Jehovah by the use of images is denounced and punished as an act of apostasy from God. When the Hebrews in the wilderness said to Aaron, " Make us gods which shall go before us," neither they nor Aaron intended to renounce Jehovah as their God ; but they desired a visible symbol of God, as the heathen had of their gods. This is plain, because Aaron, when he fashioned the golden calf and built an altar before it, made proclamation, and said, " To-morrow is a feast to Jehovah." " Their sin then lay, not in their adopting another god, but in their pretending to worship a visible symbol of Him whom no symbol could represent." 1
In like manner, when the ten tribes separated from Judah and were erected into a separate kingdom under Jeroboam, the wor- ship of God by idols was regarded as an apostasy from the true God. It is evident from the whole narrative that Jeroboam did not intend to introduce the worship of any other god than Jeho- vah. It was the place and mode of worship which he sought to change. He feared that if the people continued to go up to Jeru- salem and worship in the temple there established, they would soon return to their allegiance to the house of David. To prevent this, he made two golden calves, as Aaron had done, symbols of the God who had brought his people out of Egypt, and placed one in Dan and the other in Bethel, and commanded the people to resort to those places for worship. Thus also Jehu, who boasted of his k' zeal for Jehovah," and exterminated the priests and worshippers of Baal, retained the service of the golden calves, because, as Winer expresses it, " that had become the established form of the Je- hovah-worship in Israel." " Er [Jehu] behielt den Kalberdienst in Dan und Bethel, als in Israel einheimisch gewordenen Jehovah- dienst." 2 In Leviticus xxvi. 1, it is said : " Ye shall make you no idols nor graven image, neither rear you up a standing image, neither shall ye set up any image of stone in your land, to bow down unto it : for I am the Lobd your God." And Moses com- manded that when the people had gained possession of the prom- ised land, six of the tribes should be gathered on Mount Gerizim to bless, and six upon Mount Ebal to curse : " And the Levites shall speak and say unto all the men of Israel with a loud voice, cursed be the man that maketh any graven or molten image, an abomination unto the Lobd, the work, of the hands of the crafts- man, and putteth it in a secret place. And all the people shall answer and say, Amen." (Deut. xxvii. 15.)
i The Holy Bible, with an Explanatory and Critical Commentary. By Bishops and other Clergy of the Anglican Church. New York: Charles Scribner & Co., 1871, vol. i. p. 405.
a Biblisches Bealwdrterbuch, von Dr. Georg Benedict Winer, 3d edit. Leipzig, 1847. art. "Jehu."
294 PART HI. Ch. XIX. — THE LAW.
The specifio thing thus frequently and solemnly forbidden is the bowing down to images, or rendering them any religious ser- vice. In this sense these commands were understood by the an- cient people of God to whom they were originally given, and by the whole Christian Church until the sudden influx of nominally converted heathen into the Church after the time of Constantine, who brought with them heathenish ideas and insisted on heathen modes of worship.
The simple obvious facts with regard to the religion of the gentile world are, (1.) That the gods of the nations were imag- inary beings ; that is, they either had no existence except in the imaginations of their worshippers, or they did not possess the at- tributes which were ascribed to them. Therefore they are called in Scripture vanity, lies, nonentities. (2.) Of these imaginary beings symbols were selected or images formed, to which all the homage supposed to be due to the gods themselves was paid. This was not done on the assumption that the symbols or images were really gods. The Greeks did not think that Jupiter was a block of marble. Neither did the heathen mentioned in the Bible believe that the sun was Baal. Nevertheless some connection was supposed to exist between the image and the divinity which it was intended to represent. With some this connection was simply that between the sign and the thing signified ; with others it was more mystical, or what in these days we should call sacramental. In either case it was such that the homage due to the divinity was paid to his image ; and any indignity offered to the latter was resented as offered to the former.
As, therefore, the heathen gods were no gods, and as the homage due to God was paid to the idols, the sacred writers denounced the heathen as the worshippers of stocks and stones, and con- demned them for the folly of making gods out of wood or metal 11 graven by art and man's device." They made little or no dif- ference between the worshipping of images and the worshipping false gods. The two things were, in their view, identical. Hence in the Bible the worship of images is denounced as idolatry, without regard to the divinity, whether true or false, to whom the image was dedicated.
The Reasons annexed to this Commandment. The relation between the soul and God is far more intimate than that between the soul and any creature. Our life, spiritual and eternal, depends on our relation to our Maker. Hence our