“You shall not make for yourself an image in the form of anything"

Author: Stephen

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#61
Stephen
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@Mopac
Now you can accuse me of not listening, [ to the stone cold facts that you have produced and highlighted] and you'd be right because I just ignored everything you said ....
Yes I know you did. You are without ears to hear, i'm afraid. My boxed brackets above.                         

Ok to reiterate. 

None of what you have produced above shows me where there are exceptions to the rule as you insist there is. You have simply showed me one persons opinion, a 21st century sculptor & Artist opinion (of all people), who has a vested interest to say what he has. The verses you have produced only reiterate god's command not to make images or bow down to them & other gods. 

And the punishment making "graven images" is violent in the extreme for doing so. Read all of the is commandment and see what a vile jealous god it is that you seem to revere. Look for yourself what happens to anyone who ever breaks this commandment :

20:4 “You shall not make for yourself an image in the form of anything in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the waters below.5 You shall not bow down to them or worship them; for I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God, punishing the children for the sin of the parents to the third and fourth generation .....

 Poor little innocent children didn't stand a chance , did they?

I didn't call Moses stupid , I said moses would have been stupid to defy the commands of his god, as contradictory as they are. 

The facts
You haven't explained why god told Moses NOT to make "Anything Graven" and then told him to make a staff with a graven image of a healing Serpent entwined around it?

The truth.
There are absolutely no biblical exceptions to the making of graven images.

Fact
 You have failed to produce a single piece of evidence that supports a single one your claims.

Advice.
Start with a clean slate and read the scriptures as a history. You will discover that there is a lot more to these scriptures than your teachers will ever want you to know.




#62
Castin
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@Mopac
When I say that these people don't respect scripture, I'm saying that they don't honestly care what the intent and purpose of it is. They don't really care about what it is actually saying, they only pretend to if convenient.
Some truth to that, I'm afraid. But "what it is actually saying" is a matter of such undying debate and interpretation, and biased theists are just as likely to read the best meaning into scripture as biased atheists are the worst. Everyone reads the Bible with a motive.

The interpretation that we are not to make any images, statues, or anything like that is actually very common in a lot of protestant circles, and is contradicted by scripture itself that has, even in the time of Moses, this brass serpent, the 10 commandments which are a graven image on stone, and a container for the 10 commandments that has statues on it. CLEARLY the iconoclast interpretation is off the mark.

It is easy for an artist to take their work as an idol before God, serving their creation. Even today, you see people who make the consumption and geeking out over art the thing that makes life for them. The God of scripture is not a created thing. If you take God as a created thing, you are not really looking at God. The point isn't to destroy all art, it is not to be worshipped. 

The Truth is God. The whole point of scripture is to plant this in the heart. Scripture itself is supposed to be used to make God known, it is not supposed to be taken as an idol before God. 

So sorry if I sound repetitive, but iconoclasm is a heresy. Iconoclasm is destructive towards everything and condemns the iconoclast in the process. 
My conclusion is this passage is the victim of its own poor wording here. "You shall not make images" should never be in a sentence by itself if it's dependent on a condition that's critical to its meaning, like "to worship".

For instance, imagine if someone said, "You shall not make electronics. You shall not power or use electronics." My first interpretation of this would not be "You shall not make electronics to power or use." I would not then consider myself free to make electronics so long as I did not power or use them. Rather, I would consider myself forbidden from making electronics at all.

Leviticus 26 seems to say it more clearly to me:

"Do not make idols or set up an image or a sacred stone for yourselves, and do not place a carved stone in your land to bow down before it. I am the Lord your God."

I concede that passages like this one and numerous others make it clear (to me) that what makes God jealous is worship of the image, not the image itself. My read is that God seems to be okay with images until you start liking them more than him.

