Dennis Tuuri

First Kings 7:13-39. Please stand. Listen carefully to the word of God.

First Kings 7, beginning at verse 13:

Now King Solomon sent and brought Hiram from Tyre. He was the son of a widow from the tribe of Naphtali. And his father was a man of Tyre, a bronze worker. He was filled with wisdom and understanding and skill in working with all kinds of bronze work. So he came to King Solomon and did all his work.

And he cast two pillars of bronze, one 18 cubits high and a line of 12 cubits and measured the circumference of each. Then he made two capitals of cast bronze to set on the tops of the pillars. The height of one capital was five cubits, and the height of the other capital was five cubits. He made a lattice network with wreaths of chain work for the capitals which were on top of the pillars. Seven chains for one capital and seven for the other capital.

So he made the pillars and two rows of pomegranates above the network all around to cover the capitals that were on top. And thus he did for the other capital. The capitals which were on top of the pillars in the hall were in the shape of lilies, four cubits. The capitals on the two pillars also had pomegranates above by the convex surface which was next to the network and there were 200 such pomegranates in rows on each of the capitals all around.

Then he set up the pillars by the vestibule of the temple. He set up the pillar on the right and called its name Jachin. And he set up the pillar on the left and called its name Boaz. The tops of the pillars were in the shape of lilies. So the work of the pillars was finished.

And he made the sea of cast bronze 10 cubits from one brim to the other. It was completely round. Its height was 5 cubits. And a line of 30 cubits measured its circumference. Below its brim were ornamental buds encircling it all around, 10 to a cubit all the way around the sea. The ornamental buds were cast in two rows when it was cast. It stood on 12 oxen, three looking toward the north, three looking toward the west, three looking toward the south, and three looking toward the east. The sea was set upon them, and all their back parts pointed inward. It was a handbreadth thick and its brim was shaped like the brim of a cup, like a lily blossom.

It contained 2,000 baths.

He also made 10 carts of bronze. Four cubits rather was the length of each cart. Four cubits its width and three cubits its height. And this was the design of the carts. They had panels and the panels were between frames. On the panels that were between the frames were lions, oxen, and cherubim. And on the frames was a pedestal on top. Below the lions and oxen were wreaths of plated work.

Every cart had four bronze wheels and axles of bronze, and its four feet had supports. Under the lavers were supports of cast bronze beside each wreath. Its opening inside the crown at the top was one cubit in diameter and the opening was round shaped like a pedestal 1 and 1/2 cubits in outside diameter. And also on the opening were engravings, but the panels were square, not round. Under the panels were the four wheels, and the axles of the wheels were joined to the cart.

The height of a wheel was 1 and 1/2 cubits. The workmanship of the wheels was like the workmanship of a chariot wheel. Their axle pins, their rims, their spokes, and their hubs were all of cast bronze. And there were four supports at the four corners of each cart. Its supports were part of the cart itself. On the top of the cart, at the height of half a cubit, it was perfectly round. And on the top of the cart, its flanges and its panels were of the same casting.

On the plates of its flanges, and on its panels, he engraved cherubim, lions, and palm trees wherever there was a clear space on each with wreaths all around. Thus he made the 10 carts. All of them were of the same mold, one measure, and one shape.

Then he made 10 lavers of bronze. Each laver contained 40 baths, and each laver was four cubits. On each of the 10 carts was a laver, and he put five carts on the right side of the house, and five on the left side of the house. He set the sea on the right side of the house toward the southeast.

Let’s pray.

Father, we thank you for this beautiful language and imagery of the temple that you put your special presence in and during the time of Solomon. We thank you, Lord God, for the temple and for the tabernacle. We thank you for the artwork that’s been described here. We thank you that you desire and love beauty. Make us a people of beauty. Help us to understand your scriptures today and their command for us to engage in beautiful works. In Jesus’ name we ask it. Amen.

Please be seated.

