Not So Fine Art
Deuteronomy 27:14-15
“And the Levites shall declare to all the men of Israel in a loud voice: ‘Cursed be the man who makes a carved image or cast metal image, an abomination to the LORD, a thing made by the hands of a craftsman, and sets it up in secret.’ And all the people shall answer and say, ‘Amen.’”
We use the term ‘bad’ as a condemnatory term of moral significance—i.e. ‘Drunkenness is bad for you’ or ‘Nero was a bad man’—yet, we also use that term in an amoral sense, right? We call the dry hamburger a ‘bad meal’ or a poor performance on the ballfield a ‘bad day at the office.’ Yet, the word ‘evil’ isn’t like that. A bad teacher and an evil teacher are two different things entirely. That is, ‘evil’ is only a moral term. We’d never call even the driest hamburger or the worst ballgame or the week-long monsoon evil because that sort of curse word is reserved for darker things. Yet, ‘abomination’ goes even further, doesn’t it? To call something abominable—which God says of many things in Deuteronomy—is to effectively stretch the very limits of human language to its bitter end before it snaps back like a rubber band. That is, an abomination is not just utterly evil, but unutterably so.
Now, we aren’t shocked to read throughout the Old Testament that God denounces things like transvestitism and child sacrifice and cannibalism as abominations, are we? Every sane society believes the same. In fact, you can measure a nation’s health by where it falls on that spectrum. The healthy society calls such acts abominations, an ill one degrades them to crimes, and even more sickly one degrades them to taboos, a terminally ill one degrades them to norms, and a society on its deathbed degrades them to rights. Yet, get this: God also places the crafting and worship of idols in the same hellish chasm! Do we realize that our ability to worship the works of our own hands is that detestable to God? Do we purge the pride in our own hearts before we protest the pride being paraded all around us in our dying nation?
Remember: revival only happens in a nation and in a soul where sin is felt as an abomination to Holiness and dealt with accordingly.