Images of Diminished Glory

In our current culture, many statues are being removed that are especially related to racism. People are moving quickly from one thing to the next in this "cancel culture". It did not take long for people to move toward religious statues—even statues of Christ. Some are outraged by this, but many are rightly asking, "Should those statues have ever been put up in the first place?"

In Chapter 4 of Knowing God, J.I. Packer makes a case for us that we should have never had these statues to begin with. In fact, having these statues of Christ is a violation of the second commandment. Exodus 20:4-5 says, "You shall not make for yourself a carved image, 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, for I the Lord your God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children to the third and the fourth generation of those who hate me,".

Packer shows us two dangers when it comes to these images of God. The first is that "images dishonor God, for they obscure his glory" (pg. 45). To bring God down to an image that a human created is a vast obstruction of his glory and majesty. God is so much more glorious than any of us can imagine or dream of. One day we will be floored before him. To bring God down to our level in an image created by us betrays the fact we are severely misinformed about his glory and nature. Isaiah 6:3 declares that whole earth is fully of his glory! We should not be so audacious to think we can boil the glory of God down to a single image.

Looking back to my younger years, I remember having a t-shirt that proudly displayed a picture of Christ with dreadlocks. I remember thinking at the time that this shirt was really cool and edgy. Now I shudder to think that I was a walking billboard for a misconstrued picture of Jesus. The truth is, we don’t know what Jesus looked like and this was someone just imagining in their minds what they would have liked him to look like and, truth be told, I liked this idea of his looks myself.

This brings us to Packer’s second point in that "images mislead us, for they convey false ideas about God" (pg. 46). That picture on my shirt certainly wasn’t Jesus. The danger here is that repetitive exposure forms an image of Jesus in my mind, which I may be tempted to think of during worship, which is sin according to the second commandment. Packer puts it like this, "Psychologically, it is certain that if you habitually focus your thoughts on an image or picture of the One to whom you are going to pray, you will come to think of him, and pray to him, as the image represents him" (pg. 47).

As I close, let me give one exception that I think Packer allows room for as well. I do not think images of Christ as used in children’s books and Bibles, nativity toys, etc. fall under this second commandment violation. I think most of these are cartoons used to help children understand and grasp the person of Jesus so they can begin to know and see him. They don’t (I think) lead us to think of these cartoons as we worship.

Packer says, “Historically, Christians have differed to whether the second commandment forbids the use of pictures of Jesus for the purposes of teaching and instruction (in Sunday-school classes, for instance), and the question is not an easy one to settle; but there is no room for doubting that the commandment obliges us to dissociate our worship, both in public and in private, from all pictures and statues of Christ, no less than from pictures and statues of his Father” (pg 45).

God is jealous for his glory. It cannot be contained in an image and he has expressly forbid that we attempt to do so. We’ve all seen pictures and statues of Jesus, but we have to recognize that these actually hinder our worship instead of aid it. In the second commandment, God tells us that his glory and majesty are incomprehensible and far above us. This is the God we worship.
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We’ll be jumping into Chapter 5 of Knowing God this week. We’re not so far along that you can’t join us if you’d like! Be sure to join the discussion on my Instagram post at @camlhyde

You can see the post for Chapter 3 here.