The Ten Commandments
SPIRITUAL WORSHIP
(Ex. 20:4-6; 32:1-8; John 4:19-24; KJV)
Subject
The Only Worship God Accepts from Man Is Spiritual Worship, and All Attempts to Approach God through Images Are Vain and Sinful
Golden Texts
“Thou shalt not make unto thee a graven image” (Ex. 20:4); “God is a Spirit: and they that worship him must worship in spirit and truth” (John 4:24).
Plan of the Lesson
The Character of God Forbids the Making and Worship of Images (Ex. 20:4-6)
Israel’s Early Disobedience of the Commandment Prohibiting Images (Ex. 32:1-8)
Jesus’ Teaching About the Spiritually of True Worship (John 4:19-24)
Setting of the Lesson
Time: On the second month (April-May) the Israelites reached the wilderness of Sin, and on the first day of the third month (May-June) the Israelites reached the wilderness of Sinai where the Ten Commandments were given. The conversation with the woman at the well perhaps took place in December, A.D. 27.
Place: The Ten Commandments were given in the mountainous region of Sinai, between the two arms of the Red Sea; Mt. Sinai and its plains and valleys. The city of Sychar is the modern village of El-Askar, five-eights of a mile north of Jacob’s well.
Scripture Reading: Exodus 20:4-6
The Character of God Forbids the Making and Worship of Images
20:4 … “Thou shalt not make unto thee a graven image.” The First Commandment bids us to worship the one God exclusively; the Second bids us to worship Him spiritually. The First Commandment forbids us to worship false gods; the Second forbids us to worship the true God under false forms.
The need for this commandment
The Hebrews had come out of Egypt; and Egypt was a land crowded with the images of a twofold mythology – of the old African deities with their bestial emblems, and of the new foreign gods of the Shepherd Dynasty. That the tribes had brought small, portable images of the Egyptian deities into the wilderness, and were secretly paying them honors there, seems to be implied by Ezekiel 20:6-8. They were going into Canaan; and the tribes of Canaan had defiled it everywhere with traces of Baal and Astarte – Syrian deities particularly cruel, but mainly obscene. A graven image means, of course, any image of a deity, person, or animal carved from stone, gold, or wood.
20:4 … “Nor any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above.” This might refer to God Who dwelt in heaven, or the angels, but also to the sun, moon, and stars, which were worshipped by many nations in the ancient world.
20:4 … “Or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth.” Fish, at least in certain places, or of certain kinds, were regarded as sacred and forbidden to be eaten in Egypt, Syria, and elsewhere.
20:5 … “Thou shalt not bow down thyself unto them, nor serve them.” The second commandment is not one forbidding the development of art, for the tabernacle itself was a beautiful piece of art, in which various objects were represented by carving, by weaving in the curtains of the tabernacle, and indeed by the two image representations of cherubim on the ark of the covenant itself, representations, of course, which the Israelites themselves never saw, for only the high priests went into the holy of holies. What the commandment forbids is the making of images to be used in worship. Now, of course, no man probably ever carved an image of any god or goddess with the idea that that image itself was the god or goddess it was supposed to represent, nor did any man, probably, in making such an image, think that the image itself was worthy of worship; but it has always happened again, and again, in every age, that ultimately the deity represented by the image is forgotten, and the image itself becomes the object of worship. This was true in the ancient world, and is just as true in the modern world. Statues of pagan deities were themselves worshiped, and in some religions today it is often true that objects themselves become sacred, eliciting the worship of devout pilgrims whose minds do not reach beyond the image to the one whom the image is supposed to represent.