The world is a very beautiful place. DEVO and their song were right. It is a beautiful world. Their song was ironic and they talked about the ugliness in it. But it is indeed a beautiful world that we live in.

This time of year we look at the beauty of the fall leaves and the colors, the beauty even of the leaves floating downward on the wind. When we go outside, we see beautiful things. Or even if we’re inside, tiny little things—beauty absolutely surrounds us. I don’t usually drink cream with my coffee, but sometimes I do just to see the beauty of it. Take a cup of coffee and you take some real cream and you pour it in there and it makes these beautiful swirls, does it not? Beautiful. I’m really not kidding. It’s beautiful and I like looking at it.

I was outside the other day and watching smoke and the smoke was sort of curling around the side of our art building and it had these beautiful similar patterns to cream and coffee. Our world is absolutely surrounded by beauty and we come into this place and again we have beauty in the context of our world.

How do we respond to beauty? What is its significance for us, particularly in light of the second word that prohibits us from making beautiful things and worshiping them or worshiping God somehow through and in them. How do we relate to beauty?

Leonard Cohen wrote a song called “If It Be Your Will.” The lyrics go:

“If it be your will that I speak no more, and my voice be still as it was before, I will speak no more. I shall abide until I am spoken for. If it be your will, if it be your will that a voice be true, from this broken hill I will sing to you. From this broken hill all your praises they shall ring. If it be your will to let me sing. From this broken hill all your praises they shall ring. If it be your will to let me sing. If it be your will. If there is a choice. Let the rivers fill. Let the hills rejoice. Let your mercy spill on all these burning hearts in hell if it be your will. To make us well and draw us near and bind us tight. All your children here in their rags of light and our rags of light all dressed to kill and end this night if it be your will.”

Beautiful song. The song was written about response to beauty. Cohen would see this beautiful usually Catholic artwork in Canada where he was raised and he would be just so engaged with the beauty of things he would look at. That’s what really drove this song. How do I respond to this kind of beauty? If it be your will, let me praise you, Lord God, for that kind of beauty.

And then he moved from the beauty of things that he saw and his inability to respond correctly and a desire to sing praises to then the relative ugliness of the world of fallen men. And those things are kind of related as we shall see as we go on in today’s sermon.

Beauty. How do we respond to it? What’s our role in it? What is the will of God for us in reference to beauty?

In our Bible study, we’ve been studying 2 Samuel 11, the fall of David with Bathsheba. And it’s beautiful. You know, we read our Bibles and we think of them as Bibles and we don’t think of the beauty sometimes, but just listen to the beauty of how this recitation of what happened with Bathsheba began:

“It happened in the spring of the year at the time when kings go out to battle that David sent Joab and his servants with him and all Israel and they destroyed the people of Ammon and besieged Rabbah. But David stayed at Jerusalem. Then it happened one evening that David arose from his bed and walked on the roof of the king’s house. And from the roof he saw a woman bathing and the woman was very beautiful to behold.”

It is a remarkable account of the story of David’s tremendous sin with Bathsheba and it begins in such a beautiful way and it talks about a beautiful woman. This word beautiful to describe the physical beauty of Bathsheba is the same word that’s translated good in many other places of the Old Testament. Frequently when you read the word something is good—”How good and pleasant it is for brothers to dwell together in unity”—it’s that same word. How beautiful and pleasant it is for brothers to dwell together in unity.

And this beautiful introduction to this story, by the way, which puts all the blame on David—I’m not saying Bathsheba was sinless, but she is not the subject of this. Her bathing here is ceremonial washing almost surely assuredly. She was probably not naked if that’s what you’re concerned about. That’s not the point of the text and it goes on later to talk about her purification and this word for bathing has to do with purification. But it does inform us of the full breadth of the meaning of this word beauty, goodness, and what I want to do now is read the creation account.

