Deuteronomy

The Worship of Images

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Pentateuch

Lesson: 14-110

Genre: Talk

Track: 014

Dictation Name: RR187G14

Location/Venue:

Year: 1993

Let us worship God. Who shall ascend in to the hill of the Lord or who shall stand in His holy place. He that hath clean hands and a pure heart. Who hath not lifted up his soul unto vanity nor sworn deceitfully. He shall receive the blessing from the Lord and righteousness from the God of his salvation. Let us pray.

Our Father we give thanks unto Thee that we live, move and have our being in Thee. That we are not in a great void of chance or in the hands of men but in Thine omnipotent hands. Teach us day by day to rejoice in Thy mercies and to wait on Thee. To know that with Thee all things are possible. That Thou art who didst make us who are dead in sins and trespasses alive by Thy grace. How great and marvelous are Thy ways and we praise Thee. In Christ’s name, Amen.

Our scripture today is Deuteronomy 5:8-10. Our subject: The Worship of Images. Deuteronomy 5:8-10.

“ Thou shalt not make thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the waters beneath the earth:

9 Thou shalt not bow down thyself unto 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,

10 And shewing mercy unto thousands of them that love me and keep my commandments.”

This is an important and a controversial text. There are great differences of opinion concerning this law between Roman Catholics and Protestants and among Protestants as well. In fact, some Spanish Catholics also have held strongly iconoclastic views. The difference is usually with the regard to the nature of this commandment. Is it two separate sections, that is first ‘no graven images’ and second ‘no worship of them’. This would make it two laws, in effect. Some read the laws as make no images or likenesses of any kind for the purpose of worshipping them. This latter reading is more in line with God’s commandments concerning his sanctuary. A variety of images and likenesses are included in the sanctuary such as the pomegranates, the cherubim, the engraved laver and more. God would not in the very construction and furnishing of his place of worship violate His own law.

Clearly the use of art was not banned in God’s instructions for his sanctuary. Now John Calvin opposed depictions of God the Father and God the Spirit; having no material visible form, any depiction of them, he held, would be falsification. On the other hand he opposed the Anabaptists desire to smash existing sculpture and to deface paintings. He strongly opposed the misuse of art, not art itself. There’s another aspect to this law which tends to be neglected in the controversy pro and con over the place of art in the sanctuary. In verse nine we have the statement: I, the Lord Thy God am a jealous God. The Berkley version reads: I the Lord your God am a God who brooks no rival. This is the key to understanding this text. God brooks no rivals. We can begin to unravel the meaning of this text by citing two extremes. On the one hand baroque art, combining intense emotionalism and rationalism left a sad legacy to the world. It was magnificent in its way but art replaced religion as the stimulus to worship. The ceilings were painted to resemble heavens with angels flying around and to give an optical illusion of looking up into heaven. At its best baroque art was magnificent but its intense desire to create a religious and mystical experience to a deluge of aesthetic flamboyance contributed to the exhaustion of the Counter Reformation and to the idea that art can be a substitute for religion and that the artist is a prophet. On the other hand at the other extreme the Anabaptists and [unknown] emphasis on no visual art, on bare white washed walls, and often on no music was equally a departure from God’s law. It reduced religion to mystical experience or pietism and in too many cases a retreat from both art and the world.

Like baroques Catholicism it sometimes led also to a strong authoritarianism as witnessed the Mennonites and others because it was a retreat from God’s word to man’s wisdom. God in this commandment forbids us using our imagination or our ideas and concepts in framing, governing or guiding worship. Westminster Larger Catechism says of this commandment in the question 108:

“Question 108: What are the duties required in the second commandment?

Answer: The duties required in the second commandment are, the receiving, observing, and keeping pure and entire, all such religious worship and ordinances as God has instituted in his Word; particularly prayer and thanksgiving in the name of Christ; the reading, preaching, and hearing of the Word; the administration and receiving of the sacraments; church government and discipline; the ministry and maintenance thereof; religious fasting; swearing by the name of God, and vowing unto him: as also the disapproving, detesting, opposing, all false worship; and, according to each one's place and calling, removing it, and all monuments of idolatry.

Question 109: What are the sins forbidden in the second commandment?

