Contemplative Bible Reading

Deuteronomy 4:15-18 (New International Version 2011)

¹⁵ Since the Lord spoke to you from the fire at Mount Sinai, but you did not see him, watch yourselves carefully!¹⁶ Don’t sin by making idols of any kind, and don’t make statues—of men or women,¹⁷ of animals on earth or birds that fly in the air,¹⁸ of anything that crawls on the ground, or of fish in the water below.

I had never thought of it this way before, but it makes so much sense.

The LORD spoke to His people as a spirit from fire. If the LORD is a spirit, how can we make a physical thing to represent him? Well, we can’t. The LORD tells His people not to make idols for worship that represent physical things.

Funny how we draw near to physical things. It sort of makes sense to do so. The physical is familiar, and we are often most comfortable with things that are familiar. And then there are several times in the Old Testament when common sense is spoken. Are we going to take a tree trunk, worship part of it but burn the other part to keep warm on a cool night? Are we to take a rock, chisel a figure out of it for worship, but then discard all the fragments that we chipped off?

We can be logical and silly at the same time. We can worship a God who is greater than the universe, but we like to make a pocket size likeness of him to carry around.