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Stages, Altars, and Thrones: on our inclination towards image-making
One can readily understand the first commandment, “You shall have no other gods before me” (Exodus 20:3). Up until this point in the narrative, the singularity of this particular God, YHWH, is emphasized in multiple ways and leads us to be unsurprised by this first requirement of his.
But then, a strange follow-up: “You shall not make for yourself a carved image” (Exodus 20:4). This is one of the longest commands of the Ten, taking up a solid paragraph describing the limits of these forbidden objects (nothing made in the likeness “that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth”) and the reason for its prohibition (“for I the LORD your God am a jealous God”). Why the limitations on whittling?
A problem that did not leave humanity by the time of the New Testament, Paul and many of the other writers make various comments on idolatry. On the famous Areopagus, Paul says, “we ought not to think that the divine being is like gold or silver or stone, an image formed by the art and imagination of man” (Acts 17:29). To the Romans he says the whole history of humanity has “exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and creeping things” (Romans 1:23).
