How should Christians view statues of Jesus?

Again she is the patron of what is most offensive before God — of idolatry in every shape. It is in vain to say that there never has been idolatry under Christianity; in vain to plead that the objects adored are only images for memory, not idols. The self-same excuse the old heathen philosophers used to urge. They sought to excuse their superstition by the assertion that nobody thought the idols were the gods, but only the visible tokens that reminded them of beings above and behind them. The apology of idolaters in Christendom is exactly similar to that of the pagans. The truth is, that to have such visible tokens or signs is the denial of faith, the destruction of the principle and power in which the Christian is told to walk. He is called to "walk by faith and not by sight." All efforts therefore to make people religious by palpable symbols of the sort is false and pernicious in principle; it is but heathenism christened. Every Christian person is bound to set his face against it. No doubt all this came in by slow degrees, with an apparent show of pious reasons: when have they been wanting for bad things? The truth is however that we are not competent to judge in divine things; and God therefore has revealed His will that we may be subject as children. Then, when we honour Him by subjection of spirit, we find out the excellence of God's will in Christ. We learn that there is nothing arbitrary but good, yea, the best in all the Lord lays on us. Although we accept it, not because we understand it but because He says it (and we accept it therefore gladly and simple-heartedly as His authority over our souls), yet, having done so, we learn that our God and Father is infinitely wise in all He says, and as good as He is wise.

The language of these laws is absolute and peremptory. “You shall” or “you shall not.” No allowance is made for any deviation. First, no other god could be allowed to take God's place. Nothing must in any way be used even to represent God, no image, no likeness of anything in creation must have any place of spiritual honor in people's minds. This is idolatry. Even pictures of this kind were forbidden (Num. 33:52)

Likely they excused their idolatry, as many do today, by saying this was only an image made to represent God, but God forbad any such images (Ex. 20:4). Actually, though things like this are claimed to be only representations, it is very soon that the thing itself becomes the god that people worship.

Here lies the solid ground of the appeal against idolatry. They saw nothing. God did not show Himself to them. He did not assume any bodily shape of which they might form an image. He gave them His word, His holy commandments, so plain that a child could understand them, and the wayfaring men though fools need not err therein. There was no need for them therefore to set about imagining what God was like; nay, this was the very sin against which they were so faithfully warned. They were called to hear God's voice, not to see His shape — to obey His commandments, not to make an image of Him. Superstition vainly seeks to do honour to God by forming and worshipping an image. Faith, on the contrary, lovingly receives and reverently obeys His holy commandments. "If a man love me," says our blessed Lord, "he will" — what? make an image of me, and worship it? Nay, but "he will keep my words." This makes it so simple, so safe, so certain. We are not called to work up our minds to form any conception of God. We have simply to hear His word and keep His commandments. We can have no idea whatever of God, but as He has been pleased to reveal Himself. "No man has seen God at any time; the only-begotten Son, which is in the bosom of the Father, he has declared him." "God, who commanded the light to shine out of darkness, has shined in our hearts, to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ."

Jesus is declared to be the brightness of God's Glory and the exact impression of His substance. He could say, "He that has seen me has seen the Father." Thus the Son reveals the Father; and it is by the word, through the power of the Holy Ghost, that we know anything of the Son; and therefore for any one to attempt, by any efforts of his mind or workings of his imagination to conceive an image of God, or of Christ, is simply idolatry. To endeavour to arrive at any knowledge of God or of Christ, save by scripture, is simply mysticism and confusion; nay more, it is to put ourselves directly into the hands of the devil, to be led by him into the wildest, darkest, and deadliest delusion.

"Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them nor serve them: for I the Lord thy God am a jealous God" (Ex. 20:4-5). God is jealous of giving His glory to another, but that only emphasizes the fact that the Son is one with the Father. All images that man might make can but provoke to jealousy but here is "the image of the invisible God." He is jealous for His Son, "that all men should honor the Son even as they honor the Father." "Worthy, O Lamb of God, art Thou That every knee to Thee should bow."

It is remarkable that the commandments given with the object of asserting and safeguarding the glory and the rights of God should be three, and this long before the reality of the three Persons in the Godhead was brought to light. We cannot but see in the second the clearing away of all that would be calculated to confuse the issue when our blessed Lord Jesus appeared as "the image of the invisible God" (Col. 1:15). In Him, and in Him alone, is found the true and perfect representation of all that God is.

Christendom is no stranger to ephods. Many are the things of divine appointment which it has apart from Christ and by which it imagines that it can approach God. The church, ministry, baptism, the Lord's supper, and even prayer, separated from their source, become ephods before which people prostrate themselves. Form takes the place of God, and souls thereby fall again into idolatry. Ah! do they not even make an idol of Christ on the cross! The brasen serpent had been kept and the people had made a false god of it. Like the faithful Hezekiah, the true witness of the present day cannot put up with that. The king brake in pieces this idol, and called it Nehushtan, i. e., a piece of brass (2Kings 18: 4).

Christendom is no stranger to ephods. Many are the things of divine appointment which it has apart from Christ and by which it imagines that it can approach God. The church, ministry, baptism, the Lord's supper, and even prayer, separated from their source, become ephods before which people prostrate themselves. Form takes the place of God, and souls thereby fall again into idolatry. Ah! do they not even make an idol of Christ on the cross! The brazen serpent had been kept and the people had made a false god of it. Like the faithful Hezekiah, the true witness of the present day cannot put up with that. The king brake in pieces this idol, and called it Nehushtan, i.e., a piece of brass (2 Kings 18:4).

A terrible evil is before us in this record. God displaced by an outward and visible sign — the very essence of idolatry! Even the light of the Gospel has not preserved Christendom from this folly and sin. Baptism and the Lord's Supper — precious ordinances of divine institution, blessedly suggestive to the spiritual mind, are the very real dependence of multitudes in our day. Not these only. "Sacred" images and pictures have been brought forth on many a day of disaster (such as a volcanic eruption or an outbreak of disease), and have been paraded through the streets in order to ward off that which the people feared. Oh, the horror of it to Him Who has made Himself known in the person of His Son, and Who has withal given to men His Written word.

In the second place they were to make no attempt to have an image or material representation of any unseen power. God is "in heaven above," and anything purporting to be an image of Him is forbidden. Many other powers there are both invisible and visible, and no representations of such are to be made. All the idols of the heathen are strictly forbidden, and in this connection the warning is issued as to the sins of the fathers descending in retribution on the children. God knew how terribly infectious such idolatrous practices are; and, that if the fathers start them the epidemic rages with tenfold virulence in the children, and brings down the judgment upon their heads.