Answer: The sins forbidden in the second commandment are, all devising, counseling, commanding, using, and anywise approving, any religious worship not instituted by God himself; tolerating a false religion; the making any representation of God, of all or of any of the three persons, either inwardly in our mind, or outwardly in any kind of image or likeness of any creature: Whatsoever; all worshiping of it, or God in it or by it; the making of any representation of feigned deities, and all worship of them, or service belonging to them; all superstitious devices, corrupting the worship of God, adding to it, or taking from it, whether invented and taken up of ourselves, or received by tradition from others, though under the title of antiquity, custom, devotion, good intent, or any other pretense: Whatsoever; simony; sacrilege; all neglect, contempt, hindering, and opposing the worship and ordinances which God has appointed.”

End of quote.

Now these answers ably state the positive and negative implications of the commandment but they also reflect the belief and iconoclasm in calling for the removal of all monuments of idolatry, that is all church artifacts. In other words, Anabaptist in like thinking and [unknown] thinking was beginning to creep into other churches. This emphasize gave a simplistic way of keeping the commandment. It’s application has been carried to great extremes such as opposition to the presence of a cross in a church or on its steeple. All this is not further obedience to the law, Arminianism, very prone to this, for example exists commonly in bare and often ugly houses of worship. But this does not separate it from idolatry. The Arminian emphasize on man’s free will creates in man an icon of radical independence from God. Far, far worse than some of the things they oppose in the way of art. If man can choose or reject God men is then god over God, his free will can frustrate God. This is as much a false god as any of the Balaam of the Canaanites. We must again cite Isaiah 45:9-10:

“Drop down, ye heavens, from above, and let the skies pour down righteousness: let the earth open, and let them bring forth salvation, and let righteousness spring up together; I the Lord have created it.

9 Woe unto him that striveth with his Maker! Let the potsherd strive with the potsherds of the earth. Shall the clay say to him that fashioneth it, What makest thou? or thy work, He hath no hands?

10 Woe unto him that saith unto his father, What begettest thou? or to the woman, What hast thou brought forth?”

Thus intellectual images must be seen as basic to idolatry and as the most common form. In fact, every pagan image embodies some intellectual premise, sometimes highly sophisticated ones. In Hinduism for example, the various images represent a variety of concepts which seem intellectually astute and superior but for one defect, they represent man’s ideas about what ultimate power should be. Therefore set forth a fallen man’s vision and an evil one. Idolatry therefore is not a primitive fact but an aspect of a sophisticated development of false religions. Our university professors are very much prone to idolatry. They worship their ideas and the ideas of other men. Idolatry is unknown among the ostensibly most primitive peoples such as Bushmen, Eskimo’s, Hottentots and others. Idolatry is an intellectual development among the more civilized peoples because it represents the triumph of the human intellect in interpreting reality. Modern idolatry is purely intellectual in most cases. It has various names such as the Marxist concept of the materialistic determination of history. The idea of inevitable progress, the dogma of evolution and so on and on. Idols can be objectified in institutions, ideas, scientific concepts and the like. Freud’s, Darwin and Marx have been important idol makers in the modern era. Basic to idolatries is a belief in a continuity of being between the natural and the supernatural realms. Given this premise all reality is held to be a possible process of deification. As the gods are now, so men in time can be, it is held. Mormonism gives open ascent to this belief. Such a faith creates idols out of its ideas and goes much further than some ancient pagan cults. God says that he brooks no rivals and all forms of idolatry are thus doomed.

He brings home to children the consequences of idolatrous generations to the third and fourth generation thereafter. Ideas and faiths clearly have consequences. Strictly speaking the subject of images or icons can be divided into two classes. First idolatry is clearly the worship of false gods. Second, Iconolatry is the use of prohibited means and devices in the worship of the God of scripture. Iconolatry works to deflect and pervert the nature of worship by introducing man’s concept in to a revealed religion. Man must think God’s thoughts after Him but man too often feels that this supplemental thinking will improve on what God has revealed. In all iconolatry man is worshipping his own imagination and his own reasoning. Let us pray.

Our Father we thank Thee for Thy word and we thank Thee that we are called by Thee to be Thy people have been given Thy spirit, that we might preserve ourselves by Thy word and by Thy spirit for the errors and the evils of this world. Teach us to rely on Thee, to trust in Thee and to grow as thou wouldst have us to grow. In Christ’s name, Amen.

Are there any questions now about our lesson? Yes?

[Question] Do you think the media creates idols?

[Rushdoony] Yes, a very good point. The media is in the business of manufacturing idols and unhappily the world of entertainment is in the business of creating idols out of its entertainers. So the media is an instrument of idolatry. It is very much given to creating false gods. Yes?

[Question] Apart from the worship of the statue of Jesus on the cross would there be anything inherently wrong with a cross depicting Christ on the cross?

