Then ye shall drive out all the inhabitants of the land from before you, and destroy all their pictures, and destroy all their molten images, and quite pluck down all their high places. Numbers 33:52
Let’s suppose your home was about to be destroyed by a fire, flood or other disaster, and you had only a few minutes to grab personal belongings before fleeing; what would you grab? Most people facing such a situation would seize valuables of various kinds, but almost all would chose to take photo albums and digital records containing pictures of family and past events. All those pictures represent treasured memories that would be impossible to replace if destroyed. Our text speaks of pictures that are to be destroyed, pictures that belonged to the Canaanites whose land is to be taken over by the Israelites. But they are not the same kind of pictures that you and I would place such a high value upon. And they needed to go.
Photography did not exist in ancient times, and artists’ renderings of people and places were rare and expensive. So the pictures named in our text had to be something different from what we use the term for. Experts say the word used in our text refers to stone images that were specifically carved to represent some form of false god that the Canaanites worshipped. They were a direct violation of the Third Commandment: ‘Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them’ Exodus 20:4,5. The Canaanite pictures were some profane artist’s rendering of what he thought his imaginary god looked like. And they were dangerous; because the Israelites did not manage to destroy them all, many of them fell into idolatry and sin that proved a perpetual plague on the nation. Do they have any counterparts today? Yes.
When you and I were saved, God brought us into His royal household with all of its blessings and privileges. And He desired at that time that we would destroy the false gods that occupied our affections in our past life. ‘Mortify therefore your members which are upon the earth; fornication, uncleanness, inordinate affection, evil concupiscence, and covetousness, which is idolatry’…’But now ye also put off all these; anger, wrath, malice, blasphemy, filthy communication out of your mouth’ Colossians 3:5,8. It is not hard to see how these things are destructive to a Christian’s testimony. Yet we all experience a slippage into one or two of these things more often than we realize. Like the Israelites, we have not completely put off the old man with his deeds (Colossians 3:9). So we are in a constant battle with things that we should have destroyed long ago.
The Third Commandment is still in order; we need to obey it to be victorious. – Jim MacIntosh