TUESDAY

SCRIPTURE: Deuteronomy 5:8-9

Do you find golden statues attractive or compelling in any way, perhaps other than their monetary value? Few of us have likely felt a real compulsion to make a golden calf or another physical object of worship, something we would cling to for meaning and purpose. We understand that if we can build it, we probably should not worship it. At least not until it becomes an idea, an assumption, or even a doctrinal understanding.

We sometimes forget that these, too, are things we have crafted in our attempts to make sense of life. We may even become as devoted to a particular idea about God as to the actual God we are trying to describe. Yet even our best descriptions fall short of capturing who God is. Something similar happens when we become more committed to what we think about a spouse, a friend, or even an enemy than to the actual person. Even when we are right, there is always more to someone than our limited ideas can fully express. Good relationships are built on staying focused on the person, not merely on our conclusions about them. When we assume we have someone all figured out, we often stop listening.

The second Commandment is, at least in part, God saying, “Do not think you can figure me out, craft me into a shape, and then place me on a mantelpiece to admire, polish, and control. I am bigger than that. I am not something you can fully capture, but someone you can come to know. Keep listening. Keep learning. I am more than your representation of me.”

• Do we tend to place our trust more in our explanations or in having the right answers, rather than in the love and grace of the God who is far greater than we can explain?

• How comfortable am I with the possibility that I may have gotten some things wrong, or still have more to learn, while resting in the assurance that I am loved by a God of grace? Why?

• How can insisting on being right, or requiring others to agree, become a form of idolatry?

• What can I feel confident and secure in knowing, even as I continue learning and growing?

• How can we focus more fully on the God who invites us to follow Jesus, so that what we already know does not keep us from learning more?

• What invitation do I sense God extending to me today?

Take a few moments to share with God in prayer what is on your heart as you reflect on this passage.

“I have found that nothing is more dangerous to one’s own faith than the work of an apologist. No doctrine of that Faith seems to me so spectral, so unreal as one that I have just successfully defended in a public debate. For a moment, you see, it has seemed to rest on oneself; as a result, when you go away from that debate, it seems no stronger than that weak pillar. That is why we apologists take our lives in our hands and can be saved only by falling back continually from the web of our own arguments, as from our intellectual counters, into the Reality — from Christian apologetics into Christ Himself. That also is why we need one another’s continual help — oremus pro invicem (‘Let us pray for each other’)” C. S. Lewis, “Christian Apologetics,” in God in the Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics, edited by Walter Hooper (Eerdmans, 1970), pp. 102–103.