Imagining God

J.I. Packer known best as the author of Knowing God draws out the second commandment's prohibition against imagining God.

How should we form thoughts of God? Not only can we not imagine him adequately, since he is at every point greater than we can grasp; we dare not trust anything our imagination suggests about him, for the built-in habit of fallen minds is to scale God down. Sin began as a response to the temptation, "You will be like God" (Genesis 3:5), and the effect of our wanting to be on God's level is that we bring him down to ours. This is unrealistic, not to say irreverent, but it is what we all do when imagination is in the saddle.

Hence the second commandment, "You shall not make for yourself a graven image, or any likeness of anything." This forbids, not worshipping many gods (the first commandment covered that), but imagining the true God as like yourself or something lower. God's real attack is on mental images, of which metal images are more truly the consequence than the cause. When Israelites worshipped God under the form of a golden bull-calf, they were using their imagination to conceive him in terms of power without purity; this was their basic sin. And if imagination leads our thoughts about God, we too shall go astray. No statement starting, "This is how I like to think of God" should ever be trusted. An imagined God will always be more or less imaginary and unreal.

Growing in Christ (Wheaton: Crossway, 1994), pp. 243-244 [bold emphasis mine]

Packer goes on to remind us that the only trustworthy images of God are to be found in his revealed Word—the written Word of scripture and the incarnate Word of Jesus. Also, by accepting the presentation of God in scripture as a unity we'll avoid the error of imagining, in Packer's words, "a clash between the presentations of God in different parts of the Old Testament . . . and what we imagine Jesus to have been." (p. 244) I think a lot of contemporary Christian art, music and literature would do well to remember the second commandment when fashioning presentations of the triune God. Books like The Shack might be helpful in some respects, but they also risk introducing ideas about God based more on man's fallen imagination than God's self-disclosure.