Is it wrong to have pictures of Jesus?

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.

The mind of man craves for some representation of the being he worships. From the degraded savage who tries to represent the supernatural forces around him by amulets and charms, to the idolater who invests his carved or molten image with divine powers, or the devotee who vainly prostrates himself before crucifix or images of saints, all betray this instinct for a tangible representation of the object of worship. Christ is the Image of God. An image of Christ is therefore absurd, and a negation of all that He is; for if He be the Image of God, why require an image of Him? God as God is invisible. He fills heaven and earth, and no finite creature could take account of so glorious a Being whose time is eternity, whose dimension is space, whose being is Spirit. There was every necessity why He should be adequately represented to our ken. But who among created beings could be the embodiment of the Uncreate? Our marvel is that all that God is in His own being is adequately set forth in Christ. There was no deficiency in Him; He brought down here the entire fullness of the Godhead — setting it forth without flaw from the stable of Bethlehem, the waters of Jordan, and the synagogue of Nazareth, right on to the grave of Lazarus, the garden of Gethsemane, the cross of Golgotha, the emptied tomb, and the throne of glory. There is no one else capable of compassing in his own person all the majesty and the nature of God. Jesus is the Son; there is therefore, no disparity between Him and God, in Him was most perfectly expressed every element in the divine nature. Renewed by grace, we draw near to our Saviour with unshod feet and gaze into His face; and in Him is the absolute, complete, final revelation of God. Never, in any religion or philosophy before, has it been written "GOD IS LOVE." But the truth is out now — in Jesus. God's nature is disclosed, set before men and celestial beings, revealed in the Man who is also, and must be, eternal Son.

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.

"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."

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)

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.

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.

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 point urged here is, that when they came and stood, as far as any then could stand, in the presence of God, they had seen no similitude of Jehovah. What a guard this was against the misuse of outward forms! God Himself did not disclose Himself by an external creature-shape. Jehovah their God did not make Himself visible to them by a similitude. Consequently there is here a heavy blow struck at the tendency towards idolatry. For when severed from Christ then those ordinances only became a snare to men. Still more since Christ: misused ordinances are practically the same thing in principle, as Galatians 4 teaches. This was guarded against from the first by the fact that no similitude of God was vouchsafed. "Ye came near and stood under the mountain; and the mountain burned with fire in the midst of heaven, with darkness, clouds, and thick darkness. And Jehovah spake to you out of the midst of the fire: ye heard the voice of the words" — because they were called to obey — "but saw no similitude; only ye heard a voice. And he declared to you his covenant, which he commanded you to perform, even ten commandments; and he wrote them upon two tables of stone." And then comes the exhortation to beware of corrupting themselves by idolatries, by the likeness of any creature. This is pursued to the end of the chapter, with the institution of the cities where the manslayer might find refuge.

Then He challenges the folly of those that set up graven images as entitled to resemble or to represent Him. "To whom then will ye liken God? and what likeness will ye compare to him? The workman casts a graven image, and the goldsmith spreads it over with gold, and casts silver chains. He that [is] impoverished so that he has no oblation chooses a tree [that] doth not rot; he seeks to him a skilled workman to prepare a graven image [that] shall not be moved. Do ye not know? have ye not heard? has it not been told you from the beginning? have ye not understood the foundations of the earth? [It is] he that sits upon the circle of the earth, and the inhabitants thereof [are] as grasshoppers; that stretches out the heavens as a veil (or curtain), and spreads them out as a tent to dwell in: that brings the princes to nothing; that makes the judges of the earth as vanity. Scarcely are they planted, scarcely are they sown, scarcely has their stock taken root in the earth, but he also blows upon them, and they wither, and the whirlwind takes them away as stubble. To whom then will ye liken me, or shall I be equal? says the Holy One. Lift up your eyes on high, and behold. Who has created these [things], bringing out their host by number? He calls them all by name; by the greatness of his might, and strength of power, not one fails" (vv. 18-26).