Exodus 20: 4-6: “Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing 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, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me; And shewing mercy unto thousands of them that love me, and keep my commandments.”
The most important commandment comes first and all the other commandments rely on keeping the first commandment. If we don’t believe that there is only One God then nothing else matters, as far as the commandments are concerned. This commandment is often misunderstood and is taken to mean “no idols”. Many idols that people worship, including mammon, are examples of breaking the first commandment rather than breaking the second. This commandment is for those who want to restrict God to something that they can manage. God’s entire creation cannot contain God (see Deut 10: 14, “Behold, the heaven and the heaven of heavens is the LORD’S thy God, the earth also, with all that therein is.” and 1 Kings 8: 27, “Behold, the heaven and the heaven of heavens is the LORD’S thy God, the earth also, with all that therein is.”). However, we often want to restrict God to a size that we can manage, this is breaking the second commandment. We may want to think that our God is small enough to fit into our scheme of things so we assume that He is equivalent to something that we can imagine. When Aaron made the golden calf while Moses was on the mountain, he first broke the second commandment (see Ex 32: 4, “And he received them at their hand, and fashioned it with a graving tool, after he had made it a molten calf: and they said, These be thy gods, O Israel, which brought thee up out of the land of Egypt.”) by suggesting that the calf was the God who had brought them out of the land of Egypt. However, the moment we break the second commandment we begin to substitute the true God for the God that we have made and we break the first commandment as well.
(The view expressed in this blog are my own and should not be taken as inspired in any way.)
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