[Sunday School] What Does the Second Commandment Require? (WSC49-52)

Alright, let's pray.

Lord, thank you for this morning.

We thank you for bringing us here together to study your word by way of the catechism that you have blessed us with through the tradition.

Lord, help us this morning as we think about the second commandment.

Help us to remember that you are sovereign and that, Lord, you tell us how best to worship you.

Lord, and that we are not to worship you according to our own imaginations, to our own desires, our own cares, what we think is best, but Lord, according to what you have said is best.

So, Lord, send your spirit now.

Help us to grasp these things and be encouraged by them.

We pray in Jesus' name.

Amen.

Alright, so last week we talked about the first commandment, which you might summarize by saying it's about who we worship.

This week we're talking about the second commandment, which is more about how we worship.

And I'll illustrate this with, you know, some of you were here for when I preached the series on the Ten Commandments back in 2022.

And uh I opened the sermon on the second commandment with an illustration about a time when I was selling real estate in East Nashville, and I had this listing on a pretty rough part of East Nashville.

Now it's like, you know, all the houses there are a million dollars, but it wasn't the case that I had this dumpy little house listed for like$36,000.

It was it was a mess.

And it was across the street from this missionary Baptist church, and I got a call from uh the pastor of his church because he wanted to see if they could buy it and turn it into like transient housing, ministry housing, that sort of thing.

And I was glad to go and talk to him.

So I went to his church for a meeting with him, and as I'm walking down the hall, I see this painting, fairly good-sized painting in the hallway of The Last Supper.

Except it's not the Last Supper as you've probably seen it, because instead of being all pasty white with flowing blocks, all the characters of The Last Supper in this painting were black and they had aferas.

And I remember thinking to myself, like, that is not what Jesus looked like.

But, you know what?

If you look at Da Vinci's painting of the Last Supper, that's not what Jesus looked like either.

Right?

And so there's an ideological kind of move that happens in the Afro Last Supper.

It's a part of liberation theology.

It's a whole thing.

There's actually a thought that goes into it.

It's an act of artistic subversion to say, you know, Jesus was not white.

Jesus identifies more with the poor, identifies with the marginalized, identifies with the black man.

But it's a protest against a false ideal about who Jesus is.

And instead of protesting the protest, maybe we need to recognize that there's something like a false ideal that happens every time we represent an image of Jesus.

Even in Da Vinci, right?

And it's the wisdom of the second commandment that we're getting into today that prohibits that kind of image making.

And helps us to realize that anytime we make an image of God or we make an image of Jesus, we're making an image according to our own understanding, according to our own ideals, according to our own, in a sense, preferences, and they're always going to fall short.

So let's dive right into it.

Question 49, which is the second commandment?

The second commandment is, and this is the shorter catechism, and where you on the handout you have the larger catechism because it really dives into uh the ins and the outs, like we saw last week with the first commandment.

So shorter catechism 49, which is the second commandment?

The second commandment is you shall not make unto thee, thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth.

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 showing mercy unto the thousands of them that love me and keep my commandments.

So, when we think about the making of false images, creating of idols, disordered worship, what's one of the first incidents that comes to mind?

Well, I don't know.

This is what you're looking for, but passion of the Christmas.

What's that?

Passion of the Christmas.

Yeah, we'll get we'll get to that.

Um, but I'm thinking biblically for now.

Think of idolatry and false.

The golden calf.

That's kind of the paradigm in or incident of false worship in the Old Testament.

Uh, I mean, we can get all the way back to the garden to really talk about idols.

But if you think about the making and worshiping of false images, the golden calf really comes to the top.

What were they doing there?

What do you think?

What was all that about?

They were trying to put forth a godlike figure to go up to the mountain.

Yeah.

Yeah.

They were afraid.

God had appeared to them.

It was a theophany, right?

So God appears in fire and smoke.

The mountain is rumbling, thunder, uh, thunderbolts of lightning, very, very frightening, and that kind of thing.

And you know, they're so, you know, they're so terrified by it that they don't, they're they're forbidden from going close to the mountain.

But in Hebrews it talks about they're so terrified that they beg that the voice stops.

It's like this is a God who is so transcendent, so majestic, so sovereign.

So they just don't know how to deal with him.

And Moses is up there on the mountain 40 days, 40 nights.

He's gone.

They don't know what's going on.

Alright?

And so what do they do?

They default to what they know.

What did they learn in Egypt 400 years?

How do we worship God?

Icons, images, idols.

And so they weren't dumb, right?

They didn't think that throwing all the jewelry into the fire and fashioning a golden calf and that like this golden calf is the God who brought them out of Egypt.

Like, that would be silly.

That would be ridiculous.

But they did believe that this image was the means by which he worshiped that power that delivered you.

And so they and that's you know, that's the thing.

Even though they were trying to worship the true God, right?

