GOD’S MARRIAGE COVENANT- NO GRAVEN IMAGES

 “You shall not make for yourself an idol…” Ex 20:4

For 430 years, God’s covenant people were exposed to Egyptian culture which included worshipping a variety of idols. This had many implications for the Israelites’ understanding of a God they could not see.

Firstly, God said to them “Don’t make me look like something I am not.” It was in them to have an object to worship. The Egyptians had reduced their gods to what they could understand and control, but God is bigger than anything we can imagine. God says to us, “Don’t try to manage me so that you can manipulate me. Our relationship is to be based on love and submission, not on what you can get from me.”

Secondly, if we make an idol, we must place it somewhere and, to us, that place becomes holy.  We differentiate between spiritual and secular. We make the place where God is located sacred and everywhere where He is not, secular but God says that each person is to carry His presence in his being because we are His temples.

Thirdly, we must not confine God to a location otherwise where He is, is spiritual and everywhere else, where He is not, we can live as we like. The best kind of life is to have a God-consciousness all the time so that we are aware of God in everything we do.

God says, “Don’t try to make me manageable.”

                        “Don’t try to confine me to a location.”

“Don’t try to separate life into secular and spiritual.  I am your life.”

                                                “Don’t try to figure God out.”

When we treat Him like this it provokes Him to anger.

The best life is serving a God you can’t get your head around.  God is multi-dimensional, we are three-dimensional.  We can never figure God out and we must not try. We must give God the freedom to be God without trying to understand Him, control Him or confine Him to our experience or some place outside of which we are free to do as we like.

The Samaritan woman asked Jesus, “Where do you go to find God?” Jesus responded by explaining to her that God is not confined to a place because He is in us. We recognise everything by its boundaries, but we cannot set boundaries around God since He is a spirit.  We cannot understand spirit because we can’t control it.  We need to have faith in a God bigger than anything we can control. We must give up our need to control, submit to, trust, and love the God who is revealed in the Bible and not a god we have shaped in our own imagination. When we make God manageable, our concept of Him becomes an idol to which we bow, and to which concept we force everyone else to bow.

This was the problem the Pharisees had which led to them crucifying Jesus because He did not match their idea of God.