Feel free to comment below with your own thoughts about each verse and how you will be acting on each thought. Also, if you haven’t yet signed up to receive the notifications of new studies, you can do that today. (The form is at the bottom of the page).

Idols – Day 1

Exodus 20:4-5

You shall not make for yourself an image in the form of anything in Heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the waters below. You shall not bow down to them or worship them, for I The Lord your God am a jealous God …

The Thought

For many people who have been in a traditional church for much of their life, these will be familiar words, but for some modern day Christians they will not. The Lord could not have been clearer in His warning against idols. In fact this commandment from the Lord is just a qualification of the first one, which states You shall have no other gods but Me (Exodus 20:3).

That seems fairly clear, and I’m sure it did to the Israelites when they first heard it, but then the frustrations of life got in the way, and they forgot what God had said. That still happens to many of us today.

In this commandment, the second of the ten in this chapter, God went on to say that the children would be punished for the parents’ sin! That seems a hard statement from the God who loves us, and most of us today recognise that we would avoid anything and everything that could threaten our children. How sad that the Israelites, as we shall see tomorrow, so quickly forgot this instruction from The Lord.

Action

Read the commandments in Exodus 20 and ask yourself how many you have broken. Do not get depressed. God is still a forgiving judge who loves us and came Himself to earth to allow us to be freed from the consequences of sin.

Let us reflect on that fact as we go through the day today, and Thank Jesus for going to the cross for each one of us.

For a full list of online studies available on this site, please click here.

If there is a subject you would like to see on this site, please use the comment section below or drop us an email (there’s a link at the very top of the page). We can’t promise to cover them all, and our studies are usually prepared a month or two in advance, so please be patient.

For a full list of physical resources available through this site, please click here.