Leviticus 19:4 - Homiletics

This verse contains the laws of piety and of faith. "Turn ye not unto idols" forbids the worship of false gods; "nor make to yourselves molten gods" forbids in addition the sin of worshipping the true God under the form of a molten shape.

I. The great temptation to the Jews down to the time of their captivity appears to have been that of taking the gods of the nations round about them as their gods; Baal, Ashtoreth, Molech, Chemosh, drew off their affections from Jehovah. They did not desire apparently to give up the worship of God altogether, but to combine the worship of false gods with it, that is, to transfer a part of the religious affections which were due to God to some other object. This is done in the present day,

II. The Jews were also guilty of the kindred sin of worshipping Jehovah under the form of an idol. This was the sin of Aaron's calf, which represented, not any strange god, but Jehovah himself ( Exodus 32:5 ), and this was the case with Jeroboam's two calves of gold ( 1 Kings 12:26-33 ). This offense is committed by any Christians who adore a representation of the Deity, sculptured or painted, or any sign or symbol of him, of whatever material or appearance it may be. It is the sin of men or Churches which have faith to believe that there is a God, but so feeble a faith that they require visible symbols of his presence instead of bravely trusting in the Unseen. The Israelites said to Aaron, "Up, make us gods, which shall go before us; for as for this Moses, the man that brought us up out of the land of Egypt, we wet not what is become of him." When they could not see Moses, the servant of God, they required a visible image of God. They could not trust him unseen; they required proof of his nearness; and this craving of a feeble faith led them to prefer the symbol of "a calf that eateth hay" ( Deuteronomy 4:15 ) to no similitude at all. "Other nations, surrounding the Jews on every side, had their visible objects of worship, making their task of Divine duty and faith more easy. But to acquiesce in their unseen God, I am; to obey without immediate continual consciousness of his nearness; to trust in his protection at times when they had no sensible aid to help them to realize to their imagination his power; to let loose, as it were, their prayers into the air, without having some representative figure, or emblem, at the least, at which to point them;—all this was too difficult a task for a feeble faith in things invisible and spiritual" (Moberly, 'The Law of the Love of God').

The same feebleness of faith has produced the worship of images in the Christian Church. It was not till the seventh century that they crept into use for aids in worship, and when they were approved in the eighth century by the second Council of Nicea, that Council was at once rejected, and its doctrine of images was repudiated by the Council of Frankfort and the bishops of Charlemagne's empire.

In like manner, a feeble faith craves for full light, for demonstration, for infallibility, where God has only given twilight moral certainty, and an authority which is not absolute. It craves for immediate resolution of spiritual difficulties where God demands a patient dealing with them; it asks after a sign where no sign is to be given; it seeks out for itself mediators instead of going straight to God.

Not only does the use of images in worship arise from a feeble faith, but it makes that faith feebler and feebler, and thus leads to materialism. After a while the symbol becomes substituted for the thing symbolized by it, and the affections which the emblem was intended to excite toward an unseen object, do not pass beyond the external sign. Materialism and weakness of faith are the spiritual effects of worshipping images and craving after visible symbols.

"A brave contentment with an invisible God, showing itself in faithful and strong-hearted maintenance of piety in the absence (if it should so please God) or the apparent scantiness of signs, tokens, miracles, and other visible indications of the presence and protection of the Omnipresent and Omnipotent, and a like courageous and faithful abstinence from making to themselves unauthorized images, symbols, and emblems of him who communicated with the people without similitude, must be the particular quality or part of Divine love enjoined under the second law. The peculiar affection enjoined is the brave, trusting, spiritual faith in God invisible, spiritual, absent to our sense, dim in his tokens, obscure sometimes in his providences, not demonstrable in his evidences, not invariable in his benefits.… Possessed of this spiritual faith in the Unseen, a man walks along his narrow path of life with a confidence, security, and cheerfulness which establish at once his comfort and his safety" (Moberly, 'The Law of the Love of God').