The Second Commandment

"You shall not make for yourself a carved image--

any likeness of anything that is in heaven above,
or that is in the earth beneath,
or that is in the water under the earth;
You shall not bow down to them nor serve them.
For I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God,
visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children
to the third and fourth generations of those who hate Me,
but showing mercy to thousands,
to those who love Me and keep My commandments.

Imagine this.

A man walks into the woods with an axe and spends the morning chopping away at the base of a tree, first on one side, then the other. When the tree finally falls to the ground, he chops off a certain length and takes it back to his workshop, where with hammer and chisel and various carving tools he fashions the wood into a specific shape. Perhaps it is the image of a person, perhaps the form of an earthly creature, perhaps the imagined appearance of an unearthly thing. But once he is satisfied with his handiwork, he takes the carving into his house, sets it in a corner, and bows down to it in worship as his god.

It has eyes that cannot see. Ears that cannot hear. A mouth that cannot speak. Hands that cannot reach down and touch him in response to his petitions and praise. With his own hands he has fashioned for himself a god to which he ascribes the power of a deity, forgetting that he himself cut the tree down from which his god is made. But this was the nature of idol worship in the times and places of those liberated Israelites.

The great God of all that is is not such as those gods. He sees and hears, He knows and speaks, He touches with His own power and presence. He can neither be defined nor confined to the finite limitations of a carving of wood or statue of stone or any other physical representation of His personage, and He did not want His people to try and capture his likeness that way. We are the ones who have been made after the image and likeness of God; we are His representatives here on this terrestrial sphere; we are His physical reflection, fashioned to look like Him and to be like Him.

How could the product of our own hands ever be eternally and immortally more powerful and able than we? That idol will disintegrate with the passage of time, but you can't do away with the One True God.