God is not redundant.
For most of my life, “false god” and “idol” were interchangeable terms, whether I meant them literally, in speaking of biblical history, or metaphorically, of anything that might usurp the supremacy of God in my life. From several years of teaching experience, I can add that my undergraduate students also hear “idol” and equate it to “false god.” Using “idolatry” as a sometimes synonym of “worshiping false gods” has scriptural precedent in the writings of Paul (Col 3:5). No doubt the two concepts are deeply intertwined.
At the same time, the ostensible redundancy in the Ten Commandments (Exodus 20; Deuteronomy 5) always bothered me. “You shall have no other gods before me” was followed by what I took to be its mere repetition: “You shall not make for yourself an idol.”[1] Perhaps you, like me, have wondered at this apparent oddity. It seemed inelegant, not befitting the God who so intricately designed the universe.
Of course, it hardly needs to be said that the mistake was mine, not God’s. The golden calf episode (Exodus 32) illustrates the point. While Moses is on the mountain, the people of Israel request Aaron to make an image for them. Although there are some complexities in the passage, it is evident whom the wayward Israelites are worshiping: “Tomorrow there will be a festival to the Lord” (v. 5)—that is, to YHWH, the God of Israel. (“Lord” in small caps reproduces in print the longstanding tradition among Jews of not orally pronouncing what is written in the text: God’s holy name, YHWH.) At first glance, the prior verse seems to confuse the point, since it records, “These are your gods, Israel …” (v. 4; also v. 8). The Hebrew ’ĕlōhîm is grammatically plural, but most often in the Old Testament its referent is singular; hence the NIV’s footnote: “Or This is your god.” Since Hebrew does not include capitalization, we may plausibly adjust the statement as follows: “This is your God, Israel, who brought you up out of Egypt.” Who brought Israel out of Egypt? YHWH, the one true God. The Israelites are breaking the second commandment, against fashioning an image, but they are not breaking the first commandment, against worshiping other gods.[2] They are worshiping an idol of YHWH.
A distinction between the first and second commandments is not simply an obscure piece of Bible trivia. It can help us read the Old Testament more accurately, and it can teach us about proper worship.
- False Gods and Idols in OT history: When the kingdom divides in two after Solomon’s reign (1 Kings 12), Jeroboam I establishes two golden calves at Bethel and Dan—repeating the idolatrous worship of YHWH of Exodus 32. Across the remainder of 1–2 Kings (as well as in Hosea and Amos), the northern nation is condemned for its devotion to these images. Yet King Ahab is judged much worse than any other Israelite king (1 Kings 21:25), and Jehu receives the softest critique among them (2 Kings 10:31: “not careful to keep the law of the Lord … with all of his heart”). Why? At least part of the reason is that Ahab championed the worship of Baal, while Jehu destroyed it. They were both idolaters, but at least Jehu worshiped the right God.
- False Gods and Idols in contemporary worship: In my “low church” upbringing, we eschewed all the trappings of “formal” or “liturgical” worship. It seemed to me that we could tailor the format of our weekly gatherings however we wanted to meet the congregation’s preferences, so long as we sang about, preached about, and prayed to the right God. Historically, though, most Christians have attended closely to the form as well as to the content of worship, since how we worship very often shapes our theology. In the pithy phrasing of David W. Jones, it is not enough that we “worship the correct God . . . but also, [we] must worship the correct God correctly.”[3] The prohibition against image-worship has immediate application in some parts of the globe. For others, the extended application is to avoid mistaking the mode of worship for the object of worship. If we attend to the pleasantness of a worship service—the style and quality of music, the smoothness of preaching, the beauty of the space, or the technology—and its effectiveness in filling a sanctuary to the exclusion of the truths it proclaims and the habits it cultivates, we risk “worship[ing] and serv[ing] created things rather than the Creator—who is forever praised. Amen” (Rom 1:25).
Timothy Gabrielson is assistant professor of biblical studies at Sterling College in Kansas and an academic tutor for the BibleMesh Institute.
[1] I should add that traditions enumerate the Ten Commandments differently, with Roman Catholics, Lutherans, and Jews combining these two statements into one command. Most Protestants, as well as Orthodox, see these as commandments one and two, respectively, which I follow here.
[2] Or at least their violation of the second commandment is primary. I mentioned that there are complexities in the passage, and the fact that “these” is plural (not the singular “this”) would seem to incline toward “gods.” The vast majority of the time, ’ĕlōhîm with a plural verb, adjective, or pronoun indicates many deities. So it could be that their mistake is worshiping a pantheon of gods with YHWH at its head. But the fact that it is a single idol indicates they are worshiping a single divinity, and in rare cases, ’ĕlōhîm, meaning one “God,” is paired with grammatically plural words even when the sense of the whole is singular (as in Abraham’s speech in Gen 20:13: “And when God [’ĕlōhîm] had me wander [plural verb] …”). Most importantly, the book of Nehemiah understands the golden calf to represent one entity; when this same account is narrated there, it switches from “these” (Exodus) to “This is your g/God …” (Neh 9:18).
[3] Jones, An Introduction to Biblical Ethics (Nashville: B&H Academic, 2013), 148–49.