Of the Ten Commandments
Exodus 20:5. For I the Lord your God, am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children to the third and fourth generation, of them that hate me.
1. I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God.] The first reason why Israel must not worship graven images, is because the Lord is a jealous God (Exodus 34:14). The Lord whose name is Jehovah is a jealous God. Jealousy is taken in a good sense, and so God is jealous for his people. 2. In a bad sense, and so God is jealous of his people.
1. In a good sense, and so God is jealous for his people (Zechariah 1:14). Thus says the Lord, I am jealous for Jerusalem, and for Zion, with a great jealousy. God has a dear affection to his people, they are his Hephsibah or delight (Isaiah 62:4). The apple of his eye (Zechariah 2:8). To express how dear they are to him, and how tender he is of them, Nihil charius pupilla oculi, Drusius. They are his spouse, adorned with the jewels of grace: They lie near to his heart. He is jealous for his spouse, therefore will be avenged on them who go to wrong her (Isaiah 42:13). The Lord shall stir up jealousy like a man of war; he shall roar, he shall prevail against his enemies. What is done to the saints, God takes as done to himself (2 Kings 19:22), and the Lord will undo all them that afflict Zion (Zephaniah 3:19). I will undo all that afflict you. 2. Jealousy is taken in a bad sense, and so God is jealous of his people: And so it is taken in this commandment. I the Lord your God am a jealous God. I am jealous lest you should go after false gods, or worship the true God in a false manner; lest you defile your virgin profession by images. God will have his spouse keep close to him, and not go after other lovers (Hosea 3:3). You shall not be for another man. God cannot bear a rival. Our conjugal love, namely a love joined with adoration, and worship, must be given only to God.
Use 1. Let us give God no just cause to be jealous. A good wife will be so discreet and chaste, as to give her husband no just occasion of jealousy. Let us avoid all sin, especially this sin of idolatry or image worship: It is heinous, after we have entered into a marriage covenant with God, now to prostitute ourselves to an image. Idolatry is spiritual adultery, and God is a jealous God, he will avenge it: Image worship makes God abhor a people (Psalm 78:58). They moved him to jealousy with their graven images. When God heard this, he was wroth, and greatly abhorred Israel. Image worship enrages God (Proverbs 6:34). Jealousy is the rage of a man: It makes God divorce a people (Exodus 32:7). Your people, lo-ammi (Hosea 2:2). Plead with your mother, plead, for she is not my wife (Song of Solomon 8:6). Jealousy is cruel as the grave. As the grave devours men's bodies, so God will devour image worshippers:
Use 2. If God be a jealous God, let it be a word to such whose friends are popish idolaters, and they are hated by their friends, because they are of a different religion, and perhaps they cut off their maintenance from them. O remember God is a jealous God, better move your parents to hatred, than move God to jealousy: Their anger cannot do you so much hurt as God's: If they will not provide for you, God will (Psalm 27:10). When my father and mother forsake me, then the Lord will take me up.
2. The second reason against image worship, Visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children, to the third and fourth generation.] There is a twofold visiting. 1. There is God's visiting in mercy (Genesis 50:25). God will surely visit you. That is, he will bring you into the land of Canaan, the type of heaven. Thus God has visited us with the sun-beams of his favour: He has made us swim in a sea of mercy: This is a happy visitation. 2. There is God's visiting in anger (Jeremiah 5:9). Shall I not visit for these things? That is, God's visiting with the rod; and (Isaiah 10:3). What will you do in the day of visitation? That is, in the day when God shall visit with his judgments. Thus God's visiting is taken here, in this commandment, visiting iniquity, that is, punishing iniquity. Observe here three things.
Observ. 1. That sin makes God visit: Visiting iniquity. Sin is the cause why God visits with sickness, poverty (Psalm 89:31-32). If they break my commandments: Then will I visit their transgression with the rod. Sin twists the cords which pinch us: Sin creates all our troubles: It is the gall in our cup, and the gravel in our bread: Flagitium & flagellum sunt sicut acus & filum. Sin is the Trojan Horse: The Phaeton that sets all on fire: It is the womb of our sorrows, and grave of our comforts. God visits for sin.
Observ. 2. One special sin God visits for, is idolatry and image worship. Visiting the iniquity of the fathers. Most of God's envenomed arrows have been shot among idolaters (Jeremiah 7:12). Go now to my place which was in Shiloh, where I set my name at the first, and see what I did to it. God for Israel's idolatry, suffered their army to be routed, their priests slain, the ark taken captive, and we never read that the ark returned to Shiloh any more. Jerusalem was the most famous metropolis of the world: There was the temple (Psalm 122:4). Where the tribes go up, the tribes of the Lord. Yet for their high places and images, their city was besieged and taken by the Chaldean forces (2 Kings 25:4). When images were set up in Constantinople, the chief seat of the Eastern Empire, this city which was in the eye of the world impregnable, was taken by the Turks, and many cruelly massacred. Then the Turks, in their triumphs, reproached the idolatrous Christians, causing an image or crucifix to be carried through the streets in contempt, and throwing dirt upon it, cried, This is the God of the Christians: Here was God's visitation for their idolatry. God has set special marks of his wrath upon idolaters. At a place called Epoletium there perished by an earthquake 350 persons, while they were offering sacrifice to idols. Idolatry has brought misery upon the Eastern Churches, it removed the golden candlesticks of Asia. This iniquity God visits for.
