The Good Life Study: No Images

In Week 2 of "The Good Life," the SE Online team tackles the Second Commandment. Though the second commandment seems like it covers much of the same ground as the first, they actually speak to two different issues. Whereas the first command talks about the worship of other gods, this command speaks to the appropriate worship of Israel’s God. Though the nations around them created statues and tokens of their gods, the Israelites were prohibited from using anything to represent their God

So how do we violate this commandment today? To be sure, there aren’t too many people walking around with statues of God in their pockets. All of us, however, walk around with pictures of God in our minds. We can let dogmatic systems box in the living God. We allow our own stereotypes to say who God can or can’t use for His purposes. While a picture can be a helpful reminder, you can’t have a relationship with a photograph. Pictures always have limits.

GROUP DISCUSSION QUESTIONS:

1. What was your biggest takeaway from the video teaching time? How did it change the way you look at the second commandment? What does this command have to say about the ways we worship and think of God?

2. Read Exodus 20:4-6. What do you see as the main difference between this commandment and the first one? In what ways does the first speak to who we worship and the second to how we worship? Why do you think God so jealously guards how we represent Him?

3. How does knowing that we are created in God’s image change the way we think of His image? How does it change the way we see the people around us? In what ways would our attitudes/actions towards others change if we really saw them as people made in the image of God?

4. As part of your personal study, you were asked to make a list of all God’s characteristics. Share your lists with one another. How are your lists similar? How are they different? What attributes did others write down that you neglected? How does this caution us against merely holding to our own “images” of God?

5. Read Romans 1:21-32. How does Paul describe idolatry in these verses? How does he see idolatry as the gateway to all other forms of sin? How do these other sins grow out of a misunderstanding of who God is? What are some practical ways our images of God affect the way we live? How do we keep our eyes focused on Jesus – the true image of who God is?

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