Sermons from Lone
Rock Bible Church Seeing Is Not Believing (Part II) While most people in our society don’t
carve or sculpt their own idols to worship, it is still our obligation to honor the Second
Commandment. Looking at Exodus 20:4-6, let’s move forward in our study: 1. Explain the verses Exodus 20 A number of years ago, I was working
with one of the RMBM churches, which at that time did not have a pastor. The church leader
came to my office to talk about how we are going about finding a man to fill the pulpit.
The Rocky Mountain Bible Mission is a fellowship of a couple dozen churches and camps and
outreach ministries, pretty much in western Montana, but also northern Idaho and some in
Wyoming. We are pretty rural. That’s the emphasis of the work. It is not always easy to find a pastor
to go to a church where he may make $500 to $1,000 a month and preach to 15 to 30 people.
It is a very narrow but a very vital niche. So we had this to talk about and that was what
was on my mind as this gentleman came to sit and discuss options. What interested me in
our talk and surprised me, was this gentleman’s concern was primarily about the
church building and not the people or the community. He had put a lot into it. He had
spent a lot of hours, a lot of money, a lot of labor, and he was concerned that the
facility would go unused. He wanted the facility to receive the attention for which it was
due. The talk was not about God’s people, about finding a pastor to help them grow in
the knowledge of Jesus. It was not about reaching the community with the gospel. It was
not about the kingdom. It was about the building. I thought to myself as I reflected on
that conversation, how could this be that an individual could be a Christian and a
Christian leader for years and when it comes down to what matters, we are dealing with a
thing and not God Himself, or those for whom Jesus died. This gentleman did not worship
that building, but it seems he had to have it in order to worship. We are going to talk along these lines
this morning as we continue our discussion of this Second Commandment. I believe that if
anything, the Second Commandment about graven images and false gods and idols, is calling
God’s people to clarify their view of God that we might see clearly so that we can
know and enjoy and worship Him. A week ago, we talked about the verses
themselves, walked through them fairly slowly and carefully. Today I do want us to look at
the background of these verses. When it comes to Scripture, pretty
much from one end to the other there tends to be a problem connected with seeing as
opposed to hearing. Not so much with seeing itself, but trusting what we see rather than
what we have heard. I would trace that to the Garden when God’s word was clear and it
came clearly to the first couple. Certain things you may do. Certain things you may not
do, and among those things has to do with the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. I look back to Genesis 3, when the
serpent got the woman alone and questioned her as to what she had heard and shifted her
thinking from what she had clearly heard to what now she could see and led her, and by
extension you and me, into a destructive path. “What have you heard?” the devil
said. 2The woman said to the serpent, "From the fruit of the trees
of the garden we may eat; It went downhill from there. But you
see, her eyes trumped her ears and as a result, here we are in a fallen world. When we
come to that period of time when God led His children out of the land of Egypt and toward
the Promised Land, it is noteworthy that God deliberately did not provide the people with
an image of Himself. I am so impressed with the book of
Deuteronomy. A slow and careful reading of that book is profitable, to say the least.
Deuteronomy 4 is Moses’ swan song, the second giving of the Law. He is reminding the
people of what they ought to have known. The wilderness wandering of 40 years is history
to them now and they are preparing to 9"Only give heed to yourself and keep your soul diligently,
so that you do not forget the things which your eyes have seen and they do not depart from
your heart all the days of your life; but make them known to your sons and your grandsons.
“That you be drawn away” -- because God gave you nothing to see that you might
worship what you see. People cannot see God in His essence.
We sometimes think, “Nobody can see God and live.” The Bible does say that.