They were trying to worship the true God, but they were worshiping him falsely.

And that's an actual category that exists in Scripture.

You can try to worship the right God and you can do it in the wrong way.

And just like last week we talked about idolatry being the worship of false gods, the worshiping of the true God in a false way amounts to the same kind of thing.

The two commandments go hand in hand.

We're still committing idolatry, but this time in the crass sort of, I made a thing with my hands and now I'm going to worship it.

So this the logic here is, the logic behind it is the creator-creature distinction.

God is transcendent, God is holy, holy, holy, God is holy, other.

There is nothing in creation that can, there is no representation that we can make in creation that will sufficiently represent who God is and what he is like.

Only God is able to create a representation of himself that will serve to represent himself in the world.

You know what we call that?

We call that the image of God.

That's us.

We are the we're the idols, so to speak, that God has made in order to represent himself in the world.

And he has called us not to make any idols, any images, anything like that.

In Christ we have the preeminent image.

So in him and through him we reflect God because Jesus is God.

So let's talk about what the second commandment requires.

Shorter catechism answer, and I'll ask someone to read 108 in just a second, but the shorter catechism asks, what is required in the second commandment?

The second commandment requires the receiving, observing, and keeping pure and entire all such religious worship and ordinances as God has appointed in his word.

So to unpack that, can someone read for us larger catechism 108?

It's on one side of your hand out.

The shorter one?

108, right?

What?

Yeah, 108.

What is the second commandment?

Right?

The duties required in the second commandment are the receiving, observing, and keeping pure and entire, all of religious worship and ordinances as God inspires 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 its own, the ministry and maintenance thereof, religious fasting, swearing by the word of God, and vowing unto him, and also the disapproving, detesting, opposing, all false worship, and according to each one's place and calling, removing it.

And all monuments of idolatry.

Can you imagine if we do that?

Is that a question?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Go ahead.

And many people will remember this, and probably in older generation houses they'll have this.

That picture of Jesus hanging on the wall.

So just go and grab it, pull it down, walk out with it.

I mean, I would, but you have to, well, I mean, maybe not.

But so we're going to get into that, right?

Yeah.

We are all ready to side.

Yeah.

Yeah, we're going to get into that.

The second and the fourth commandment.

That's where we have all sorts of fun conversations that we don't normally have.

So, but first I want to talk a little bit about how the second commandment applies in the church.

Because our tradition has understood the unpacking and application of the Second Commandment to speak directly to the ways in which we worship God.

You know, why did we have a Protestant Reformation?

One of the main answers to that question is the recovery of the doctrine of justification by grace alone, through faith alone, and Christ alone.

But another huge part of that question is the reformation of worship according to Scripture.

You read Martin Luther's Babylonian captivity of the church, you read John Calvin's exchanges with Cardinal Savaledto.

One of the big things that's driving the Reformation is, you know, the Roman Catholic Church, we got all these smells, all these bells, all these robes, all these sorts of things going on.

Where is any of this in Scripture?

All of this is getting between the people of God and the worship of the true God.

And it is a big, big deal, right?

And so God defines our way of approach to Him.

And that's been stated, the way we think about this in our tradition is in the regulative principle of worship.

Westminster Confession, chapter 21, paragraph 1 says, the acceptable way of worshiping the true God is instituted by himself and so limited to his own revealed will that he may not be worshipped according to the imaginations and devices of men or the suggestions of Satan under any visible representations or any other way not prescribed in the Holy Scripture.

So, again, this is what we call the regulative principle of worship.

And the regulative principle of worship states that whatever is not commanded in Scripture is forbidden to be done in scripture in worship.

And that's as opposed to, say, a normative principle of worship, which is more common for Martin Luther in the Lutheran Church, where that principle is whatever is not forbidden is permitted.

And so Lutherans have that principle, but you know, their worship is just as traditional as reformed worship.

And historically, Luther was far more willing to abide some of the remnants of Roman Catholic worship than the Reformed works.

So that's one way to think about it, is the normative principle.

We can do whatever we want as long as God doesn't say we can.

And there's another pragmatic, there's a principle of worship that is at play today, and this is the one we're probably most familiar with because it's the one we're most exposed to.

It's the pragmatic principle of worship, where uh whatever people want is functionally commanded.

For the sake of relevance, for the sake of winsomeness, you know, we can do whatever works.

Whatever works is what gets people in the church, what grabs their attention, what holds their attention.

I saw a clip on X this week, uh, formerly known as Twitter.

Not that I was high.

Ed Young, who's a pastor in Texas, uh, he likes to do a lot of flashy stuff.

Once he spent an entire week, or no, 24 hours in a bed with his wife on the roof of their church as part of promotion for like a series that they were doing.

But in this clip, it's a big mega church, he drove, drove a car, a royals, a Rolls-Royce, backstage from backstage onto the center of the stage and got up out of it and started preaching a sermon, and he went on about how like you know, Jesus was an entertainer.

