Protestant Ethics Today (Part 3): The Second Commandment
Be sure to check out part 1 and part 2 of Ben’s series on Protestant Ethics Today.
The second commandment (Exodus 20:4–6) forbids the making of physical representations of God (v. 4) and using them in worship (v. 5). It also provides an explicit rationale in v. 6: God is rightly jealous that his creatures worship him alone. He would not be the supreme God and the supreme good if he accepted anything less. He will punish those who do not worship him alone, while rewarding those who do.
Images of God are forbidden because God is a spiritual being who cannot be imaged without a distortion of who (and even what) he is. Images, as many theologians point out, also encourage believers to take the anthropomorphic imagery of scripture literally instead of understanding that such anthropomorphic imagery is the way God comes down to our level to speak to us in ways that are understandable to us as creatures. When we read in Scripture, for example, that God “sees” and “hears” and has “arms” and so on, we are to understand that God is omniscient (knows everything exhaustively) and omnipotent (has absolute, righteously exercised power), among his other attributes. God cannot talk to us in “God talk” because we are finite creatures, so he accommodates himself to our level of understanding, using normal human language. Images or God, however, encourage us to take such language literally, thus bringing God down to our level, which turns God into a god of our own design, one conveniently tolerant of our ignorance and sin, demanding nothing of us because it is just like us.
Protestants, with the exception of some Lutherans and high-church Anglicans, have historically understood the second commandment also to prohibit physical depictions of Jesus Christ. This historical position, however, has been abandoned by many Protestants today. Pictures of Christ are everywhere: on book covers, in children’s Bibles, in church buildings, and more. The main argument in favor of images of Christ is the incarnation. Though fully divine, Jesus took on true human flesh in order to save sinners plunged into ruin by the first man, Adam. Others have insisted that images of Christ serve as helpful teaching aids.
The argument for the acceptability of images of Christ, however, fails for two main reasons. First, the more pragmatic reason: we have no idea what Christ actually looked like. It is therefore impossible to capture his likeness today, even if we thought it was a good thing to do. Second, and more important, the incarnation is an essential Christian teaching, but it is an incarnation (enfleshing) of the divine Son of God. Theologians refer to this as the hypostatic union, the great mystery that in the person of Jesus Christ there are two complete, and perfectly united though distinguished, natures: the divine and the human. If we could sit Christ down to be drawn or painted, we might be able to create a realistic depiction of the humanity of Christ. It would still be impossible, however, in any such physical depiction to capture the union of the human and divine in Jesus, which means that all such images would necessarily say something false and incomplete about him.
Protestants in the broad Reformed tradition have seen an additional significance in the second commandment beyond proscribing physical depictions of God, namely that all worship must be carried out according to God’s word. This principle is succinctly stated in chapter 21 of the Westminster Confession of Faith (“Of Religious Worship, and the Sabbath Day”):
The light of nature showeth that there is a God, who hath lordship and sovereignty over all, is good, and doth good unto all, and is therefore to be feared, loved, praised, called upon, trusted in, and served, with all the heart, and with all the soul, and with all the might. But the acceptable way of worshiping the true God is instituted by himself, and so limited by his own revealed will, that he may not be worshiped according to the imaginations and devices of men, or the suggestions of Satan, under any visible representation, or any other way not prescribed in the Holy Scripture.
God’s existence and the obligation all men have to worship him, in other words, is clear from God’s general revelation in the world (Romans 1:18–32). But the way men are to worship must be determined by God’s special revelation in his word. Human worship goes quickly and badly astray as soon as men decide that they will figure it all out according to their own imagination and desires.
Examples of worship not as “prescribed in Holy Scripture” abound in the Bible: Nadab and Abihu’s offering of “strange” or “unauthorized” burning incense (Leviticus 10:1–3), Uzzah reaching out his hand to steady the ark of the covenant (2 Samuel 6:5–15; 1 Chronicles 13:5–14), abuses of the Lord’s Supper (1 Corinthians 11:17–34), and disorderly worship (1 Corinthians 14:26–40), to name some prominent examples.
The episode of the golden calf is particularly instructive (Exodus 32). Because Moses is delayed on Mount Sinai, the impatient Israelites demand that Aaron make “gods” for them. Thus, we begin with an explicit violation of the second commandment that is driven simply by human reasoning and desire. Aaron, instead of leading the people in worship as he should, allows their desire to determine how God will be worshipped (Exodus 32:2–5). Aaron even attempts to pass this all off as if it can be carried out as a valid expression of true worship: “Tomorrow shall be a feast to the Lord” (Exodus 32:5).
As a rebuke to much modern worship we see that fervency of spirit cannot be equated with truthfulness of worship: the people gave freely of their gold (Exodus 32:2–4), “they rose up early the next day and offered burnt offerings and brought peace offerings,” “the people sat down to eat and drink and rose up to play” (Exodus 32:6), and sang so fervently that Joshua and Moses could hear them from a distance (Exodus 32:18–19). Such worship, no matter how plausibly justifiable it might have seemed, was wrong for one simple reason: God did not positively command it. “They have turned aside quickly out of the way that I commanded them” (Exodus 32:8). The same holds true today, even though the coming of Christ has fulfilled, and therefore brought to an end, the priestly, sacrificial-temple worship of the Old Covenant. Worship must still be regulated according to God’s word. This does not mean that every single particular is regulated by the Bible (chairs vs. pews, bulletins vs. projectors, time a service starts, etc.). It does mean, however, that the most important aspects of worship are not left to human reason and speculation: the word must be preached, there must be prayer and singing of God’s praises, and the sacraments must be administered, and all of this in ways commanded in Scripture.
New Testament teaching reiterates how important it is to worship God in the way he determines in his word. Jesus warned against worshipping God according to the mere traditions of man (Matthew 15:1–9; Mark 7:5–13). The apostle Paul wrote of the same danger in Colossians 2:20–23 when he warned the believers in that town about worshipping God “according to human precepts and teachings” (Colossians 2:23).
A right understanding of the second commandment is urgently needed today. It is a strange fact that evangelical Christians believe the Bible to be relevant and determinative for just about every issue one could imagine (finances, vocation, healthy marriages, childrearing, etc.) except for that which matters more than anything else in Scripture: how sinners worship a holy God, a God who is a consuming fire (Hebrews 12:29) and must therefore be worshipped “with reverence and awe” (Hebrews 12:28) and “in Spirit and truth” (John 4:24).
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