Though we sometimes may get the impression that God is engaged in some sort of game of
spiritual hide and seek, that if we turn the corner quick enough, hit the light quick
enough, look under the right spot and we will see God, “Oops, caught Him,” and
then we are dead. God is not into hide and
seek. We do not see God because He is hiding. We do not see God because He is holy. It is the nature of the situation that
the God of heaven is just that, the God of heaven. He is exalted. His ways and His
thoughts are higher than ours as the heavens are above the earth. We cannot attain to
them. Even if we try real hard, get a good run at it, really think about it, pool all of
our resources -- no. The point is God is in heaven and cannot be seen and desires
to be worshipped accordingly. That is absolutely fundamental for us to keep in mind. We
cannot see Him, not because He is hiding, but because He is holy. That means separate,
apart, in a class by Himself, in an eternally exalted state. People cannot see God and He left no
image to be seen because this is what would happen. What we see with our eyes, we would
tend to want somehow to depict with our hands. I saw it, now I want to make a copy of it,
a replica of it. Had God left anything of Himself to be seen, people would have picked up
on that and said, “I think I can do that. I think I can represent that. I think I can
replicate that.” But anything we might come up with would be utterly inadequate. You
cannot represent the creator with anything created. It would first be inadequate and
secondly it would be inaccurate. There is a gap, a gulf between where God lives in the
pureness of His essence and where we dwell in our mortality that cannot be bridged by us.
Any attempt to bridge it necessarily involves reducing God and He will not be reduced.
This is the point of graven images. This is the case. It is not just a good idea of God.
It has to do with who He literally is in His nature and we try to bridge that to our own
detriment. Anything that we would replicate where
God is concerned would eventually become a replacement for who God is in our fallen minds.
We have not only succeeded in reducing God to human terms, but in so doing, in the
twistedness of our own fallen natures, we have elevated ourselves. Look what we have done.
We have caught Him. We have captured Him. We have reduced Him. Now let’s worship Him.
When we do that, we have replaced Him and we have come full circle then to wrong worship
of an inaccurate and inadequate image. There is a process described by the
apostle Paul in the first chapter of Romans that parallels this perfectly. This comforts
me. I think Paul got this and he sees it. Romans 1, talks about the fallenness of the
race. He is building his case in Romans 1 for the fact that every human being deserves the
wrath of God and we ought to be amazed that we do not receive it. In Romans 1, speaking of
humankind: 19because that which is known about God is evident
within them; for God made it evident to them. God put it there. He is talking about
the conscience. 20For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes, His
eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen, being understood through what has
been made, so that they are without excuse. That is, through conscience and
creation, God has made available evidence of His existence through every person. 21For even though they knew God, they did not honor Him as God or
give thanks, but they became futile in their speculations, and their foolish heart was
darkened. That is, their God-free heart was
darkened. 22Professing to be wise, they became fools, Language we heard in Deuteronomy. Once
that happens: 24Therefore God gave them over in the lusts of their hearts to
impurity, so that their bodies would be dishonored among them. Wrong worship leads to wrong behavior
and as God is reduced from His holy essence to any sort of image or when His presence is
attached to anything tangible, we have just opened the door to worship Him our way. We
have come to a point where we prefer to trust our heart and we are danger of deterioration
not only in worship but in life. Look at Exodus 32. One of the most
sadly ironic passages perhaps in Scripture is Exodus 32. God has led the children of
Israel out of Egypt with a strong hand and an outstretched arm. He had led them with a
pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night. He has fed them manna in the
wilderness. All these things are coming together and God is performing His role perfectly.
Moses is up on the mountain receiving the Ten Commandments and the people are down below
wondering who their God is and why can’t they see Him. Exodus 32 1Now when the people saw that Moses delayed to come down from the
mountain, the people assembled about Aaron and said to him, "Come, make us a god who
will go before us; as for this Moses, the man who brought us up from the land of Egypt, we
do not know what has become of him." We can’t see him! I do not think
it is happenstance that they had viewed Moses as their religious icon. Now he is gone and
they need to see something. “So make us a god, Aaron.” Perhaps they had their
swords and whetstones. “Make us a god, or else! We will make our own and we won’t
include you.” 2Aaron said to them, "Tear off the gold rings which are in
the ears of your wives, your sons, and your daughters, and bring them to me." They knew the name, because God had
given them His name. Aaron, in an act of fearful apostasy, deliberately misrepresented God
to them by providing a form of God. Aaron saw this. He made an altar. Aaron made a
proclamation and said, “Tomorrow shall be a feast to Yahweh.” Now that God has been created in the
image of disobedient and degenerate people, the next day they rose early, got the
offerings out of the way, brought peace offerings, and then the people sat down to eat and
drink and rose up to play. They began their revelry and it is at this point that the sound
of their partying ascended to the heights of the mountain. Joshua is hearing it and Moses
is hearing it and God is hearing it, and we are getting ready for a pretty serious upset
of their applecart. Why? Because Aaron did this. He misrepresented God and the next that
happened was the people’s behavior degenerated immediately, because now they have a
god with whom they can live and work and play. They have a god in their own image. In the following chapter of Exodus,
there is an interesting contrast. In Exodus 33, Moses says to God, maybe I could see You.