We are in the entertainment business, and that was his whole kind of thing.

And you're looking at that, I mean, that's just one example.

We got lots of different churches, lots of different vibes where it's it's a show, man.

And you know, to be charitable to the people who engage in the showy kind of worship, they believe butts and seeks is the mandate from the Lord.

They believe that this is a matter, it's not just about you know building their own little kingdom, although in lots of cases I'm sure that's true, but it really is about this is how Jesus said we're supposed to do it.

This is what Jesus wants me to do, to do any and everything in order to reach people, in order to grab people, in order to bring them in.

Whereas, you know, under a regulative principle of worship, within a reformed and Presbyterian tradition, we really do believe that God has told us everything we need to know in order to order our churches and to order our worship.

And that when you engage in that kind of pragmatic worship approach, what you win them with is what you win them to.

And so if you win them with entertainment, if you win them with flashiness, if you win them with Rolls-Royces, that inevitably shapes the hearts and the minds of the people who come into worship.

And you know, I've been in churches like that.

I've been in churches where people are won by the rock concert, they're won by the flashy lights, they're won by the fashion and the glitz and the glamour of the sort of like the Nashville scene, right?

And then you get into a small group with them, and you start trying to do life with them, and you start trying to hold each other accountable and challenge each other to grow in the word, and it's like, whoa, whoa, I didn't sign up for any of this.

Right?

This isn't as glamorous, this isn't as sexy, I don't, I don't want any of this.

I'm like, Jesus is cool.

Um that's fine.

I mean, Jesus probably had spiky hair and D V.

I can get down with that.

But you know, I I don't want any of this other stuff.

My sin, I don't want to talk about that.

Grace, well, you know, everybody's imperfect.

It's just, it's it's all this sort of stuff.

What you win them with is what you win them to.

And so, yeah.

A mile line.

Right, right.

And so God tells us what we need to do.

He doesn't leave us to guess about it.

And he doesn't, you know, yeah.

Have you ever been in a church where everything smacks of like 1990s pop culture?

Well, and that's the church that back in the 90s had done the pragmatic thing is was winning everybody like crazy.

Right?

You wed yourself to one generation, you find yourself a widow in the next.

When you wed yourself to the abiding word of God, you find an abiding significance, right?

That transcends the generations, that there's something here, there's something deep, there's something thick, there's something substantive that you can latch on to, and you don't feel the itch to move in five years because the philosophy of ministry has got a little stale for 10 years or 20 years.

Okay, when you wed yourself to one generation, you find yourself in a widow.

I've never heard that before.

That is a very striking provocative provocative.

I wish I could say it's original to me, but I heard it somewhere.

I think I said that.

Dr.

James Tiberius Every Smar.

You know, which I'm not fair.

Go ahead, Ruby.

That is so cool.

But because uh our fathers did not do this, what's good enough for grandpa's good enough for me, and an old-time religion and all that kind of stuff.

Well, that's what I was raised in.

Maybe that's why glad me so much is like uh a negative of the world is not a positive of Jesus.

Keep yourself separate from the world.

Right.

What does that mean exactly?

Yeah, if you if you define yourself negatively, if you just are what the culture isn't, then you're just as beholden to the culture as the people who swallow it, hook line, and sinker.

Exactly.

That pastor knows it.

I'm not gonna be as charitable because that pastor knows it.

He knows that it's for self-aggrandizement.

And you know, when John MacArthur was asked, how did you go to your church?

What what did you do?

He said, I preached the gospel.

Right?

I preached the gospel.

And churches like that, there's mega churches, and and and again, you're pulling people away, right?

And and you you have you don't have an insurance of salvation.

You have false insurance.

And and yes, it feels good.

And it's it really, that's a mission feel.

You know, and I know I'm hanging with raw garage, but in a megachurch, if that guy that pulls up a college roll, that's a mission feel right there.

You know, but then the Bible's coming, then you're going to feel that connection.

When I came here, when I visited here, and I've said it before, I was reconning this place, and we were going to Sunday school in fellowship hall, and I came up and told Sarah, I said, they know their Bible.

I mean, the death, the knowledge, the seriousness of it.

I think that's it.

The spuriousness of it all, the solemnity of it all, right?

It's not, it's eternity, right?

Yeah.

Yeah.

And it's, you know, as we think about this, it's important, right?

People can hold this regulative principle as a conviction and do church in very different ways.

Like we have a very we have a style here.

Uh if you went to another PCA church in Nashville, there are several of them.

Each one's gonna have a different style.

And some are gonna smell and sound a little more contemporary than this one.

There's lots of room for that.

There's lots of room for diversity within a regulative principle of worship.

And sometimes you'll hear hear people teach and talk about this sort of thing, and they have a very narrow idea about what it means, right?

