Understanding the Second Commandment Today

Are you carving idols and breaking the second commandment? I bet you are and you don't even know it. We're going to dive into the ancient Hebrew and find out the real meaning of the second commandment and find out just how relevant it is for today. I'm Jim Staley with Passion for Truth Ministries and welcome back to the Real Meaning of the Commandment series where we're going to be talking about commandment number two. This is a very serious topic because if we don't understand the true meanings of these commandments, then we might be offending God all along unintentionally. So let's dive in and find out exactly what the second commandment means. Let's read it first. Exodus chapter 20 verse 4 through 6. It says this, you shall not make for yourself a carved image or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above or that's in the earth beneath or that is in the water under the earth. Before we go into verse 5 and verse 6, I want to talk about verse 4 and really unpack this because the first two commandments are connected to one another, right? So the first commandment was, I am the Lord your God and you shall have no other gods before me. We learned that that literally means judges. You shall have no other judges before me because God says, I'm the only judge. So how do we relate this to the second commandment? Because most of us feel like we're not serving other gods, but we learn that we do let other people judge us, and we even let our past steal over our head, and we try to impress people that we don't like and don't even know we're breaking the first commandment by doing that. So is it possible that we could be doing the same thing in the second commandment? I submit to you the answer is yes. Because as we walk through the second commandment, we're going to learn that it is far more relevant for us today than what we originally thought. Because most of us are going to interpret the second commandment as, hey, I'm not carving little wooden idols. I'm not serving other gods. But the question becomes, what's God's original intent? What is the purpose and meaning behind what he's saying? So in the original context, in Israelite times, in ancient times, yes. The issue was they would take and mold little teraphim, it's what it's called, and we'll talk about that in just a minute, these little household gods. They would decorate them with silver and gold and carve them and what have you, and most of them are about the size of your hand or smaller. Many of them were actually the size of a palm of a hand so they could put them in their pockets. So let me explain to you what the teraphim actually are, and you'll see just how relevant the second commandment is for today. The teraphim, they are small carved images to look at, to rely on, to trust, to gain confidence from, and dependency from. What they would do is they would carve these household idols, and they would place them either like on their fireplace mantle or have a special place, like a shrine, where they would place these images that represented different gods over that particular topic. For example, they would have a god of thunderstorms or a god of sun or a god of the harvest, right? And then every god in between, the god of the soil, the god of hunting. And if they wanted success in a particular area, they would rely or pray to that particular god. They would even take that teraphim, that idol, put it in their pocket, almost like a good luck charm, and they would use that in connection while they're harvesting, while they're plowing, and so on and so forth. Every time they wanted success in a particular area of their life, they would beseech these idols and they would begin to create a dependency on this particular teraphim. Now, today you might say, well, we don't really do that, but we do in a lot of different areas where we put our trust and our dependency in something that is not God-Yahweh related. The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob is a jealous God, he says. He says he does not want us to turn our dependency, our self-worth, our identity, and hand it over to anything or someone else. Anytime someone has the ability to influence you to such a degree where it is affecting your identity, who you are, and your self-worth, then you've replaced God with that person, both breaking the first commandment. And now, because we've created the idol in our life, the absolute teraphim that we are absorbing appreciation and value from, higher than we are from Him, then we're breaking the second commandment as well. This gets serious, ladies and gentlemen, because the power of the living God only works through those who keep His commandments. know that from Scripture, that we prove our love by keeping His commandments. Turn to 1 John 5, verse 3, and you'll see that as plain as day, right in the New Testament. Not from the Old Testament. The New Testament is absolutely just the Old Testament revealed, as much as the Old Testament is the New Testament concealed. So, in 1 John 5, 3, it says, For this is the love of God, that we keep... His commandments, and His commandments are not burdensome. This is absolutely the only way for us to prove our love for God is to keep His commandments. I've got six daughters, and the only way that I know that my children love me is if they do what we ask as parents. If they disrespect us, if they're rebellious, if they don't do what we ask, then that is an indication that they don't love us. And so to create love, we create a symbiotic relationship where they're receiving from us, we're receiving from them, and everybody grows as a result. But if we go back to even the story of Rachel, we'll see the dependency on these idols in ancient times. If you remember the story of Rachel and Laban, her father, and how when she left the house with her husband Jacob, and everything that they had after 21 years of being in his household, and they left. What did Rachel do? The daughter of Laban took the household idols. Jacob didn't know. It was a total secret, and she hid them, remember, underneath the pillows in her tent. And then when her dad came along, freaked out that someone had stolen the idols, because to steal the household idols... was in the ancient culture's mindset to remove the ability for success. There's no way to be successful in anything from relationships to the harvest to their work career. It didn't matter. There was no way to have success. This is their mindset. And Rachel was so angry at her father. She wasn't taking the household idols for herself. She was basically totally corrupting and what's the word? Cutting him off at the knees, destroying his destiny from his perspective by stealing what his good luck charms were or what he was depending on. And he and she almost got killed over it because Jacob said, whoever you find these idols with, we'll kill them. And luckily, she was smart enough to move her way around there where no one ever found out. Today, my friends, we don't have household idols, but we have things that