The second commandment, which God gave to the nation of Israel was: "You shall not make for yourself an idol in the form of anything in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the waters below. You shall not bow down to them or worship them; for I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God" (Exodus 20:4-5). Though we, as Christians, are not under the law, this command is very relevant to us even today. None of us, to the best of my knowledge, has any desire to literally create gods or idols out of stone or wood. But I think that many of us are guilty of trying to create our own image of God.

For instance, in Michelangelo’s famous Sistine Chapel painting, God is shown to be white and European, which, not coincidentally, describes Michelangelo himself. In ancient Greece, the gods Apollo and Aphrodite epitomize the Greek ideal of the beautiful body and intelligent mind which was so important to the Greeks. In modern times, the Old Testament images of Jehovah as a great warrior and angry judge have been replaced by those traits that our own society values. The average person in America probably pictures God as a loving parent or a tolerant forgiving friend. This says more about the qualities that we admire than it does about the nature of God.

For many people, theology is not the study of God so much as it is the re-creation of God. Instead of learning about God from the Scriptures, many try to decide who God is for themselves. And that is idolatry. For example, the Bible teaches that Jehovah is a God of justice. But many feel uncomfortable with that, so they ignore those parts of the Bible that teach it and emphasize only the loving aspects of God. But God is who God is. We can’t create Him to be what we want Him to be. He is not the sum total of the values and prejudices of each generation. How could we depend on and trust a God who changes with the whims and beliefs of each generation?

What a comfort to know that the God that we worship is unchanging in His character! When Moses asked God what His name was, He replied, “I am that I am.” In Hebrew, this has a verb tense that includes all time – past, present, and future – so that God’s name can actually be rendered, “I am who I am, I have always been who I am, and I will always be who I am.” The God we worship is the same God that Abraham worshiped and the same God that Paul worshiped. He is the same yesterday, today, and tomorrow.

God doesn’t want to embody our values – He wants to transform them. Instead of making Him in their own image, God desires to remake us into His image. He challenges the world’s ideas of what is good and valuable. Our society values self-reliance and strength, but God wants us to learn reliance on Him and humility. Our society values wealth and success, but God wants us to live simply and develop the qualities of love, mercy, and being willing to give our lives up for our brethren.

There is only one way that we can know what God is like. In John 1:18, we read, "No man has seen God at any time; the only begotten Son, which is in the bosom of the Father, has made Him known." Jehovah God showed us what He is like when He sent Jesus to this earth not only to pay the price for our sins, but also that we might understand what God is like. Only God’s Son could present to us the perfect image of Himself. "The Son is the radiance of God’s glory and the exact representation of his being" (Hebrews 1:3). Everything Jesus said and did was a manifestation of His Father. Every miracle Jesus performed was a sample of what God can and does do. Even Jesus’ greatest miracle, the raising of Lazarus, was but a foretaste of what God is going to do one day when He resurrects all of mankind.

Yes, Christ is the ultimate image of God. But, guess what? The Bible says that we, too, can be images of God as well. "And we, who with unveiled faces all reflect the Lord’s glory, are being transformed into his likeness with ever-increasing glory" (2 Corinthians 3:18). If we are children of God, then surely we will bear His likeness.

D. Thorfeldt @CDMI