The Ten Commandments: "Picturing God"

Our second reading in the bulletin is from the book of the prophet Isaiah, reading chapter forty-four. But before we read that, we’re going to turn to the insert in your bulletin on which we have a responsive form of the Ten Commandments and I would like us to read those commandments responsively together.

Some of these commandments here are abbreviated from the version we find in Exodus 20. The full commandment, the full second commandment is under the sermon title today and that’s the focus of the message. But let’s read responsively:

Last Sunday, we looked at the first commandment in which God says "You shall have no other God before me." No other Gods before God. And as we looked at this together, I suggested that the commandment really has to do with priorities. With your first priority in life. With God as your first priority in life. Is God priority number one for you? I asked why this ought to be the case, why God should be number one, and I also asked how this could become reality in a busy world where everything is flowing into our lives demanding to be your first priority. How can it happen? How can we "obey"?

To that question, I said simply, it won’t just happen unless we make it happen, unless, in some part of our lives, we set time aside for God. Daily, set time aside for God. I know for myself, if it’s not the beginning of the day, it won’t happen. But we’re each different. When is the best time for you to set aside time for God? And should it be alone or with others? Just as we here are doing today. And why, . . why should we do it? Well, last week I gave four reasons why God should be priority number one. Very briefly,

• there was the rational reason. That’s the way it is rather we acknowledge it or not. That’s who God is. Number one. The rational reason.
   
• Then there was the realistic reason: our lives are short. We are not God. We often choose priorities that are in no way divine. Link your life, small as it is, to a priority that will last. The realistic reason: Our lives won’t last unless they are attached to God.
   
• Then I gave the reformed reason. The reformed reason says that our happiness is bound up in our relationship with God. We are to glorify God and enjoy God forever. Our joy is wrapped up in glorifying God, in honoring God as if God were God. The reason that comes out of the reformation or the years that follow the sixteenth century reformation.
   
• And then the remarkable reason, the final reason, just this: that if our joy and pleasure lies in keeping God first, then it’s also true that we can actually bring pleasure to God as well by doing it. It’s as if God is like a parent who responds to our child-like love and lives: when we put God first, it brings a smile to the face of the immortal, eternal God.

So that’s what we looked at last time. The first commandment, God is our first priority: how we make God our first priority, and why we make God our first priority. And then in thinking together about the first commandment, the how and the why, you may or may not have noticed that I didn’t stray into the territory of "who" or "what": that is, into "who" or "what" this God is, the one making the claim to be our first priority – but that, you see, is really the subject of the second commandment that we come to today.

That’s the issue at stake in the second commandment: Who is the God whom we acknowledge as our first priority? Or "what is the god," as some might put it, what is this God that is to be our first priority? Listen again to that second commandment which tells us that we are

In other words, the second commandment tells us that if the first commandment is true, if God is to be our first priority, then we had better make sure, in the second place, that it is the right God. To the best of our ability at least, the right God, who is that priority. Not any God will do. But only the right God. No idols. No substitutes allowed.

And this is not easy. This is not easy to make sure that the God we worship is the right God. We are finite. God is infinite. This is not easy. It’s not easy if we assume that idolatry involves making anything into something that we worship, so that idolatry is a problem far bigger than the kind of overt idolatry which was prevalent in ancient times. Of course, we don’t do that! We don’t set out, I hope we don’t, I don’t know of anybody here who does, we don’t set out to make an image of God before which we deliberately bow down and worship. Indeed some of us might say that we just don’t do that kind of thing these days, even though in some places in the world people still do – primitives! But we’re not like that! We don’t do that. BUT, having said that, it’s still not easy to keep this commandment, because its intent goes way beyond the deliberate making of objects to bow down before and worship.

That is, the commandment is about any ideas we have about god that are somehow less than or other than God. It is about any "things" we worship as a substitute for God, whether deliberately or by default. And, further, the commandment is also about every idea we have, whether an idea about God or not, or about things, or about philosophies, or whatever they may be, any idea that we love, adore, and cherish, as if it were to us our god.

We’re going to worship something. That’s just how it is! We all have a god, or some idea about God that we cherish. The question then for today is this: What are our ideas about God? In our minds? Is it possible as we think about God that we have created some kind of an idol?

