The Word is Worth a Thousand Pictures

Q #96: What is God’s will for us in the second commandment? A. That we in no way make any image of God nor worship him in any other way that has been commanded in God’s Word. Q #97: May we then not make any image at all? A. God can not and may not be visibly portrayed in any way. Although creatures may be portrayed, yet God forbids making or having such images if one’s intention is to worship them or to serve God through them. Q #98: But may not images be permitted in churches in place of books for the unlearned? A. No, we should not try to be wiser than God. God wants the Christian community instructed by the living preaching of his Word—not by idols that cannot even talk.

How backwards these Q&As based on the second commandment might seem to us today. We live in such a visual society! We use Facebook and Instagram to spread images of our life far and wide, and few of us do much writing at all anymore. For a century we’ve lived the proverb, “A picture is worth a thousand words.” Most of us think that a picture is always more easily grasped, more clear, and, in fact, more real than words. But Q&A 98 flat out reverses that sentiment. The Word is greater than a thousand pictures. Why is the commandment, and the catechism, so adamant about its prohibition of images for worship? It is not only in the Ten Commandments that this exclusion of images is present. We find it throughout Scripture, in the Old and New Testaments. “With whom, then, will you compare God? To what image will you liken him” (Isa. 40:18)? “Of what value is an idol carved by a craftsman? Or an image that teaches lies?…The Lord is in his holy temple; let all the earth be silent before him” (Hab. 2:18, 20). “Therefore since we are God’s offspring, we should not think that the divine being is like gold or silver or stone—an image made by human design and skill” (Acts 17:29). To put it bluntly, there is no way that an image could come close to representing the God that the Belgic Confession calls “eternal, incomprehensible, invisible, unchangeable, infinite, almighty.”   Instead of images and idols, QA98 points to the living preaching of God’s Word as the proper means for instruction in the Christian community. Romans 10 goes even further, indicating that the preaching of the “word about Christ” is the means by which God creates faith in us. This probably should not surprise us—the God who spoke creation into being speaks faith into us. In the preaching of the Word (and in the celebration of the sacraments—the visible Word) we encounter the living God, not a pale imitation. An image, an idol, can only be static and paralyzed. A picture is a snapshot of a moment in time—locked, even, in that moment. But the God we encounter in faithful preaching is alive! He is not frozen, but he engages us—comforting and challenging us with the good news of Jesus Christ. This is the gospel—“the good news by the Holy Spirit sent from heaven—things into which angels long to look!” (1 Peter 1:12) Thanks be to God! ~Pastor Matt