Tag: Exodus

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The Second Commandment

Title slide with photos of Mayberry & Bluemont Churches

Jeff Garrison
Mayberry & Bluemont Churches
Exodus 20:4-6, Deuteronomy 4
June 28, 2026

This version of the sermon recorded on Friday, June 26, 2026 at Bluemont.

At the beginning of worship:

This has been a long and hard week. Thursday, I had an all-Commissioner meeting of Presbytery in Roanoke. I arose up early to get the trash out before driving up to the Star City. When I opened my email, I learned that Loren, the interim pastor between Stewart’s retirement and my coming, lost her husband. 


While in Roanoke, I planned to visit Peggy Slate in the hospital. Peggy ran the Higher Ground Retreat Center, just north of Bluemont. She also kept Wild Goose on track. I texted her daughter to let her and her father know my plans. In the middle of my meeting, I received a text saying Peggy’s kidneys failed and was moving to hospice at noon. 

Then about 2:30, I received another text saying she died, not long after arriving at hospice. I left the meeting and spent time with her husband Guydell and children.

Then, after I got home, Barbara Wagonner texted that Mel Condit, a recent new member at Mayberry, died. For the past several months, Mel battled cancer. He was released from the hospital just a few days earlier. A wonderful addition to our church and community, Mel will be missed. 

I’m older than Loren’s husband, the same age as Peggy, and a bit younger than Mel. Thursday, it hit hard. Our time on earth is short; life is precious. We should make the best of it, and should comfort one another during times of grief. 

Before reading the Scripture:

Last week, we looked at the first commandment which excludes all other gods. Today, we’ll look at the second commandment which forbids any physical representation of either another god or the one true God. At Sinai, the idea of no idols showed a radical departure from the norm. At this time, everyone used art to depict deities. Israel stood alone and offered a new way of looking at God. 

There is only one holy God who must not be depicted in artwork. This doesn’t mean that art is bad; it’s just not to be used to depict the one beyond our comprehension. Instead of knowing God through paintings or sculpture, we meet God in scripture. Even objects in church—from the Bible on the pulpit to fancy windows—must not be worshipped.[1]

In their deliverance from Egypt, Israel encountered the living God, whose reality can be described, and then only partially, with language.[2]  

Today’s text is from Exodus 20, verses 4-6, and Deuteronomy 4:15-20, where we’re given more reasons to have no idols. 

Read Exodus 20:4-6, Deuteronomy 4:15-20

A salty old sailor sat through a sermon at the Seaman’s mission. The preacher went on and on with the dos and don’ts of the Ten Commandments, visibly shaking the old seaman. “What’s the matter,” his buddy asked. “Well,” he said pondering, “at least I ain’t made no graven images.”

God, in the Second Commandment, goes to great lengths to stress the importance of not having idol in any form. Whether it comes from the heavens, the earth or the waters, idols are off-limits. God is creator, not a creature. God is the artist, not the subject of art and therefore is not to be portrayed in artwork, which draws upon the created world. The Almighty refuses to be objectified. If we objectify God, we then assume we can handle God. 

We might wonder why God gets so upset over idols. After all, why would a a great and powerful God be threaten by us worship of something less than himself? Yet, idolatry is always more a reflection on us than upon God; God isn’t threatened by our misguided actions. God has the power over all other make-believe gods and there is no danger of him losing his position as the Creator and the Sustainer of the world. Instead of God taking this personally and being upset, God’s concern is our well-being. 

As Bob Dylan sings, “you’re gonna have to serve somebody.”[3] In a study on the Ten Commandments, the authors note: 

“modernity did not succeed in killing the gods, rather it succeeded in fostering rampant superstition. Modern people like to think that as we become more educated, liberal, enlightened, the less we need to worship gods. No. We appear to have been created to worship…[4]  

We’re created restless, with a longing, an emptiness. We’re created with this desire that we try to fill. God created us this way so that we might see the need to have him fill our restless desire to worship something beyond ourselves. But God wants us to come freely, which means that we will also be tempted to create our own substitute for God. All of us have this desire for fulfillment; idolatry is when we try to satisfy it with something that is less than God.[5]   

Joy Davidson, who would later marry C. S. Lewis, wrote a commentary on the Ten Commandments titled, Smoke on the Mountain. Addressing this commandment, she said, “idolatry lies not in the idol, but in the worshipper.” 

The horror of idols is that they’re impotent, they’re without power, and they can give us nothing. Instead, idols rob us of the power we have within ourselves and from God through the Holy Spirit.[6]Certainly our idolatry have become more sophisticated. We gave up on Aaron’s golden calf and miniature statues of Artemis which endeared the Ephesians.[7] But are we putting our trust in God, or in something else? What is it that we worship? What do we do with our desire to connect to something beyond ourselves? Do we go to God or to something less that has only enough power to rob us of a relationship to the living God?

