Exodus 20:4

II. THE LORD. EALOUS GOD.

4. Thou shalt not make any graven image.

After declaring in the first commandment who was the true God, he commanded that he alone should be worshiped, and now be defines what is his lawful worship. Any sort of image for worship is here intended. The Hebrew word strictly means. carved image, of wood or stone. The Roman Church makes but one commandment of the two first, while in order to keep good the number ten they divide the tenth into two, making the first sentence of that commandment the ninth. The consequence has been that, in many professed disciples of the ten commandments in books of devotion, what we term the second, forbidding idolatry, is entirely omitted. The motive for thus abstracting the second commandment from the decalogue is very easily imagined on the part of. church which gives so much countenance to image worship. Guided solely by the dictates of our erring reason, we might suppose that the aid of bodily sense might be called in to assist our mental vision, and that the use of images, paintings, crucifixes, and other outward symbols, might at least be harmless, if not positively beneficial, in refreshing the memory and quickening our devotions. But God knows the downward and deteriorating tendencies of our nature even in its best estate, and he sees that the employment of outward symbols of worship would gradually tend to lower the stand of pious feeling, and finally to withdraw the mind from the ultimate spiritual object, and fix it upon the gross sensible medium. We have only to look at the history of the Greek and Latin churches for an abundant confirmation of this view of the subject.-- Bush.

Or any likeness of anything that is in heaven.

"That which is in heaven," we are to understand the birds, not the angels, or at the most, according to Deuteronomy 4:19, the stars as well; by "that which is in earth," the cattle, reptiles, and the larger or smaller animals; and by "that which is in the water," fishes and water animals.

Under the earth.

It is important to notice that "under" here means "lower in level," lest the Scriptures be accused of propounding the theory that the interior of our sphere is filled with water. The reference is to the fishes that inhabit the sea.