You know, regulative principle, good reformed worship means, you know, Kenny's in a dress up there, we don't have any instruments, so on is a gown, right?

Not a round.

A robe, a rope, a rope, a rope, a gown, a night gown.

Well, I was talking to a friend at this conference this week, and the kids call his rope a dress, and it's fine.

Yeah.

But yeah, so there's there's room within this, right?

Just God God draws the lines here in terms of his commandments, and there's room in between, right?

So an important distinction that we make when we're thinking about the regulative principle is the distinction between elements and principles.

Or sorry, elements and circumstances.

Elements and circumstances.

Elements are those things that God requires, commands in scripture.

Uh circumstances are the practical stuff, right?

The practical decisions that we have to make surrounding those elements that God has prescribed in Scripture.

So, for example, Scripture commands us to gather for worship on Sundays, right?

Do not forsake or neglect the gathering of the saints, right?

Commands us to gather for worship on the Lord's day.

Scripture does not command what time we gather.

Right?

We can come together for worship at 10 15.

Can come together for worship at two, there's room there.

Scripture tells us to sing psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs, right?

But it doesn't tell us exactly which songs to sing.

Scripture commands us to preach the word when we come together.

The word ought to be preached.

But the specific words aren't prescribed.

My sermon manuscript is not in Scripture.

It doesn't even tell us which text we ought to pick today.

So there are a lot of those things that happen where we have the stuff that God commands us to do, but he leaves it open to the light of nature and according to Christian prudence and general principles of the word and how we order those sorts of things.

So the elements of worship, just to list these off quickly.

One element, prayer.

Philippians 4, 6.

Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything, by prayer and supplication, with thanksgiving, let your requests be known to God.

Even more than prayer in general, you look at Acts 6 and talk the how the apostles talk about the ministry of the prayer, or in 1 Timothy 2, talking about specific praying the prayers.

There's this idea that when we gather together for worship, it's not just prayer in general, but it's the actual liturgical offering of prayers that we do in our gathered worship.

Reading of Scripture, 1 Timothy 4.13, Paul saying to Timothy, Until I come, devote yourself to the public reading of Scripture, to exhortation, to teaching.

Publicly reading the Word, teaching the Word, preaching the Word, exhorting people to walk in step with the Word.

These are proper elements of our gathered worship.

And following that, preaching.

2 Timothy 4 2, preach the word, be ready in season and out of season.

Reprove, rebuke, exhort with complete patience and teaching.

Mentioned it a minute ago, singing of psalms, hymns, and spiritual psalms.

Colossians 3 6.

Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly, teaching and admonishing one another in all wisdom, singing psalms and hymns and spiritual psalms with thankfulness in your hearts to God.

Confession of faith.

1 Timothy 3.16.

Great indeed we confess is the mystery of godliness.

He was confessed, he was manifested in the flesh, vindicated in the Spirit, seen by angels, proclaimed among the nations, believed on in the world, taken up in glory.

Giving and receiving of offerings.

Matthew 5, 23 through 24.

If you're offering your gift at the altar, and there remember that your brother has something against you, leave your gift there before the altar and go.

First be reconciled to your brother, and then come and offer your gift.

Clearly, the teaching of that passage isn't to say there will be offerings in a worship service, but it assumes it.

It presupposes it.

That's a part of the worship service.

Sacraments.

Matthew 28, 19.

Go, therefore, and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit.

Or Acts 2, 42.

They devoted themselves to the apostles' teaching and the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers.

Oaths and vows.

Deuteronomy 6.13.

It is the Lord your God you shall fear, him ye shall serve, and by his name you shall swear.

That's coming in the midst of a covenant renewal ceremony where Moses is re-articulating the stipulations and the blessings, the curses, and all that of the covenant for God's people.

Fasting.

Esther 4.16.

Go, gather all the Jews to be found in Susa and hold a fast on my behalf.

And do not eat or drink for three days, night or day.

We read about fasting, of course, in the New Testament as well.

And Jesus, what's that?

What's that?

That is pretty descriptive.

But when you get to Jesus in Matthew 6, you know, and he's teaching on your fasting and how you should do your fasting, you know, don't do it in a way where you're making a public show of it, but do it in secret, right?

He's presupposing fasting.

Uh as part of the Christian life.

Something that we can even do corporately.

Thanksgiving.

When the Jews all gather for the feast of Purim to give thanksgiving, or Paul, again, in 1 Philippians 4, when he says, make supplication all things with thanksgiving in your heart, with thankfulness in your heart.

So those are the elements that scripture lays out for worship.

We can say more about them, we can nuance them.

But all that to say, the reason we do stuff in worship, the reason we have the order we have, and the order can be different, it can be laid out in different ways.

You might find some things one week that you don't find the next week, and vice versa, that kind of thing.