Unfortunately, this does not address the underlying problem that jealousy is a primitive and absurd quality to apply to an all-knowing, all-powerful being who is infinitely wise and infinitely good.
#63
Castin
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@Stephen
But saying "you shall not make an image of heaven above or earth beneath or the waters below" still strikes me as a pretty weird and roundabout way of saying "you shall not make idols". 
From your post 48 Castin >  it is exactly as you have put in your post above. It doesn't say   an image OF     heaven it says  IN heaven

"You shall not make for yourself an image in the form of anything in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the waters below.
You shall not bow down to them or worship them."

But let's not get blindsided by semantics, The fact is that on the strict command of this god Moses was told NOT to make graven images of anything above in the skies /heaven  or below on earth. There is absolutely no getting away from this fact. God then goes against his own dictate and commands Moses to make a staff/rod/ pole and to entwine around it a healing Serpent. And they have this staff in their possession for over a thousand years before Hezekiah decides this  gods created and designed Serpent Healing Staff is an abomination and orders its destruction.

Meanwhile, standing inside and outside of the Jerusalem Temple of Solomon the most sacred place on earth (depending on which god you supported),  King Hezekiah of Judah has Graven  images of heavenly beings and two giant engraven statues with wingspans of over 30ft and no one seems to find these images offensive in anyway..at all, no one, not even god or King Hezekiah?

This is not to mention all of the heavenly imagery that adorn the inside of god's own house/temple.
You're right; my mistake. Is there a significant difference between "of heaven" and "in heaven"?

The staff gets destroyed after people start to worship it and Hezekiah gets justifiably freaked out that God will get mad. But I really can't blame them; if it had been saving my tribe's ass from necrotizing venom and degenerative nerve damage for a thousand years I'd probably be throwing my panties at it too.

For instance on Wikipedia you'll find:

"... However, sometimes objects that God instructed to be made were turned into idols by the Israelites. The Book of Numbers contains a narrative in which God instructed Moses to make a bronze snake as part of addressing a plague of venomous snakes that had broken out among the Israelites as a punishment for sin. The bronze snake is mentioned again in 2 Kings 18; however, rather than remaining a memorial of God's providence, it became an idol that the people named and worshiped. Thus the bronze snake was destroyed in King Hezekiah's reforms."

Earlier I read you asking why it suddenly became unacceptable to worship the staff after the Israelites had been doing it for a thousand years. And my answer is I have absolutely no idea. Fair question.
#64
Mopac
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@Castin
The jealousy of God is a poetic way of saying that if a people turn over to vanities and forsake the truth, they are going to suffer for it. Idolatry tends to get passed down to children as well.

The lesson here is to keep it real, not live in fantasy land, which is destructive to yourself, society, and even your children.

Don't be shocked. This must be understood in context that the God worshipped here is not a creates thingg or a fabrication but The Truth itself.



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#65
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@Mopac
The lesson here is to keep it real, not live in fantasy land, which is destructive to yourself, society, and even your children.
Choke cough, splutter splutter cough choke choke, splutter choke splutter cough. Give me ten minutes to clean up my keyboard and monitor.
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#66
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You're right; my mistake. Is there a significant difference between "of heaven" and "in heaven"?
Indeed there is. OF heaven would be exactly what it says and of course if indeed there was also a commandment not to make images OF heaven then this commandment was also broken.

"OF heaven" as you may appreciate would be a map of the stars/the planets, the Moon and the Sun and the movement of the planets etc, i.e the 'heavenly bodies'  that were IN heaven.  And of course  the twelve houses of the Zodiac which the temple in Jerusalem was adorned . 

Any close reading of the scriptures by any novice wouldn't or shouldn't fail to recognise the references to Astronomy and indeed Astrology. Jesus himself mocked the false priests for not understanding what it was they were looking at in the Temple itself. These puppet priests were not fully trained Priests and didn't have the Knowledge of how to interpret what it was they were looking at. But Jesus did.

You see,they along with the disciples hadn't been taught, "the mysteries of  heaven".