LD 35, Isaiah 40:18-31 "The Word of the Lord" Scott Hoezee

In his 1998 book The Rise of the Image, the Fall of the Word Mitchell Stephens asserts a bold thesis: the age of the printed word is passing away, a new era driven by video images is being born. What's more, Stephens thinks this is a good thing. "Moving images use our senses more effectively than do black lines of type stacked on white pages." Properly used by skilled technicians, video can instruct us better than books. Video will soon fashion better understandings of our world. The last line of the book even brazenly re-works the opening line to the Gospel of John by claiming that "All our enlightenments are not behind us. We are beginning again, and in this new beginning is the moving image."

Although many of us may hope Stephens is wrong about the eclipse of reading, few of us could deny that we are now living in an image-driven culture. In the last half of the twentieth century television changed the very layout of our homes. Prior to the 1950s we arranged our living rooms differently. Now if you walk into most any home, you can find at least one room in which every chair, sofa, and beanbag is arranged in such a way that the person sitting there will be able to see the room's center-of-attention: the TV set.

We are an image-driven culture. Churches have picked up on this. Go to almost any of the mega-churches that were started in the last twenty or thirty years and you will see a welter of features which tie in with our desire to see and not just hear. Go to Robert Schuller's Crystal Cathedral in California and you will see a Jumbotron--a giant large-screen television which provides close-ups of the minister as well as other images. Other congregations have perhaps not gone quite that far but in many places dramas and skits and video clips have become a standard part of worship services as have slide projectors displaying not just song lyrics but often scenes of mountains which help to create a certain effect when singing a hymn like "How Great Thou Art."

How very different this is from Old Testament Israel! And what accounts for this difference is not the obvious fact that we have photography and video technology whereas ancient Israel did not. No, the difference between then and now is Israel assumed that worshiping Yahweh was to be done in the absence of images. As we said last week, this was one of the hallmarks which distinguished Israel. Whereas other nations assumed they needed to have a visible image of their god in order to worship, Israel banned depictions of Yahweh.

Instead the worship of Israel was driven by, based upon, and focused on the word. Verbally recounting God's mighty deeds in creation and in the exodus from Egypt, singing the psalms, and listening to the Law of God: these were the constitutive elements of Israelite worship. But the face, appearance, or likeness of Yahweh was nowhere to be seen. The second commandment forbade it in no uncertain terms.

In history scholars have debated how to count the commandments. God's Law begins by saying we shall have no other gods and we shall make no graven images. But are those two different laws or the same law stated two ways? If you were to visit a Roman Catholic or Lutheran congregation, you would discover that they have combined into one law what we regard as the first and second commandments. (Catholics and Lutherans still have ten commandments because they divide up into two the final commandment about coveting.)

But we separate the first two commandments because we believe each covers slightly different territory. The first commandment tilts against worshiping gods other than Yahweh. The second commandment says that even when you worship Yahweh, you may not make any images of him.

But why? It's quite easy to understand why God would not want us to worship Marduk, Baal, the Pharaoh of Egypt, or Donald Trump. But if our hearts are aimed squarely at the true God of the Bible, why is it as wrong to make an image of God as it would be to worship a false god in the first place? Even the Catechism is uncompromising in this area. So what does this second commandment mean and how should we apply it in a time when images have come to dominate? To answer those questions we will begin with Isaiah 40.

This passage is quite similar to Psalm 115 which we looked at last Sunday morning. Basically Isaiah wants to say two things: one, the true God of Israel is superior to the gods of other nations precisely because whereas those gods are made out of the finest gold, wood, and stone they cannot compete with Yahweh since Yahweh is the one who made the gold, wood, and stone in the first place. It doesn't matter how well a craftsman may do in molding the gold, chiseling the stone, or carving the wood, he's still using God's raw material!