Let’s ask ourselves? What are our Golden Calves today? What keeps us from fully enjoying God? When I look at the walls in my office, I see the various token representations of my accomplishments. I feel proud and might think to myself, “I’ve done some neat things.” Some of you have accomplished a lot more. But when I think, “Gee Jeff, you’re good,” those mementos become first cousins to that sacred cow of Sinai. What is it that we value the most? 

Our accomplishments, our diplomas, our homes, our jobs, our cars and boats and motorcycles, our families? These good things can also be substitutes for God. God wants us to enjoy the finer things in creation, but he alone should be the object of our devotion. Akin to how one spouse will covet a devoted relationship from the other, so God desires our devotion. 

God provides a reason for such a relationship. If we, who have been chosen by God, worship something else, we’re cursed. Yet God offers even more abundant blessings if we keep it.

Let’s talk about this curse. We may think it unfair God’s wrath is not only experienced by the idolater. It extends to his or her offspring for three to four generations. Yet, if idolaters share the wrong message with their children, how will they hear? The message of the idol will be carried on within the family for generations and the barrier they built between them and God will continue. 

Psychologically, this curse plays out in the family systems of alcoholics and drug addicts. There are books written about the phenomena, such as Adult Children of Alcoholics.[8] Someone who is a dependent upon some substance is essentially an idolater. The substance becomes their God. And within their family, because of how people live with and around them, the abuser’s family carries the curse with them. 

John Calvin suggests the curse is not so much the result of God inflicting it, as the absence of God, which allows it to continue.[9]The curse continues until someone says “enough” and invites God back into their life. 

Now, consider the promised blessings. Idolatry brings a curse, but the blessing of faithfulness stands in sharp contrast. The curse continues for three or four generations, the blessing to the thousandth generation. God’s mercy overwhelms his wrath. Surely the Psalmists got it right when he proclaimed, “the Lord is gracious and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love.”[10] As human beings, we tend to be overly concerned with the wrath of God and the possibility of punishment. We forget how much greater God’s capacity to love is when compared to his anger. John Calvin, in his sermon on the Second Commandment proclaimed that it is “almost against God’s nature” to punish.[11]

God’s love is much greater than we can imagine, hence the reference to a 1000 blessed generations. Think about this. Biblical standards set a generation at 40 years. A 1000 generations would be 40,000 years, which would mean that we’re not yet at the 10% mark for the blessings bestowed on those like Joshua and Caleb who were faithful during the Exodus. The blessings from that era continue!

Surely this commandment means that we are not to depict God in any creaturely way.  But as Christians, we acknowledge that 1400 years after the commandments, God came to us as a man. In other words, God himself chose to relate to us in a way we can understand. Yet, interestingly, we’re not given a physical description of Jesus. The mystery of what God looks like continues! Instead, we’re told that we will meet him when we reach out to someone in need and that we’ll feel his presence when two or more are gathered in his name.[12] God’s incarnation in Jesus Christ doesn’t mean we are allowed to worship a picture of Jesus, even if we had one. But the incarnation gives us a better understanding of the nature of the God we worship and adore. 

Through Christ, we can have even a more personal relationship with God, which is what God longs for and we need. We can’t have this relationship with a piece of art; nor can we have such relationship with a god who’s nothing more than a projection of our own wants and needs. We can only have such a relationship with the living God. Only such a God can offer us salvation and ever lasting life.   

Let me now say something about religious art. This is one of the areas we live out our faith in tension. Our devotion is to be to God, revealed through Jesus Christ. We all have crosses, Bibles, pictures supposedly representing Jesus, but none of these are to be worshipped even though sometimes, if used right, can help us focus more on God. 

In Reformed Churches, if you go back in history 150 years, you’d be surprised to find no pictures of Jesus and no crosses. If the sanctuary had stained glass, it was only decorative; they’d be no pictures of anyone in it. Over the past century and a half, we’ve back off such a strong prohibition against these types of art. However, we should remember no picture representing Jesus is accurate and be on guard that such art does not become a focus of our worship. For the God we worship transcends our abilities to create. And only a God who transcends our limited view has the power to be useful.

Think seriously about how you depict God. Make sure the God you worship isn’t some false god, but the God revealed in his Word, who has the power to create and to save. Amen.

This sermon was edited from a sermon preached in Hastings, Michigan in 2007.

[1] Daniel D. Patrick, The Ten Commandments: Interpretation, Resources for the Use of Scripture in the Church Louisville, KY: WJKP, 2000), 56. 

[2] Duane L. Christensen, Deuteronomy 1:1-21:9, Word Biblical Commentary (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2001), 114.

[3] Bob Dylan, “Gotta Serve Somebody” (1979)

[4] Stanley Hauerwas and William Willimon, The Truth about God: The Ten Commandments in Christian Life (Nashville: Abingdon, 1999), 36.

