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[Music] The Peril of an Easy Tolerance A message by Dr. Bruce W. Thielman You shall not make for yourself a graven image,

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or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. You shall not bow down to them or serve them,

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for I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children to the third and fourth generation of those who hate me, but showing steadfast love to thousands of those

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who love me and keep my commandments. And may the same God who spoke these words illumine our hearts that we might understand them. Pray with me.

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In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, Amen. I would like to think with you tonight about the second commandment.

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There is one commandment which is longer than the second commandment, namely the fourth commandment. But there is no one of the ten commandments

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that is more often repeated in Scripture than the second commandment. It is then rather ironic that this is the commandment which many single out,

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suggesting that it is not particularly relevant to our time. They argue that we do not go about carving and directing idols and images, and therefore what this commandment says

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is not really germane to this age. They mistake the intent of the commandment, for this commandment really concerns the peril of an easy tolerance.

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When the commandments were first given to the children of Israel, the Israelites were surrounded by many tribes and peoples

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who had pagan deities, many of these very obscene false gods. The true God, Jehovah, the God of the Israelites, was concerned lest his people

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should involve themselves with these surrounding pagan and false deities. Therefore, he gave to them the first commandment, "No other gods beside me."

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But in the second commandment, he spoke to them about a far more subtle and therefore more dangerous temptation. In the second commandment, he warned his people

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lest they fall into the trap of understanding God, the true God, Jehovah God, exclusively on their own terms. In other words, in this commandment,

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he warns them lest they seek to make him the true God in their own image. You remember how immediately after Moses had received the Ten Commandments,

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as he came down from the mountain while the thunder of God's appearing was still echoing from the stony crags, he found the children of Israel

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dancing in a festival of worship about the image of a golden calf. Now Aaron quickly explains to Moses that this golden calf did not represent any false god.

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It was not a pagan deity borrowed from any of the surrounding tribes or nations. No, Aaron says, we are worshiping the one true God, Jehovah, who brought us out of slavery in Egypt,

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and this is how we have chosen to see him, as a golden calf. And scripture notes that God punished Israel that day by taking the lives of 3,000 men.

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Why? Not because they had broken the first commandment. This was to them not a pagan or a foreign god. But because they had broken the second commandment,

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they had insisted upon seeing God as they chose to see him, not as he actually was. This is the sin

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against which the second commandment is directed, and it is a sin of our own time. We all recognize that in order to understand, to think, we have a tendency to assemble knowledge

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in the form of symbols or images. When your senses, for example, examine or gather data from some object, and when your intuition, spiritual and otherwise,

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gather information about something or someone, all of this information which you receive into your mind, you then transform into a kind of symbol or image. This is the way in which our knowledge is stored.

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If I say to you, for example, "A red rose blooming," you immediately picture that in your mind. The image is there.

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We use words as symbols or images. A word is nothing other than the symbol which we wrap around an idea. Now, the difficulty in this symbolic thinking process of ours is

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that we have a tendency many times to become so fascinated with the symbols we have created that we forget the reality behind them. You know how easily we can do this with a word symbol.

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The Bible, for example, speaks very specifically about individuals who substitute a word for a reality. In John's first epistle we read, for example, that we are not to love in word or in speech,

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but in deed and in truth. Love is more than a word. Love is something that you do. We describe those who substitute the symbol, the word, for the deed by saying that they're paying only lip service.

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We have a tendency, you see, to establish symbols to represent realities, and because the symbols are for our own use, we select symbols that please us.

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And then we become more interested in the symbol than in the reality that is behind it. Not only that, but our symbols many times are built in direct accordance with our own prejudices

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and preferences and tastes, and therefore we not only confuse ourselves with regard to reality, we sometimes pervert reality by the symbols that we make our own. It's precisely against the doing of this that the Second Commandment speaks.

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It says, "Don't get locked into worshipping your own ideas about God instead of worshipping God as he truly is." I read about a church in Denmark, a Protestant congregation, that had a rather unique custom.

