You Shall Not Make for Yourself an Image in the Form of Anything

3 Aug

Exodus 20:4-6, Colossians 1:15-23

There's a scene in the Will Ferrell film Talladega Nights where his character Ricky Bobby sits at the dinner table saying grace. Around the table, everyone chimes in with their preferred version of Jesus. Ninja Jesus. Tuxedo Jesus. Jesus as the lead singer of Lynyrd Skynyrd. It's absurd. That's what makes it funny. But it's only a slight exaggeration of something most of us do.

The second commandment: you shall not make for yourself an image in the form of anything, sounds simple enough. You're probably not carving statues. There's no golden calf in the lounge room. So it's tempting to think you've got it handled.

But the commandment goes deeper than what you have on your shelf. It reaches into what you carry in your imagination.

There Are No Photos of God

Deuteronomy 4 describes the moment God spoke to Israel at Sinai. Fire, cloud, deep darkness, and out of it, a voice. Verse 12: you heard the sound of words but saw no form. There was only a voice.

God revealed himself by speaking, not by appearing. No shape, no image, nothing to reproduce or represent. And Moses' warning that follows is pointed: watch yourselves carefully, since you saw no form on the day the Lord spoke to you. We must not attach to God anything he hasn't revealed about himself.

The reason matters. God isn't withholding himself out of mystery for its own sake. He's so holy, so beautiful, so far beyond what we can contain, that any image we made would shrink him. It would reduce the infinite to the finite, the Creator to something a creature could carve. Philip Jensen used to say that God is so radically other than us that we simply can't comprehend him, and if we try to portray him in physical form, we'll end up worshipping our own limitations.

God is always so much more than whatever we've managed to picture.

The Plastic Jesus Problem

The danger the second commandment is really guarding against isn't ancient idol worship. It's something closer to home: the tendency to construct a comfortable, non-threatening version of God that fits neatly into our existing life.

A plastic Jesus. One we can control rather than one who controls us.

It's not always obvious when it's happening. It can look like picking up the parts of Scripture we find encouraging and quietly setting aside the parts that challenge us. It can look like a faith that conveniently aligns with our politics, our lifestyle preferences, and our existing moral commitments — never requiring us to change anything significant. It can look like treating God as someone who exists to bless our plans rather than someone whose plans we exist to serve.

Our hearts are constantly producing substitutes, constantly crafting a god that validates rather than challenges. We don't often reject God outright. We edit him. We take the Bible and, instead of letting it reshape us, we reshape it until it reflects us back.

The honest question the second commandment puts to us is: what is one thing you would find genuinely hard to give up if God asked for it? Family, health, career, comfort, reputation? Whatever comes to mind fastest is probably worth thinking about. Because we have a tendency to take the good gifts God gives us and quietly promote them above the giver.

The Real Jesus

Here's where the commandment turns from warning to gift. We don't have to imagine God. He has revealed himself.

Colossians 1:15: the Son is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation. For in him all things were created — things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible — all things have been created through him and for him. He is before all things, and in him all things hold together.

This is not Baby Jesus. This is not Ninja Jesus or Tuxedo Jesus or any of our preferred, comfortable versions. This is the one in whom all God's fullness dwells, through whom all things were made, who is the head of the church, who was before everything and holds everything together. The God who spoke out of the fire at Sinai, that same God became flesh in Jesus Christ.

That's what the second commandment is ultimately pointing us toward. Not a list of restrictions on our imagination, but the invitation to know the God who has made himself known. We don't need to imagine him, he has spoken. We don't need to construct him, he has come. The image of the invisible God is not something we make. It's someone who arrived.

Surrender Your Imagination to God

The second commandment is an act of mercy. It protects us from the poverty of a god of our own making, a god who will never surprise us, never stretch us, never call us to more than we were already planning to do. A god that small can't save anyone.

The real question it puts to us is not whether we have any statues. It's whether we are letting God be who he actually is, or whether we're quietly editing him into someone easier to manage. Is the Jesus we're following the one revealed in Scripture, the one who is the image of the invisible God, who died to reconcile us, who is head of the church. Or is he a more comfortable version we've assembled from the parts we like?

We don't get to pick our preferred Jesus the way the characters in Talladega Nights do. But we do get something better: the real one. The one who is infinitely more glorious than anything we could construct. The one who, according to Colossians 1, holds the whole creation together.

Stop making God smaller than he is. The second commandment isn't a restriction — it's an invitation to something far bigger.