Ultimately such image-worship must degrade and deaden the whole religious life of a person or a nation. “The habit of continually associating in thought this piece of dead matter with the living God, the employment of the one to recall the other, the tokens of external reverence addressed to the idol as representing God, the limitation of worship practically to the presence of the idol, with the feeling which inevitably results that the divine presence is equally local, limited to the spot where the image stands; all this forges in the mind so close a link betwixt the Invisible and his visible similitude as degrades the divine. It is impossible to preserve a sense of God’s pure spirituality when he is always adored as locally present to the senses in the form of a piece of matter. It is impossible to treat an image as a virtual representative or ‘locum tenens’ of deity without assuming that God somehow resembles his representation. The progress of idolatry is therefore downward” (J. Oswald Dykes). “In many niches of Wesminister Abbey we see that the statues have been removed. Who did it? The Puritans. And why? Because lamps had been hung and incense burnt before those stone idols. Were they not right? The Romanists might say, We did not worship the images, but only the Virgin through the images. Well, but we say that Virgin-worship was idolatry of the creature, not worship of the Creator. The whole history of Christendom is a demonstration of the peril and ruin of putting anything in the place of God or between our own souls and God. The crucifix, for instance [these words, we must remember, are from no less a person than the archdeacon of Wesminister, who spoke these very words in Westminister Abbey], through half-Romanized Protestants are now introducing it into our churches, is both a dangerous and an unwarrantable material symbol” (F.W. Farrar).
There is also a great danger in making the Lord’s Supper a violation of this very commandment, when people practice what is called the adoration of the sacrament, i.e., an actual bowing down to a chalice in which the communion wine is reserved. Today, many souls kneel while passing what is called the reserved sacrament, and it grieves the heart to think that one professing a belief in Jesus Christ could have such a perverted conception of true worship – bowing down to man-made wine, contained in a man-made chalice.
Notice carefully how that service to an image or the god represented by it naturally follows the worship of that image. We serve whom we worship.
20:5 … “For I Jehovah thy God am a jealous God.” Our God will not tolerate the reverence due Him being given to an image (See Deut. 4:24; 6:15; Josh. 24:19). Anger, jealousy, hatred, and revenge are ascribed to God, not as passions, but as the feelings of a holy being in regard to that which is evil. As Judge of the universe, God has the supreme right not only to entertain these feelings, but also to carry out their holy behests in the administration of His everlasting dominion.
20:5 … “Visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children, upon the third and upon the fourth generation of them that hate me.” James G. Murphy points out: “The iniquity spoken of here is that of polytheism, or idolatry, of having or making any other God. He that makes and worships an idol has lost the knowledge of the true God. This iniquity is called the iniquity of the fathers, inasmuch as it originates with them, and is only perpetuated in the sons who adhere to it. The history of the world shows that the ungodliness of the fathers, is, as a rule of fallen nature, followed by the sons. The fathers will have to account for their own iniquity; but the sons, who, on arriving at the seat of judgment in the same iniquity, will be treated as responsible beings, and visited for the iniquity which they have made their own. The forefathers of the Egyptians had departed from the living God, and devised numerous gods for themselves, and their sons not only followed, but outstripped their fathers in the abominations of superstition and deification.”
Let it be carefully noted that to make another God is synonymous with being God. To make another God is to declare that we consider the true God inadequate for our needs, and unworthy of our absolute devotion. “It is a solemn thing to pass on to children a wrong conception of God; it is the most awful thing a man can do” (G. Campbell Morgan).
20:6 … “And showing lovingkindness unto thousands of them that love me and keep my commandments.” How beautiful to discover this reference to love at the beginning of the Decalogue, the law of God. While God is absolutely just and absolutely holy, yet God loves men and longs to have them love Him. This is almost the only place in the first six books of the Bible where love to God is mentioned, except in the parallel passage (Deut. 5:10; cf. 7:9 and Judg. 5:31). If a man sweeps the idols away, and gets into living connection with God, worshipping Him without anything between, the result will be that his child’s child will, most likely, so worship. Here is a remarkable comparison – God visits the iniquity to the third and fourth generation; but He shows mercy unto the thousandth generation. If a man will commit to His posterity a worship which is true, strong, whole-hearted and pure, and will sweep away all that interferes between himself and God, he is more likely to influence for good the thousandth generation that follows him, than a man of the opposite character is t touch that generation with evil.