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Every time the congregation would leave the place of worship, they would, each and every one, bow before a certain spot on the wall. Now, the wall was completely plain, there was nothing there, but they would all bow before that spot,

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and when asked why, no one seemed to know. It was just something that had been done there for generations. Then the church had to undergo major renovation, and in the process, they uncovered, under three layers of paint

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and two layers of plaster at that very spot, a picture of a Roman Catholic Madonna. Now, that sanctuary had been used hundreds of years before by a Roman Catholic congregation,

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and evidently that congregation at that time fell into the pattern of bowing before the Madonna as they left the sanctuary. And here was a congregation of Protestants, to whom such an act would be completely uncommon,

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doing the same thing hundreds of years later, even though the Madonna no longer appeared and could not be seen. Now, what had happened? They had become so caught up in their symbols,

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their traditions, the way they always did things, that they lost the reality of their faith. When you hear a story like that, you immediately think of Jesus and the woman of Samaria.

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Do you remember how she said to him, "Some people say we are to worship here, and other people say that we are to worship here. What do you think about the matter?"

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And Jesus replied, "You worship what you do not know. You are to worship in spirit and in truth. That is, guided by the Spirit of God, you are to worship God as he truly is."

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Now, just as our symbols, our prejudices, and our preferences can disturb and disrupt and make impure our worship, so they can defile our theologies. Our theologies are nothing more than collections of words

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by which we seek to define God and the things of God. But as we've already noted, words as symbols can become very perverse things, and we can become more attracted to our words

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than the reality that is behind them. So it is that some people are so dedicated to their theology, so completely committed to the formulae of their faith, that they lose touch with the God who is real.

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Oh yes, God reveals himself to us. He reveals himself to us in Christ, in the Scripture, and in nature, and in history. But every one of these revelations,

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we receive and symbolize in our own minds. And once again, we can make of these revelations something much less than God in fact wants them to be. And this is the idolatry which the second commandment refuses.

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Now we live in an age of tolerance, and that's not all bad. It is far better to be tolerant than it is to be cruel. But tolerance has become so fashionable in our time

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that many times it becomes a very serious sin. For example, we say with regard to religion that every man has a right to his own religious views. After all, no one should intrude into the religious understandings

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and persuasions of another. And we describe ourselves as being very tolerant in this regard. Now we're not as tolerant as we really think we are. For example, when the Mormons justified

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a man's having more than one wife on the basis of their religion, we did not tolerate that. As a society, we prohibited that. If there was a faith group here in western Pennsylvania

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that started to make basic to its act of worship the offering of human sacrifices, we would not tolerate that. We would stop that immediately.

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We are not totally and utterly tolerant. But I am suggesting that we are many times too easy in our tolerance. That is, we allow distinctions to become blurred.

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We are so indolent and indifferent with regard to the beliefs of others that many times we tolerate from them those things which are images of God,

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expressions of other people's preferences and prejudices, or our own preferences and prejudices, and not actually of the God who is God. One of the reasons that we live in such a theologically barren time

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(and there is very little good theology being done today) is the fact that we have this easy tolerance by which we regard the theological constructs of everyone who has anything to say in theology.

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There can be no cutting edge that is not narrow. There can be no power in faith, there can be no progress in faith, unless one is dealing with that which is truly true.

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But to gain that kind of truth, one must struggle. One must go beyond one's own prejudices and preconceptions and symbols.

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One must seek the truth with a constantly honest humility. Now, if you want to see an illustration of how serious this idolatry can become in our time,

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I would point you to two groups which are very active in America today. The first is the so-called moral majority, led by Rev. Jerry Falwell,

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and the other is called Christian Voice, led by Rev. Robert Graves. These groups are very actively engaged in preaching their understanding of the gospel,

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and they are seeking to influence the national election to be conducted on Tuesday in terms of their own personal understanding. Now, let it be said

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that there are many good things that can be said about these groups. They emphasize, for example, the importance of a Christian's being involved in politics,

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and that's very good. They have a very high concern for national righteousness, and that's very much needed in our time.

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They are very ardent and passionate in the pursuit of their goals, and we can respect and admire them for this. But at the same time, we must acknowledge

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that there is a very deep and serious idolatry in what they are doing. You see, they have focused their emphasis in this current campaign

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on a very few issues. They are concerned about pornography, about homosexuality, about abortion,

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about prayer in the public schools, about the recognition of Red China, about the SALT II Treaty. Now, every one of those is, of course,

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a serious and a major concern. But they have become so focused upon these questions that they have come to identify these questions

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as God's principal concerns for America in this hour. They are so convinced that these are the major issues of the day

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that they proclaim from their pulpits that God is principally interested in these events in this day. In other words,

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they have made God over to suit their own preaching and desires. The fact of the matter is that the items with which they are principally concerned

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are not much discussed in Scripture, while many other items, such as justice, the feeding of the hungry,

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the clothing of the naked, even a matter like the pollution of nature, these things are far more discussed in Scripture than the subjects that they call to our attention.

