In Leviticus 26:1, God says to Israel,
You shall not make idols for yourselves or erect an image or pillar, and you shall not set up a figured stone in your land to bow down to it, for I am Yahweh your God.
The phrase “erect a pillar” uses the verb קום (qum), “to raise up.” A few verses later, after detailing the blessings Israel can expect for obedience, God identifies himself as Yahweh their God who freed them from Egypt, and has “broken the bars of your yoke and made you walk erect [קום]” (v. 13).
It seems that one reason Israel should not raise up idols of false gods is because it inverts reality. Israel doesn’t raise up gods; God raises up Israel.[1]
This kind of polemic against idols appears elsewhere in the Old Testament. In Isaiah 46:1-4, the prophet describes the gods of Babylon in this way:
Bel bows down;
Nebo stoops;
their idols are on beasts and livestock;
these things you carry are borne as burdens on weary beasts . . .
Listen to me, O house of Jacob,
all the remnant of the house of Israel,
who have been borne by me from before your birth,
carried from the womb;
even to your old age I am he,
and to gray hairs I will carry you.
I have made, and I will bear;
I will carry and will save.
False gods need to be carried by their worshipers, but Israel’s God carries Israel.
There are other places in the Bible where the same principle appears, where people try to do for themselves what is more properly done for them by God himself. So in Genesis 11:4, the builders of the tower of Babel want to “make a name for themselves,” but God frustrates this purpose and in the next chapter calls Abram, of whom he promises “to make your name great” (Genesis 12:2). Also in 2 Samuel 7:2-3, David has it in mind to build a house for God, and while well-intentioned, God intervenes to tell David that in fact it is he who will build David a house (2 Samuel 7:11). Neither David nor Solomon can outdo God in blessing.
In the New Testament, when Peter thought he had done something special for having “left everything” to follow Jesus, Jesus informs him that those who leave everything for his sake will inherit “a hundredfold” (Matthew 19:29). Peter could not out-give God. The principle even applies to salvation itself, which comes as a gracious gift of justification in Christ from God, and not to those who would seek to establish justification for themselves (Romans 10:2-4).
But why this prohibition in Leviticus against “raising up” images by those who God himself had raised up?
Part of the background here is the original creation account. God created man in his own image, which means that man was created to represent God’s presence in the world, specifically in his function of exercising wise and righteous dominion over the creation. In the larger context of the creation story, the garden of Eden should be seen as the first temple. It was a holy sanctuary (cf. Ezekiel 28:12ff; Revelation 22:1-5), and Adam was to act as its guardian priest (cf. Genesis 2:15 and Numbers 3:8). But while the ancient temples around Israel contained images of the deity, Eden (and the later temple in Jerusalem) was unique in that the “image of God” placed within it was a living image—man himself.
Israel was forbidden to make images of God in large part because God had already made an image of himself in making man. For Israel to “raise up” an image according to their own imagination was a slap in the face to the God who had raised them up already in his own image. Idolatry, in addition to being anti-God, is also anti-human. It denies the dignity of man even as it exchanges the glory of God for something creaturely. In the attempt to establish their own forms of worship according to their imaginations or according to the customs of the nations, Israel would miss the blessings that God was ready to bestow on them, and that they had already received in him, and in consequence they would find themselves degraded and estranged.
There is a lesson here for us today who would neglect God’s own revelation of himself and his will in favor of our own ideas about him.
[1] In Leviticus 26:1, the parallel prohibition is against “setting up a figured stone in your land [לֹ֤א תִתְּנוּ֙ בְּאַרְצְכֶ֔ם] to bow down to it,” because God’s promised blessing is that “I will give peace in the land [וְנָתַתִּ֤י שָׁלוֹם֙ בָּאָ֔רֶץ], and you will lie down” (Leviticus 26:6). What does Israel prefer, to set idols in the land to bow to, or for God to set peace in the land so they can lie down safely?