Why is it that in every nation and among all men there is a tendency to make images of God? What are the evil consequences of making images of anything that is worshipped? Can any image adequately represent God? If not, then what does making an image of God really mean? Did the Hebrew people, in their subsequent history, obey this commandment? (See, e.g., 2 Chron. 14:3, 5; 15:8, 16; 23:17; 24:18; 30:23-25; 31:1; 33:3-7).
Would a crucifix, i.e., a cross upon which the crucified Savior is carved, be prohibited by this commandment? What is the difference between a cross without the image of Christ and a crucifix?
Scripture Reading: Exodus 32:1-8
Israel’s Early Disobedience of the Commandment Prohibiting Images
32:1 … “And when the people saw that Moses delayed to come down from the mount, the people gathered themselves together unto Aaron, and said unto him, Up, make us gods, which shall go before us; for as for this Moses, the man that brought us up out of the land of Egypt, we know not what is become of him.” We do not know exactly how many days Moses had been in the mount when the terrible tragedy here described took place. It may have been three or four weeks. However, when the people said that they did not know what had happened to Moses, they were telling what was not true, and they knew it was not true. “They knew that Moses was up there in the mount with Jehovah. The elders could have told them that. The fire on the mount might have burnt the confirmation in on all minds” (Alexander Maclaren). They felt the need of leadership; but, instead of asking Aaron or some other person to take the place of Moses as a man needing God’s presence and power, they made the awful request of Aaron, who was the high priest, actually to make for them gods who could lead them in the days to come. They were still at the foot of the mountain from which the command against such making of images had been given. God Himself had marvelously delivered and led them all these months and how they could ever have made such a request is a mystery unless we know the perverseness, wickedness, and fleshliness of the human heart. The sad thing is that Aaron was carried away by this request, and yielded to it, perhaps through fear. We certainly hope that he had no confidence himself in any such gods that might be made.
32:2-4 … “And Aaron said unto them, Break off the golden rings, which are in the ears of your wives, of your sons, and of your daughters, and bring them unto me. And all the people brake off the golden rings which were in their ears, and brought them unto Aaron. And he received it at their hand, and fashioned it with a graving tool, and made it a molten calf.” With the golden ornaments and earrings the Israelites offered for this purpose, Aaron made an image of a calf. Possibly it was originally formed of wood, and then covered with gold plate, as were almost all of the larger idols worshipped by ancient people. This image of a young bull “was copied from the Egyptian Apis, but, for all that, it was not the image of an Egyptian deity – there was no symbol of the generative of bearing power of nature, but an image of Jehovah” (C.F. Keil). The idea of representing God by so awful a thing as this is revolting, and yet when men substitute a false religion for the true worship of God, they have always been known to sink to unbelievable depths of superstition, cruelty, and sensuousness. Some of the blackest passages in Greek and Roman literature have to do with the deities of these nations. The practices of religious devotees in the worship of Diana in the city of Ephesus is sufficient testimony to the wickedness men will indulge in when their conceptions of God are erroneous. “And they said, These are thy gods, O Israel, which brought thee up out of the land of Egypt.” To acclaim that the God of mercy, grace, and power, Who had delivered the Israelites from Egypt, had any connection with a lifeless image of a beast, seems to be nothing less than the suggestion of Satan himself (Cf. 1 Kings 12:28; Neh. 9:18).
32:5, 6 … “And when Aaron saw this, he built an altar before it; and Aaron made proclamation, and said, To-morrow shall be a feast to Jehovah. And they rose up early on the morrow, and offered burnt-offerings, and brought peace-offerings; and the people sat down to eat and to drink, and rose up to play.” See 1 Corinthians 10:7. The Israelites should have been praying. They should have been talking together one with another concerning the communications Moses had given them, which in turn he had received from God. They should have been singing praises to God for their deliverance. They should have bowed down to the ground in awe because of what they knew was happening on the mount where God and Moses were in communion. Instead of that they turned this sacred occasion into a carnival. Instead of fasting they were feasting, and instead of praying they were playing. This is not the last time in the history of God’s people that such a perversion has taken place. Sadly, there are churches today where preaching and teaching the Word of God and the true worship of God have become secondary matters, and a gymnasium, dining room, and dance-floor have become the center of “church” life.