But the reason we have those things is not because I was just sitting around and thinking of things that it would be nice for us to do.

It's because these are things that are positively commended to us in Scripture.

This is the kind of stuff that you're supposed to do when you're gathered together for worship.

And there are other things that we don't do in a worship service.

Like we won't watch a video together in a word, like a movie together in a worship service.

We won't, I don't know, we might, we won't like choose to have a fellowship meal one day instead of a worship service.

Or just think of any number of other things that you might think, hey, that would be kind of cool for us to do in worship.

A lot of times what happens is people want to take the whole of the Christian life, the whole of the church's fellowship, the whole of being connected in community, and cram it all into a Sunday morning.

Well, church is a big word having to do with the body of God's people and our embodied life together.

Worship is a particular thing that the church gathers to do.

So we shouldn't expect to do everything the church does while the church is gathered for worship.

Gathered worship is its own thing, and it kind of runs on its own set of rails.

And the regular principle gives us the vision for how we do that best.

So that's the ecclesial application, that's the positive application.

Let's flip to the negative application where we can get into more personal kind of applications of the second commandment.

So, shorter catechism 51 asks, what's forbidden in the second commandment?

The second commandment forbids the worshiping of God by images or any other way not appointed in his word.

Now, can someone read the handout?

Larger Catechism 109.

The sins forbidden in the second commandment are authorizing, counseling, commanding, using, in any way, improving, any religious worship not instituted by God Himself, tolerating a false religion, the making any representation of God or, or sorry, of all or of any of the three persons, either inwardly in our mind or outwardly in any kind of image or rightness of any creature whatsoever, all worshiping them, or in it or by it, the making of any representation of anything deities, and all worship of them or service belonging to them, the superstitious devices, corrupting the worship of God, adding to it or taking from it, whether inventing 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 on neglect, contempt, pigment, and opposing the worship and ordinances which God help affords it.

What is Simony?

Oh no, Simony is what Simon tried to purchase the Holy Spirit.

Exactly.

Trying to sell the gifts and privileges of God to people for money, like indulgences.

How can that inwardly in our mind find your own?

That is a great question.

And that is an important question because there are some overzealous nerds in the reformed tradition who think that you can read the gospels and not come up with any kind of mental image whatsoever.

I forget the percentage, but there are a number of I found I know this because my brother is this, where they actually can't form a mental image of people in their mind.

Something about their psychology, where it's like when he thinks about me, he can't think about my face.

He recognizes me when it's not like he's weird or anything.

He couldn't draw a picture of me from him.

And he's an artist too, it's funny.

But he does abstract art, so maybe that trash.

But yeah, I mean, if you read the gospels, it's telling you a story about a man, right?

Right.

Right, right.

It's giving you visual, it's giving you pictorial language.

The question is, what do you do with that?

Right?

Because Jesus is described and presented to us as a man.

Okay, what color was his hair?

What was his skin tone?

What were his jawline like?

So on and so forth.

It doesn't give us any of those details about what he looked like.

And so there's a normal human psychology in response to reading a thing, and I'll speak for myself, like I see a man when I read these things, but I see the representation of a man.

I don't see a particular face.

I don't and I don't sit and speculate on what that particular face would have looked like, right?

And that's the distinction psychologically that has to happen.

One of the issues with making images, so let's say it's the Passion, or it's the Chosen, or even the Jesus film, or you know, Afro Jesus, or The Last Supper, or whatever, the more our imagination concerning the person of Christ is formed by those kinds of things, the more that becomes our understanding of who he is.

And so does anybody like watch the Passion of the Christ and worship the Jesus on the screen?

No.

Does anybody look at, I mean, maybe some people have the picture, you know, I can, growing up in the Catholic Church, I can envision a particular one, even though, you know, I envision it then put it out of my mind.

Alright?

It's like, does anybody sit there and worship the painting of Jesus?

Maybe some folks.

But they attempt to worship Jesus by way of the image that's been formed in their mind.

Just as human beings, we can't we can't divorce the two.

The images get attached to the person and they start to form our understanding of the person.

And so that when you are praying to Jesus, that's the image that's coming to mind.

And that's the danger in it, right?

That gets the principially, it's the same as the Israelites trying to worship the true God by way of the false calf.

Except it's less obviously so because we know that Jesus was a man.

And what we have before us is the image of a man.

Right?

And so it's hard, it's harder to recognize that we're falsely worshiping him.

Because it seems so right, it seems so true.

And I, you know, I I'll I'll preface this and I'll nuance all this and I'll soften all this because I know this is one of the things, especially being formed in the kind of Christian culture that we are, uh, I would venture a guess that for like 75-80% of the people who come in the church, this is not a moral conviction that was even on your radar.

Right?

So I get that.

So I'm not going to be the legalist Presbyterian from on high accusing you of idolatry right here in the chair.

