For those of you who came in after the time of announcements this morning, and after the call to worship, those of you who are here today visiting with us, we just want to extend a special welcome to you. We are thankful that you could be here to worship with us at first praise. This is a church that loves Jesus Christ, that's addicted to the gospel, loves His word, and that's all we're going to hear from this morning. We're going to discover a little bit more about Jesus, and we're going to do so through the Ten Commandments. We've been in the middle of a series over the past few weeks on the Ten Commandments, and we're just getting to the Second Commandment this morning, the Second Commandment in verses 4 through 6 of Exodus chapter 20, but before we read the Second Commandment, I want to first read the prologue to the Ten Commandments that we have discovered over the past few weeks, because it's important to remember that the law is given to people who are already under the grace of God. We have already received the grace of God as we rest upon Jesus Christ as He's offered to us in the gospel. And out of that, by living our lives dependent upon Jesus Christ, dependent upon the grace and the power of the Holy Spirit, our lives begin to reflect Him, they begin to reflect His character, and they do so in ways that look like the Ten Commandments. So with that in view, let's take a moment now to read the Ten Commandments, beginning in verse 1 of Exodus chapter 20. And God spoke all these words saying, I am the Lord your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery, and now down to verse 4. You shall not make for yourself a carved image, or any lightness 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. For I the Lord your God and the jealous God visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children to the third and the fourth generation of those who hate me, but showing steadfast love to thousands of those who love me and keep my commandments. Amen, this is God's word to us this morning. You know, one of the most distressing things that I think could happen to you or to me or to anybody for that matter is for someone to misrepresent your character and then go and tell their misrepresentation of your character to a bunch of other people. It's one of the most hurtful things that can happen to you, for someone to perceive something about you that is untrue, and then to go and broadcast that to others. It's a hurtful thing. We've all experienced that kind of pain, but how do you feel when someone goes about perceiving something about you that is equally untrue, but it kind of works to your benefit. They exaggerate your virtues. They exaggerate how good you are at something. A few years back I was at a conference in San Diego and I bumped into one of my former seminary professors and it was he and myself and one other guy in this conversation. My former professors told this other guy that I was one of the best students that he had ever had, and I can tell you for a fact that that was not true, but it was quite flattering nonetheless, but it was not true. You might find it flattering when people embellish your virtues as well when they tend to exaggerate those things, but for me at least it's somewhat embarrassing to have my virtues embellish, because really it sets a standard that I'm not quite able to meet or that I have not met before, and it builds expectations in people that are beyond the scope of my ability to actually reach. And so the reality is whether someone is putting you down or they're over building you, most of us just want to be loved and accepted for who we actually are, not for how we're perceived to be or built up to be in one way or another. We just want to be accepted for who we actually are. That's how most of us want to be. You know there's kind of a running joke about marriage that men will marry women hoping that they will never change but they end up changing. And a man and a woman will marry a man hoping that he will change and he never does. And all of that is kind of fueled by a fundamental misunderstanding of who the person is, the false expectation of who that person is, it's divorced from reality. We want to be loved and we want to be accepted for who we actually are rather than who someone else imagines us to be or perceives us to be. And if that's the way you and I are my friends, why would we expect that God would be any different? Why would we expect that God would be okay with us imagining him to be something other than who he actually is? See that's what God is prohibiting here in the second commandment. That's what he's calling us to resist. If the first commandment is calling us to resist, the inward temptation that we have to worship something other than God to build our identity upon something other than him, what the second commandment is calling us to resist is the notion that we can worship the true and living God anyway in which we choose. That we can worship the true and living God as we imagine him to be rather than for who he actually is. But there's another thing that the second commandment is calling us to resist as well. And he's calling us to reject any worship of him that is in ways that do not actually please him. He wants us not to worship him in ways that do not actually bring him pleasure. See we not only want to be accepted and loved for who we actually are rather than for what other people imagine us to be or want us to be. But we also want people to work for our own particular joy. We want people to treat us in ways that bring us actual joy. You don't want to be used by other people. Nobody likes to be used by other people. That sort of thing crops up all the time in our relationships very often in our marriages too. If for example I was to go and get tickets to the sweet 16 and elite eight basketball games coming up in a couple of weeks in New Orleans from my wife for our anniversary. I'd be living in a van down by the river in about two minutes. But if she got that for me she could get me to do anything that she wants me to do for at least a year. See you don't give someone a gift that you necessarily want for yourself. You give them a gift that works for their own joy. You serve