we are so dependent on for our success in life. For instance, today the teraphim would call Facebook, would be called Instagram. How about someone that spends too much time on YouTube or social media? It can even be a spouse that we put so much dependency on for value that God is not even hardly in the picture. You see, I love this definition right here. An idol is anything that we depend upon to meet the deep needs of the heart, love, security, worth, or significance. It is anything that we utilize in our life to meet the deep needs of the heart. You see, there's nothing wrong with having your spouse meet needs of your heart and the value and the appreciation. It needs to be there. But the deep needs, the foundational needs, the needs that supersede everything else. In other words, with everybody else is gone and they don't give you any value or appreciation, the foundation stones of your heart that your life is dependent on, those are met by God himself. And see, that's why when your spouse doesn't meet your needs, you can absolutely live a fulfilled life because the Messiah himself came. bled, died, rose again for your foundational needs to be set. He is the foundation stones. He's the rock from which we build our house. John Calvin said it this way, the human heart is an idol factory. I believe that with all my heart, mind, soul, and strength, that our heart, we are just built for idolatry. It's not that the ancient Israelites or the people of the ancient East were just some sort of archaic people. Like, who would carve little idols and worship them? But we have the exact same motive today. We just call... them different names. You see, I'll prove it to you. Take the phone away from your teenager or junior hire and see what happens to their countenance as it contorts to the strangest of shapes. What about you? Maybe you're on social media so much that if you fasted from it for a week, you wouldn't even know what to do because today people are relying on the value that they received. From the things that they put online, the perception of their own reality that they put online, that's what they're receiving. How many likes they get, how many shares they get, how many views they get determines the value of who they are as a person. That is idolatry because it fills the deep need of the heart of value that Yahweh is only supposed to be in. When He sent His only begotten Son to die, He did so at the greatest extent and the greatest risk. It is our responsibility to keep Him in that superior position when we're in the highs and when we're in the lows and everything in between. So now let's take a look at the last part of this verse because we've only really truly gone through the first part. So let's go through the last part. Exodus 20 verse 5, it says, Nor serve them. For I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children to the third and fourth generations of those who hate me, but showing mercy to thousands to those who love me. And what? Keep my commandments. Do you see that blessing and love and... Everything that we want, the prosper victory, the breakthrough victory in our life is totally dependent on keeping his commandments. And we're only on the second one. And we're discovering that the majority of believers out there are breaking them and they don't even know it. They believe that God is centered in their life. But if you really had the ability, if God could map out your life and put it in a graph, The most important things in your life, would they be Him? Because the deep recesses of your heart, what are they fed by? Why do we care so much about what people think about us, and we don't really care what God thinks about us, because we refuse to do the very things He's asking us to do, Bible things. in Bible ways. We're redefining the Bible to fit around the lifestyle that we live. What I want to focus on here is this whole back half of the second verse of the second commandment is all about the children. It's all about the next generation. This is all about the next generation. What we do as parents, parents, listen up. This is critical, especially with a father of six daughters and a granddaughter. Yeah, all daughters, all females in my house, for sure. Even my dog is a female. But when you as a parent are in idolatry, whatever your value is, you're automatically teaching that to your children and your grandchildren. You can't get away from it. It's default. It's automatic. God built it into the system of children to follow in the way. of their parents. It's difficult for them to break out of those molds. That's why when you see a parent that is angry, children will typically be angry. When parents are abusive, children will be abusive. When parents fall into addictions, children will fall into addictions because the teraphim that you carve, you are putting in the children's pockets. Let me say that again. The idols of your life that are fulfilling the deep recesses of your heart, you are putting those idols inside, inside the pockets of your children. They may not know it, but they're holding on to the value system that you created. Is your value come down to how well you keep God's commandments and the details, or does it come down to the love? and the image of Messiah because you got to have both. It's not about just keeping God's commandments and it's not just about the image of God. It's the image of God is completely dependent on how well you keep his commandments through faith by the Spirit. of the living God. It is spirit and in truth and there's nothing else in between. There's no credit on Judgment Day for just walking in the spirit but breaking His commandments. And there's no way to keep His commandments and not walk in the spirit. They're all the same. So, brethren, sister, and listen carefully. As we walk through these commandments and discover the real meaning, what we are really trying to do is set up the next generation for success. And in order to do that, we have to be successful at first. knowing what the commandments are so that we can make intentional moves to keep them and to put them on the doorposts of our house and on our gates i feel led to pray today father Father, thank you so much for your word. I pray that you would keep the idols of our heart far from us, that we would repent, Father, for the addictions that we have with our phones, with the internet, and with the value system that's been corrupted by society today. I pray that we would remove those value systems and put you back in the center place where you need to be. Father, I pray that you would, across this land, reorganize, reestablish, and reestablish and restore you as the only God, the only Elohim, and the only one that we worship and depend on for everything. Amen. If this video has blessed you, I encourage you to watch this video and this video as well, and make sure you subscribe to our YouTube channel and turn on those notifications so you don't miss a single video that we put out here at Passion for Truth. Until then, I'm Jim Staley, and I'll see you in the next video.