So, you know, we're all we're all learning and growing, and you know, you go home and you discern whether you whether or not you agree with me in the shorter catechism and all this on this sort of stuff.

To be a member, the membership conversation I have with people is always, you know, to be a member in this church, the door to membership is as wide as the gospel.

You don't have to subscribe to the Westminster standards.

I do.

You know, or any officers in the church do.

But, you know, I put that out there again because this is a new thing for a lot of people, and it might be a jarring thing for a lot of people.

And the last thing I want to do this morning is heap condemnation on you if you haven't considered it before, or if you're just not in the same place I am, or the standards are.

We all have crosses hanging in the church, right?

Yeah.

What's the difference between that L we have and the cross?

Cross isn't a representation of God.

It's the instrument by which Jesus was crucified.

But it's uh, I mean we don't have Jesus hanging on there.

Right.

Well, I had I wore it for a long time until I so my parents got me this gold chain in Portugal when um they went without me when I was like 15.

So I've had it for a long time.

And my dad wore a chain too, and he had a crucifix on it.

And when he died, you know, I I took that and I wore it for a long time.

And now I don't wear it anymore.

It sits in a little safe by my bed.

Uh, and that's the reason I don't wear it.

I'll wear a cross.

I got no problem with a cross, I got a cross on my arm.

But it's the actual representation of Jesus on it.

Right?

That's when we know what a cross is.

It was a tool, it was an implement, but we're not picturing the man when we picture the cross.

So that's why we have those.

Look at what happened to Jewish theology and worship over history.

They finally, in the exile, finally had it pounded out of their heads that you cannot make a damage.

Well, and that's that's been a good thing.

Um, but by the time Jesus, the I'm in I'm in the move now, right?

Reading, trekking through the gospel, by the time you get to the New Testament, what have they made uh idols of instead, the temple, and even the word of God?

Yeah.

Searching the scriptures, or you think you have eternal life in those, and those those are they which testify of me.

So the holier is the word of God's a holy thing, but in our hands, we can do tremendous corrupting of it as it passes through our minds and and speak of it.

We can misrepresent, we can have sort of a superstitious treatment of scripture itself.

Yeah.

This is why we can't have nice things.

I have nice things.

Well we do have nice things.

Actually, actually, I have a heirloom proof of it hanging on my wall.

It is, I think, carved up salt or something.

It's like hundreds and hundreds of years old, and it is cracked and broken.

And the fact that it is broken and it's it's is even better, but I look at that, I don't look to it at all.

But I'm thinking of the what did you mean to the person who first had you?

You proved that I talked to it.

What did you mean?

And what how come my parents would not have been their house?

But how come it's okay for me to hang it on my wall and talk to you and think about you know, historically the church and faith?

My dad said people are Christians in the light over the church oftentimes.

It's like the broken body of Jesus.

What sin he carried on him because of me?

That's what that image talks to me about now.

Not a bit of worship in there, but a reminder.

Yeah, there I mean there are things, right?

I see the crossing on the pews all the way up the way.

There are things that are symbols biblically commended to us, even.

I mean, when Paul talks to the Galatians, and you foolish Galatians who has bewitched you, it's before your very eyes that Jesus was set forth as crucified.

Uh, the word there is more as like placarded billboarded sign.

Uh he's talking to people who weren't there to see Jesus crucified.

And so there's a place for the pictorial, right?

Uh and I think this, you know, and things, symbols that bear witness to biblical truth, it's when we get to the person of Jesus himself, or the person of God more generally.

Everyone can agree about that.

We shouldn't be making images of God himself.

Uh, it's where, you know, the humanity of Jesus comes in, where people might want to push back, or you might want to push back and say, well, he was a man, we know what men look like, we can image men.

Um I would still push back on that, and so would the shorter catechism.

But you know, there's there's um there's a kind of habit that gets formed when we create images.

Um I talked a little bit about it before in terms of informing the Jesus that we worship, even if we're not worshiping the image.

But there's also, you know, this kind of tendency to create Jesus in our own image is a thing that every culture struggles with.

Uh, Yaroslav Pelikin is a great church historian, and he wrote a book called Jesus Through the Centuries, and he works through each century in that book, and he shows kind of like the dominant image and understanding of Jesus.

Uh you know, like in the 19th century, it's the enlightenment Jesus, or 18th century, it's the enlightenment Jesus.

In the 19th and 20th century, it's the liberating Jesus, the Jesus for the poor.

In the 21st century, I don't know.

There's James Calarico's version of Jesus, and there's, you know, there's the activist Jesus, there, and on the other side of the spectrum, there's the conservative Jesus who drapes himself an American flag and wears a MAGA hat.

Right?

There's a mood, there's a habit that we form where Jesus becomes a kind of wax nose.