them in the ways that work for their own joy, their own well-being. And that's what God's calling us to do here in the second commandment. Not to give him worship in any way in which we choose but to worship him is he's called us to worship him. He's revealed that he would like to be worshiped and served through his word. So that's what the second commandment is calling us to as well. The fact that there even is a second commandment. The fact that it even exists reminds us of something doesn't it? It reminds us that our hearts are idle factories. There were manufacturing them all the time. That's an ongoing theme as you not only explore the Ten Commandments but as you explore scripture from Genesis chapter three until you get to the end of it in Revelation chapter 21. You discovered that our hearts are idle factories. We're born with this nature that automatically pushes against God and who he is and what he's all about and what he's calling us to do. And then we have that all added into a culture that is like that. That fuels our inward tendency towards idolatry and it warps our understanding of who God actually is and it creates in us this tendency to want to worship God as we imagine him to be rather than for who he actually is. And that kind of thing is actually what was happening with the whole golden calf episode that you see in Exodus chapter 32. That's exactly what's happening there. In Exodus chapter 32 what you see is Moses going to the mountain receiving direct special revelation from God as to what the people are to do how they are to worship him and how their lives are to be shaped now that they have received the grace of God. Well in the meantime Moses or Aaron rather is at the bottom of the hill and he is shaping up this golden calf. He's shizzling out this golden calf and his intention in creating the golden calf was not to create a whole different God for the Israelites to worship. That wasn't his purpose even though that's what they ended up doing by default anyway. His purpose was not to create a different God for them to worship. His intent was to depict the true God, true God that had actually brought them out of Egypt to depict the true God in an image that just so happened to be in the form of some bovine. That's what Aaron did and what happened is he ended up making God into his own image. Aaron made God into his own image as he imagined God to be and then he goes about building this do-it-yourself sanctuary and altar and then the feast day comes and people begin to worship this self-derived, self-manufactured God and they begin to engage in some sort of liturgical dance. It's the only liturgical dance that you ever see in Scripture and they dance around the golden calf and what happens as a result of this faulty worship, gross immorality. The people begin to live immoral lives. They're not worshipping God as he's called them to worship in the first commandment and in the second commandment and what it's causing them to do as a result is to break all the rest of the commandments that have to do with the way in which we engage with our neighbor and it just goes to show you this. This is an important thing for all of us to latch onto. There is a direct correlation between our worship and our ethics. There is a direct connection between the object of our worship and the way in which we live our lives, the integrity with which we live our lives, the way in which we live our lives in relationship with one another. So in other words if you imagine God to be something other than who He's revealed Himself to be, it's going to cause you to live in ways that are inconsistent with the way in which He's called us to live. Just think about that a little bit. Think about whenever someone says to you, I'd like to think of God as being whatever. What are they doing there? Well they're heading off the cliff theologically. They're heading off the cliff as far as the Bible is concerned. But they're actually telling you is they're telling you about a God that they want to exist, rather than the God who actually exists. Because who in the world would ever create a God that would rub against their own personal preferences? Who would do that? Nobody would do that. In fact that's one of the reasons why I think that Christianity is true. Because the God of the Bible is constantly confronting our own preferences. All the time. That's what He does. He exposes our sin. He exposes our idolatry and He calls us back to Him by His grace. Everyone who professes to be a follower of Christ, for instance, and then rejects the idea that God would ever send anybody who rejected Him to hell, who would ever condemn that person, who rejects the idea of any of that type of thing. If someone who wants to go to the buffet of the Christian life and scoop up a heaping of mercy and put it on their plate, but they want to reject the whole notion that God is a just God, that God is a holy God. But the fact of the matter is just as when you get the Darren, you also get the stone, you also get the mercy and you also get the justice. You don't get to pick and choose the parts of God that you like that fit into your own little idea of who you want God to be. We are so inclined towards that all the time. See if someone comes to you and says, I like to think of God as being someone who would never condemn anybody. What they're doing is they're telling you a lot more about themselves and they're telling you about God. That's what's going on fundamentally at the end of the day. And when you and I forget or reject or fail to take heed of the fact that we are the ones created in the image of God, when we forget about that, we end up creating a God who fits into our own image, a God of our own imagination that's completely foreign to the God who's revealed to us in Scripture. And it's a God who would never contradict you. And quite frankly, what kind of God is that? It's no God at all. A God who would never challenge us, who would never, who would never expose anything in our life that is an idolatry, is no God at all. It's a God of our own imagination. So the reality is that when you worship the true God as you imagine him to be, rather than for who he really is, you're not only worshipping the true