Ask Pastor Mike Live

Mike Fabarez: All right, let's talk to Ryan now. Ryan, you're on the air with Mike Fabarez. How can I help?

Ryan: Hello, Mike. How are you?

Mike Fabarez: Good.

Ryan: I was going to ask you about idolatry, specifically Leviticus 26:1. I appreciate art—I'm a newer Christian—and I notice some of my Christian friends have either paintings or statues of Christ. I do have a replica of the Christ the Redeemer statue on my patio from Brazil.

I realized I don't pray to it, but I like having those things around. I wonder if that is the wrong comfort to have in that graven image. Is that idolatry or to appreciate it for art? This may be a stupid question.

Mike Fabarez: No, it's not a stupid question. Matter of fact, it's still a debated question. There are some in the great tradition of the Puritans—and I'll call it a great tradition because there are so many great things about it that I'm all for—but when you have what we would call an iconoclastic view, which just meant that after the Reformation, there was this sense of taking down all the idols.

The idols they saw as any statue that was made, and they would quote Leviticus 26 and Exodus 20. They don't want you kissing the ivory feet or the marbled feet of Mary or Joseph or some statue of Jesus. They didn't want a crucifix with Christ hanging on the cross. So they purified the church, thus the name, and they said we're not going to have any of that.

Simplicity in worship. They even started to say, "Take all the instruments out," because in the high church, certainly in Roman Catholicism going back to Beethoven and Bach, we had pipe organs and orchestras and all kinds of instruments. Now it was like, "Nope, we're just going to sing acappella." You saw this pendulum swing back.

I guess the latest of this might be J.I. Packer in a book that was a bestselling medallion-winning book, Knowing God. It's a great book, but he will say, "I don't want any picture of Jesus. I don't want any representation of Jesus." So they'd go to your church and say, "Your cutouts for the kids' flannelgraph stories or whatever the things on the screen trying to teach your kids what Jesus did, you cannot have an image of Christ."

I'm going to say I don't think that's the context of any of what we're reading regarding making these images. We remember Moses got horribly angry when the golden calf was there and they were bowing down to it and they were worshipping. He said you're not going to do that. God does not need some kind of image to worship him.

They would even argue, and if you go into the Semitic ancient Near East, the way that this is probably understood is that the calf was the burdened beast that would carry the deity of Yahweh. They would say, "Well, we're really not worshipping the calf, although he's engaged in our..." All of that was rightly understood as let's get rid of these images in our worship.

But if you look at what's really being said in Exodus 20, it's a lot like the whole discussion of tattoos, tattooing, and cutting yourself for the dead. You have to get the context of that. You want to put a verse on your arm, you can. Even in Exodus 20, when the Ten Commandments are first recorded here, it talks about no likeness that is on earth, anything on the earth, or anything under the earth.

The idea of having an image is really in the context of you're not supposed to have any other God before me. You're not supposed to make a carved image or any likeness of something. Then all of a sudden God creates a worship center and he has these angels over the box where he's going to manifest his glory.

Therefore, I think you probably could catch a fish and you could hang it in your study or in your man cave and you probably wouldn't think twice about it. Well, that's an image of something that swims under the sea and it's under the water. That's specific in Genesis 20. But you're not worshipping the fish on the wall.

Your kids in Sunday school at your church are not worshipping the video that talks about Jesus walking through Galilee and calling the disciples to leave their nets and follow him. Here's my argument for the fact that I don't think you should be offended in your conscience about an image of Christ.

If it's not used in worship, the image of Christ, God himself put Christ in an image. God took the Son and gave him a visible image. Therefore, all the embodiment of Christ, he is himself in-fleshed and encased in flesh. He still is, and we will worship him one day and he will be in flesh. I'm not worshipping our representations of Christ, but if I have a video for my kids, I'm going to be fine with that.

I sit here in an office and I have no depictions of Jesus—well, I take that back. I'm looking at a Rembrandt right over my computer screen. I have him on the storm with the apostles on a piece of canvas. It's not the original. The original was stolen and is lost and they don't know where it is, so I don't have the original. Don't send the FBI to my office.

But here I have the Rembrandt of Jesus on Galilee in the storm. It's a great picture. It encourages me to keep going when the times are tough. I don't worship that picture, but I am encouraged by the picture. I guess I don't have the picture like my grandpa did in his living room of an oil painting of Jesus by the Renaissance painters, but my grandpa never worshipped that.

It's okay. I'm not going to be surrounded by a bunch of images of Christ. I think of Christ as embodied in heaven at the right hand of the Father and my worship goes to him. But the reality is that when I'm teaching as a didactic effort, especially with children or even in my own study, as I look up, I have something to motivate me that reminds me of the earthly incarnate Christ.

I don't think anyone should have a problem with that. J.I. Packer notwithstanding, he's kind of a throwback. He was a professor of the Puritans, so he bought a lot of that. In a very true sense, I'm an iconoclast at heart, as I often say to my colleagues. I don't like a lot of stuff that is somehow associated with worship.

I want it to be clean. I don't want Christ on a cross. I'm not even big on crosses. I don't even like you wearing a cross around your neck necessarily, but I'm not going to tell someone they can't. I'm all about trying to think in our own minds about Christ being crucified by our words.

When Paul spoke to the Galatians, Christ wasn't crucified in Galatia, but he said before whose eyes Christ was crucified in his preaching. That was the point. He was giving them words. When people say we don't even have a cross on your pulpit or behind your pulpit, I'm going to say, "Yeah, but you better hear it preached here every week."

Therefore, I don't need the image, but I'm not opposed to the image. I kind of have an affinity to the Puritans' view on this and I get it because I do know if I go to Rome, which I've been to the Vatican, and I've been to the Middle East several times, I know there's a lot of stumbling over images and I don't like it.

I don't want our worship to be associated with images, but I don't think it's wrong for you or I to have in our office or our study or in our living room some kind of depiction—a woodcut or a canvas oil painting or whatever it is—that depicts Christ as long as it's communicating to us not "come here and worship this image" but "this is the reminder of the incarnate Christ."

A book I would recommend to you which goes into a lot of what—and it's a short book and an easy read—Francis Schaeffer wrote a book called Art and the Bible. It's a great read. I just reread it recently and I just thought it's so good for us to remember, even as I read in my daily Bible reading not long ago, that the things that were done in the tabernacle were done for glory and for beauty.

It even depicted angelic beings and all of that was for glory and for beauty. I love art. I respect good art. I think we should not be shying away from art that depicts biblical scenes or biblical characters or even the mainstay of what our biblical theology is based on: the person of Christ.

But you can go too far and you might visit some old lady in the church and she's got 18 images of Christ around her and she thinks that there's something to it. They become an amulet for her or a good luck charm for her. If you're trusting in the image, you've gone too far. If you can't handle that you're going to be trusting in an image, then don't put any around you. But you and I, I trust, are not trusting in any image. Does that help?

Ryan: It does. Thank you. I'm going to get that book, Art and the Bible. I found it online. Thank you.

Mike Fabarez: It's a good read and it's a short read. You can read it in a couple sittings, no problem. Schaeffer makes the case and it's a good one. There was a Critical Concern series book, too. Schaeffer is just right to the point and I love the way he thinks in this book.

There was a Critical Concern book by Multnomah Press that came out years ago in the '80s or '90s about art and Christianity. That's a generally good topic. I know Moody Publications has put out a couple books recently on art and Christianity. Those are helpful and it's good, but I think Schaeffer is going to stay right within the biblical lines without any kind of flirting with Bob Dylan or whatever. I hope that helps. Okay, thanks Ryan.