While I was working on this sermon last Monday I also took in a few glimpses of the candidate debate at Calvin College. The last question was what each candidate would put into a time capsule to sum up the century just gone by. Mr. Bush suggested a microchip to demonstrate American know-how and ingenuity. Mr. Forbes suggested a grain of sand since that's where the silicon comes from that makes the microchip. Isaiah would do both men one better by suggesting we look to God who made the sand in the first place! If we're tempted to worship the technology behind microchips, we shouldn't. Isaiah would guffaw with the same sarcastic glee he displays in this chapter. All we human beings can do is fiddle with the material God created in the first place. Compared to God, everything we create is puny.

Isaiah even claims that the very vault of heaven is just a gossamer fabric that God stretched taut once upon a time to create the "tent" of this world. But if God wishes, he can rip the fabric of space as easily as when we brush aside cobwebs in the forest.

The true God is the one who created everything. But that is pretty much what we focused on last week. Today we need to zero in on this question of images of God. Isaiah joins the rest of the Old Testament in its incessant, insistent injunction against making any images of God. Within this immediate context of Isaiah 40 the reason seems to be that because God is so vast, so holy, so completely "other," there is nothing within the scope of his creative work that could even begin to capture who he really is. Any image we make of God from the stuff of his creation will, of necessity, be not just incomplete but wrong.

That alone is a curious point to ponder. We all know that every image, even a good one, is incomplete. Sometime back I told you a story about Picasso and a man who had commissioned Picasso to paint a portrait of his wife. Picasso did the portrait but when the husband came to pick it up, he complained. "It doesn't look like my wife!" "No?!" Picasso replied. "Well what does your wife look like?" The man pulled out his wallet to produce a photo of his wife. "She looks like this," he said. Picasso studied the picture for a moment and then handed it back saying, "Small, isn't she?"

The point is that even a photo does not look exactly like the person in the picture. It's two-dimensional, not three; it's not life-size, and so forth. Every image, including those of God, is only a snippet of the real thing. That, of course, does not prevent us from cluttering up our walls with multiple portraits of our family. None of them looks exactly like the person pictured but that doesn't mean we can't appreciate the image nevertheless.

But in the case of God the Old Testament claims that any image of God that we could possibly make would be misleading precisely because it would be incomplete. Apparently this matter of capturing Yahweh visually is so dangerous and dicey an enterprise that God once upon a time believed it would be safer to ban the practice altogether.

Biblically there appears to be three main reasons behind the second commandment. The first is what was just said: since we don't want to worship a false god, and since images of God inevitably lead us to think of God the wrong way, there is a sense in which using images leads us to worship a false god after all. If you want to know, love, serve, and worship the true Creator of the universe, then let him reveal himself to you in his Word.

As we said last week, one of the things we know about the Bible is that when you step back to take in the full sweep of God that emerges from Genesis to Revelation, what you have is a richly complex, nuanced, textured epiphany which is so vast that there flat out is no way to make it neat or tidy. But as soon as we develop one primary way to paint the divine face or depict the divine presence, we run the risk of focusing on what that image does show and so conveniently leave out the multitude of things it fails to convey. That is why the incompleteness of every image of God makes that image also wrong.

A second reason for not making images of God is that it violates God's transcendence. When we use the stuff of this earth to bring God down to our level, we may lose sight of the fact that God is everything, everywhere, spanning every level and dimension of reality.

But a third and final reason is more personal than such coldly galactic perspectives on God; namely, we resist static images of God because we believe God is so very alive, so very loving, and therefore is in a vital relationship with us. Let's try an analogy: many of you who are married have a picture of your spouse in your office or on your desk at work. But if you have a good, loving, and solid relationship with your spouse such that you can kiss him or her hello and goodbye every day and look forward to sharing supper together every evening, then although you have that picture at work, do you spend a good deal of the average day staring at it?

Probably not. But what happens if that spouse suddenly dies? Probably the value of that portrait would go up. Probably then there would be many days when you would find yourself staring at the picture with longing, yearning, and fond remembrance. Its value would increase precisely because the relationship it signifies would be no more.

