Conclusion: What Scripture Teaches About Idols

Just as, by looking up to heaven and seeing its order and the light of the stars, one can infer the Word who set these things in order, so whoever beholds the Word of God must also behold God his Father. Since the Word comes forth from the Father, he is rightly called his Father’s Interpreter and Messenger. We can see this from our own experience. When a word comes from a person, we infer that the mind is its source, and by thinking about the word we see with our reason the mind that it reveals. In the same way, but with far greater evidence and beyond all comparison, when we see the power of the Word we also come to know his good Father, as the Savior himself says, “Whoever has seen me has seen the Father.” [a]

But all inspired Scripture teaches this too, more plainly and with greater authority. So we in our turn write boldly to you as we do, and you, if you turn to the Scriptures, will be able to check what we say. For an argument confirmed by a higher authority is proved beyond dispute. From the first, then, the divine Word firmly taught the Jewish people that idols were to be done away with, when it said, “You shall not make for yourself a carved image, nor the likeness of anything that is in heaven above or in the earth beneath.” Another writer gives the reason they are to be done away with, saying, “The idols of the nations are silver and gold, the work of human hands. They have a mouth and will not speak; they have eyes and will not see; they have ears and will not hear; they have noses and will not smell; they have hands and will not handle; they have feet and will not walk.”

Nor has the divine Word passed over in silence the teaching about creation. It knows well how beautiful creation is, and so that no one, looking only at this beauty, should worship these things as gods instead of as God’s works, it firmly teaches people beforehand, saying, “And when you look up with your eyes and see the sun and the moon and all the host of heaven, do not go astray and worship them, which the Lord your God has given to all the nations under heaven.” But he gave them, not to be their gods, but so that through them the nations might know, as we have said, God who made them all.

For the Jewish people of old had abundant teaching, since they had the knowledge of God not only from the works of creation but also from the divine Scriptures. And in general, to draw people away from the error and senseless imagining of idols, he says, “You shall have no other gods but me.” He does not forbid them to have other gods as though there were any. He forbids it so that no one should turn away from the true God and begin to make gods for himself out of things that are not, like those whom the poets and writers call gods, though they are none. And the wording itself shows that they are no gods, when it says, “You shall have no other gods,” for this refers only to the future. But what is referred to the future does not exist at the time of speaking.