P.O. Box 53055    
Los Angeles, CA 90053   

CONNIE: What, exactly, do you think God looks like? The old man on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel? Or perhaps like some of the paintings found in Egypt’s pyramids? Join us today as we look at the God with 1000 Faces!

Giving God’s trumpet a Certain Sound for more than 75 years, this is the Voice of Prophecy.

CONNIE: Hello, I’m Connie Jeffery,

LONNIE: and I’m Lonnie Melashenko. Thank you for joining us today, as we continue our study of the Ten Commandments. I hope our title today, “The God With 1000 Faces” got your attention.

CONNIE: It certainly got mine, Lonnie. I know we see a lot of different representations of God, and it seems like we all have our own conception, based on experiences from our childhood, maybe on places we’ve traveled . . .

LONNIE: And I don’t think that’s a bad thing. In fact, if you sit down and read the Bible from cover to cover, I believe you’ll find many different pictures of God there as well.

CONNIE: It’s almost as if God doesn’t want to be “pinned down” or made to take only one form, isn’t it.

LONNIE: Definitely, and that’s one of the points I want to touch on in my message later today as we look at why God commanded His people not to make “graven images” of any gods, including Himself, and not to bow down to anyone but Himself. But as we look at this topic of idols and worship, I find myself fascinated these days with the way that people seem to worship other people. Particularly celebrities. Is it just because we live so close to Tinsel Town, do you think, Connie? Or is it a worldwide phenomenon?

CONNIE: Well you know Lonnie, in preparation for this, you and I have talked about this a little bit and I kind of made a list of a of reality shows that are on television today.

LONNIE: And we worship those idols!

CONNIE: Think of American Idol for instance! I know you’re not a big American Idol fan; you probably don’t have time to watch it?

LONNIE: That’s right! I go back to people like the Beatles.

CONNIE: We could start there, because the Beatles….

LONNIE: …..Or Marilyn Monroe…

CONNIE: Yeah, well the Marilyn Monroe of yester-year is like the Britney Spears of today!
LONNIE: People have to worship someone or somebody…

CONNIE: …to fill a void! Look at what we do, even young people, when you think back of old footage from the Ed Sullivan Show, where the Beatles…Well look at the girls faces as they’re screaming as the Beatles burst onto the stage and look at the adoration! They elevated them and put them on a pedestal.

LONNIE: And somehow Americans are especially prone to celebrity height us, what are some of the currents names you’ve listed?

CONNIE: Well, the shows! American Idol, right now I couldn’t go back and tell you the winners of the first two seasons but on the current show there is a girl named Carrie Underwood, who was an unknown girl from Oklahoma, they took and elevated her to the winner of American Idol, and millions of voted. A sweet wholesome girl put up their where people are looking at her and kind of worshiping her.

LONNIE: They put her on a pedestal.

CONNIE: And then there’s the show I Want To Be A Hilton and the Apprentice, that’s very good Lonnie, you do watch television on occasions. There was a hit called Dancing With The Stars, it was a big hit for awhile. All of these reality shows, in fact I hear that some of them are flops, and we have such a plethora of these shows where we try to take ordinary people and make them into some sort of celebrity.

LONNIE: We have stars, we have sports heroes, but all of these people are here today, gone tomorrow.

CONNIE: The point is we shouldn’t be looking at people as idols; we need to be looking at God!

LONNIE: Whether it’s Shaq in basketball or Gretzky or Jordan, we are prone…and I think that God has created a void in us of a desire in us to want to be with Him. But often we tend to substitute that with someone else.

CONNIE: You know, there are a lot of great rags to riches stories, but do we really want to worship these people? I hope not!

LONNIE: Well, God is kind of urging us to obey His commandments and worship only Him.

CONNIE: And not to make any graven image, but don’t you think that it’s not just idols carved out of stone….

LONNIE: It’s in everything now! Magazines, TV, Movies…everything!

CONNIE: Well, here at the Voice of Prophecy We’ve made it a point to show people that the real answer is Jesus Christ.LONNIE: That’s right! There is an answer, and that answer is Jesus!

“There Is an Answer”, Ralph Henderson, from More Precious Than Rubies CD.

CONNIE: Amen! That was Ralph Henderson with the song “There Is an Answer.”

LONNIE: As you were saying a few moments ago Connie, there are a lot of questions out there in the world, people wondering what life’s all about and seeking all kinds of answers, but we here at Voice of Prophecy have always believed the answer is to be found in Jesus.

