf isn’t anything like the Lord Almighty. In fact, it’s radically opposite. In Ten Words to Live By, Jen Wilkin makes a great comparison between the calf and the Lord:
It is small, but God is immense.
It is inanimate, but God is the ever-living Spirit.
It is location-bound, but God is everywhere fully present.
It is created, but God is uncreated.
It is new, but God is eternal.
It is impotent, but God is omnipotent.
It is destructible, but God is indestructible.
It is of minor value, but God is of infinite value.
It is blind and deaf and mute, but God sees, hears, and speaks.
Aaron wasn’t attempting to make an idol that would adequately represent the Lord. He was attempting to make something that made everyone feel better: a softer, gentler, more easily manipulated, more palatable concept of Yahweh. A god who would make no moral demands that must be followed, would have no actual power to bring judgment or wrath, and would exercise no real authority—in short, a god that they could control, because the real Yahweh is entirely uncompromising in His holiness, and as a result, uncompromising in His expectations and demands of holiness for His people… those who bear His name.
We still do this today. Well, maybe we don’t do what Aaron did: we don’t form a little statute out of gold. But we certainly do attempt to make some kind of facsimile of God in our hearts and in our heads. We do this by attempting to define Him by our image of what we think He should be, and like Aaron did with the gold on the calf, we carve a little wrath off of here and scrape a little power off over there, or we shave a bit of grace away from this and scratch a little justice away from that... and we hold in our hearts and heads a “God” of our own creation, a mere caricature of the real God. And then we point to this abomination and say, “Behold the LORD!” But that’s not God.
No, we need to submit our ideas about God to the Word of God… the WHOLE Word of God, not just the parts that make us feel better or just the parts that affirm our notions of what God should be like. The Lord is the God of judgment AND forgiveness. He is the God of justice AND mercy. He is the God of love AND the God of wrath. He is the God of grace, comfort, and hope AND He is the God who punishes, disciplines, and destroys. And sadly, we tend to focus on some aspect of His character to the detriment of the others, and we make Him into something He is not, which then is not Him at all. This may seem confusing, but one of the beautiful aspects of God is that He is all of these things in perfection, all at the same time… He is so much greater than we are!
And He has chosen to reveal Himself to us in His Word, and more personally in the Person of Jesus Christ:
15 He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation. 16 For everything was created by him, in heaven and on earth, the visible and the invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities— all things have been created through him and for him. 17 He is before all things, and by him all things hold together. 18 He is also the head of the body, the church; he is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, so that he might come to have first place in everything. 19 For God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in him, 20 and through him to reconcile everything to himself, whether things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace through his blood, shed on the cross.
Brothers and sisters, we are called to imitate, to emulate, to be like Jesus, because Jesus is God. Jesus walked in obedience to the commands of God without compromise not because He had to earn the love of the Father, but because He loves the Father. Jesus called sin sin and never approved of it, but was merciful and tender in His approach to calling sinners to repentance. Jesus called people to follow Him because He knew that His way is the path of life, the narrow road, the firm foundation. Jesus served the sick, the broken, and the possessed, but he rebuked the self-righteous and the holier-than-thou, and He called those who would come after Him to a righteousness that exceeded theirs. Jesus humbly gave His life so that those who were far from God could be brought near, so that those in bondage would be redeemed, so that those who were dead would be made alive again.
He did this by taking our place on the cross, receiving the punishment that we deserve for our sins, so that we could be forgiven if we belong to Him by faith. And He triumphed over death by rising again, so that those who are His are also guaranteed eternal life with Him. But He’s coming back to judge the world, to set everything right and to the way it should be, and everyone will be called to account. He is God, and that is His right, because nothing else is God.
And this takes us to our next point:
2) Idolatry has consequences.
2) Idolatry has consequences.
Practicing idolatry is choosing to believe in something that is not true. It’s essentially lying to ourselves. It’s saying that this action or hobby or person or thing is God. But there is only one God, and He will not suffer to share His glory with an idol:
8 I am the Lord. That is my name, and I will not give my glory to another or my praise to idols.
This why God says that He is a jealous God in verse 5 of our focal passage:
5 Do not bow in worship to them, and do not serve them; for I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God, bringing the consequences of the fathers’ iniquity on the children to the third and fourth generations of those who hate me,
God’s form of jealousy isn’t from some place of insecurity or fear. God is jealous because He loves His people. Think of it this way: What if Melanie looked in my phone and found a bunch of pictures of some other woman, or worse: women? I can guarantee that she would instantaneously be jealous. Why? Not because she’s insecure or fearful (although those emotions would and should quickly follow in her case), but because I’m her husband. We’ve made a binding covenant with each other to that effect. And I’m not to be out there spending time and attention on some other woman, because then I’m being unfaithful to the covenant that we have made between each other and with God. Her jealousy makes perfect sense. There is such a thing as a godly jealousy, as Paul said in 2 Corinthians 11:
2 For I am jealous for you with a godly jealousy, because I have promised you in marriage to one husband—to present a pure virgin to Christ. 3 But I fear that, as the serpent deceived Eve by his cunning, your minds may be seduced from a sincere and pure devotion to Christ.
God is jealous when we chase after idols, because we are actually denying the truth. We are saying that something other than God is god. We are willfully, foolishly, sinfully suppressing reality by giving ourselves to idols. And there is going to be a reckoning for that, according to Scripture:
18 For God’s wrath is revealed from heaven against all godlessness and unrighteousness of people who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth, 19 since what can be known about God is evident among them, because God has shown it to them. 20 For his invisible attributes, that is, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen since the creation of the world, being understood through what he has made. As a result, people are without excuse. 21 For though they knew God, they did not glorify him as God or show gratitude. Instead, their thinking became worthless, and their senseless hearts were darkened. 22 Claiming to be wise, they became fools 23 and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man, birds, four-footed animals, and reptiles.