[Rushdoony] Well, there have been objections to a crucifix with Christ on the cross from both Catholic and ‘Protestant sources. It used to be intensely strong in the Catholic Church and is still present to a degree. And the object has been that ours is the faith of victory and the image of Christ on the cross when made central in a church tends to emphasize defeat and some years ago a a very controversial book was written on the Spanish Christ of Latin America which pointed out what the observance in Latin America were, namely they tend to stress tragedy. Good Friday was all important, Easter a minor holy day. And while the book was criticized by some, others felt that it had been pointed to something that was very important, namely, that the use of the crucifix with the crucified Christ had given a very, very erroneous impression to a sizable segment of Christianity. Now it was ironic that this happened and I believe that the full title of the book was The Other Spanish Christ. To distinguish it from the Christ in Spain where the movement was very strong against Christ merely as crucified, but the empty cross as in Protestantism as a token of victory. So historically that has been an important fact. What has happened when the emphasis has been on the crucified Christ rather than the victorious one.

[Question] [unknown]

[Rushdoony] Yes. It is interesting that the Beatles in their heyday actually made the statement or at least one of them did that they were bigger than Jesus Christ. There have been demands for revival and another tour by the Beatles but I believe it was George Harrison that answered that demand recently by saying that he did not expect John Lennon to return from the dead. [Laughter] Well, I was startled to find just this past week that there are quite a number of imitation Elvis Presley’s touring the country and making a fortune out of it. And one of them has been able to con middle aged women who were young when the Beatles were first around of vast sums of money and is now facing charges on that account. But the idolatry of such people is staggering. And apparently the same thing prevails with a great many other rock stars so that a substitute religion is very much in evidence all around us and the media is as Otto observed very given to being a media for idolatry.

[Question unintelligible]

[Rushdoony] Yes they have. Yes?

[Question unintelligible]

[Rushdoony] A very good question because it gets to a fundamental fact. Man is a sinner and what does he do when he approaches his own law? He looks for every loophole imaginable so that as Philip [unknown] writing on Supreme Court decisions (he puts out an annual book on the Supreme Court’s decisions), he made the statement a few years ago that no law has wound up meaning what the framers intended it to mean because what man, the lawyer, and the lawyer represents all of us, do is to immediately go to work to find every possible way of finding loopholes. As one student at a seminary once telephoning me said, the professor, supposedly one of the most highly respected professors of Old Testament and supposedly orthodox, said that simplistic interpretations should be avoided. When God says in Genesis 1:26-28: “Let us make a man in our image.” He says we should not be simplistic like men of the Reformation and since who say ‘let us’ refers to the Trinity. It could refer to angels and other spiritual beings who were working with God. In other words, he said open the door to other possible interpretations.

Well when that is done and it is done because man is a sinner and he wants to take something and make it mean exactly the reverse, you’re going to get all kinds of strange meanings. That’s why I’ve often said with each new version of the Bible we get readings that are further and further out and perhaps not in my lifetime but if they continue at the present rate one of these days they are going to come out with a thesis that the bible says shall not commit adultery, its actually commanding us to commit adultery. Deconstruction, in other words, at work. Well, when they take the many laws against homosexuality and make them add up to the bible favoring homosexuality you’ve got to say anything is possible when man is a sinner. He can make black mean white.

Any other questions or comments? Yes?

[Question] John Lennon, the song writer…[unintelligible]…wasn’t he a wife beater?

[Rushdoony] That’s what she said at one time and now she has apparently found its profitable to exalt him, she had separated and planning to get a divorce, he was a sorry wretch, a very sorry wretch, but that does not make any difference. That only improves his image with fallen people. And it doesn’t hurt if you are any number of things, use narcotics, go for far eastern cults that are ridiculous, and so on and on.

[Question unintelligible]

[Rushdoony] Oh yes, he was no martyr, He set his face towards Jerusalem, He went knowing it had to be done. For a moment He quailed in the garden of Gethsemane but He was insistent on fulfilling His destiny. He was not a martyr, not by any stretch of the imagination.

Well if there are no further questions, let us bow our heads in prayer.

Oh Lord our God we give thanks unto Thee that Thou art on the throne. That Thy word and Thy spirit speak to correct us, to guide us and to bless us. And so we come to Thee, committing ourselves, our fears and our hopes into Thine omnipotent loving and merciful hands. And no go in peace, God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Ghost, bless you and keep you, guide and protect you, this day and always, Amen.