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But what has happened is they have become so focused on these matters that they have now gone to the extreme of announcing that any Christians

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who do not support them in their views are hypocrites, false believers. That's what the Reverend Jerry Falwell

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called them in Time magazine two weeks ago. In other words, if you do not see God as they see God, then your faith is not real.

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This has led the Jesuit publication America to describe them as fascists. They are, you see, focusing on particular concerns

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and then attacking by accusation any who do not share their concerns. And they do all of this in the name of God.

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The leading conservative journal in America today is Christianity Today, a journal which was helped in the times of its beginnings

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very generously by J. Howard Pugh, the generous benefactor of this college. Christianity Today, in reviewing these groups, says that they are narrow, simplistic,

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and pied pipers. And then they use this particular sentence, and I want to quote it. They say, "Uncritical support

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of this kind of thinking is unworthy of the Christian." Now those two words, "uncritical support," is what I'm calling "easy tolerance."

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Beware of too easily accepting the words of those who say that they have the biblical theology, that they have the biblical ethics,

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that they have the biblical psychology, that they have the biblical philosophy of education, that they have the biblical view of political science, that they understand the biblical concept of economics,

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that they grasp alone the biblical hermeneutic, or view of homiletics. These individuals, by saying this, are imaging God in terms of their own attitudes

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and prejudices. They claim to have a corner on the mind of God, and no man has a corner on the mind of God. When I think of these people, I think of Elijah.

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Do you remember that occasion on which he cried out to God, "Everybody is out of step but me. Your enemies are at every hand, God.

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They are tearing down your altars. They are killing your priests and your prophets. And now they're after me, and I am the only one left." And God says to Elijah,

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"Elijah, there are 7,000 people around here whose faith is just as real as your own." Elijah's mistake is he was making God too small. He made God small enough to fit into his own ideas.

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God so small that he had to be engaged in protecting him. God does not need to be protected by us. And when any individual seeks to reduce God to fit their own imaginings,

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imagings concerning him, they are in danger of breaking the second commandment. Or in the New Testament, we think of Paul and Barnabas. Do you remember when they came to Lystra?

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And they announced the good news, and there were some men who heard it and fell down before the two disciples and began to worship them as if they were gods.

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And Paul and Barnabas were absolutely horrified, and they cried out, "Sirs, why do you do these things? We are men like yourselves.

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Turn away from these things to the living God." So we need to turn away from the words of mere men and the concepts of mere men

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and the symbols and the prejudices and the preconceptions of mere men and seek instead contact with the living God. For God, this commandment goes on to say,

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is a very jealous God. The commandment says that he is jealous and that he will visit the iniquity of those who break this commandment not only upon themselves,

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but upon their children and their children's children. Now, we don't like to hear the word "jealousy" attached to the word "God." When we think of jealousy,

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we think of over-possessiveness and of a kind of hateful resentment. And certainly those attitudes, those human failings,

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have no place in the character of God. But the word "jealousy" has another meaning, which is not so common, but which is equally correct.

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And that meaning is a concern for the honor of one who is esteemed. When a woman says, for example, "I am very jealous for my country,"

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she is saying that she loves her country and she wants the very best for it. Now, in the Bible we have two words for jealousy. In the Old Testament, the Hebrew word "qahna,"

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and in the New Testament, the Greek word "xellos." And both of these words, which we commonly translate "jealous," can also be translated "zealous."

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In other words, God is described in this commandment as being very anxious, very zealous, and very caring concerning what happens to His people.

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He does not want them to be harmed by an easy tolerance. He doesn't want them to be led astray by their own symbols and images of Him.

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He does not want them to adulterate faith as He intends it to be. He does not want them to blur distinctions between good and evil.

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He does not want them to tear the fabric of the society by an impure worship, which will not only hurt them, but will also hurt their children

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that come after them. I don't know about you, but it rejoices my heart to know that God is very zealous about this matter.

