Many people today are not struggling so much with the question of whether God exists, but rather with the God they were taught to believe in.
In revisiting the idea of humanity being made in the image of God, I have found it impossible to ignore its biblical counterbalance: the Second Commandment’s warning against making images of God at all. This ancient prohibition speaks with unexpected clarity into our own time—especially for those carrying religious trauma—inviting us to distinguish between the God who is revealed, and the gods we have unconsciously constructed.
One of the most striking features of the biblical story is this tension:
Human beings are made “in the image of God”—and yet we are forbidden to make “images of God”.
The command could hardly be clearer:
“You shall not make for yourself a graven image, or any likeness of anything in heaven above or on the earth beneath…” (Exodus 20:4)
At first glance, this seems puzzling. If we are made in God’s image, why are we so firmly warned not to make images of God at all?
The answer, I think, goes to the very heart of biblical faith—and to many of the distortions of God that still wound people today.
The danger is not images—but projection
The problem is not that human beings are imaginative or visual creatures. Scripture itself is full of imagery, poetry, metaphor, symbol, and story. The problem is projection.
A graven image is not simply a statue or carving. It is something fixed, manageable, reduced—something that allows us to say, “This is what God is like,” and then to stop listening.
Over and over again, the Bible warns against making God in our image—projecting onto God our fears, our violence, our need for control, our tribal loyalties, or our unexamined assumptions.
And when that happens, the results are rarely benign.
When images reveal our nightmares
If you walk around many old churches and cathedrals, especially in Europe, you may notice something curious. On the outside walls—often high up—are grotesque carvings: gargoyles, demons, mocking faces, contorted creatures.
They are not images of God—but they tell us something important about what human beings feared, imagined, and projected.
Throughout history, when people have dared to picture God directly, the images have often turned dark:
• a God obsessed with punishment,
• a God who demands blood,
• a God who sanctions cruelty, exclusion, or holy violence.
These are not revelations of God.
They are reflections of us.
The Second Commandment exists not to limit God, but to protect us from our own capacity to distort God.
Idolatry as misdirected imagination
This is why the biblical critique of idolatry is so fierce. Idolatry is not merely about worshipping the wrong thing; it is about living under a false image.
A false image of God always reshapes human behaviour.
If God is imagined as violent, we will justify violence.
If God is imagined as anxious about purity, we will become anxious and controlling.
If God is imagined as conditional in love, we will learn to withhold love from others—and from ourselves.
The commandment against graven images is, at heart, a commandment against theological harm.
Jesus: the image we are not forbidden to see
And this is where the Christian faith makes its most daring claim.
While the Bible forbids us from making images of God, it also proclaims that God has given us an image—freely, graciously, without coercion.
“He is the image of the invisible God.” (Colossians 1:15)
In Jesus, God does not appear as an idol to be controlled, but as a life to be encountered—a person who walks, listens, touches, heals, challenges, forgives, and suffers. Jesus is not an object to be defined.
Jesus does not show us a God who resembles our worst instincts.
He reveals a God who contradicts them.
Here is a God who refuses violence even when provoked.
A God who exposes rather than reinforces religious hypocrisy.
A God whose power is shown in self-giving love.
This is not projection.
This is revelation.
Why this still matters—deeply
Many people today are not rejecting God.
They are rejecting a graven image they were taught to worship.
An image of God who hates before he loves.
An image of God who demands certainty over compassion.
An image of God who stands against the very people Jesus consistently moved toward.
Seen in this light, the Second Commandment becomes unexpectedly liberating.
It invites us to let go of the God we have constructed—so that we can encounter the God who is revealed.
Living as images, not idol-makers
To be made in the image of God is not to define God, but to reflect God.
And reflection is always dynamic, relational, and responsive. It changes as the light changes. It deepens as love deepens.
Perhaps the deepest obedience to the Second Commandment today is this:
To resist every version of God that looks too much like our fear—and to keep returning to Jesus, who shows us what God is truly like.
There is another form of idolatry that rarely names itself as such: the hunger for strong leaders who promise to solve our problems for us. Again and again, history shows how easily people overlook cruelty, dishonesty, or harm, provided someone appears forceful enough to restore pride, order, or control. Strength is mistaken for wisdom; dominance for leadership; certainty for truth. In such moments, responsibility is quietly surrendered—and a very old kind of graven image is raised again, not in stone, but in power.
This is why Jesus remains such a disturbing figure. He refuses to become the kind of leader people most often want. He does not promise to sort everything out on our behalf, to crush enemies, or to shoulder moral responsibility in place of others. Instead, he calls people back to themselves—to conscience, compassion, truth, and costly love. His authority is not rooted in domination but in integrity; not in spectacle but in faithfulness. In Jesus, God rejects the illusion of control and invites us into a different kind of strength altogether: the courage to live rightly without handing our moral responsibility to another.
A word to those wounded by false images of God
If faith has ever felt frightening, shaming, or suffocating rather than life-giving, you are not alone.
Many people carry religious trauma not because they rejected God, but because the image of God they were given became unbearable. A God who watched constantly. A God easily disappointed. A God who loved conditionally, punished swiftly, or seemed obsessed with conformity rather than compassion.
Some were harmed because of who they are—their identity, their body, their questions, their love.
Others because of what they felt they could never be—certain enough, obedient enough, pure enough, faithful enough.
If any of that resonates, it may help to hear this:
The God who wounded you may not have been God at all—but a graven image shaped by human fear.
The Second Commandment exists for precisely this reason. It recognises how readily we project our anxieties, control, and unresolved shadows onto the divine—and then speak those projections with absolute confidence.
When that happens, faith becomes dangerous.
Jesus consistently exposes these false gods, not through argument, but through the way he is.
He refuses to shame people into transformation.
He does not demand belonging as the reward for conformity.
He meets people where they are—especially those crushed by religion rather than nourished by it.
If you had to step away from faith in order to survive—emotionally, spiritually, or psychologically—that distance may not have been failure, rebellion, or hardness of heart. It may have been discernment. Even obedience to the commandment that forbids us to live under false images of God.
You are not required to go back to the version of God that frightened or diminished you.
You are invited—gently, freely, without pressure—to encounter God as revealed in Jesus: not coercive, not shaming, not threatened by your humanity, your doubt, or your healing.
The true image of God does not ask you to disappear in order to belong.
It restores what was taken.
It honours your dignity.
And it meets you, not where religion said you should be, but where you truly are.
These reflections inevitably raise further questions—especially about power, authority, and what faithfulness looks like in anxious times. If false images of God so easily attach themselves to coercion, certainty, and domination, then Jesus’ refusal of those paths deserves closer attention. He does not merely correct our theology; he challenges our instincts about leadership, strength, and control. That is a conversation I want to return to soon, because the way we imagine power—divine or human—may be one of the most decisive spiritual questions of our age.
Jeremy Marks, 21st January 2026