This is a very serious topic because if we don't understand the true meanings of these commandments, then we might be offending God all along unintentionally. So let's dive in and find out exactly what the second commandment means. Let's read it first.

Exodus chapter 20 verse 4 through 6. It says this, you shall not make for yourself a carved image or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above or that's in the earth beneath or that is in the water under the earth. Before we go into verse 5 and verse 6, I want to talk about verse 4 and really unpack this because the first two commandments are connected to one another, right? So the first commandment was, I am the Lord your God and you shall have no other gods before me. We learned that that literally means judges.

You shall have no other judges before me because God says, I'm the only judge. So how do we relate this to the second commandment? Because most of us feel like we're not serving other gods, but we learn that we do let other people judge us, and we even let our past steal over our head, and we try to impress people that we don't like and don't even know we're breaking the first commandment by doing that.

So is it possible that we could be doing the same thing in the second commandment? I submit to you the answer is yes. Because as we walk through the second commandment, we're going to learn that it is far more relevant for us today than what we originally thought. Because most of us are going to interpret the second commandment as, hey, I'm not carving little wooden idols. I'm not serving other gods.

But the question becomes, what's God's original intent? What is the purpose and meaning behind what he's saying? So in the original context, in Israelite times, in ancient times, yes. The issue was they would take and mold little teraphim, it's what it's called, and we'll talk about that in just a minute, these little household gods.

They would decorate them with silver and gold and carve them and what have you, and most of them are about the size of your hand or smaller. Many of them were actually the size of a palm of a hand so they could put them in their pockets. So let me explain to you what the teraphim actually are, and you'll see just how relevant the second commandment is for today.

The teraphim, they are small carved images to look at, to rely on, to trust, to gain confidence from, and dependency from. What they would do is they would carve these household idols, and they would place them either like on their fireplace mantle or have a special place, like a shrine, where they would place these images that represented different gods over that particular topic. For example, they would have a god of thunderstorms or a god of sun or a god of the harvest, right?