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I like to hear those kinds of passionate words used to describe God. They are much more fulfilling to me than the cold, pale platitudes

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that are used by many metaphysical theologians. I mean to know that God so loves and that God so cares that He is zealous or jealous for us.

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That's the kind of love that can be wounded. That's the kind of love that's made out of sacrifice. It becomes human and dies, even death on a cross.

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Need I remind you that the Christian faith is the only faith in the world which was not satisfied with a God that was omnipotent?

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The only faith in the world which is not satisfied with a God who is King? The only faith in the world which is not satisfied with a God

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who has all power and strength and the ability to use them? The Christian faith worships a God who lays aside his omnipotence

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and becomes weak, putting himself in the hands of man. The Christian faith worships a God who is not only a king, but a rebel.

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A God who not only can do all things, but who has the courage to lay that ability aside and to allow men to abuse him if they will.

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We have a God who says, "I do not call you servants, I call you friends." And then goes beyond that to say,

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"Greater love hath no man than this, that he lay down his life for his friends." And then goes beyond that to lay down his life,

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literally, actually, and not only for his friends, but also for his enemies. Don't miss the magnificence of that kind of love

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by erecting for yourself some image of God which suits your own tastes, and which is so much less than that. The commandment warns us,

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"God zealously wants our love, as he zealously loves us." And it ends on a very positive note. It says that those who practice

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the disciplined faith that seeks God as he truly is will be richly blessed. Back in 1868, a missionary who was stumbling around amongst some ravines

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on the eastern shore of the Dead Sea found a stone shaped much like a tombstone with some Phoenician characters and some Hebrew words on it.

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That stone, which is known as the Moabite stone, is now in the Louvre in Paris. And that stone tells us about the Moabites, a people that existed at the same time

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as the early years of the children of Israel. They were a neighboring tribe. Now, we find very little about the Moabites in Scripture, but from this stone we learn more about them.

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We learn that their king was Mesha, we learn that their god was Kemosh, and so on. Now, what interests me is the fact that here were all these tribes gathered

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in the Fertile Crescent at that day, and about many of them we know nothing, and about many of them we know only those things which we've gathered from odd artifacts

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like the Moabites and the Moabite stone. But the children of Israel, they have had an impact upon our civilization which is beyond measuring.

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We know the names of all of their kings, we know the exploits of those kings, we know the history of that people, the story of its priests and its prophets,

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three of the great religions of the world, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, all came out of this one tribe which was no larger and no more significant numerically

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than any of the other little tribes that were gathered about it. Now, why is that so? That is so because this tribe of Israel

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obeyed this second commandment. They did not allow themselves to become syncretistic and attached to the faiths of others, and they did not allow themselves

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to see God on any terms other than those that God himself offered. This has always been a great point of worship amongst the Jews.

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When Pontius Pilate was on the throne in Jerusalem, he allowed his Roman soldiers to bring their official standards into Jerusalem, which was the capital city of the Jewish people,

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and on those battle standards were the pictures of false gods. And the Jews were enraged, and they said, "You must remove these standards,"

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and they pressed the matter so earnestly that Pilate had them surrounded by his army, and he said, "If you do not desist, I will have you killed."

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And they tore open their robes, they bared their necks and their chests, and they said, "Kill us! We would rather die

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than have any false god or any false thought of God in this holy place." And Pontius Pilate gave in.

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And this same zeal for the God who is true and real moved over into Christianity. If we were to visit first-century Athens,

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we probably would send a postcard home saying how nice it was to see all the beautiful statuary which was accumulated there.

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But it is noted in the book of Acts that when Paul got to Athens, he was deeply provoked. And why?

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Because he saw attempts to visualize God, and these attempts to symbolize or represent God

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were infinitely less than God himself is. Celsus, the first great intellectual opponent of the Christian faith, said, "Christians will have nothing to do

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with images, altars, temples, or false ideas of God." And the great conflict between the Christian Church

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and the Roman Empire centered over just this question. The Romans saw the emperor as God. Now, they did not actually believe him to be God.