[5] cf, Ronald Rolheiser, The Holy Longing: The Search for A Christian Spirituality (NY: Doubleday, 1999), 3-5.

[6] Joy Davidman, Smoke on the Mountain: An Interpretation of the Ten Commandments in terms of today (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1963), 38-39.

[7] Acts 19:23ff.

[8] Janet Geringer Woititz, Ed.D., Adult Children of Alcoholics (Deerfield Beach, FL: Health Communications, 1983, 1990).

[9] cf, John Calvin, Institutes, II, vii, 18-20.

[10] Psalm 145:8.  Variations of this theme is found throughout the Old Testament.

[11] John Calvin, Sermons on the Ten Commandments, Benjamin W. Farley, translator. (Grand Rapids, Baker, 1980), 78.

[12] See Matthew 18:20, 25:40.

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The First Commandment

Title slide with photo of Mayberry and Bluemont Presbyterian Churches.

Jeff Garrison
First Presbyterian Church
Exodus 20:1-4, Revelation 22:8-9
June 21, 2026

The sermon was recorded at Mayberry on Thursday, June 18, 2026

At the beginning of worship:

Happy Father’s Day to all who are fathers and all who have fathers. We begin today working through the Ten Commandments, We start with the first commandments which is to have no other gods before the one true God. As Jesus teaches us in the Lord’s Prayer to address God as “Father,” it’s a good day to begin this series. 

Throughout this summer, I plan to focus my sermons  on one of the Ten Commandments. By the time we’re done, I hope none of you will be under the illusion they’re the Ten Suggestions. Instead, consider the commandments as God’s gift; the boundaries in which we can have abundant life on earth. Envision the law as being fence posts staking out our territory. Within the boundaries, we have lots of freedom, but when we move beyond the fence, we damage our relationships with God and with others in the human family.  

The commandments were important for Martin Luther.  We think of Luther being so focused on grace, but he wrote that to know the commandments is to know the Bible. As a modern commentator writes, “to understand them properly, we must know the great overarching story—Creation, Exodus, kingship, prophets, exile, Jesus, death, resurrection and ascension.”[1]

Before reading the Scripture: 

As I focus on the Ten Commandments for this summer, I plan to draw from the commandments as presented in the book of Exodus. The Commandments can be found in two places in the Old Testament: Exodus and Deuteronomy. The same list, but they have some slight differences as the reason for obeying the commandments.  

Let me go over one additional thing about the Commandments. There are two ways of numbering them, both come up to ten. The traditional way, used by Jews use as well as those of us in the Reformed tradition, has the first commandment as having no other gods and the second as the probation against idols. However, some churches, notably the Roman Catholics and Lutherans, combine these two commandments then split what we think of as the tenth commandment, the probation against coveting, into two parts. 

Read Exodus 20:1-3, Revelation 22:8-9

We’re given a three-fold proof of why we are to have no other gods before the One True God—the Creator of heaven and earth. 

First, it’s the Lord who gives this commandment to us. “I am the Lord,” the fifth chapter beings. As Americans, we don’t tend to like titles like Lord and King and as we’ll celebrate in two weeks, we fought a revolution against such. But to understand what’s being said here, we should recall that in ancient times a “Lord” controlled lands and those who lived on it. This text implies that God, as Creator, rightful holds the title for the earth. As the Psalmist proclaims, the world and they that dwell therein” belong to God.[2]   

And just who is this God? The Confessions of the Presbyterian Church bring together many of the attributes of God found in Scripture. We speak of God as: “a Spirit, infinite in being, glory, blessedness and perfection.” God is “all-sufficient, eternal, unchangeable, incomprehensible, all present, almighty, all knowing, most wise, most holy, most just, most merciful and gracious, long-suffering and abundant in goodness and truth.”[3]That’s a mouthful.

Furthermore, we should remember on this Father’s Day that while we speak of God as “Father,” it’s metaphorical. Jesus uses such language in the Lord’s Prayer as a way for us to understand the relationship God desires. The same is true when Isaiah speaks of God as a caring mother.[4] God cares for us like parents care for children.

In addition, the male pronoun often used for God shows a limitation with the English language. Using the pronoun “He” or “Him” doesn’t mean God is a man. To think of God as a man puts God in a human category, which breaks this commandment. God exist beyond human sexual categories. 

When we think about God, it’s easy to be overwhelmed. As mere creatures, God exists beyond our imaginations. It’s easy when contemplating God to give up and resign ourselves to be unable to understand God and therefore drop our quest to know God. But God, as he lays out the commandments, encourages us. We’re reminded that not only is he Lord, he’s also our God. “I am the Lord, your God,” he says. God, the all-powerful creator, who rightfully claims ownership of Creation, is also “our God.” There is an intimacy expressed here. God isn’t just a Creator with no interest in us. God calls us and wants us to be a part of his family.. And God takes the initiative to enter a relationship with us, to be personally involved with us.