There’s an implication in this for us in who we are. Right? Eventually we’ll get to the fourth word and in that fourth word we’ll be told to work six days a week and then rest on the seventh following the example of our Father in heaven of God the Creator. And so this creation account is very important for us in saying this is what God did and this in a creaturely sort of way is the sort of things that we do.

Now listen to this story. If we take this sort of translation of the word good and bring in the implication that the verse from David’s account clearly tells us is an appropriate connotation of this Hebrew word for good or beautiful.

In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form and void and darkness was on the face of the deep and the spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters. Then God said, “Let there be light” and there was light. And God saw the light that it was beautiful. And God divided the light from the darkness. God called the light day and the darkness he called night. So the evening and the morning were the first day.

Then God said, “Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters.” Thus God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament. And it was so. And God called the firmament heaven. So the evening and the morning were the second day.

And then God said, “Let the waters under the heaven be gathered together into one place, and let the dry land appear. And it was so. And God called the dry land earth, and the gathering together of the waters he called seas. And God saw that it was beautiful.

Then God said, “Let the earth bring forth grass, the herb that yields seed, and the fruit tree that yields fruit according to its kind, whose seed is in itself on the earth.” And it was so. And the earth brought forth grass the herb that yields seed according to its kind and the tree that yields fruit whose seed is in itself according to its kind. And God saw that it was beautiful. So the evening and the morning were the third day.

And then God said, “Let there be lights in the firmament of the heavens to divide the day from the night, and let them be for signs and seasons and for days and years. And let them be for lights in the firmament of the heavens to give light on the earth.” And it was so. And then God made two great lights, the greater light to rule the day and the lesser light to rule the night. He made the stars also. God set them in the firmament of the heavens to give light on the earth and to rule over the day and over the night and to divide the light from the darkness. And God saw that it was beautiful. So the evening and the morning were the fourth day.

And then God said, “Let the waters abound with an abundance of living creatures and let birds fly above the earth across the face of the firmament of the heavens.” So God created great sea creatures and every living thing that moves with which the waters abounded according to their kind and every winged bird according to its kind. And God saw that it was beautiful. And God blessed them saying, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the waters and the seas and let birds multiply in the earth.” So the evening and the morning were the fifth day.

And then God said, “Let the earth bring forth the living creature according to its kind, cattle and creeping things, and beasts of the earth, each according to its kind.” And it was so. And God made the beast of the earth according to its kind, cattle according to its kind, and everything that creeps on the earth according to its kind. And God saw that it was beautiful.

Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, according to our likeness. Let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.” So God created man in his own image. In the image of God he created him, male and female, he created them.

And then God blessed them. And God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply. Fill the earth and subdue it. Have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air, and over every living thing that moves on the earth.

And God said, “See, I have given you every herb that yields seed which is on the face of all the earth, and every tree whose fruit yields seed. To you it shall be for food. Also, to every beast of the earth, to every bird of the air, and to everything that creeps on the earth, in which there is life. I have given every green herb for food.” And it was so.

And then God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very beautiful. So the evening and the morning were the sixth day.

Thus the heavens and the earth and all the host of heaven were finished. And on the seventh day God ended his work which he had done. And he rested on the seventh day from all his work which he had done. And then God blessed the seventh day and sanctified it because in it he rested from all of his work which God had created and made.

God in the original pages of the scriptures that reveal him to us is someone who makes things beautiful. And he doesn’t just make beautiful things, he improves their beauty day to day until the climactic end of his beautifying work is reached and he sees that it is very beautiful. No wonder it’s such beautiful thing to us. I don’t think the fall has had much effect on the physical universe apart from men and their relationships.

And when we look at the beauty of the world in which we live, we proclaim with God that it is very beautiful. And as we contemplate this Lord’s day in which we rest from our labors, it certainly also should inform us not just that God rested on the seventh day, but that his work was beautification. I think it is a fair analogy to say that is an essential part of what being human is. We bring beauty to the world.