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The conduct of the emperors was so despicable that nobody really believed that. But they saw the emperor

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as representing God. And the Christians said, "We will not see God represented in such a way. We will have no concept of God

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that is lower than God is." And so a tremendous struggle. And many, many thousands of Christians lost their lives

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in horrible ways in the conflict. But the Church won out. The Empire is gone, and the Church remains today

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the oldest and the grandest institution on the face of the earth. The Church won. So today we name our sons Paul

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and our dogs Nero. (P. 3) And why? Because the Church, you see,

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has never been satisfied with explanations of God. It seeks always the experience of God. That's where the power of the faith comes.

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And that power of communion with God as he really is, blesses the people, gives the people impact,

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cutting edge, progress and advance throughout time. Generation after generation is so blessed. What we're talking about here

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is nothing less than the worship of God, centering our lives about him as he really is, turning away from the bitter fruit of Greek philosophy and focusing instead on the rich tradition

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of our Judeo-Christian faith, worshiping not the God of the many, but the One who is One, orienting our whole lives about him,

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lunging toward reality, scraping off those sordid incrustations of our own prejudices and preferences, those things that we have allowed

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to represent God to us, which are in fact so much less than he really is. There's a single sentence in the Old Testament

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that sums it all. "Take heed to thyself that thou offer not thy burnt offerings in every place thou seest."

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What that means is simply this. Our lives are burnt offerings. We're like candles. And every day a little more of the candle is burned away.

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The candle is always getting shorter. Therefore, we are told, burn your candle only at the holiest shrine. Be discriminating in what you worship.

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Any woman who discovers that her husband loves all women exactly the same way that he loves her will quickly be dissatisfied with that husband.

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Love, in order to be real, must be discriminating and focused, and so it is with worship. We need to practice a kind of sanctified intolerance

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to turn away from trifles, because trifles will rob us of the tremendous. Which brings me to the last thing I want to say.

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It's about Johann Heinrich Donicker, the great sculptor. He made many, many famous statues, Ariadne, Sappho, many Greek deities. But when he got to middle age,

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he decided he wanted to do his masterpiece. And because he was a Christian, he chose to sculpt the form of Jesus, the Son of God.

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Jesus is God with skin on his face. Jesus is God as he really and truly is. Jesus is God not in an abridged, but in a vest pocket edition.

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If you want to see God, look at Jesus. So he set out to sculpt Jesus, and after sculpting a figure, he invited the little children

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who played outside his studio to come in. And he said, "Who is this?" And they said, "Oh, it's a great man." And very discouraged, he asked the children to leave,

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and he smashed the statue to the ground. And he began again. And when he had progressed with another figure, he invited the children in once more,

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and he said, "Who is this?" And they said, "Oh, it's a very good man." And again, Donicker was very depressed, and he asked the children to leave,

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and he smashed the statue to dust, and he started a third time. And when he was well along with the carving, he invited the children to come in once more,

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and he said, "Who is this?" And they said, "Oh, that is Jesus, the Son of God." That statue went out and became world famous. It assured Donicker of his place of immortality

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amongst the world's sculptors. A few years later, Napoleon, who was on the throne of France, saw the statue, and he wrote to Johann Donicker,

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and he said, "Come to Paris, and carve for us a Venus for the Louvre." And Donicker wrote back this line, "Sire, the hands that are offered to God in Christ

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can never fashion again any lesser deity." That's the call of the commandment. Not our image of him, but God as he is. God is jealous, lest we hurt ourselves and our children

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by worshiping that which is less than he is in all his fullness. He means for us to know him truly. And if you would know God truly, then look to Jesus.

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For Jesus is what God is. Let us pray. Our Father God, we thank thee that thou dost love us enough

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to command us toward that which is good. We praise and glorify thee that thou art passionate enough in thy caring for us

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that thou dost guide us so that we might not go astray, not only to gods that are not real, but to ideas of thyself which are unreal.

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We would know thee as thou art. We would praise thee and worship thee as thou art. We would adore thee and magnify thy holy name as thou art. We would not be satisfied with explanations of thee,

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but only with the experience of thee. By thy Holy Spirit fill us and confront us with thyself in thy Son. For it is in his name that we pray.

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And the Lord bless you and keep you. The Lord make his face to shine upon you and be gracious unto you. And the Lord lift up the light of his countenance upon you

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and give to you and to all those whom you love and to all those whom nobody loves his peace. [silence]