Let me look to a couple of writers to put this in a different kind of a way. Sally McFague used to teach theology at the divinity school at Vanderbilt. She’s a prominent feminist theologian and she begins the preface to her book called Models of God (written in 1987) like this, with an implicit reference to the second commandment:

In the closing pages of my last work, Metaphorical Theology, I experimented with the model of God as friend in an attempt to address the issues of idolatry and irrelevance leveled against the patriarchal imagery of the Christian tradition — that image which focuses on God purely as male. The dominance of the patriarchal model, I felt, excluded the emergence of other models to express the relationship between God and the world. And so the model has become idolatrous (italics mine) and has rendered the traditions’ imagery anachronistic or out of date.

Let me put it what Dr. McFague says into other words. What I hear her saying is this: that when we view God exclusively as male, then we’re breaking the second commandment. Because that’s not who God is, at least the God revealed in the pages of holy scripture. It may be, she would say, that the dominant images of God in the pages of holy scripture are male. King and shepherd, images like that. But even within scripture, there are images of God as female. God is like a woman searching for us, as if she has lost all her money. God is like a mother hen, Jesus says, gathering her brood, or like a she-bear, says Hosea, defending her cubs. The male images may be the dominant images, but there’s another view as well, and we short-circuit the image of God that has been given to us in Holy Scripture if we don’t look at all those ideas which are given there for us to shape our view of God.

So the second commandment forces us, you see, to dig deep into our minds and hearts, she would say, to ask "What are the main ideas, the main thoughts we have about God, which we depend upon, that we cherish, that we worship, that we trust in, which influence our lives, but which may or may not be true?". . . which may, in fact, be more idolatrous than we care to think, so that in the end, because we’ve been sloppy in the way we think about God, we end up not building a literal object which is a clearly an idol, but building "an idea of God" which is less than or other than God and which therefore is nevertheless idolatrous.

This is a thought which I trust will shake us up! Which is my intention right now! But not so shaking as the thought of another writer by the name of John Shelby Spong, whose intention is to shake up all of Christianity! John Shelby Spong is the retired Episcopal bishop of Newark, who when it comes to talking about God, thinks that any talk about God in human terms, even when you think of God as male or female, he would say even to Sally McFague, is passé. To Spong, the question is not about whether God should be more female than male or male than female, but rather that any talk about God which in any sense reflects God as personal, God in human terms, is wrong, is outmoded, irrelevant, out of date. No thinking person, he says, can think of God in that way.

This old "persona" way of thinking about God he calls "theism." In his writing (Why Christianity Must Change or Die) he defines theism before going on to dismiss it. He says,

The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary defines ‘theism’ as belief in one God as Creator and Supreme Ruler of the Universe. Encyclopedia Britannica describes theism as the view that all limited or finite things are dependent in some way on one supreme or ultimate reality, which one may also speak of in personal terms.

He says, "Richard Swinburn, an English theologian, defines theism as a view of God that is something like a person without a body who is eternal, free, able to do anything, know everything, is perfectly good, is the proper object of human worship and obedience, the creator and sustainer of the universe.

And then he adds that he defines ‘theism’ as the belief in an external, personal, supernatural and potentially invasive being, a being who wants to invade this world, though stands outside and apart from creation in the first place.

This is, he says, is theism. And he adds that he rejects it completely: That way of defining God in human terms, any human terms, is dead, he says. Most theological talk about God is, and I quote, "meaningless. A new way to speak about God must be found."

Well, whether or not Bishop Spong is right or wrong, at least, he and Sally McFague are provocative, and I trust that they provoke us to think about who God is, who our God is, the God we embrace, so that we actually think about God, about how we picture God, thinking again and again about who God is.

So then, my primary understanding of the second commandment is to do precisely this, to make us dig deep into our lives and ask ourselves, "What is the picture, what is the image of God that guides us, controls us, influences us and dominates our life? Does it bear any resemblance, closeness, proximity, to the real God? Or is it just, even in our minds, an idol, an idol that we have made. Remaking God in our own image.

Having said that, having muddied the waters on the negative side, in the next few minutes, what I want to do is to come back and say that even from the commandments, the commandments which tells us that we should make no idols, there can be found a springboard, a starting place from which to think and re-examine our views about the God whom we are to worship, the One who is to be our priority, and who tells us that we are to make no idols as substitutes.

