In the story that we looked at Sunday, we saw God not only force the statue of the Philistine god Dagon to bow, but He also removed the head and arms of the idol to reveal its true nature. The point was: the Creator is not okay with us worshiping His creation. All of this draws us back to the second commandment, which states:
“You shall not make for yourself a carved image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. You shall not bow down to them or serve them, for I the LORD your God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children to the third and the fourth generation of those who hate me, but showing steadfast love to thousands of those who love me and keep my commandments. | Exodus 20:4-6
This isn’t new to most people, you learn in Sunday school that idolatry is bad. The question that this brings up is: what makes something an idol? The irony of this story is that the means by which God reveals the idolatry of the Philistines is through the ark of the covenant: a box made of wood and gold. Why is the ark not considered an idol? How can God justify commanding a box to signify His presence just after commanding the people NOT to worship anything made?
THE ARK DOES NOT REPRESENT GOD
The purpose of the second commandment is not to keep us from creating anything physical to aid us in worship, but specifically to keep us from confusing the Creator and the creation. In Romans 1, it is this confusion that God calls out:
exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and creeping things. | 23
The ark of the covenant was in no way meant to visually depict or represent God. It represents His covenant and it depicts the cherubim bowing before Him. The emotion it invokes is not that the God who commanded it is worthy of praise.
THE ARK IS NOT MEANT TO BE WORSHIPED
When the Israelites made a golden calf and bowed down to it, they were treating the idol as something worthy of the worship that belonged to God. His jealousy for His honor prohibits this.
The ark of the covenant was a very different construction. God created it to be the seat that He dwells on among His people. While His presence was with the ark, it was not IN the ark. He could leave it at any time. At no time was the ark ever something in itself. It was never meant to be worshiped, but instead, it was a symbol of the covenant: I will be your God, you will be my people.
THE ARK CAN BECOME AN IDOL
Though the ark of the covenant is not an idol, it can become one if His people forget what it was meant to reveal and who it shone the light of glory on. Part of the problem of Israel in the previous chapter is that they trusted in the power of the ark without giving honor to the God it was meant to point to.
Idolatry is making something to represent God, something to aim our worship toward, or whenever we are willing to allow the creation that reveals God’s power and glory to become an end in itself.
This argument between: what supports the worship of God and what takes from it(where is the line between helpful and idol), has been a discussion in the church for a long time. The Reformers sought to rid the church of the iconography of the Roman Catholic church; the Puritans took it one further and destroyed all artistic depictions relating to the church. My grandfather, pastoring a church in the middle of the last century, was brought up on charges for having a picture of a Bible and a cross in the sanctuary, for fear the people may worship them in an inappropriate manner. A well-known theologian of the time, R.B. Kuiper responded to the controversy by stating:
To say that the second commandment rules out all symbolism in the place of worship is a most serious error. God Himself commanded Moses to make the cherubim for the tabernacle. Scripture breathes not a syllable of disapproval of the oxen supporting the brazen sea in Solomon’s temple. Christ Himself institutes the New Testament sacraments – the water of baptism symbolizing His blood and Spirit, the bread and the wine of the Holy Supper symbolizing His broken body and shed blood. To say that symbols in the place of worship are forbidden by the second commandment and then to add that only such symbols are permissible as are commanded by God is not only a highly inconsistent but a far from innocent course of reasoning. It is making God contrary to His own moral law. No matter how well intentioned, that is rank heresy.
While we should be careful not to become idolators: rooting our view of God in this world, we must also be careful not to be pietists: keeping God from ever being present in this world. He has given us a multitude of signs and symbols to His beauty and grace; we must neither let them rise above Him in our honor, nor miss what they have to teach us about Him.