Now, this Spirit of God is described in the Genesis account as taking darkness and bringing light, taking formlessness and bringing form, taking voidness, emptiness and bringing filling to it. These are acts of beautification. And when we look at the kind of work that Hiram inspired by the spirit did to create the kind of beauty in the temple and then what the workers did long before this in the tabernacle and the beautiful work that they did, we see this same thing going on. We see that our essential character is one of beautifying the places that we that we create and the things that we do.

It’s interesting that in the Exodus account of the construction of the tabernacle, if you look carefully through it, it seems to follow this same sevenfold order of creation. And so we have this beautification going on in creation, the beautiful world that God has given to us. And then we have this beautiful microcosm of the world that God insisted be built for him to have as his particular place of meeting with the people in the time of the Mosaic covenant up until the coming of the Lord Jesus Christ.

God wants the temple to look sort of like the earth. He wants it to be beautiful the way the earth is beautiful and yet it isn’t just a garden, right? It’s a structure. It has design elements to it as we just saw and as we’ll look at again in a few minutes. But the design elements aren’t just representations of the physical world. I mean the representations—they’re not exact copies or duplicates. It’s beautiful work. It’s artistic work. And I think that alone informs us in terms of our essential character as men to bring beauty to our world.

And then as we saw or as we noted, what happens then is ugliness comes to the world by the sin of Adam and Eve. And it’s we’re exalting beauty. That’s good. But we must be careful with beauty. After all, it is the beautifulness of the forbidden fruit, the physical appearance of it that Eve looks upon and is enchanted by. We have a little bit of a distrust of beauty because it was also the source of the fall.

It was the creating work of God was to make things beautiful. But the physical beauty and the concentration on something physical as opposed to the ethical commands of God, the spoken word of God is what led us into the fallen estate. And fallen estate was marked by ugliness, by division, that was a breaking down and decaying, that was death and the immediate results of that are in the ugliness of sinful relationships with Adam blaming Eve and Eve the serpent and all that stuff, all the blameshifting that goes on. This is the ugliness of the world that DEVO sang about. That it really isn’t a beautiful world—in their video they show wars and people being mean and horrible and wicked. And in that sense there is ugliness of the world.

And our job in beautification is not just related to the acts of creating beautiful houses and places to live, putting on beautiful clothes to come into the beautiful sanctuary of God and hear his word proclaimed to us. But it is the beauty of relationships here as well that is the reversal of the fall that’s come about through the work of the Lord Jesus Christ. He died that the disunity and the fragmentation of mankind would become unified now in a beautiful order called the church, the community, the body of the Lord Jesus Christ. And so we have this wonderful beauty proclaimed.

And as I said, this word for good is the same word that’s in Psalm 133:1: “Behold, how beautiful, how pleasant, how good it is for brothers to dwell together in unity.” When God saw that it was very beautiful, he saw in the midst of his beautiful creator order a beautiful relationship between husband and wife.

So we have a need for beauty. God blesses beauty. He wants us to think in terms of beauty.

What does this have to do with the second word? Well, the second word prohibits us from making beautiful things—as beautiful as they may be—and then using those things as mediators apart from the word of God. While the world is beautiful, we have learned over the last three or four weeks not to seek out visual beauty as mediation between us and God, but rather the work of the Lord Jesus Christ, the word of God.

Right now, there’s two ditches that people have fallen. There’s many more than that, but it’s interesting to note that the Eastern Orthodox Church declares that the icon, a painting, is what the word of God is in colors and shapes. It is a visual word of God. And they don’t mean that as some kind of symbolic representation. What they mean by that is the icon is a place, a portal, a place where divine energies come into the created world. And so you know, we worship this thing because it is the divine energy of the spirit coming into a visual representation.

