Worship

Ex.20:⁴ “You must not make for yourself an idol of any kind or an image of anything in the heavens or on the earth or in the sea. ⁵ You must not bow down to them or worship them, for I, the LORD your God, am a jealous God…” [with emphasis]

The second commandment is, “You shall not make idols”, and it is The Battle with Worship. Over the next couple of days, we will be looking closely at the second commandment- our struggle with worship. The first and the second commandments appear similar but they are really different. With the first commandment God says, “you will not have another God but me” and with the second He says, “You will not worship another God but me!” The difference is, if the first commandment has to dowith God asking our hand in marriage so to speak, then the second commandment is about faithfulness to God. Think about it this way, first God says, “I want you to be mine – you are mine!”. Then He says, “You will not lie with any other person but Me.”

“You must not make for yourself an idol of any kind or an image of anything in the heavens or on the earth or in the sea…” God is a Spirit and so not visible to the human eye. And because of the way the human mind works, we tend to attempt to imagine what God looks like. This is the reason why there are all sorts of gods in different cultures. They are imaginations of men- pictures, paintings, graven images, altars of clay man has come up with to represent a deity or god. God’s commandment is, you will not make an image to represent Me [paraphrased]. As human beings, we easily fall into this trap because we want to have something tangible; we always want to fill in the blanks, to complete the missing link.

Not many people listen to the radio anymore but I still do. My wife and I developed a fondness for a particular radio program with two hosts that analyze football in a very interesting way. After listening to them over a period, I subconsciously created images of both hosts in my mind. Then one day we decided to look for pictures of them online and we were shocked. The reality was very far from what we had imagined. Similarly, when we try to imagine what we do not know or have not seen, we make mistakes. God says we are not to imagine or create a caricature of Him.

Prayer: Lord Jesus, I will worship no other god but You, in Jesus Name. Amen!