These two things, and I'm not accusing everyone of if you have a picture of Jesus in your house, therefore you are making Jesus in your image, but the two moods, the two habits, the moves, are very closely connected to each other.

If you come at it with a strong sort of second commandment logic, where God is transcendent, God is other than I can imagine, even Jesus, he is fully God, fully man, but he's a man unlike any man I've ever known.

He's a man who transcends my understanding of manliness, right?

He's not the kind of man that I can sort of put in my own box, that I can imagine according to my own predilections, my own preferences.

Jesus is who Jesus tells me he is in his word, and that's what I'm gonna go with, right?

If you have that sort of posture toward knowing him and worshiping him, that's gonna be the best immunity against that and being absolutely soaked in the word to get to know Jesus more and more and more.

That's gonna be the best immunity against all of these sort of cultural incursions that would try to lean in and tell you, like, Jesus wasn't like that, Jesus was like this.

Jesus just happened to agree with you in all of your political convictions.

Jesus just happened to share the same outlook that you do about environmentalism or about partisan politics or so on and so forth.

Just a quick funny story about just works of art in general, like religious works of art.

We went to St.

Augustine a while back.

My sons were very young at the time.

And it's a statue of the uh priest who founded St.

Augustine, the mission there.

The statue's got to be at least 15, 20 feet tall.

And so my son asked me, you know, who is that?

And I, you know, read the class next to him, and he looked up and go, wow, he was tall.

The difference between what you know a child seeing a representation and saying, that's what it is, versus our saying, I can appreciate the work of art, but I know that was, you know, it just that's always struck me.

Wow, he was tall.

That's the kind of conversation I have with my kids all the time.

Yeah.

Because we live in the church culture we live in.

They're going to encounter images all the time.

They go to Mother's Day out, they go to DBS, wherever.

You know, they won't, they won't.

Trying to teach your kids not to be legalists too is fine.

But they won't participate in making the images or coloring them or doing like Jesus image crafts and stuff.

And that's that's not like me and Suzanne dropping the hammer.

That's a decision they make for themselves.

It's great.

Caesar's gotten into some interesting arguments with teachers and classmates.

That's a story for another time.

Everyone knows what Jesus looked like.

But yeah, and I try to tell them this like we aren't responsible for other people's image making.

And I just try to help equip them when you see Jesus.

And I do think we can make a distinction between cartoonish pictorial depictions of Jesus that communicate the fact of his humanity as opposed to those that are more photorealistic and try to communicate details about his humanity.

I think there's room to talk about that.

I have Jesus' storybook Bible in my house, it's fine.

But yeah, just having those conversations with him about I I know you see the pictures, that's not what Jesus looked like.

I don't want you to think about that picture of Jesus when you worship him.

I want you to think about what God reveals to you about him in Scripture.

You said something, you said soaked in the Word, right?

That Jesus soaked in the Word.

And when we ask ourselves, well, why are these images being made, right?

Of the saints, of the Virgin Mary, of Jesus.

Why?

Well, because I want that intimacy with them, right?

I want that, well, the intimacy, it's almost like there's you're trying to shortcut being soaked in the word because you don't want to find Jesus in the Word.

Greater intimacy than any picture or sculpture, whatever you look at.

So when you said soaked in the Word, that's where you find Jesus, but what's that effort of word?

That's where's the effort?

I will get intimacy.

I don't need a picture, I don't need a statue.

The intimacy is found soaked in the word.

Oh, but wait, that means I have to read it.

Well, I have you know I have pictures of my wife on my phone, right?

Now imagine if we were sitting on the couch together, and instead of me looking at and engaging with my wife, I just looked at a picture of her on my phone.

And maybe I'm talking.

Well, yeah.

But they're doing something else.

But imagine like I'm talking to her while looking at my drone.

I got a picture of James.

James, how you do it?

Because, and that's, you know, it seems silly because we're all in the same room together.

Well, God is always in the same room, right?

And so it's it's, you know, again, I I want to be charitable because, you know, nobody has an image or looks at an image, possesses an image because they want to replace Jesus.

But if he has given himself to be known, and given himself for us to experience union and communion with him through the word, through prayer, through worship, through all of these sorts of things, then if we take the thing that he didn't command, it may feel like to us that it better facilitates our relationship with him.

Because we like images, we like pictures, they speak to us in a certain way.

We think it's getting us closer, but actually it's standing between us and him.

Just like me holding up the phone.

And so that that brings us to the shorter catechism, like you know, question 52, like, why does God care?

Right?

What are the reasons NX to the Second Commandment?

The reasons NX to the second commandment are God's sovereignty over us, his propriety in us, and the zeal he hath to his own worship.

So he's in charge, he gets to tell us how to worship.

Uh he his propriety in us, like it is proper for us to worship him, and the zeal he has to his own worship.

He wants us to worship him.

Is it because he's like some exalted narcissist?

No, it's because he is the only object worthy of our worship.