God falsely, but you end up worshipping a whole brand new God all together. You're breaking the first commandment and the second commandment all in one fell swoop. And that's why it's so important to remember this very important thing about Christianity. Christianity is fundamentally a faith that is grounded in the Word rather than a faith that is grounded in images. It's a faith that is rooted and established and the revealed Word of God. The special revelation that God brings to us rather than in a world of pictures and a world of our own imagination of who we expect God to be. And what more relevant issue is there for us in the 21st century than that? Because we live in a world that has come to devalue the verbal and overvalue the visual. That's the shift, the cultural shift that's going on in the world. And it'd be hard press to say whether it's the church that's influenced the world more in that direction or the world that's influenced the church. Because it's alive and well in the church. And as a result, our overemphasis on the visual over the verbal has made us a much much more trivial culture as a result and a much more trivial church. There's something about the visual, the image that causes us to be less attentive and less reflective than we are to the verbal. In fact, one of the great things that you'll learn in political science 101 at any school, anytime you study political behavior, you'll be taught about the 1960 presidential debate that happened between John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon. It was the first televised presidential debate that ever happened. John F. Kennedy, of course, at the time was the young, good-looking senator from Massachusetts and Richard Nixon was the sitting vice president, an older man comparatively with kind of those loose Richard Nixon cheeks. So they have their debate and of course at the end of the debate, they have to ask who won the debate. The pollsters back then just as much as now were engaged in that. And the people who listened to the debate on the radio thought that, by and large, Richard Nixon had won that debate hands down. He won the debate. But those who watched it on television had a different view. The overwhelming majority of the people who watched it on television thought Kennedy was the clear winner. And the point is not to pick sides in a political battle, but the point is that there's something about the image being projected on the television screen that trumped the actual words that were being said. It trumped the content of what was going on. And yes, nonverbal communication whatever. But the point is that the substance got lost in the image. It's not that Starbucks makes the best coffee. It's that they have the best image. And Christianity tells you something about that, doesn't it? Christianity tells you that it's not an image-based faith. Our faith is a word-based faith. And that's why our forefathers in the Christian faith made it a point to clean out the icons and the images of the pre-reformation church because those images were not merely pointers to Christ. They actually became objects of worship. It became objects of worship that distorted who the true God really was altogether. That's why Protestant places of worship, houses of worship are comparatively plain compared to those of other traditions because we understand that our faith is ultimately a faith that is grounded in the word and not in images. It's why we so highly value preaching and why we so highly value Bible study because faith does not come primarily by seeing it comes by what? Hearing the word of God. Hearing the word of God as it's preached into our lives as it's read into the degree that we actually have visible signs in the church which are baptism in the Lord's supper. They're always accompanied by a faithful proclamation of the word of God to us. So there you go but there are some exceptionally practical issues that we have to face with regard to that in our own lives as well. Practical issues and practical ways in which the second commandment is brought to bear upon our lives. And I just want to point out a few of those to you this morning. One thing that we need to consider is just the context in which this commandment was given. It was given before Jesus Christ came and took on flesh and dwelt among the people. So people would have had no ability to have any image, any idea of the form of God. But what do we do on this side of things? On this side of things where Jesus actually did have human flesh. You could touch him and feel him and he had the shape of a human man and people saw him. Thousands and thousands of people saw him at any given time. What do we do about that? What do we do about the fact that it's almost impossible to find any children's Bible without a picture of Jesus Christ in it? What do we do about our manger scenes that we put up at Christmas? People love their manger scenes. It's funny to me almost just in by way of just something that pops into my mind. Many of the people who are so animate about having the tin commandments etched on the walls of the local courthouse are the same people who want to have a manger scene on the courthouse lawn which may very well be a violation of the second commandment. That's another discussion for another day. But it's the reality. What do we do about images of Jesus? Well, we really don't know what Jesus looked like. When we explore scripture, we don't know that much about what Jesus looked like. But even if we did, how accurate would your picture of Jesus hung up in a household actually be? Are you going to hang up the picture of Jesus in your household where he's cleaning out the money changers? Or is it going to be the picture where he's got the little kids on his lap? Is he going to have a happy sweet face or is he going to have an angry face? Is he going to have the face of being transfigured? Or is he going to have the face where he's suffering on the cross? See, when you create an image of Jesus Christ either pictorally or even just in your head of how you imagine him to be all the time, you get this unbalanced view of who God actually is, of who Jesus Christ actually is. The word of God, my friends, and not an image is what