What is this God like? How do we begin? Well, as we look at the commandments themselves, and the context of the commandments in Exodus, as given to ancient Israel, what I want to suggest is that there are three images of God, three ways to begin to think about God, that emerge. And I’d like you to set side these side by side with how you personally think about God and see how they match up.

The first thing that we find from the commandments themselves, and I focus especially on those first lines, the prologue, the introduction to the commandments, ("Then 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. You shall have no other gods before me"), the first thing I have to say about who God is, stands in contrast to Bishop Spong’s view. That is, I believe that the commandments themselves come inescapably from a God who is personal and wants to be known as a personal God, who wants us to describe God in personal terms because as personal beings we cannot describe God in any other way! God is not human, but God condescends to our way of thinking and enters our world and our imaginations in terms we can understand, in relational terms, not as an it, but as an I. God has chosen to be known as a "who" and not a "what." And that’s a theme we see not only in the commandments but it stretches itself throughout the pages of scripture.

"I am the Lord your God, says God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery, out of bondage. You shall have no other Gods before me."

God is personal and wants to relate to us, person to person, as it were. Not human, but personal. And that view is only strengthened when we come to the Christian part of our faith, where we claim, as Christians have done from generation to generation, that God’s ultimate revelation, God’s ultimate word to us, in which he says to us "This is what I am like" comes to us, not in a list of laws, not even in the book where we find the "Ten Laws" or Commandments; and God certainly doesn’t come to us ultimately as an idea or a philosophy, as a thought about God, but comes to us as a person. God’s word to us about who God is comes to us ultimately in the form of a person: Jesus of Nazareth, who touched the lives of real people personally. That’s who God is. That’s what God does. So that the early church believed that in Jesus, they saw the face of God. That Jesus was the God-given image of God. Of the invisible God, says Colossians, that we can latch on to and through which we can say, "I don’t know everything about God. I still need to be careful of my thoughts about God, but what I can be certain of is that God is inescapably personal and wants to relate to us personally."

That’s the first thing we can say, that comes straight from the commandments and from the prologue. And the second thing also comes from the prologue and it’s this: That the God who is revealed in the commandments, who does not want us to have a false God, a false image of God, is persistent. Personal and persistent, persistent about deliverance. Persistent about deliverance from injustice. Persistent about saving people, rescuing people from whatever mess they find themselves in: "I am the Lord your God," says God, "who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage, out of slavery." I persist until I deliver!

God persists and wants to do that with people like you and me. When Isaiah speaks about idolatry in the 44^th chapter, he mocks the idols of the people because they cannot do this, they cannot save, they cannot deliver, they cannot hear, they cannot set people free. But the God of the commandments does that: intervenes in life. We don’t understand how, but God persistently intervenes in life to save people. To touch people where they are.

Is this our God? Is this what your God does? Is this your God, personal, persistently, intervening in life, to help, to save, to redeem, to deliver?

The God of the commandments, and of the second commandment, is persistent about deliverance, is intensely personal, and then, finally, is passionate. Passionate about these precepts that God has given us, these commandments that God has given us. This God clearly cares about our lives, will not leave us as if we were puppets with no moral choice, but confronts us with moral choice again and again and says, "Here is the foundation, here is the place where you start to think about your life. With these precepts in hand that I set before you, make your choice. This is the path of life. There is another path which is death. You choose."

You shall not make for yourself an idol. Think deeply about who God is to you, the God you worship. The one in whom you believe, on whom you’ve banked your life.

• Your god may be a thing, unlikely to be an idol that you set up as an idol, but who knows, these days?
• Your god may be a thing that you worship, your money, your investments.
• Your god could be our nation, which we worship.
• It could be the arms that we bear,
• And it also could be an idea that we cherish, that we’ve fallen in love with, that we’ve loved since childhood; an idea that we have never changed about God. So that in reality we’ve never really thought as an adult about who God is, the One that influences and molds us but who has become less, way less, than the true God, the God of Jesus Christ.

Who is this God? Not human but intensely personal, who wants to relate to us deeply.

Who is this God? Persistent to deliver us from our own bondage and others, through us in this world.

Who is this God? Passionate about his own precepts and about our response to his summons, a summons which comes to us again and again through Christ especially, but which also comes to us through these words too, these ten words that God, through Moses, lays before you and me, even today, this very day in which we live.

Let us bow before God in prayer.