He is the only thing in all the universe that can bear the weight of glory.

And so, as we worship him, we become worth we become like him.

We become like what we worship.

That's so much of an Isaiah when he's railing against the idols.

They're deaf, they're dumb, they're blind, they can't walk, they can't speak, they can't do any of these things.

And when we worship them, we become as deaf and dumb as them.

God wants us to become as alive and full of life as he is in our own properly creaturely way.

And so he wants our worship because he wants us.

And that's, at the end of the day, it's not God being a cosmic killjoy and just saying, here are my very strict boundaries, you stay in the lane, right, for funsies.

No, he's drawn the lines on the side of the road so that we can safely get to our destination.

Right?

And he knows that any time we go off and we start worshiping in our own ways that seem right to us, that don't get us to our destination.

They either get us lost in the woods or we end up in a ditch.

So that's ultimately what this gets at, right?

As we've said several times now, we tend to think of the law and rules and regulations as someone saying, like, taking something from us.

The law is actually God giving something unto us.

He's showing us the way that life works best.

He's showing us how we ultimately get to fullness of enjoyment in Him.

As always, the grace of God puts us on the road.

The grace of God brings us back onto the road after we get us ourselves in the ditch again and again and again.

The law does not save us.

We're not saved by our right worship.

We are saved so that we can rightly worship and experience all the joy, all the life, all the fruit that comes from that.

Chesterton, we're taller when we bow.

Taller when we bow.

Right.

I so appreciate what you just said, Kenny, and it just makes me think of the wise men.

We've seen his star and we have come to worship him.

They made that trip on purpose to worship that little king.

Yeah.

I find that so incredibly cool.

Yeah.

And when they came to the house, the first thing they did was worship him.

So in the New Testament, the gospel begins with the worship of Jesus by these Gentile astrologers or whatever they were.

Yeah.

Who are making a trip on purpose to worship him?

Isn't that incredibly cool?

Yeah.

Chesterton was a good image bower, wasn't he?

Possibly.

We still got a lot of good things to say to English Bower.

I give him some grace with his Catholicism because the English church, I mean, what were his options really?

The English church was so corrupted that the Catholics and Great Britain seemed like clean by comparison, most part.

So I give Chester Sifton some great grace above his Catholicism.

He's served the church well with his writing.

Worship is worship is a thing that we'll do forever.

Think of all the other things in church that we do and in church life that we do, and how they'll be radically changed when the new heavens and the new earth descend.

But worship, worship will happen forever.

It won't be taken away, it'll be purified, it'll be sanctified, it'll be glorified.

We'll finally have consummate communion with the object of our worship, and we won't be held back by our sin.

You know, we won't have to do the confession of sins and worship anymore.

It'll just be straight up assurance and hardened and affirmation of faith.

It'll permeate all of life.

Yeah.

The earth will be as full of the glory of God as this seed.

And we'll actually see it.

And we'll actually see it.

He truly is.

Yeah, you won't have to look at me while the words being preached, and you'll look at Jesus.

I'm looking forward to turning into a little bubble of worship.

Yeah.

But that is, you know, that's that's why the first and second commandments so dialed in on who we worship and how we worship.

It's important.

This is what we were made for.

So God is showing us how to be fully human and giving us these rules.

And people started worshiping Jesus on this planet as the sun was coming up today.

Just imagine the planet twirling around.

They may have even had a little worship surface up in the National Space Station, if there are any Christians up there, but they did.

And then imagine the planet working and the voices rising as the glow at the morning.

It's unincredible.

And some of those, like I've been in Sydney with Sudanese Christians, they cannot worship without jumping.

So they're like they're jumping up and down, and their voices are going up in praise, and their whole person is just yeah, like they're on pogo or whatever, those little bouncy things, and that's quite an experience.

But um as the planet turns, the voices raise and praise to the Lord Jesus.

Yeah.

Let's pray.

Lord, we lift our hearts in praise to you now.

We thank you for your great and precious gifts to us in Christ.

And Lord, we thank you for your holy, just, and righteous command.

We thank you that you give us your word to show us the way we should walk.

Not because it commends to us how we earn your salvation, but it tells us of how Jesus earned our salvation in his life, death, resurrection, and ascension.

So, Lord, help us to follow him as we walk this road.

Help us to worship him alone and not our own understanding of him, not our own representation of him, not images on the screen or on paper.

But help us to worship him as he's been revealed to us in your word.

And Lord, as we come now to the worship service, give us a sense of awe and wonder in the presence of the triune God.

Lord, remind us of the great battlefield on which you placed us.

But even as we rejoice to see the victory, help us to rejoice all the more in the fact that our names are written in heaven, that we're your sons, we're your daughters, we're in your family, we sit at your table, and that will never change.

Thank you for this time, thank you for this day.

We pray in Jesus' name.

Amen.