“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.”
— Exodus 20:4
There was a famous commercial in the Eighties featuring tennis star Andre Agassi with the tagline: “Image is everything.” It was a great slogan for selling cameras. It is a terrible theology for living. Because the moment we begin to worship an image of God instead of the God who has revealed Himself in His Word, we have exchanged the real thing for a shadow, and shadows have no power to save.
The Second Commandment is the one people most often dismiss as irrelevant. “I haven’t carved any graven images lately,” they say, and feel good about it. But the idolatry this commandment is driving at is not about statues. It is about the image of God we construct in our own minds, the God we have redesigned to be more comfortable, more accommodating, and more agreeable than the God of Scripture. When we say things like “my God would never send anyone to hell” or “my God is fine with the way I’m living,” we are not describing the God of the Bible. We are describing a god we have made.
A university study once asked Americans about their view of God. It found four types: the authoritarian God, the benevolent God, the critical God, and the distant God. What struck me was not the variety. It was that none of those descriptions quite captures the God who speaks in Scripture, the God who is both perfectly holy and perfectly loving, who is near to the brokenhearted and just toward the unrepentant, who is sovereign over history and personal in relationship. The real God refuses to be reduced to any of our categories.
The only accurate portrait of God we have is Jesus Christ. He is, as Colossians says, “the image of the invisible God” (Colossians 1:15). When Philip said “Lord, show us the Father,” Jesus answered: “Whoever has seen me has seen the Father” (John 14:9). You want to know what God is really like? Look at Jesus. Look at how He loved the children and confronted the hypocrites. Look at how He wept at Lazarus’s tomb and turned over the tables in the temple. Look at the cross. That is not the God of our imagination. That is the God of revelation.
Don’t settle for a god you manufactured. The real God is better than anything you could design, and He is the only one with the power to actually save you.
DON’T REDESIGN GOD TO FIT YOUR COMFORT. DISCOVER HIM AS HE HAS REVEALED HIMSELF.