Moses somehow felt the need to see. Did God show Himself to Moses? No, He hid Moses in the
cleft of a rock and Moses got to see his train. Seeing and hearing from a spiritual
standpoint are often in opposition to one another. I want to break these terms down for
just a second. When I say “seeing,” I am talking about seeing by way of dreams
or visions or circumstances or preconceived notions -- that type of thing. Seeing, as
opposed to hearing. When we speak of hearing I am talking about dealing with words or
language, either spoken or written. Seeing is not to be trusted. Looks can
be deceiving and that is the point. It is standard throughout Scripture beginning in
Genesis 3 when Eve sees the tree. It looks good. Looks can be deceiving. Seeing is subjective. Two people can
see the same thing and describe it differently. Seeing can change over time. We do not
always recall vividly and consistently what we have seen as time goes by. Seeing is
illusive. “I know I put my keys there! I see it in my mind’s eye. I remember
doing it.” But they weren’t there at all. It’s an illusive property. It’s
an essential one, but to trust it, to trust the seeing is dangerous territory spiritually
because it is subjective and it is changing and it is illusive. Samuel learned this lesson when he was
told to go up and anoint one of Jesse’s sons as the new king of Israel following
Saul. Jesse had eight sons. The first one looked good to Samuel. This has to be the one!
He is big, tough and strong. I don’t know what he looked like, but in the seeing of
Samuel -- this had to be the right one. God told Samuel very clearly in I
Samuel:16, “God looks on the heart; man looks on the appearance. Do not trust
appearance.” I find an interesting anecdote in the
sixth chapter of II Kings where the Syrians are going to attack. Elisha is the prophet. He
has this attendant, who is unnamed. They wake up in the morning and the Syrians are all
around them on the mountains. The attendant goes outside, looks and sees that they are
surrounded. Elisha has a different set of eyes, you might say spiritual eyes, and says
“Praise God. Open his eyes, show him what is really there.” He shows him that
the Syrian army, as many as there might be, are absolutely overwhelmed by the armies of
God that the attendant cannot see, but are really there. They go from there, interestingly
enough, to the next story, which also has to do with seeing because that army is struck
blind. This is where Elisha leads them by the hand in the capital city of Samaria, the
last place they would have wanted to go. These were the enemies. Do not trust the seeing.
Seeing is necessary but not to be trusted for spiritual things. Hearing, on the other hand, is
considerably more reliable. Remember, I defined hearing as dealing with words or language,
either spoken or written. Hearing is objective. When you write words, they pretty much
stay the same if left untouched. We are dealing with words here in our Bibles that go back
in history 4,000 plus years and they are still the same words. We can trust them not to
change. Hearing is standard. That means if you
are reading something or hearing a language, a language is subject to scientific inquiry.
Words mean certain things. Verb tenses are handled certain ways. It is a doable thing and
we can always draw it out and go back to language and say, “We are reasonably sure
this is what this means.” Hearing, particularly written, is
permanent. We talked a couple weeks back about the Dead Sea Scrolls and how it was that
the Arab boy in 1947 discovered those Dead Sea Scrolls in the caves of Qumran. Much of
that literature goes back to 250 B.C. It’s still readable. It is still there. It is
permanent. It is there to be studied, and we’re
glad that it is When Joshua prepared to lead the
children of Israel into the Promised Land, God told him, “Joshua, hold on to the Book
of the Law. Do not let it leave you. Always be speaking it. Always be cogitating on it.
Always be remembering not what you have seen, particularly, but first and foremost, what
you have heard, what God has said, what you know to be the case. Ezekiel 37 is one of my favorite
imageries in all Scripture, the valley of the dry bones. Can these bones live? The valley
is full of them. How do they come alive? Not through the seeing, but through the hearing.
