![]() The Hebrew word for "jealous" is used in the Torah only in the context of either God or adultery, explains Rabbi Joshua Aaronson of Temple Har Shalom in Park City. The Second Commandment has a harsh tone, but modern-day religious leaders say the phrases "jealous God" and "visiting the iniquity of the father upon the children unto the third and fourth generation" aren't as threatening as they sound. To be superstitious - to wear a certain pair of socks on game day, to have a lucky charm - is to try to manipulate God, she says, instead of saying to God, "Help me hear what you're asking me to do." Superstition is also a way of bowing down to something that isn't God, says Susan Northway, director of the office of religious education for the Catholic Diocese of Salt Lake City. Mwitanti says, but rather that if we put God first we would obey what the pastor believes is the ultimate commandment: to love one another, even if the another is an enemy. That doesn't mean that people who believe in God should be thinking of God all the time, the Rev. Elijah Mwitanti of Our Saviour's Evangelical Lutheran Church in Holladay, "even if it's something that seems inherently good, noble or harmless." For example, he says, "let's say I become so preoccupied with good preaching that all I do is study and study and study, and my entire time is spent on research, preparation and practicing the delivery of the message, and in the process I have no down time with God." "In spite of our delight in defining ourselves as modern, and our tendency to think we possess a sophistication that no people in the past ever had - in spite of these things, we are, on the whole, an idolatrous people - a condition most repugnant to the Lord," he said.Īnything that takes precedence over God becomes an idol, says the Rev. And vacations and sports and power and prestige. "Degrees and letters and titles," he added. Kimball in the 1970s about the ways people abuse the Second Commandment. "Clothes, homes, businesses," wrote the late LDS prophet Spencer W. So many things can be modern-day idols, say religious leaders. You constantly find 'golden calf' moments." Just watch, he says, how people sometimes drive out of church parking lots cutting other people off, just minutes after hearing a sermon about compassion. "In the middle of one of the most important theological events of the Bible, we were messing it up," notes Dan John, former director of the office of religious education at the Salt Lake Catholic Diocese and now a teacher at Juan Diego Catholic High School. It was this apparent lapse into idolatry (along with some Israelite partying) that caused Moses to smash the stone tablets in anger. Even after the Israelites heard the Ten Utterances from the voice of God on Mount Sinai, they fashioned a molten calf out of gold earrings and provided it burnt offerings. In Moses' time, idols were a part of personal and national life. But the punctuation also suggests that it's not the images themselves that are the problem but, rather, the bowing down to them. ![]() ![]() Taken literally, one segment at a time, the commandment seems to imply that no graven images of anything are allowed: no statues of horses, no photos of dolphins or, for that matter, any picture of anything. In its entirety, in the King James Bible, it reads: "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 showing mercy unto thousands of them that love me, and keep my commandments." The idolatry commandment is usually shortened so that it's concise and, frankly, more palatable. Most Protestants, Eastern Orthodox churches and modern-day Jews, on the other hand, separate them into two commandments. By some reckonings, the two commandments are in fact one: Roman Catholics and some Lutherans include the prohibition against idolatry as part of the First Commandment. The First and Second Commandments are the most interrelated of the ten: Don't have any gods before me, God said, and by the way don't make any other images that you worship. Obeying the Second Commandment, they say, is about making sure that nothing in your life is more important than God. And that would be true even if America's current favorite TV show didn't have the word "idol" in the title. Ditto for the words "bow down thyself."īut the second of the Ten Commandments, say leaders of a variety of religious faiths, is always timely. There's nothing like the word "graven" to make a commandment sound irrelevant to your own life.
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