CONNIE: But just how do you find that answer—I realize that what I said seems kind of simplistic unless you’ve really gotten to know God and developed a relationship with Jesus. So today we’d like to offer you a copy of a favorite little book written for people who are honestly searching for answers in life.

LONNIE: That’s right. The title of the book is Searching, and it was written by Chris Blake. It’s actually selections from his longer book Searching for a God to Love, about his own spiritual journey as he bumped along some pretty rough places in life before he really met his Savior.

CONNIE: We have a free copy of this little book Searching for you, and we’d love to send it your way. Maybe you have a friend you’d like to share it with. To receive your free copy, just give us a call at 1-800-872-0055 and ask for Searching.

LONNIE: Connie I’m sure you’ll have our mailing address for our listeners in a few moments, along with details of how to find us on the Internet.

CONNIE: That’s right, but now it’s time for us to listen as you share your message “The God With 1000 Faces.”

The God With 1000 Faces

I will never forget my first visit to a Hindu temple. You know you hear things like—the Hindus have 10,000 gods—and I’m not a student of Hinduism, so I don’t know just how many gods there are in that particular pantheon. But I do know that I was totally astounded as I toured the streets of Singapore, visiting shrines devoted to various religions.

There were several Hindu temples, each with a pyramid-like structure out front, adorned with the visages of dozens of deities and heroes of the lore of India. I stood in awe for several minutes, just gazing at all of those faces, pondering which of them I might worship if I had been born in Sri Lanka rather than Saskatchewan. Would it be the rather friendly looking fellow with the head of an elephant? Or might I be drawn to one of the fierce-looking demon-like deities wielding a scimitar? There are days here at the office when I could certainly the extra hands and arms of Shiva to try to get all my work done!

As I entered the temple, I was greeted by the sight of additional images and statues, representing other deities or demons—sometimes I wasn’t sure which was which, but no doubt the devout worshipers burning incense and bringing food offerings knew each one by name, and understood the power each purveyed.

Later in the day, as I visited another temple, I watched in wonder as people bowed and prostrated themselves before the various deities residing in a Buddhist temple, and as I passed little shops on the streets, I noticed that many of the store owners had placed food offerings on altars in front of their deities.

It was an eye-opening experience for me, and one that I confess I don’t fully understand even to this day. Growing up in countries with a mainly Protestant Christian background, I’ve never felt the need to bow down to or bring any offerings to an image of my God.

But what I’ve come to recognize, by observing other cultures, is that the need to worship is very deeply ingrained in our human hearts. It runs like a silver thread through the tapestry of every culture and every civilization that has ever existed since the day God created Adam and Eve.

And worship has almost always involved something tangible—something people could hold in their hands, or mold with their hands—into a form that represented what they understood their God to look like.

Nowhere in the Bible is this urge to bow down to some visible image of the divine more prominent than in the story found in Exodus 32.

If you were with us last week, you’ll remember we talked quite a bit about the religion of Egypt—the land that God redeemed the people of Israel from—and how almost anything that moved could be a subject of worship—whether a bug on the ground, a bird in the sky, or a jackal skulking in the shadows.

The Israelites had been deeply influenced by their environment, and now that they had been removed, out into the wilderness, it was only natural for them to revert back to ways that felt comfortable to them.

Sometimes I’ve wondered why God asked Moses to stay up on Mt. Sinai for 40 days and nights with Him. I mean, it obviously didn’t take God that long to write the 10 Commandments on the tables of stone. So, why did Moses have to stay up there for so long?

I’m sure the fellowship was great. And it was important for Moses to get to know God better.

But why leave the people he was supposed to be leading down in the camp for so long?

I have a feeling God knew what would happen. Perhaps He even planned to leave the opportunity open for the people to revert to their old ways. It might be the only way He could really make the point that He wanted to get across to them about just exactly who they should worship, and how they should worship Him.

The story begins like this:

“Now when the people saw that Moses delayed coming down from the mountain, the people gathered together to Aaron, and said to him, ‘Come, make us gods that shall go before us; for as for this Moses, the man who brought us up out of the land of Egypt, we do not know what has become of him’ ” (Exodus 32:1, NKJV).

Even though God had already given them the Ten Commandments in oral form. And even though they had heard the words of the Lord declaring “ ‘You shall not make for yourself a carved image — 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 nor serve them’ ” (Exodus 20:4, 5, NKJV), in spite of all of that, they still wanted something to look at. They wanted to see what they were worshiping.

You probably remember how Aaron responded to this request, collecting jewelry from the people and using it to mold an image of a calf. Something intended to represent the god they had followed out of Egypt.

