Exodus 20:4

NO GRAVEN IMAGE

‘Thou shalt not make … any graven image,’ etc.

Exodus 20:4

I. The primary meaning of this commandment no longer needs enforcement.—There is no longer any disposition to worship Jehovah under any symbolical form, whether of a calf or anything else. Even if anywhere excessive honour seems to be paid to pictures and statues of our Lord or His Mother, this can hardly be strictly said to be a breach of the Second Commandment. For the essential sin, against which the Second Commandment is directed, is the low conception of the Divine Being which is involved in representing Him as adequately symbolised by any created thing; and this would not be involved in any excessive reverence for statues or pictures, which only attempt to portray Christ’s humanity. When God came in such a form, that He could be seen and handled as the Son of Man, He satisfied that craving which in earlier ages required restraint. He showed that God could be seen and known and worshipped as man without danger of idolatry. No doubt pictures and images of Christ may be held in a superstitious reverence, and may in that way weaken our sense of unseen realities. But it would be as uncharitable to stigmatise the reverence paid to them as idolatrous as to call our regard for the relics of a dead child or friend idolatrous. Iconoclasm, under whatever guise it poses, is as wanting in lucidity as it is in charity; while the faults of character which it breeds and fosters are certainly far more serious than any which it is likely to cure. It is possible, but only just possible, that a very uneducated Christian might think that the material atoms composing a painting or statue, which represented Christ, were more sacred in themselves than the atoms composing a chair or a table. Such an idea would show a certain confusion of thought, but it would not involve a breach of the Second Commandment.

II. The Second Commandment has still a meaning; it is the safeguard of the imagination.—It bids us, first of all, think of God as He has revealed Himself—as the Father; it forbids the misuse of the imaginative faculty in thinking of Him as other than He is. This is its deepest lesson. It is the germ-thought which prescribes all high and reverent thought about God. God is to be honoured with our imagination. And then, in order that we may make it capable of honouring Him, its use is to be strictly restrained; it must not run riot and construct false views of life, or paint false and bad pictures within us and dwell on them. It needs restraint; it needs also cultivation. It can never be said too strongly that to use your imagination aright you must spiritualise it. ‘Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God’—they and only they. You must keep its delicate fibre untarnished; otherwise you cannot see that which is, the real, the Divine.

The Second Commandment is the safeguard of the imagination; it keeps us true to high conceptions of God: it forbids us to imagine Him as a God from whom we should shrink if He were a man—a non-natural Being; it forbids any degradation in our thought of Him. In order to lay hold of its spirit, we must discipline the imagination so that we may be able to use it aright: we must train it by keeping it from degradation, but especially by filling it with all that is beautiful and true. For both in the disciplining of the imagination in ourselves and in the training of it in others, the ‘Thou shalt not,’ the mere laws of prohibition and restraint are of little use. Practically we shall find that the only way not to exercise the imagination wrongly is to exercise it rightly. If we would keep it from base uses, we must put it to noble uses. ‘We must walk in the Spirit’ if we are not to ‘fulfil the lusts of the flesh.’ The Divine law for us is positive. The grim sign-posts that keep us out of the woods by assuring us that guns and man-traps are to be found there, will not give us of themselves the benefits of healthy exercise: they may keep us from dangers, they will not give us fresh air. The only way of keeping the imagination from poison is by presenting it with its true food. Give it real loveliness to dwell on and it will reject the sham, the pretentious, the unworthy.

Illustration

‘Nothing could be more repugnant than for us to bow in worship to an idol. Every instinct of our souls would rebel. But have you never bestowed on a friend, on your business, on your money, on yourself, the love and adoration which belong to God? And there is a still more special modern peril. We may not have placed a material idol in the shrine where we ought to have worshipped the true and living God, but we have seated upon His throne that impersonal energy called force. Talk about the fascination and danger of idol worship! Here is a peril a thousandfold more terrible. Millions of us (unconsciously, perhaps) are prostrating ourselves before force and law instead of before mind and heart. These fearful abstractions are benumbing and paralysing our emotions of love and devotion. I believe that a century of such prostration (it cannot be called worship) will have as deadly an influence on the soul as did the worship of Astarte and Baal. Sceptics may sneer at the idea of God’s being “jealous” as immoral, but one thing is certain, and that is that Nature, or Force, or whatever you wish to call that supreme power that shapes the destinies of men, will never let them worship anything but the highest. With a fearful and inexorable judgment, he (or it) “visits the iniquity” of worshipping anything less than the highest with infinite misery and shame. If this jealousy can be in nature without subjecting it to reproach, why should it be a reproach to nature’s God!’