No image of God

I was raised by a single mother. As a boy, I was alway wondering about my father. So once a while I asked my mother about my father. Then she told me about him. 

“James, he was a very handsome man like you.”

“James, he was a very kind man.”

“James, he was a  famous musician.”

“James, he wears a pair of glasses.” 

“James, he is exactly like you.” 

You know what? 

But people told me, “Hey, James you look like your mom.” 

Then when I was in college, one day I found a picture from my mother’s purse. That’s was my father’s picture that I never seen before. Unfortunately, he was not a celebrity. He was not Beethoven. He was none of my imagination.

Sometimes, we think about our God in a way that we have experienced. If you have a loving father, then you can easily imagine the God of love. If your father was scary, you probably imagine that God is also scary. But the second command teaches us not to make ‘self willed image’ of God like the Israelites. On top of that, we don’t need the image of God because we have the Bible in our hands. It’s better for us to faithfully read the word of God than we wrongfully create the images of God. I am sure that wen we go to heaven we all will be surprised when we see the Lord Jesus Christ because he will be none of our imaginations that we see from the pictures. 

In Exodus 32, the reason the Israelites made the calf and worshipped it was that they felt that God was unreachable. Since Moses was gone for 40 days and nights, they strongly felt that God was also gone with Moses. Probably there were afraid of loosing their God. Probably their hearts were completely broken. By making an image of God in a golden calf, they wanted to make sure that God’s covenant was still with them.

We cannot see God. We cannot touch Him. We cannot understand Him. We cannot control the power of God. Well, however, all these things do not mean that God is unreachable. We should understand that we are not the ones who keep the covenant. But God is the one who keeps the covenant. God’s covenant has already been fulfilled by the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. And Jesus says, “And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.” (Mt. 28:20)