Abraham Heschel, the great Jewish philosopher of the 20thCentury titled one of his books, God in Search of Man. Even before we know God exists, God seeks us out. Think about how God works: God reached out to Noah, to Abraham, to Moses. God came in the life of Jesus Christ. God wants to be in a relationship with us and therefore calls us back to himself. And God could demand our allegiance based solely upon his rightful position as Creator. But God isn’t petty. By entering a relationship with us, by being OUR GOD, God earns our respect and allegiance. 

The second reason given to us to encourage our compliance with the first commandment is that God led our spiritual ancestors out of Egypt. Our Great God, the Creator of all, heard the cries of the Hebrew people as they labored, building pyramids and other sorts of monuments to the rulers of Egypt. Today we marvel over their work. We shouldn’t forget that the construction of these ancient wonders was done by the backbreaking labor of an enslaved people. But God heard their prayers. Over the sound of cracking whips, God heard their cries, just as he hears ours. Through the leadership of Moses and a host of special effects, God rescued his people. God is not a distant Creator, uninterested in what goes on in the world. Our God listens and answers prayers.

The third reason given for our obeying this commandment is that we were brought out of the house of slavery. Certainly, in the wilderness, as Moses recalled the Commandments, he was referring to Egypt and the 400-year period of bondage.  

Paralleling the land of Egypt and the house of slavery gives this sentence a nice ring. It’s balanced. But let’s take a bit of liberty with its original meaning and see if we can come up with a meaning for us today. The Exodus event provides a model of how God rescues his people. It’s an archetype which reminds us how our God works in the world. With this understanding, we can make this third reason to obey the commandment apply to us personally. We obey because we’ve experienced release from bondage, whatever the form of slavery it might have been.

Has God helped you kick the smoking habit, beat drugs, get control over alcohol abuse, recover from an accident, a job loss, a divorce, or regain self-esteem? Regardless of what it was, if God helps us regain control, we are indebted in him. Therefore, we should desire not to break the commandments.  

We’re given three reasons not to break this first commandment:  

1. God as Creator desires a relationship with us.  

2.  God shows his faithfulness by delivering our spiritual ancestors from bondage in Egypt.  

3. God has or can deliver us from whatever enslaves us, from whatever holds us back from being who he has created us to be.

These are three good reasons not to have any false gods. Now let’s consider for a few minutes what it means to have no other gods before our One True God. It is interesting the way this commandment reads: NO OTHER GODS BEFORE ME. If God is, as we proclaim, all-knowing and all-powerful, then having any other gods would be to have them in front of God. So, we’re not to have any other gods. 

In Israel’s time, the Hebrew people found themselves constantly lured into worshipping their neighbor’s gods. This was especially true if their neighbor had a better harvest in a particular year. They’d want to do whatever they could to get a competitive advantage, so if they thought their neighbor’s gods looked favorably upon them, they’d in turn pray to these false gods and end up experiencing the rage of the Living God.

Having no other gods goes beyond the command to make no idols—we’ll discuss that one next week.  It means not elevating ourselves too high or not putting what should be our trust in God into some form of superstitious behavior. Think of the angel John wanted to worship in the book of Revelation. The angel quickly corrected John. We don’t lift any other being to be equivalent or even closely equivalent to God. 

Having no other gods mean we let God be God and we trust and depend upon him. God gives life. We need to remember this for whenever we put something between God and us, we find our lifeline compromised. If you have difficulty breathing and are on oxygen, you want to be careful not to stand on the tubing between you and the oxygen tank. Otherwise, you won’t get the air you need and might pass out or even die. It’s the same way with God. God desires for us to draw our life from him and to live abundantly. We don’t want to cut off our supply of his life-giving breath, but we do this anytime we place something between God and us.  

Examine yourself. Take an inventory; see where you do not completely trust God. Are there areas in your life where you’ve relegated God to second or third place and made something else more important? If so, and we’re all guilty at one time or another, confess your sins. Work toward cleaning up those areas in your life so you can live life to its fullness, as God intends.  Let us pray: 

Almighty God, you are the source of life. Through Jesus Christ, you save us from your wrath and our sinfulness. You call us to be your people and command us not to have any other gods before you. That’s easier said than done. We don’t always fully trust you and find ourselves placing other things in front of you: families, occupations, wealth, accomplishments, abilities, intellect, nation, even our church. Forgive us and fill us with your vision so we may grow into a deeper relationship with you.  Amen. 

[1] Stanley Hauerwas and William Willimon, The Truth About God; The Ten Commandments in Christian Life (Nashville: Abingdon, 1999), 30.

[2] Psalm 98:7, KJV.

[3] Westminster Larger Catechism, Question 7.

[4] Isaiah 66:13.