There’s no valid excuse for following an idol. We’re cheating on the one true God when we chase them. So in the Second Commandment, the Lord informs His people that only He is to be bowed down to in worship, only He is to be served as God, and that there is going to be a long-standing consequence if they chase other gods.
This isn’t to say that God is going to just be doling out punishments to children for what their fathers’ did. That goes against Deut. 24:16. God is warning His people about what idolatry will do: it will start a generational fade that will be difficult, painful, and ultimately destructive. Shane Pruitt, the National Next Gen Director for NAMB, posted this week what he called the Four Generation Fade. To be honest, he was using church participation as his point, but I am borrowing his concept for our purposes this morning to illustrate what the Lord was saying:
Parents don’t model that walking with God is a high priority for their kids;
Those kids grow up and make it less of a priority for their kids;
Those kids grow up and make it zero priority for their kids;
Those kids grow up without any real understanding of God.
Shane ended by saying, “Priorities today impact generations!” To be clear, this cycle can be broken at any time by children who turn to the Lord in repentance and faith. So let me take a moment and say directly to the children and students: If you have already surrendered to Jesus, as Pastor Joe would say, “made Him the boss of you,”: you have your own walk with the Lord. Take responsibility of your own relationship with Him. Don’t ride your parents’ coattails, but choose to love the Lord with all that you are, and don’t give that love to an idol. The last verse in 1 John gives us a good one-sentence instruction:
21 Little children, guard yourselves from idols.
And very quickly, our final point this morning:
3) Faithfulness has consequences.
3) Faithfulness has consequences.
Consequences aren’t always negative. The consequence that results from you working at your job is called a paycheck. Here, the Lord finishes up the Second Word by giving a great contrast to the negative consequence of idolatry:
6 but showing faithful love to a thousand generations of those who love me and keep my commands.
This contrast here: 3 or 4 generations to a thousand generations, is the largest numerical contrast in the Bible. And the Lord saying “a thousand generations” isn’t just hyperbole: for the Hebrew mind at the time, “a thousand generations” was a way of saying “to all the generations.” He is saying that His love for those who love Him would be endless.
And in fact, this is the first time in Scripture that mankind loving God is mentioned. In Hebrew thought, love and hate were not something you felt. They were something you did. They were actions that you took. Unlike the unfortunate image that we have of love in our culture today, love was not considered real if it didn’t have any follow-through. And this first mention of loving God is given in the context of obedience. This goes right along with what Jesus said in John 14:15:
15 “If you love me, you will keep my commands.
Just as we can leave a legacy of faithlessness, we can leave a legacy of faithfulness. And our faithfulness will have consequences for generations and generations to come. Think about it for a moment: how many generations of Christians sharing the Gospel lie behind us as we sit here? The time between the crucifixion and today is nearly 2,000 years… how many people’s testimonies are in your spiritual family? It’s mind-boggling. If you say you love God, keep His commands. Walk by the Spirit. Pass on that faithfulness.
Closing
Closing
The question that I leave us with today is this: whom or what do we worship? Do we worship the Lord God? Or some cheap knock-off of Him, or something else altogether? Don’t be deceived: everyone, everyone worships something. Maybe we worship God, or maybe we worship ourselves, but we all worship something.
And God has given us the opportunity to worship Him together this morning. If you’re here and you’ve never understood or believed the message of the Gospel, today you’ve heard that God has chosen to reveal Himself in the Person of Jesus Christ, and that Jesus died to take our place in the punishment that we deserve because of our sin. But through the power of the Spirit, He defeated death and rose again. If we trust Him for our salvation, surrendering our lives to Him in faith, then we are forgiven of our sins, have peace with God, and are promised to live forever with Him in His presence. We don’t earn it, and we can never be good enough to deserve it. He offers it as a gift, and He wants to change us from the inside out to make us all that He wants us to be. Surrender to Jesus in faith this morning. Right where you are, right now, give up and acknowledge that Jesus is Lord. If this is you, we want to be able to celebrate with you and help you on this new journey of faith. If you’re in the room, come down and share this with either me, or Joe, or Kerry. If you’re online, reach out to me by email at bill@ehbc.org, so that I can get you some resources to help you in this new walk of faith.
If you’re here in the room and you are interesting in joining this church family in formal membership, believing that this is a place and a people that you can worship with, grow with, and serve with, then please come and let us know that as well, so we can set a time to get together and talk about the church, answer any questions you might have, and get to know each other a little better. If you’re online and in the Albuquerque area, send me an email.
If you’d like to worship through giving this morning, you can do that online, or if you’re here in the room, you can use the plates that are by the doors.
PRAYER
Closing Remarks
Closing Remarks
Bible reading: Exodus 19 today.
Visitors: if you are a visitor this morning, I’d like the opportunity to meet you and give you a small gift to thank you for being here today. After our benediction passage, I’m going to stay down here at the front, and I invite those of you visiting today to come down if you’d like and if you have the time.
Benediction:
4 “Listen, Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. 5 Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your strength. 6 These words that I am giving you today are to be in your heart. 7 Repeat them to your children. Talk about them when you sit in your house and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up. 8 Bind them as a sign on your hand and let them be a symbol on your forehead. 9 Write them on the doorposts of your house and on your city gates.
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