“Speak to them, son of man, prophesy.” “I prophesied. I spoke the word of
God and life somehow, mysteriously to be sure, entered into the bones and they stood of
their feet, an exceedingly great army.” Romans 10:17, says faith comes by
hearing. That is how the bones stood up. Hearing by the Word of God. And when Jesus had a
point to make and would challenge his audience, “If you have ears to hear, listen.”
Because the hearing is so important. God has brought us into relationship with Himself. I
can say this safely in the 21st century, based not on what we have seen, but if
we have a relationship with the living God of heaven through our Lord Jesus Christ, it is
because of what we have heard. Jesus showed Himself to doubting
Thomas. In the 20th chapter of John’s gospel, Jesus showed up and there
was Thomas, who said I won’t believe anything unless I can see it! Jesus said Ok,
here I am. Go ahead, put your fingers in the holes. Thomas did not even have to budge. He
said, “My Lord and my God.” The text said he believed in Him. Jesus said, “You
believe in Me from what you have seen. Blessed are those who have not seen and yet
believed.” That is us! Faith comes by hearing, hearing by the Word of God. (Tape skipped at this point) In Judges 17:5, the man, Micah had a
shrine and he made an ephod and household idols and consecrated one of his sons that he
might become his priest. Remember this? Now I have my silver idol representing the God of
Israel, and now I also have a priest. I’m going to be in great shape now. I have all
I need. In those days (verse 6) --remember
this is key -- there was no king in Israel. Every man did what was right in his own eyes.
So we know it is bad. So a young man from Bethlehem in Judah who is a Levite, headed
north, up the ridge route, turns in at Micah’s house. 9Micah said to him, "Where do you come from?" And he
said to him, "I am a Levite from Bethlehem in Judah, and I am going to stay wherever
I may find a place." He has his own priest and his own
shrine and his own statues. He says: 13Then Micah said, "Now I know that the LORD will prosper me,
seeing I have a Levite as priest." I believe the Authorized Version says
“Now I know the LORD will do me good” because I am set. What did this guy want? What was truly
the pursuit of his heart? He wanted Yahweh. He wanted the God of Israel. He wanted the God
of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the God of Moses and the Exodus. He wanted the only true God
but he wanted Him on his own terms and he wanted Him reduced to a form and a fashion he
could grasp and understand. He wanted Him for his own sake. He had turned this around and now we
are not worshipping Yahweh because Yahweh is great. We are worshipping Yahweh so that He
will do me good. He wanted a God and a faith, if you will, a religion that was safe, that
was predictable, that he could control and he wanted blessing. May I suggest that is what
we want too, when it comes right down to it. The same spiritual wants that drove
this Ephraimite, all those years ago, drive your heart and drive my heart today. We want
it safe. We want Jesus, but we want it safe. We like the predictable. We love to be in
control and if the blessing comes, good. If God is the designer, as the Bible
says He is, going back before time; if God is the designer of all eternity, He is the
creator as the Bible says, and He is the sustainer. He holds it all together and He takes
humankind and history from a very definite clear beginning to a very definite prearranged
end and orchestrates all events between. If He is sovereign that way, if He
sent His Son -- and He did -- to pay for your sins and mine on a rough cross on Calvary
years ago. If He did all that and He is judge for all eternity and then He is
misrepresented or replaced we have problems. One is that we have blasphemed. We have
misrepresented God. Secondly, we have no object of our faith so in whom are we trusting?
What are we trusting in if we replace or misrepresent the God of the Bible? We are left
with worse than a distant second. We are left with nothing except ourselves and no hope
for eternity at all. We have become idolaters. I have come
up with three classes of idolatry. The first class I would call are the pagan lost. The
pagan lost are represented probably in Isaiah 44, where this guy goes out in the woods,
cuts down a tree, takes a chunk home and burns it, takes another chunk home and worships
it. It is nonsensical to sophisticated people, but he is doing it and it is his religion.
People do that yet today. It was also true in the first century
-- remember in Acts 19, the riot of the silversmiths in Ephesus and what brought that on.
They were sure somebody was undermining the goddess Diana, who supposedly had fallen from
heaven and landed on her head in the ocean outside of town. Great is Diana of the
Ephesians, they said. That was an economical issue, so they got real worked up about that.