And then every god in between, the god of the soil, the god of hunting. And if they wanted success in a particular area, they would rely or pray to that particular god. They would even take that teraphim, that idol, put it in their pocket, almost like a good luck charm, and they would use that in connection while they're harvesting, while they're plowing, and so on and so forth.

Every time they wanted success in a particular area of their life, they would beseech these idols and they would begin to create a dependency on this particular teraphim. Now, today you might say, well, we don't really do that, but we do in a lot of different areas where we put our trust and our dependency in something that is not God-Yahweh related. The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob is a jealous God, he says. He says he does not want us to turn our dependency, our self-worth, our identity, and hand it over to anything or someone else.

Anytime someone has the ability to influence you to such a degree where it is affecting your identity, who you are, and your self-worth, then you've replaced God with that person, both breaking the first commandment. And now, because we've created the idol in our life, the absolute teraphim that we are absorbing appreciation and value from, higher than we are from Him, then we're breaking the second commandment as well. This gets serious, ladies and gentlemen, because the power of the living God only works through those who keep His commandments.

know that from Scripture, that we prove our love by keeping His commandments. Turn to 1 John 5, verse 3, and you'll see that as plain as day, right in the New Testament. Not from the Old Testament. The New Testament is absolutely just the Old Testament revealed, as much as the Old Testament is the New Testament concealed.

So, in 1 John 5, 3, it says, For this is the love of God, that we keep... His commandments, and His commandments are not burdensome. This is absolutely the only way for us to prove our love for God is to keep His commandments.

I've got six daughters, and the only way that I know that my children love me is if they do what we ask as parents. If they disrespect us, if they're rebellious, if they don't do what we ask, then that is an indication that they don't love us. And so to create love, we create a symbiotic relationship where they're receiving from us, we're receiving from them, and everybody grows as a result. But if we go back to even the story of Rachel, we'll see the dependency on these idols in ancient times.

If you remember the story of Rachel and Laban, her father, and how when she left the house with her husband Jacob, and everything that they had after 21 years of being in his household, and they left. What did Rachel do? The daughter of Laban took the household idols.

Jacob didn't know. It was a total secret, and she hid them, remember, underneath the pillows in her tent. And then when her dad came along, freaked out that someone had stolen the idols, because to steal the household idols... was in the ancient culture's mindset to remove the ability for success.

There's no way to be successful in anything from relationships to the harvest to their work career. It didn't matter. There was no way to have success.

This is their mindset. And Rachel was so angry at her father. She wasn't taking the household idols for herself.

She was basically totally corrupting and what's the word? Cutting him off at the knees, destroying his destiny from his perspective by stealing what his good luck charms were or what he was depending on. And he and she almost got killed over it because Jacob said, whoever you find these idols with, we'll kill them. And luckily, she was smart enough to move her way around there where no one ever found out. Today, my friends, we don't have household idols, but we have things that we are so dependent on for our success in life.

For instance, today the teraphim would call Facebook, would be called Instagram. How about someone that spends too much time on YouTube or social media? It can even be a spouse that we put so much dependency on for value that God is not even hardly in the picture.

You see, I love this definition right here. An idol is anything that we depend upon to meet the deep needs of the heart, love, security, worth, or significance. It is anything that we utilize in our life to meet the deep needs of the heart. You see, there's nothing wrong with having your spouse meet needs of your heart and the value and the appreciation.

It needs to be there. But the deep needs, the foundational needs, the needs that supersede everything else. In other words, with everybody else is gone and they don't give you any value or appreciation, the foundation stones of your heart that your life is dependent on, those are met by God himself. And see, that's why when your spouse doesn't meet your needs, you can absolutely live a fulfilled life because the Messiah himself came.

bled, died, rose again for your foundational needs to be set. He is the foundation stones. He's the rock from which we build our house.

John Calvin said it this way, the human heart is an idol factory. I believe that with all my heart, mind, soul, and strength, that our heart, we are just built for idolatry. It's not that the ancient Israelites or the people of the ancient East were just some sort of archaic people. Like, who would carve little idols and worship them?