gives us a robust view of who Jesus is, a balanced view of who Jesus is, not a picture of him. The manger scenes that we set up at Christmas time on our mantle, or on the courthouse, or on our front lawn, are almost certainly inaccurate. And if you don't believe it, just give a little thought to what it would be like to give birth amongst a bunch of stinky cattle with no professional medical help and tell me if that conjures up the image of all his calm and all his bright to you. It's almost certainly untrue. And the pictures that we have in children's story bibles, to the degree that they're appropriate at all. And I'm not so sure that they necessarily are. But to the degree that they are appropriate, they're appropriate for three year olds, and four year year olds, and five year olds. People with maturity don't need to create an image of Jesus Christ, whether it be in picture form, or whether it just be an imagination of who God actually is, detached from who he reveals himself to be in Scripture. People with maturity are people who know that they need the word. They need God to reveal himself to us in his word. And we need to embrace Jesus Christ as he's revealed in his word, not as we imagine him to be. So that's one thing. Here's another thing to think about. Does God have a negative view of images in general? In other words, is the second commandment prohibiting art? Is that what it's prohibiting? I think certainly not. Because when you look at Scripture, you even discover in the Old Testament in the context with which this is given, that God actually commanded the people to create pieces of art for the tabernacle, for the places of worship. They made pomegranates and all sorts of things like that. And even in our own space of worship, this is not just a box that we meet in. It's just purely utilitarian. It has something aesthetic to it, something of beauty. When you look around, you can see that there was some actual thought given to the beauty of this place. And what it does is it communicates something of which we believe about God, right? It communicates a sense of reverence, a sense of awe that God is beautiful, that God is majestic. This is not a place that looks like a movie theater. It's not a place that looks like a basketball arena. It's a wholly other place for the worship of a wholly other God. And it just tells you something. And this is important given that we live in a community that's somewhat artistic. Visual art and performing arts and television and so forth, those are great things. Those are things that we ought to give praise to God for. They give human beings the ability to express creativity and beauty in those particular realms. And they give us a full understanding of God's world and of the people that he's created. And they bring to us in stories, stories of redemption. We can actually watch movies. We can see pieces of art. We can see plays and so on and so forth. All of these images. And we can see how ingrained in the human soul is this longing to be redeemed. And it can draw us to understanding, a deeper understanding of what the gospel is actually like. And so the church needs to be a place that befriends artists, that accepts creative people into our midst, that encourages and supports their work. The church ought to be a refuge for people who have that creative bent. But at the end of the day, in our own worship together, as we gather together, doing what we're doing right now, it's not a place where images are to be included. Images are not to be included in the Christian worship on the Lord's day because God has revealed Himself to us. And He's revealed Himself to us not in images, but in His word. That's what He's done. That's how we ought to worship Him. And speaking of worship, what does the second command have to say about that? What does it say about our worship? As we gather together, doing what we're doing right now, and as we leave here today, and we go about doing our ordinary lives throughout the course of the rest of the week. Let me talk about public worship first as we do this. As we gather together on the the Lord's day, we want our worship to be informed by scripture. We don't want to add anything to it. We don't want to subtract anything from it. We want the Word to be what fuels our worship here. And my friends, that is liberating. It's not constricting. It's liberating. It frees us from imbibing traditionalism, from following after the doctrines and commandments of people who have a God of their own imagination, rather than a God who reveals Himself to us through His Word. It prevents that kind of tyranny. And the Word is what fuels our whole culture of worship here. It says, we understand God as He's revealed to us in His Word, which is why our worship, as we gather together today, my friends, has a feeling of reverence and awe, because our God is consuming fire. Our God is a holy God. He's holy other. He's infinite, eternal, unchangeable, and is being, and wisdom, and power, and holiness, and justice, and goodness, and truth. And so because that's the case, we don't come to Him in a casual, nonchalant way. We come to Him with a sense of reverence and awe. But there's also another thing about God. God has taken on flesh. He has dwelt among us. He has drawn near to us a manual. God with us. He calls us His friends. He calls us His beloved children. We actually can cry out to Him and say, , Abba, Father, there's an intimacy that's there because of that. He's pursued our joy by giving Himself for us. He's called us to cast our burdens upon Him because He cares for us. He's given us the joy of victory, the joy of the resurrection. So yes, our worship ought to have a sense of reverence and awe, but it should also be a celebration. This is enough funeral service. This isn't a dirge. We even partake the Lord's supper. It's not meant to be like you're at just some morbid event. It's a time of joy because you're communing with one another and you're communing with God who loved you and gained Himself for you. That's the beauty of it and that's what a worship that's grounded in scripture that's grounded in the Word tells you. That's what it shows you about God. We want to be broken down and we want to be rebuilt every