To whom then will ye liken God? or what likeness will ye compare unto him? Isaiah 40:18
It is a mystery why anyone would bow before a lifeless lump of stone or wood, however artistic it may be. While the pantheon of heathen gods may have had their originals in human beings, heathenism is ultimately nature worship; the various pagan gods either representing or presiding over natural phenomena. For example, Baal was the weather god, Venus was the god of fertility, and Thor was the god of thunder. Still other gods presided over human affairs, such as Mars, the god of war.
War, weather, and fertility have no tangible substance, being circumstances rather than physical beings. Evidently, the deluded devotees of nature thought it necessary to build physical representations of the natural phenomena they worshipped.
The workman melteth a graven image, and the goldsmith spreadeth it over with gold, and casteth silver chains. He that is so impoverished that he hath no oblation chooseth a tree that will not rot; he seeketh unto him a cunning workman to prepare a graven image, that shall not be moved.
Isaiah 40:19-20
What expense was poured into this sore travail! In contrast to these vanities, the prophet Isaiah declares:
To whom then will ye liken God? or what likeness will ye compare unto him? Isaiah 40:18
The God in heaven is a living, Divine being. As such, no earthly likeness can be made to represent His glorious Person. One of the reasons God forbad the construction of images representing Himself was because the true God already has a living, physical form. Isaiah continues to drive the point home by directing us to the physical location where God dwells:
Have ye not known? have ye not heard? hath it not been told you from the beginning? have ye not understood from the foundations of the earth? It is he that sitteth upon the circle of the earth, and the inhabitants thereof are as grasshoppers; that stretcheth out the heavens as a curtain, and spreadeth them out as a tent to dwell in: Isaiah 40:21-22
Traditional idolatry still exists in many parts of the world today. But more subtle idols are worshipped in the form of fashion, riches, and fame. The knowledge that our Creator is very near – enthroned directly above His creation – is a powerful fortification against the insidious disease of idolatry. The wine of Babylon has caused men to look upon their star-spangled canopy as an endless black void. What a different world we might live in if men saw it as a thin barrier between themselves and God, who is declared to be ‘a consuming fire’?
Unfortunately, this realisation will come too late for many. The day fast approaches when every idolater will look up with horror at what he thought was endless space, when ‘the heaven [will be] departed as a scroll when it is rolled together’ (Revelation 6:14). Peering through the rent in the firmament, he will clearly distinguish the form of the sitting Monarch. In bitter anguish, he will view his former gods with disgust, as the prophet details:
In that day a man shall cast his idols of silver, and his idols of gold, which they made each one for himself to worship, to the moles and to the bats; Isaiah 2:20
But it is too late. In despair he will cry ‘to the mountains and rocks, Fall on us, and hide us from the face of him that sitteth on the throne, and from the wrath of the Lamb’ (Revelation 6:16).
Christopher Sparks