Observation 3. Idolatrous persons are enemies not only to their own souls, but to their children: visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon their children. As an idolatrous father entails his land of inheritance, so he entails God's anger and curse upon them. A jealous husband finding his wife has stained her integrity, may justly cast off her and her children too, because they are none of his. If the father be a traitor to his prince, no wonder if all the children suffer. God may visit the iniquity of image-worshippers upon their children.
Question: But is it not said, every one shall die for his own sin? The son shall not bear the iniquity of the father? How then does God say, he will visit the iniquity of the fathers upon the children?
Response: Though the son be not damned for his father's sin, yet he may be severely punished (Job 21:19). God lays up his iniquity for his children. That is, God lays up the punishment of his iniquity for his children; the child smarts for the father's sin. Jeroboam thought to have established the kingdom by idolatrous worship, but it brought ruin upon him and all his posterity (1 Kings 14:10). Ahab's idolatry wronged his posterity, they lost the kingdom and were all beheaded (2 Kings 10:7). They took the king's sons, and slew seventy persons. There God visited the [reconstructed: iniquity] of the father upon the children. As a son catches a hereditary disease from his father, the stone or gout; so he catches misery from him, his father's sin ruins him.
Use 1. If so, then how sad is it to be the child of an idolater? It had been sad to have been one of Gehazi's children, who had leprosy entailed upon them (2 Kings 5:27). The leprosy of Naaman shall cleave to you, and to your seed forever. So it is sad to be a child of an idolater, or image-worshipper. His seed are exposed to God's heavy judgments in this life: God visits the iniquity of the fathers upon their children. I think I hear God speak, as (Isaiah 14:21): Prepare slaughter for his children for the iniquity of their fathers.
Use 2. See what a privilege it is to be the children of good parents: the parents are in covenant with God, and God lays up mercy for their posterity (Proverbs 20:7). The just man walks in his integrity, his seed are blessed after him. A religious parent does not procure wrath, but helps to keep off wrath from his child: he seasons his child with religious principles; he prays down a blessing on his child: he is a lodestone, drawing his child to Christ by good counsel and example. O what a privilege it is to be born of godly religious parents! Saint Augustine says, that his mother Monica travelled with greater care and pains for his new birth, than for his natural. Wicked idolaters entail misery on their posterity. God visits the iniquity of the fathers upon their children: but religious parents procure a blessing upon their children. God reserves mercy for their posterity.
3. The third reason against image-worship, of them that hate me.] This is a reason against image-worship, it is hating God: the Papists who worship God by an image, hate God. Image-worship is a pretended love to God, but God interprets it as a hating of him: Quae diligit alienum odit sponsum: she that loves another man, hates her own husband. An image-lover is a God-hater. Idolaters are said to go a whoring from God (Ezekiel 34:15). How can they love God? I shall show that image-worshippers hate God, whatever love they pretend.
1. They who go contrary to God's express will, hate him. God says, you shall not set up any statue, image, picture, to represent me: these things I hate (Deuteronomy 16:22). Neither shall you set up any image which the Lord your God hates. Yet the idolater will set up images and worship them. This God looks upon as a hating of him. How does that child love his father, who does all he can to cross him?
2. They who shut the truth out of doors, hate God. Jephtha proves, that his brethren did hate him, because they laboured to shut him out of his father's house (Judges 11:7). The idolater shuts the truth out of doors: he blots out the Second Commandment: he makes a shape of the invisible God: he brings a lie into God's worship, which is a clear proof he hates God.
3. Idolaters, though they love the false image of God in a picture, yet they hate the true image of God in a believer. They pretend to honor Christ in a crucifix, yet persecute Christ in his members: these hate God.
Use 1. This may confute those who plead for image-worshippers, they are very devout people, they adore images, they set up the crucifix, kiss it, light candles to it: they love God. Indeed, but who shall be judge of their love? God says, they hate him: they give religious adoration to a creature: these hate God, and God hates them: and they shall never live with God, whom he hates: he will never lay such vipers in his bosom: heaven is kept as paradise, with a flaming sword that they shall not enter: and (Deuteronomy 7:10) he repays them that hate him, to their face. God will shoot all his murdering pieces among idolaters: all the plagues and curses in the book of God shall befall the idolater: the Lord repays him that hates him to his face.
Use 2. Let it exhort us all to fly from Romish idolatry; let us not be among God-haters (1 John 5:21). Little children keep yourselves from idols. As you would keep your bodies from adultery, so keep your souls from idolatry. Take heed of images, they are images of jealousy to provoke God to anger: they are damnable: you may as well perish by false devotion, as by real scandal: by image-worship, as drunkenness and whoredom. A man may as well die by poison as pistol: we may as well go to hell by drinking poison in the Romish cup of fornication, as by being pistolled with gross scandalous sins. To conclude, God is a jealous God, no rival; he will visit the iniquity of the fathers upon their children: he will entail a plague upon the posterity of idolaters. He interprets idolaters to be such as hate him. He that is an image-lover, is a God-hater: therefore keep yourselves pure from Romish idolatry: if you love your souls, keep yourselves from idols.