Sunday. So we say at our church that we want to read the Bible, preach the Bible, pray the Bible, sing the Bible and see the Bible in the sacraments. That's what we want to do. We want it to inform everything that we do together on Sundays, but we also want His Word to inform how we go about worshiping Him in all of our life. See, when we ground ourself and who He's revealed Himself to be rather than how we imagine Him, we understand that we need to depend upon the grace and the power of the Holy Spirit to work out our own salvation, to live a life that pleases Him, to live a life of joyful communion with Him, to live in ways that reflect His character. As we struggle through all of the issues that we face in our ordinary life, it calls us to trust in Him and His Word, to will and to act not according to our own purposes, but to His purposes as He's revealed it in His Word. Our life isn't lived on the basis of our own sensibilities, our own passions, our own imaginations of God, or what the world is doing, as to be lived in ways that reflect Him, that reflect how He has revealed Himself in His Word. Let me just say this last thing and then I'll be done. You'll notice in verses 5 and 6 that this commandment comes with both a warning and a promise and the warning is this that He will visit the iniquity of the fathers on the children to the third and fourth generation of those who hate me and He does it because He's a jealous God. That seems rather punitive, doesn't it? That God would punish my great-great-grandchildren for my own idolatry. I think that just tells you how seriously God takes His worship, that this isn't some kind of peripheral thing, this is an important issue and when we fail to worship Him as He is, we end up digging our own grave. See, God has exclusive rights over us, just as a husband has exclusive rights over his wife and a wife has exclusive rights over her husband and when one party commits adultery, of course it's going to arouse jealousy. Reminds me of this show, The Sister Wives. Have you ever seen that one? They say that the biggest issue they have in their marriage, it's this man who's married to four wives that's on TV, it's old reality show. He's got four wives and the wives say the biggest thing they struggle with is you guessed it, jealousy. I wonder why? There's massive adultery taking place there and that's going to happen when someone commits adultery against you and it happens with God as we commit adultery against Him and that idolatry, that idolatry, that worship of God as we imagine Him to be, creates a culture in our own families that encourages children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren to be idolaters themselves, to turn away from the worship of the true and living God. Parents, you need to remember this. Don't think for a second that how you understand God and how you worship God does not have a profound effect on your children. It absolutely does. You are the model of godliness or ungodliness to your children and you are the ones that are going to show them whether Jesus Christ is to be valued above everything else valued in the world or if you're just paying lip service to Him. So that's a challenge for you and your families. Is your household a place where there is a culture of worship, of the true God as He reveals Himself to be? Is it a place where Christ flavors your life as you engage with your children and engage with your spouse? Or is Jesus just peripheral to it all? That's the challenge, that's the warning here. But there's also a promise in this passage and the promise is this that God will show steadfast love to thousands of those who love Him and keep His commands. There's a parallel to this in Deuteronomy 7 where the thousands is talking about thousands of generations and the point is this that God's mercy is broader than His wrath. God's mercy is broader than His wrath where sin abounds, grace abounds all the more. Yes, there are going to be godly children who come from the most ungodly household imaginable and there are going to be ungodly children coming from parents who worship Christ more and they worship anything else in this world. But the point is this, the ordinary way in which the next generation comes to worship and treasure Jesus Christ is when parents and especially the fathers truly love Jesus Christ more than they love anything or anybody else. Parents who love Jesus teach their kids about Jesus. They talk about Jesus in their household. They bring their kids up to worship Jesus. They seek to raise their kids in the nurture and instruction of the Lord and they're instilling in their kids a true and faithful biblical understanding of who God is and what He's all about and they're resisting their native inclination to worship God as they imagine Him to be. Repentant parents are going to be people who look to Jesus Christ as their law keeper. As the one who accomplishes their righteousness, they'll see this law, they'll see these commandments and see themselves as failures, but they'll look to Jesus as the one who kept it for them. In Jesus's refusal to commit idolatry and to worship the Father as He truly is, He gains our acceptance before God. Friends, the image that you are called to worship is Jesus Christ who Paul says is the image of the invisible God, the first born of all creation. Jesus is our hope and peace. And let's get thought to that now as we come to Him in prayer. Father, what privilege it is to be able to plum the depths of your word, how difficult it is because it shows us that every person here thousands of times has been guilty of violating this commandment that you have given to us because we're people who received grace. You graciously showed us who you are. You graciously showed us who you call us to be. You graciously show us what you've done for us by obeying this commandment where we failed and we pray that that grace that you have given to us, that steadfast love that endures forever would fuel our lives and cause us to worship you, follow you, love you and treasure you as you truly are and not as we invent in our own neighborhood of make believe. Do this in our lives for your sake, for your glory and for our joy. You pray it in Jesus name. Amen.