Now, they’ve chosen visual arts as their particular idol in violation of the second word. It would be a useful exercise to meditate on how we could do the same thing with musical arts in charismatic churches. It isn’t the icon that becomes the point of energy infused and that leads us into worship. It’s music and it’s a particular form of music that gets the spirit to move in us somehow. Either way, it’s a rejection of word as the mediation between us and God and the word Jesus Christ for something else, things that are beautiful and good and proper in their place. But they become improper when in violation of the second word, people worship these things.

Well, how did the Eastern Orthodox get away with disobeying the second word? Well, what they say is that the Ten Commandments were for the old creation. That in the old creation it was a hearing-based system. It was a time of fasting leading up to the incarnation in physical form of God in the person of Jesus Christ. And so for the Eastern Orthodox theologian and philosopher, the Old Testament is indeed a time of hearing. And it would have been wrong to do what they’re doing now then. But it’s okay now because Jesus has come. The incarnation has occurred. And now physical form is infused with spiritual dynamic energy. And in fact, this is what they see the mission of man is to come together in worship. The divine energy is infused into the icon. We’re recipients of it and we take then the whole created order and look for God’s divine energy to fill it. It’s deification. And this is why their version of sanctification is called deification. It doesn’t mean taking on godlike attributes the way we would think of it. It means the fusion of the spirit of God himself. And they justify this through visual means because they say now that we’re adults, we’ve moved from hearing-based to sight-based. Now, the problem with that is kind of obvious.

Jesus isn’t here. He was here for a while. He said, “It’s good that I go away.” The New Testament abounds with statements like, “Faith comes by hearing.” Hearing by the word of God, not by sight.

It’s interesting that on the other side of it, we’re celebrating the Reformation this week and this Friday. Calvin, you know, on the other side of it the Reformers were a little frightened of beauty because the Roman Catholic Church had abused beauty, had abused physical structures, statues, pictures etc. in worship and had bowed down to them, statues of Mary etc. And so the Reformers perhaps properly fasted from beautiful architecture for a period of time, but they saw it, they justified this the other way around. They said well in the Old Testament there were a lot of beautiful things and it was by sight. But now that Jesus has come, we’re mature and now it’s by hearing. Isn’t that interesting? That’s very interesting.

So, you know, that’s why we had music in the Old Testament because that’s what kids like is little songs. But in the New Testament, you know, some of the Reformers said no music, no musical instruments. That’s childish worship. Now we have pure worship, which is intellectual thought. You know, just word to word, word to ear, that’s it. And everything else is out.

So, it’s interesting that these two poles both end up with improper, I think, views of the arts. In the scriptures, we’re commanded, of course, not to engage in idolatrous worship through sight. We know that both in the Old Testament and in the New Testament, the truth of the second word is there. And that truth says we may not take visual images and worship God through them. That implied then the second commandment Paul repeats the statement against idols in the New Testament. Faith continues to come by hearing and hearing by the word of God. This is what we have. So we want to make clear on all of that.

But we also want to say that we don’t—we want to avoid the rejection of beauty because of the second word because the second word was a command of God. And what we just read in First Kings was the result of God commanding Solomon to build a temple and he builds the temple with beauty and God dwelt in that temple and was pleased to do so. Beauty is essential to the person of God.

Psalm 29:2 says, “Give to the Lord the glory due to his name. Worship the Lord in the beauty of holiness.” So there’s beauty. We have beautiful settings. We have beautiful clothes. But the beauty is a beauty of holiness, primarily focusing upon relationships.

Again, in Psalm 27:4, David says, “One thing I have desired of the Lord, that will I seek, that I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life, to behold the beauty of the Lord, and to inquire in his temple. For in the time of trouble, he shall hide me.”

So, let’s not, you know, put this way off in the eschatological category that David was seeking to do. He was talking about dwelling in the house of the Lord, the tabernacle, the tabernacle of David that he constructed and then later the temple. He was saying this is the place of God’s beauty where we inquire in his temple and we inquire about specifically deliverance from enemies. So the point is it should be our desire as well to dwell in the house of the Lord to behold the beauty of the Lord. There’s nothing wrong with beauty in the house of the Lord.

