In 1995, I had many conversations with Charity, a Professor CIE and my spiritual mentor. Several were on the Ten Commandments and God’s opinions of them. This one is on the one prohibiting the worship of graven images or idols.
Ralph: The second of the Ten Commandments is, “You shall not make yourselves a graven image, or 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 or 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 forth generation of those who hate me, but showing steadfast love to thousands of those who love me and keep my commandments." [Exodus 20:4-6]
Charity: The Creator would have never said that. The Creator does not punish. The Creator has us to aid him. The Creator is Love and nothing else. Therefore The Creator does not care if you make anything that is an image.
Ralph: These are like statues, what they call idols.
Charity: Do you not have those now in your churches?
Ralph: (Picking up Russian picture on a block) This is a very common one in Russia, this type of picture. They have these in their churches all the time.
Charity: But this is not of The Creator.
Ralph: No, that is of Mary and the baby Jesus. But I'm saying that's a sample of the kind of art work that they have in the Russian churches we saw, walls and walls of them. Icons. They do this as a regular business.
Charity: The Creator does not care if you do anything like that. The Creator does not care if you make any kind of idols or anything else. The Creator is not a human being and therefore not prone to caring of an image or a picture.
Ralph: Not being a historian, I can't speak for sure about what they were doing in those days. I have the feeling we are talking about how there were lots of groups of people, the Hebrews we are talking about, and they had these statues of the various gods that they had in their region. They were worshiping these statues as ISIS and all the various Egyptian gods that they had statues of around the pyramids.
Charity: That was the time that we tried to take them away from worshiping ourselves, instead of The Creator.
Ralph: I think this is in response to the fact that most of the people at that time were worshiping these gods, god of the sun, gods of this and gods of that, which, as you say, is what they were representing. And so they said, "Don't worship any idols, I am the only one you should worship. I'm not an idol, I'm not a rock, I'm not a carved piece of wood.”
Charity: The Creator would not say that.
Ralph: So that's the second commandment, it says basically, "Do not worship any graven images" which is the usual phrase, which means a rock, a carved shape of some god, which is a common practice among the Egyptians
Charity: OK
Ralph: They were coming out of Egypt at this time.
Charity: We've answered that then.
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