God Will Not Be Limited – Second Commandment

God Will not Be Limited

The Second Commandment

Exodus, 20.4, 5; Deuteronomy 5.8, 9

“You shall not make for yourself a carved image, or 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 or serve them…”

Beware the temptation to put God in a box.

The making of images and idols is apparently a most satisfying way of worshiping; after all, we see much evidence that this has been the practice of peoples in every culture, time, and place. Physical beings that we are, it seems natural to have some concrete, material object to focus on as we go through our various devotional practices. But a god you can hold in your hand or mount on your mantle must be a pretty small god. We may ascribe all kinds of powers and privileges to it, but, at the end of the day, if he is dependent for his worship on our carving or crafting him and bringing him out so that we can focus on him while we do our obeisance, then he is necessarily limited. Those who use images to worship will soon enough come to associate their god with the image they see of him, thus constraining their imaginations by what they can see, rather than by what they can only imagine based on what he has been pleased to reveal of himself. And that’s the other problem: pagans make idols because their gods don’t reveal anything about themselves. Their gods, and all their powers and privileges, depend upon the imaginations of foolish men, who then create idols and images to concretize their vain imaginations and their view of their god, because there is no other way to keep their sense of him intact from one generation to the next. Surely this is no way to treat the God of Scripture.

Do we limit God in any ways? Are there any aspects of your own approach to worshiping God that “put Him in a box” rather than celebrate the vastness and greatness of His unseen essence?

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“In the Gates” is a devotional series on the Law of God by Rev. T.M. Moore

T. M. Moore is editor of the Worldview Church. He serves as dean of the Centurions Program of the Wilberforce Forum and principal of The Fellowship of Ailbe, a spiritual fellowship in the Celtic Christian tradition. He is the author or editor of twenty books, and has contributed chapters to four others. His essays, reviews, articles, papers, and poetry have appeared in dozens of national and international journals, and on a wide range of websites. His most recent books are The Ailbe Psalter and The Ground for Christian Ethics (Waxed Tablet).

Scripture quotations in this article are from The Holy Bible, English Standard Version, (c) copyright 2001,2007 by Crossway Bibles, a division of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Editor’s note: The use of a translation other than the Authorised Version in an article does not constitute an endorsement in whole or in part by The Christian Observer.