32:7, 8 … “And Jehovah spake unto Moses, Go, get thee down; for thy people, that thou broughtest up out of the land of Egypt, have corrupted themselves: they have turned aside quickly out of the way which I commanded them; they have made them a molten calf, and have worshipped it, and have scattered unto it, and said, These are thy gods, O Israel, which brought thee up out of the land of Egypt.” Before Moses left the mountain God told him of the apostasy of the people. Moses was already prepared to descend when this surprising command from God was heard, to get down quickly to the people. “In the abhorrence which their idolatrous and licentious worship created they are called the people of Moses, and their deliverance is ascribed to him” (James G. Murphy). God can never ignore the sin of His people, and God must afflict His people because of their disobedience and transgressions, but this is all of mercy and of love. How terrible it would be if God allowed us to go on in our sinful willfulness, and did not upbraid us, punish us, correct and chasten us. Where would any of us be if God never put a restraining hand on us? Jonah ran away from God, but God sent a terrible storm after the boat in which he was hiding. God often sends storms in our lives to bring us back to our senses; and God, in the verses that follow, makes Israel to suffer that she might learn that her welfare and happiness were secure only in obedience to His divine law.
Scripture Reading: John 4:19-24
Jesus’ Teaching About the Spirituality of True Worship
Early in our Lord’s ministry, on one of His journey’s from Judea to Galilee, necessarily going through Samaria, the territory which lay between these two areas, He stopped to rest at the noon hour, quite weary with His journey, at the well of Jacob near the city of Sychar. The Samaritans and the Jews were uncompromisingly enemies of each other. The Samaritans believed that only the books of Moses were inspired of God, and that they were the true worshipers of Jehovah. The Jews were convinced, and rightly so, that all prophets of the Old Testament Scriptures, but that the temple sacrifices and worship which belonged to the history of their ancestors from the time of David down to the time of our Lord were ordained of God, and represented a more complete body of religious truth than anything which the Samaritans had. That noon there came to this well to draw water a woman who, by the very record of her in this chapter, must have been a woman of a very gross nature, one who had lived with five different husbands, from whom, no doubt, she had been divorced, though some may have died, and who was now living with a sixth, who was not her husband. She was thus living in adultery. All the finer things of life had long before gone out of her experience. She was a slave to life on a purely physical plane. How marvelous that our Lord revealed one of the greatest truths He spoke in all His ministry – the character of God – to a Samaritan woman of common type.
4:19 … “The woman saith unto him, Sir, I perceive that thou art a prophet.” On perceiving that the one who was speaking to her was indeed possessed of superhuman knowledge, and recognizing him to be a prophet, and confessing him so to be, she said to him,
4:20 … “Our fathers worshipped in this mountain; and ye say, that in Jerusalem is the place where men ought to worship.” The mountain to which this woman referred was Mount Gerizim (Deut. 11:29; 27:12). “Here a rival temple was built by Manasseth, who was driven from Jerusalem by Nehemiah (Neh. 13:28). Though it was destroyed by John Hyrcanus (129 B.C.), yet the worship here continued in some form down through the centuries, and so continues to this very day” (George Reith).
It is clear from this verse that much of the conversation with this woman is not reported, for we do not have any record here of Jesus’ speaking about Jerusalem, though He must have done so.
4:21, 22 … “Jesus saith unto her, Woman, believe me, the hour cometh, when neither in this mountain, nor in Jerusalem, shall ye worship the Father. Ye worship that which ye know not; we worship that which we know; for salvation is from the Jews.” The hour to which the Lord refers is, of course, the hour at which the Christian dispensation begins, when, through Christ, God is fully known and truly worshiped, for no one truly knew God until Christ came and revealed Him. “Locality disappears in Christ, who is at the right hand of God, the High Priest of men” (George Reith).