Yes, it’s the beauty of restored relationships through Christ, holding back the effects of the curse. But yes, as well, it’s proper to wear a little beauty in our physical person on the Lord’s day to embrace some beauty in the context of the structures in which we worship. We know that’s okay because the church is the temple now and the temple was adorned with beautiful things.

Isaiah 64:11: “our holy and beautiful temple where our fathers praised you. They say, now it’s burned up and it was a holy and beautiful temple.”

Isaiah 52:1: “Awake, awake. Put on your strength, O Zion. Put on your beautiful garments, oh Jerusalem.”

God commands beauty to be placed in the environment of worship in the tabernacle as well as in the temple. Tabernacle Exodus 26:31, for instance, “you shall make a veil of blue and purple and scarlet material in fine twisted linen. It shall be made with cherubim, the work of a skillful workman.” Things above, things in heaven were commanded to be embroidered or woven into one of the veils that would hang in the context of the tabernacle. God commanded that works of beauty be put in the place of worship.

God commanded this. And in this case, he’s commanding the creation of a depiction of a created being, a thing, right, that God made alive, a cherubim, an angel, a messenger of his. They didn’t look like these cherubim, but that’s kind of the point. Something in heaven.

And then we also read that, you know, there was an ark to be constructed. An ark was placed in the context of the Holy of Holies. And we know all about that. We know that there were two—hopefully we know that on top of the ark there were also angels there as well. The ark was there and the angels were covering the so-called mercy seat, the throne of God. Angels were placed in the ark.

Now, the ark is a rectangular box. It’s a somewhat abstract piece of art. What is it? It’s a rectangle. It’s not carved like a tree. It’s not made like a cherubim. Cherubim are sitting on it, but it is somewhat abstract in what it’s to represent. And you have to think about it and meditate upon it leading up to the ark.

There was a golden altar of incense that was later made and there was an altar in the courtyard. And these altars were rectangular devices or rectangular solids and they had four horns on them. Now, there’s nothing in the created order that is a rectangular solid with four horns on it. It’s abstract art. It’s supposed to represent something. And then if we read in the scriptures that the earth has four corners, yea, our earth. It has four corners. Four corners has our earth. If we read that, which we do in the scriptures, then we can see that the altar is a representation of the earth.

And actually, if we think of the temple itself, rectangular, the tabernacle, it’s rectangular with division points. Hebrews tells us explicitly this is made after a heavenly pattern, but it’s a representation of earth being brought into the heavenly throne room. Right? Because we just read that in the art that Solomon made for the temple. We have lions and tigers and bears. Lions and cherubim and oxen and stuff all throughout the design of this water chariot that he had created. Animals are brought in. Palm trees are to be placed. He makes these two big tall huge pillars like lilies. Huge lilies. Kind of like a palm tree that becomes fruited out at the top.

And you know there’s evidence, some evidence—I don’t know if it’s true, but there is evidence that says that it was the Jewish architects captured by Greece that created what we call, we think of as Greek art. I don’t know what that is. Is it an Ionic column or something? I don’t know. But there are these things that seem to have their predecessors in these palm trees with branches out or these big huge pillars that were created with capitals and lilies on the top that this becomes is then brought into what we think of as Greek or Roman art. I don’t know if there’s books on this subject but in any event there’s this representation of this huge lily and not just a lily because it’s got interesting chain work around it at the top and there are hundreds of pomegranates, stylized pomegranates right. And it says explicitly that these pillars are hollow and so these when the wind comes up these pomegranates no doubt would bang against it.

So we’ve got some auditory artwork going on as well. But we’ve got this representation of plants and animals and cherubim. This is what God said had to be in the case of the tabernacle and obviously blesses by his presence in the case of the temple with Solomon. This is what he delights to dwell in—is a beautiful place. Why would we think it otherwise? Because what we know about the Creator is that when he creates things, they’re beautiful. And he knows that we are made in his image and we’re to make things that are beautiful and he wants us to be beautiful in our praise and worship of him. He wants us to think of him and the place where he comes to meet us in the word as also a place of great beauty.