But we have the exact same motive today. We just call... them different names. You see, I'll prove it to you. Take the phone away from your teenager or junior hire and see what happens to their countenance as it contorts to the strangest of shapes.

What about you? Maybe you're on social media so much that if you fasted from it for a week, you wouldn't even know what to do because today people are relying on the value that they received. From the things that they put online, the perception of their own reality that they put online, that's what they're receiving.

How many likes they get, how many shares they get, how many views they get determines the value of who they are as a person. That is idolatry because it fills the deep need of the heart of value that Yahweh is only supposed to be in. When He sent His only begotten Son to die, He did so at the greatest extent and the greatest risk.

It is our responsibility to keep Him in that superior position when we're in the highs and when we're in the lows and everything in between. So now let's take a look at the last part of this verse because we've only really truly gone through the first part. So let's go through the last part.

Exodus 20 verse 5, it says, Nor serve them. For I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children to the third and fourth generations of those who hate me, but showing mercy to thousands to those who love me. And what?

Keep my commandments. Do you see that blessing and love and... Everything that we want, the prosper victory, the breakthrough victory in our life is totally dependent on keeping his commandments.

And we're only on the second one. And we're discovering that the majority of believers out there are breaking them and they don't even know it. They believe that God is centered in their life. But if you really had the ability, if God could map out your life and put it in a graph, The most important things in your life, would they be Him? Because the deep recesses of your heart, what are they fed by?

Why do we care so much about what people think about us, and we don't really care what God thinks about us, because we refuse to do the very things He's asking us to do, Bible things. in Bible ways. We're redefining the Bible to fit around the lifestyle that we live. What I want to focus on here is this whole back half of the second verse of the second commandment is all about the children. It's all about the next generation.

This is all about the next generation. What we do as parents, parents, listen up. This is critical, especially with a father of six daughters and a granddaughter. Yeah, all daughters, all females in my house, for sure.

Even my dog is a female. But when you as a parent are in idolatry, whatever your value is, you're automatically teaching that to your children and your grandchildren. You can't get away from it. It's default. It's automatic.

God built it into the system of children to follow in the way. of their parents. It's difficult for them to break out of those molds.

That's why when you see a parent that is angry, children will typically be angry. When parents are abusive, children will be abusive. When parents fall into addictions, children will fall into addictions because the teraphim that you carve, you are putting in the children's pockets. Let me say that again.

The idols of your life that are fulfilling the deep recesses of your heart, you are putting those idols inside, inside the pockets of your children. They may not know it, but they're holding on to the value system that you created. Is your value come down to how well you keep God's commandments and the details, or does it come down to the love?

and the image of Messiah because you got to have both. It's not about just keeping God's commandments and it's not just about the image of God. It's the image of God is completely dependent on how well you keep his commandments through faith by the Spirit. of the living God. It is spirit and in truth and there's nothing else in between.

There's no credit on Judgment Day for just walking in the spirit but breaking His commandments. And there's no way to keep His commandments and not walk in the spirit. They're all the same.

So, brethren, sister, and listen carefully. As we walk through these commandments and discover the real meaning, what we are really trying to do is set up the next generation for success. And in order to do that, we have to be successful at first. knowing what the commandments are so that we can make intentional moves to keep them and to put them on the doorposts of our house and on our gates i feel led to pray today father Father, thank you so much for your word. I pray that you would keep the idols of our heart far from us, that we would repent, Father, for the addictions that we have with our phones, with the internet, and with the value system that's been corrupted by society today.

I pray that we would remove those value systems and put you back in the center place where you need to be. Father, I pray that you would, across this land, reorganize, reestablish, and reestablish and restore you as the only God, the only Elohim, and the only one that we worship and depend on for everything. Amen. If this video has blessed you, I encourage you to watch this video and this video as well, and make sure you subscribe to our YouTube channel and turn on those notifications so you don't miss a single video that we put out here at Passion for Truth. Until then, I'm Jim Staley, and I'll see you in the next video.

Transcript for:Understanding the Second Commandment Today

Transcript for:
Understanding the Second Commandment Today