And just maybe something similar lies behind the rule about images for God: God sees no need for us to spend our time mooning after a mere picture since he is with us every moment of every day! He's as close as the nearest prayer, nearer to us than flesh is to fingernails. His relationship to us is lively, living, constant. Indeed, some of you maybe do not have a picture of your spouse at work in part because you don't need the image--the real thing wakes up next to you every morning and gives you a toothpaste kiss each evening before the light goes out. God wants his presence in our lives to be just that real and meaningful. We don't need the picture. We've got Him!

So in summary: we don't want to insult God by reducing him to images made from the stuff God himself created. We don't want to lose sight of God's grandeur and the scope of his vastness. We don't want to forget that we, every day and in every way, already have God's living presence.

But before we close this sermon, we need to mention two final items. One has to do with the application of this commandment in the light of the incarnation. The New Testament tells us that Jesus is the exact image of God, bearing the stamp of the divine nature. He is God's precise representation, a chip off the old block, the Son who is his Father all over again. Because Jesus was a real person, it has been natural to produce images of him. From paintings that hang in the Louvre to Miriam Schooland's children's Bible storybook, from Hollywood movies to Sunday school Christmas programs showing baby Jesus in the manger, the church has been awash in divine images of Jesus from the beginning.

Is all of that a violation of the second commandment? Well, when it comes to the flesh-and-blood reality of Jesus, it almost certainly is the case that these portrayals do not violate the commandment. God himself has provided us with this image of his Son, and we can safely assume God is not working against his own law.

But even so we need to be very cautious with our subsequent re-presentations of even Jesus. If the common way of showing Jesus as looking pretty much like your average white guy leads us to think that we Caucasians have more in common with Jesus than do people with other skin colors, then we are in trouble. You see, even when it comes to pictures of our Lord there is the danger of focusing so much on what the picture shows that we conveniently brush aside the massive quantities of information the picture does not show.

But lastly we need to bring these reflections back to where we began this morning: namely, to a culture increasingly driven by images. Does the second commandment have anything to say to our time?

Probably it has a lot to say, but let's restrict our musings to just one thing for this morning. Mitchell Stephens claims that moving pictures utilize our human senses better than printed words on a page. There is one obvious way in which that is true. When you read a book, you are not using your ears and your eyes the same way as when you watch some fast-paced video. But it may well be that the use of the human imagination in reading by which we "see" the faces and "hear" the voices of a book's characters is a more wondrous activity than the passive intake of sensory perceptions from a video.

A canary can see and hear a music video on MTV. The bird probably cannot make sense out of what he sees, but then who can!? But what that bird, and all other non-human creatures on this planet, cannot do is read a book and so utilize the wonders of the mind to create worlds and receive new insights as a result of the process of imagination.

That process, of course, takes time. It takes more work than passively soaking up a video. But it pays high dividends. So maybe what the second commandment has to say to our generation is that we need to be cautious about the impatience which now leads many to prefer the quickness of video to the more imaginative exercise of learning through words.

God wants us to learn about him through his Word. We dare not let an image-driven culture shrivel up the patient use of our imaginations. Because in the wise way by which God created us it may well be that it is through the faculty of our minds that God builds his relationship with us. For now we will not see God the way we can see a video. We encounter him instead through his Word and by the Spirit. A fast-forward culture of rapid-fire images which is impatient with anything that is not flashed before them may well be at risk of doing exactly what we've said this morning we must never do: namely, try to make God quick, convenient, local, simple, obvious, and under our control.

Twice in this passage Isaiah quotes Yahweh as asking his people, "Do you not know? Have you not heard?" The knowledge that we receive from hearing God speak to us through his Word is the source of our loving relationship with God. Perhaps a culture that insists on seeing instead of hearing could find in Isaiah's words cause to wonder what we lose in the rise of the image and the fall of the word, especially if that which falls is the Word who was with God in the beginning. Or as Isaiah put it from earlier in this 40^th chapter, "The grass withers, the flower fades, but the word of our God stands forever." Indeed. Amen.