The word brings beauty to the world. God desires this. He commands it. He approves of it as well. There’s a lampstand in there. Another piece of somewhat abstract art. What is it? Well, it’s an almond tree. It’s got almond blossoms on it. But have you ever seen an almond tree with lights? Twelve of them. And some people think this is a representation of the 12-fold house of the stars in which we live, zodiacal signs or whatever it is. It’s interesting.

The golden altar of incense is there. The table of showbread is there. The temple and tabernacle have things in them that are representations of the world. Yes. Direct representations. Huge carvings of angels or imprints or carvings of lions and oxen that’s there. But then there are also these abstract uses of art that God brings into his what I would call abstract representational in some geometric form of certain other things.

If we were to construct a vision of what these water chariots were that we just read about, what’s going on is it’s a representation that the water, the heavenly water from the temple will go out to the four corners of the world. It’s a way to make a statue that represents movement of waters out from the temple into the four corners of the world. That’s art. That’s beauty. That’s what God desired his people to see as they came to Solomon’s temple. As they came to worship and praise him with song that David had created for use first in the tabernacle of David and then in the temple.

So God commands us to engage in beautification in art specifically and right here now mostly I’m focusing on the visual arts. He wants us to make things of beauty. How do we kind of put this together with the prohibition of making things as a way to worship him?

Well, I think these things are really brought together quite nicely if you read a Roman Catholic version of the Ten Commandments, there is no second commandment. It’s merged with the first. And the last commandment, the 10th commandment is broken into two. Don’t covet your neighbor’s wife and then all the rest of it stuff. In spite of the fact that if we look at Exodus 20 and Deuteronomy 5, you know, they’re first it says house and wife, then it says wife and house. They’re merged together. It kind of integrates the two. But this is what they’ve done. And this is what they did until the time of the Reformation. And the Reformation said, “No, the second word is a prohibition of the use of visual arts the way you’re doing it in the Roman Catholic Church and in the Eastern Orthodox Church where you’re bowing down to these things.”

Now, you might think that bowing down to an icon would actually produce art, but it doesn’t. Actually, it retards art. If you think that your hands can make something that divine energy then comes into it becomes godlike to you. You’re worshiping it. What does that do? You are made to serve God, right? So, what you’ll end up doing is serving that representation. You’ll be submissive to the artwork and you’ll not really develop much artwork.

Prior to the Reformation, you had alchemy, an attempt to manipulate lead and make gold out of it, to take things and magically through divine energies transmute things and you didn’t have a whole lot of scientific advance. With the Reformation and with the separation of God from the created order in terms of direct mediation, what do we have? Alchemy becomes chemistry and it produces all the modern living great world of chemicals that we live in today—tremendous societal advance, right? Same thing with astrology.

Prior to the Reformation, we have astrology dominant. The stars are worshiped. We’re sort of submissive to them rather than exercising dominion over the created order, which God says we were supposed to be doing and thinking of. And as a result, astrology just sort of freezes an understanding of the physical created universe in place for a long period of time. And with the coming of the Reformation saying that no, created things are beautiful, well ordered, but they’re not God. They’re not to be seen as having divine energy, as being united with God. They’re created things. And because they’re created things, we can mature in our understanding of chemistry. We can mature in understanding of astronomy. And now we can plan to send men to Mars. That’s a direct result, I think, of the Reformation, and very much related to a correct understanding of the second word, not denying art, but rather seeing art in its rightful place which is a thing of development and maturation and the same thing’s true with art.

There was a great renaissance of learning that happened in the context of the Protestant Reformation. Now art can be bad. You know in another place where God commanded artwork to be made was in the desert in the wilderness and the people sinned and God had Moses sent serpents to bite them and kill them. And then he had Moses make a bronze serpent to hold up and people would look to it and be healed.