Why a calf, we wonder (scholars tend to think it was actually an image of a bull, but was described as a calf when the story was told—as a way to show how impotent such a god actually was). Well, the Egyptians worshiped the Apis Bull—one of their most important religious symbols. And the Canaanites represented the chief god of their pantheon—El—as a bull as well.

Bulls were often used as symbols in worship because of their strength and virility. Maybe Aaron simply wanted the people to recognize the strength and virility of the God who had led them out of Egypt. A bull would be a fitting way to symbolize that.

Now, why would the Lord object to such seemingly good intentions? After all, He is a strong and powerful God, isn’t He?

Yes, indeed He is.

So, what’s wrong with setting that image of Him in solid, imperishable gold, to remind the people of what a powerful God they serve?

Plenty.

As soon as you paint a picture of God or make a statue of God, you place limits on your god. You decide what He looks like. You decide what expression He has on His face. You decide whether the eyes gaze at you with compassion or with fierce anger.

Whatever image of God you have in your mind on the day when you make the image, that is what you represent God to be. You set Him in concrete, as it were. And ten years or twenty years from now, if you are still bowing down to that image, your relationship to God probably won’t have grown very much. Your understanding of God will have been set in concrete as well.

And God does not want that to happen to you in your relationship with Him.

Our poor human understanding of the Almighty has grown and changed through the years. I have to confess that when I read the New Testament, particularly verses like 1 John 4:8, “He who does not love does not know God, for God is love” (NKJV), it gives me a bit different image of my God than some of the passages in the Old Testament, where God—because of the harsh times and harsh environment His people faced—came across in a slightly less gentle light, shall we say.

Consider these Old Testament descriptions of God for example:

“Hear attentively the thunder of His voice, and the rumbling that comes from His mouth. He sends it forth under the whole heaven, his lightning to the ends of the earth. After it a voice roars; he thunders with His majestic voice, and He does not restrain them when His voice is heard. God thunders marvelously with His voice; he does great things which we cannot comprehend” (Job 37:2-5, NKJV).

“ ‘The LORD roars from Zion, and utters His voice from Jerusalem; the pastures of the shepherds mourn, and the top of Carmel withers’ ” (Amos 1:2 NKJV).

The first, found in Job, envisions the Lord as a thunderstorm, booming with His powerful voice over the mountains. Now, how would you picture a thunder god? Israel’s neighbors, the Canaanites knew just how to do that. Statues of Baal, their god of the storm are often found by archaeologists, a god with thunderbolts in his hand. But would the Lord of heaven and earth want His image to be captured and set in stone as only the god of the storm? I don’t think so.

The second verse, taken from Amos, describes God roaring like a lion. The Babylonians used images of lions to signify the strength of their king and kingdom—but would the Lord want His character compared only to that of a lion? No. throughout the Bible we find many metaphors and similes used to describe our God.

He comes in different ways to different people, to meet different needs.

In a sense He is something like the deities represented at a Hindu temple in all their variety of expressions. The Lord comes to us with a thousand, or perhaps 10,000 different faces. But none of them can be set in stone. He comes to us and speaks to us, meeting the needs we have at the moment.

What I’m saying is that God is much bigger, much broader, than anything we can capture in any art form. Even Michelangelo’s painting on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel doesn’t fully capture the majesty and the love of God. And if we allow ourselves to think of God only as an old man, far removed, almost able to touch us but not quite (as that mural represents Him)—well, you can see how that limits our ability to relate to God on a personal level.

Don’t get me wrong. I love religious art. I appreciate people’s attempts to capture the reality of the Savior in paintings, in movies, in drama. But we’ll never fully capture Him. All our attempts fall far short of the true glory of God.

And I think that’s why He prohibited the making of and worshiping of any image of a god. He wanted to keep the channels of communication with us open, so that He could reveal Himself in just the way we need Him, just when we need Him.

God is bigger than I can imagine. He’s bigger than I can picture. But He’s God, just the same. And I want to walk and talk with Him and get to know Him better every day, not limiting my knowledge of Him to the way I understood Him at the beginning of my Christian journey, or even in the middle of my journey.

How about you?

The Second Commandment isn’t just about idols and images. It’s about our relationship to God. Keeping it open. Keeping the channels of communication clear so that we can know Him in better and deeper ways every day.

I want to do that. Don’t you?

Why not commit yourself to a deeper and ever growing relationship with Him right now, as we listen to this song.

“Seekers of Your Heart”, Faith First, from Faith First CD.