4:23, 24 … “But the hour cometh, and now is, when the true worshippers shall worship the Father in spirit and truth: for such doth the Father seek to be his worshippers. God is a Spirit: and they that worship him must worship in spirit and truth.” In these lines it would seem that love, compassion, yearning, holiness, and spirituality as attributes of God, are brought together in the most marvelous compactness and simplicity. That God loves is expressed in the title that Jesus gives him, “the Father.” That the Father seeks men to be His worshippers is but one of the many evidences, from God’s call to Adam in thee Garden of Eden down to the last “Come” in the book of Revelation, that God longs that men should be with Him, worshiping Him, knowing Him, loving Him, and filled with His fullness. The worship that God asks for is spiritual worship, and it is the only kind that He accepts, worship that is in spirit and in truth. “The word ‘truth’ here probably covers two ideas – the ideas of reality and of accuracy. It is opposed to symbolic worship and to ignorant worship. It does not mean that worship was now to be sincere, for that it had already been, both among Samaritans and Jews. But among the Jews the worship of God had been symbolical, and among the Samaritans it had been ignorant. The time for this, says our, is past. We are to worship really. They need no longer take an animal to the temple to symbolize that they gave themselves to God; they were to spend their whole care on the real thing, on giving themselves to God; they were not to set candles about their altars to show that light was com into the world, they were themselves to shine as lights lit by Christ; they were not to swing censers to symbolize the sweet-smelling prayers of the saints. They were to offer prayers from humble hearts” (Marcus Dods).
To worship God in the spirit means that we are to worship Him in our spirits in a communion between the spirit of man and God, the Spirit. Thus, man’s spirit becomes the abode of the Holy Spirit. God is a Spirit, and we cannot worship Him unless we do so with our spirits and by the illumination of the Holy Spirit. The phrase, “God is a Spirit,” or “God is spirit” is one that expresses God’s essential nature. “He is a person. He is one. He is not corporeal or material, and therefore is not apprehended by the senses, not subject to the limitations of space and time. Thus the question where he should be worshiped is answered. Though for a time he appointed a particular place, that was an accommodation to human weakness, and under the new dispensation worship may everywhere be rendered to him who is everywhere present. If God is a Spirit, rites and forms and sacrifices will not suffice. He must be worshiped in that part of man’s nature which reflects the divine” (J. Ritchie Smith).
For an excellent illustration from the teaching of Jesus regarding the meaning of “spirit” as contrasted with “flesh” see Luke 24:39.
We see the sun with our physical eyes. We see one another with our physical eyes. A mother is able to distinguish her children on the playground by her eyes. A mother can also distinguish one member of the family from another, she being separated from all of them, by the difference in their voices, God is not thus discovered by our physical senses. It is one thing to know a person’s face, a person’s walk, a person’s physical build. It is an altogether deeper matter, and more important, to know one’s character, the purposes of one’s life, the kindness of one’s heart, the movements of one’s mind. These are never discovered by our physical senses, but by our mind apprehending another’s mind, our heart understanding another’s heart. So, in knowing God we cannot feel Him or touch Him. We cannot even philosophize concerning God with our minds alone. It is our spirits that apprehend Him, and the Holy Spirit in us reveals the character of God to us as it is portrayed in the Holy Scriptures, and revealed in Jesus Christ, Who is Himself portrayed only in the Word of God. There is a wonderful passage in 1 Corinthians 2:9-6 which bears directly on this lesson, and should be read with great care. For the relationship of the teachings of this lesson to the matter of spiritual worship see Deuteronomy 4:15-18.
Does the Lord’s church today bear witness to the fact that God can truly be worshipped in any place? Does anyone believe that any one congregation in one city or community in the world makes for a truer, richer, more spiritual worship than any other congregation, city or community in the world? What are some of the ways in which one can worship God erroneously? What are the advantages of the spiritual worship of God that Christians are to enjoy over a more or less natural, symbolic, visible worship?