700 years later or so, about I don’t know maybe my chronology is a little off but I don’t know at least 500 years, 600 years later Hezekiah is king and the people of God are being idolatrous with this same thing with this same piece of art and he crushes it breaks it apart. When our art becomes idolatrous it should be destroyed.

Remember the Taliban illustration I used a couple of weeks ago? They find this big Buddha statue in Afghanistan and they blow it up and the world is just absolutely shocked and disgusted and we sort of should be too because nobody was probably worshiping that thing. But if people were, if it was a thing where God’s people had taken something that might be a wonderful interesting depiction of some sort of thing art, if it changed people to becoming a thing of idolatrous worship of divine energy that has the capability of freezing development and maturation of science, astronomy, arts, whatever it is, God says just as he commanded the serpent to be constructed, the bronze serpent, he also says Hezekiah obeyed his commandments and destroyed the serpent.

So God can destroy artwork and says it should be destroyed when we become idolatrous with it. That’s not because God is against art. In fact, it’s because God is this great Creator who is the one who brings beauty to pass and who wants us as well to understand that our worship freed from subjugation of idolatry of making artwork and making it a point of energy infused in a place of contact with the person of the icon represents—right there with us. And so thinking that salvation for the world is deification of man and deification of the world and the infusion of divine energy into the world, God says break with that because that thing will leave you stagnant not only in art but that will leave you stagnant in relationships as well because that’s what the beauty of holiness is also about. That’s why we gather together. God says it’s a beautiful thing for brothers to dwell together in unity.

So the second word is a tremendous tool, a tremendous blessing from God that the Reformers used to free the church from gross idolatry and from cultural and relational stagnation that comes about when we take something other than the God of the scriptures—the God is revealed in his word, the person of the Lord Jesus Christ—and we exalt something else in its place. God brings judgments upon us.

Psalm 50:2 says that out of Zion the perfection of beauty, God will shine forth. This is Zion. This is the dwelling place where God comes to meet with us through the preaching of his word. He says this should be a place of beauty. You should wear beautiful clothes today. You should sing beautifully. We should make beautiful noises to him of praise to him. We have a beautiful table that he set before us. We have the beauty of holiness also in terms of the united relationships. We have that the Lord Jesus Christ died for the sins that break our relationships with one another and we’re coming together and we’re sitting beautifully composed with good thoughts about each other, restored again to the beauty of holiness and God says from this place of beauty God will shine forth into the world.

God sends us as lights in the midst of darkness. Those lights—the very first creation of God said it is beautiful. You are beautiful people created God’s workmanship, God’s poem, God’s piece of beauty sent forth into the world to beautify the world both in terms of the visual arts, the sung arts, the spoken arts, the artistic demonstrations, science, astronomy, metallurgy, all that stuff. God says all that is to be a thing of beauty as you develop and use it for him. And also, you’re to be a people from whom beauty shines forth in your relationships within your family and with the way you build godly, beautiful, united, peaceful relationships in the context of not just your home but your community as well.

God says that a proper understanding of the second word frees us from the very forces that would destroy art in the context of our world. But very importantly, he says, “Understand, I freed you, but I freed you so that you might work those six days. And as I said at the end of my work every day—say that was a beautiful thing. May the Lord God grant us lives of beauty this week. Production of visual beauty. May we at the end of our day today say this was a beautiful day. May we engage in work tomorrow and at the end of our day tomorrow say as God said at the end of his day, it’s beautiful what God has accomplished in this day. May God grant us his spirit to that end.

Let’s pray.

Lord God, we thank you for the beauty of the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ and the good news that this beauty now streams forth into the world. Thank you for helping us to rightly order our worship of you. Faith coming by hearing and hearing by your word. And thank you that this word commands us to beautify our lives. In Jesus’ name we pray. Amen.