On pages 1-2, he explains the importance of the Incarnation, and what it reveals about God:īut there is none of this in the Christian doctrine of the Incarnation. Robert Barron, at the beginning of his book Catholicism, (which really is as good as everyone says), talks about this point. Any image was considered to be an insult to His Divinity. He was too big, too infinite, too far beyond human imagination. This is radical, because in the Old Testament, the One you couldn’t do a depiction of was God Himself. Instead, He uses the coin to show us God. Jesus doesn’t order the denarius to be destroyed as some sort of idol. But look at what He uses to make that point: a coin with a graven image of Caesar, the very man being worshiped by many Romans. 1:27), and should give our everything to Him. So while the coin is made in the image of Caesar, each one of us is made in the image of God (Gen. Then He said to them, “So give back to Caesar what is Caesar’s, and to God what is God’s.” When they heard this, they were amazed. Jesus illustrates this point dramatically in Matthew 18:7-9, when He warns us against letting our own bodies stand between us and right relationship with God. But what upsets Him is anything that causes us to wander from Him. That’s why He orders the golden Cherubim: to remind us of Him. In fact, where images help draw us closer to Him, He wants us to have them. So what should we learn from the example of the bronze serpent? God isn’t upset with images themselves. And it also prefigured the Cross, the most visible sign of God’s love. Why? Because before they fell into idolatry, the statue helped them visibly comprehend the majesty of the invisible God. God foreknows that this will happen, yet he orders the engraving of the Nehushtan statue anyway. And sure enough, the Israelites name the bronze snake Nehushtan, and begin worshiping it, until King Hezekiah destroyed it (2 Kings 18:4).
#CHRISTIAN WORSHIP IMAGES FULL#
He does this, knowing full well that within a short time, the people are going to start worshiping the statue, instead of the God who saved them through the statue. In Numbers 21:8-9, God orders Moses to create a bronze serpent and mout it on the pole: anyone who looks upon it is healed of snakebite. In fact, He orders it in at least one case. In fact, as surprising as this tends to be for Protestants, He doesn’t even prohibit art where there’s a chance it’ll be misused for idolatry. He doesn’t prohibit art, even realistic art, even religious art. What should be incredibly clear is that God doesn’t order iconoclasm. This is the only understanding of the passage that makes any sense. Instead, the prohibition against making and kneeling before pecels is a prohibition against making and praying to idols, as the NIV, NASB, NLT, and most modern Protestant and Catholic translations of the Bible recognize. Here’s a helpful picture of what this would have looked like: It was here that God would commune with Moses, and Moses would worship Him. In Exodus 25:17-22, God orders the engraving of two golden Cherubim on top of the mercy seat upon the Ark of the Covenant. In fact, it’s much, much worse than all that. Who actually abides by that rule? Certainly not God. That’s the irony I pointed out in the first paragraph: even posting a photograph online would be against the Ten Commandments, regardless of who or what the photo was of. And if you ignore the graven part (as Protestants tend to do), it would prohibit all paintings and photographs of people, or animals, or nature. We can’t have Michelangelo’s David, or even those miniature statues of lions that people have in front of their houses. If the prohibition is against images, rather than idols, then all sculpture is out, regardless of the artist’s motivation. Is this picture okay to worship, since it’s painted, rather than engraved? Obviously not. What about idols that aren’t engraved? For example, to the right is a picture of Kali, one of the goddesses worshiped by Hindus. Understanding the prohibition as literally against “graven images” is problematic for two reasons. So a better translation is that you shall not make idols. The Hebrew word ( pecel) is used some thirty-one times in the Old Testament, and every time it refers to idols. The word being translated here as “graven images” literally means that in Hebrew, but it’s a bit misleading as a translation. Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them: for I the LORD thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me and shewing mercy unto thousands of them that love me, and keep my commandments.