The other Pastor Bayly has been leading us at Christ the Word through a Sunday school series on Idolatry, meaning an in-depth series on the Second Commandment. Here are the first three. Four more coming.
Wanted to share because I don’t hear anyone else discussing it. Only other place was a little website called Baylblog.
Thank you for sharing these. I listened to them a few months ago and was helped by them. As you referenced above, lots of good work on the same issue can be found on Baylyblog (the link here is a search for ‘images’ on the site, lots of hits).
We are far too quick to spiritualize the second commandment. Idolatry is alive and well.
Take, for example, the toy industry. It has in large part turned into an idol factory. $120+ billion revenues, with ‘kidults’ making 50% of the market share. Very little difference between a figurine collection and a pagan shrine. Many millennial’s have a god and its name is Nostalgia. If you walk into a bookstore today, you are likely to see shelves full of such ‘kidult’ collectibles, and that speaks volumes:
In studying the Bible as a young man, I found intimations of the idea that forms of media favor particular kinds of content and therefore are capable of taking command of a culture. I refer specifically to the Decalogue, the Second Commandment of which prohibits the Israelites from making concrete images of any thing. “Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water beneath the earth.” I wondered then, as so many others have, as to why the God of these people would have included instructions on how they were to symbolize, or not symbolize, their experience. It is a strange injunction to include as part of an ethical system unless its author assumed a connection between forms of human communication and the quality of a culture. We may hazard a guess that a people who are being asked to embrace an abstract, universal deity would be rendered unfit to do so by the habit of drawing pictures or making statues or depicting their ideas in any concrete, iconographic forms. The God of the Jews was to exist in the Word and through the Word, an unprecedented conception requiring the highest order of abstract thinking. Iconography thus became blasphemy so that a new kind of God could enter a culture. People like ourselves who are in the process of converting their culture from word-centered to image-centered might profit by reflecting on this Mosaic injunction. But even if I am wrong in these conjectures, it is, I believe, a wise and particularly relevant supposition that the media of communication available to a culture are a dominant influence on the formation of the culture’s intellectual and social preoccupations. – Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death, pg 9
And there’s plenty of other types of images, the largest category being digital images, which are graven images. @adionne has also been helpful to me in coming to understand this.
But the #1 area of standard cultic idolatry––and the most insidious and potent––today is pornography (fornication and adultery mediated through images). I’m convinced the ‘use’ of pornography is primarily a second commandment issue. Cf. 1 Cor. 10: it is a participation with demons. Can’t commune with demons at their table, and come to the Lord’s Table…
I believe that I heard on a Joe Rogan podcast (of all places) that if all pornography was stopped being made today you could run the footage for 5,000 years before it would stop. God Help us.