Nevertheless, they used to sell little statues of Diana and that was the trade for the
silversmiths. They were idolaters, for money perhaps, but nevertheless idolaters. That is
the pagan lost, fairly easy to identify. The second class I would call the
professing lost, making a claim, but by actions denying. In Jeremiah 7, the prophet is
railing against the people of Judah because they were not trusting God, but rather, in
Solomon’s temple. The line went something like this. Jeremiah would say you guys are
in a lot of trouble. The Babylonians are going to crush you. They say, we have the temple
of the Lord. They had come around to where they had put their trust in something they
could see. They went away to exile, so it did not
work. They no longer had a temple or a priestly system. They could no longer do the
sacrifices. All they had in exile in Babylon were the Scriptures. It was during this
period of time, the time between the Old and the New Testaments, that the Jews came to be
called Jews on the one hand, but also turned their attention to the Scriptures and
basically replaced God with the text. It was during this time that the
Pharisees, the scribes, the lawyers and teachers of the law, surfaced. They used all their
efforts and focused their intellectual capabilities on figuring out the law and built for
themselves, according to the apostle Paul in Romans 10, a righteousness based on works of
the Law, not on hearing with faith. They came to trust in their religion, with which they
had replaced the presence of the living God. The professing lost, worshipping
church, heritage, trusting in history and so forth, reputation as God’s chosen people
-- professing lost. The third class I call the frail
found. I include myself in that category. Because of our natural bent, we want something
tangible to represent our religion for us. It is built in, hence the Second Commandment.
Perhaps temporarily, perhaps in a modified sense, we become idolatrous when valuable
blessings of the faith, crowd out or replace God Himself. When His blessings become more
important to us than He Himself. Revelation 2 -- this tells us that
Jesus is alive and He knows what is going on in your church. He says (paraphrased) I know
your deeds, I know what is up. I know all about your Awana program and your Oaxaca trip
and your toil and perseverance and you cannot endure evil men and you put to the test
those who call themselves apostles and they are not. You have found them to be false. You
have endured for My names sake and you have not grown weary. You looked good! And I have
seen it and appreciate it. “But I have this against you, that you have left your
first love.” You have gotten caught up in what can
be seen, to the ignorance of that which cannot. You have left your first love. You have
confused the work and the blessing of God with God Himself. It is kind of like if you are
really into ATV’s, four-wheelers, and let’s just say it has been a good year and
for Christmas your wife gives you one. Eventually, it seems as if you like the
four-wheeler more than you like the one who gave it to you. And now you have a problem.
That is the point -- when blessings crowd out the person. Whether it is a relationship with God,
and I hope we all have that. I hope each of us in this room, have put all our trust only
in Jesus and we know the Savior. But in an earthly relationship or in a heavenly
relationship it really does not change, the other person is the one who is important, not
what that person can give us, not what that person represents to us, but the Person
Himself is key. God has blessed us with many things, with individual skills or strengths,
with health, with families, friends, relationships, assets, a wonderful country. Yet none
of these is sovereign. None of these is holy. And none of these is able to save or change
us. Only He is deserving. The book of I John is properly called
the test tube of faith, because in the book are a series of tests for people, who claim to
be Christians. You need to take the test, take the doctrine test, the apostle test, the
love test, the “test the spirit” test. It ends up saying, “That you may
know you have eternal life.” But it ends very interestingly. The
last verse of I John says this: “Little children, keep yourselves from idols.” A
test question for believers. What must I have in order to worship Him? Micah needed a
silver statue and a priest. Do you need a priest, a silver statue? Do you need to be
around certain people, listen to certain music, use a certain Bible, have a certain order
of service at a certain time, in a certain place. What must I have in order to worship
Him? Any answer is the wrong one, because all we need is Him. Heaven is where hearing and seeing
come together. Paul says in I Corinthians 13, right now I am seeing through a glass
darkly. I can hardly wait for that glass to be clear. Revelation 22 says, speaking of
heaven, “There will no longer be any curse; and the throne of God and of the Lamb
will be in it, and His bond-servants will serve Him; "Scripture
taken from the NEW AMERICAN STANDARD BIBLE®, Jim Carlson 2006, Lone Rock Bible Church, Stevensville Montana, USA |