Tim Keller in Counterfeit Gods:

“There is legitimate guilt that is removed through repentance and restitution, and then there is irremediable guilt. When people say, “I know God forgives me, but I can’t forgive myself,” they mean that they have failed an idol whose approval is more important to them than God’s.”

It comes across somewhat harsh. But I believe Keller is right. Many people, including myself at times, have no intellectual problem accepting God’s grace and forgiveness. But on an emotional level, we remain weighed down with guilt.

If we honestly believe that God’s approval is what matters and that, although we have failed him, he has truly and fully forgiven us, then part of accepting that forgiveness must be forgiving ourselves. If we refuse to forgive ourselves, we must not fully believe that God has forgiven us.

If we continue to wallow in guilt and despair, it must be that there is some other deity in our heart that we believe we need forgiveness from—an idol. But an idol can never forgive.

I see this illustration to be true in my own life. Ridding ourselves of idols doesn’t only mean that God gets all the glory he deserves from us, but it also means we get to live in the joy that comes from fully understanding and accepting what it means to be forgiven and accepted by God.

In the book of Deuteronomy, Moses warns the people not to make an image of any god. But he prefaces it by reminding them that they heard a voice, but they didn’t see anything.

“…watch yourselves very carefully. Since you saw no form on the day that the LORD spoke to you at Horeb out of the midst of the fire, beware lest you act corruptly by making a carved image for yourselves, in the form of any figure, the likeness of male or female, the likeness of any animal that is on the earth, the likeness of any winged bird that flies in the air, the likeness of anything that creeps on the ground, the likeness of any fish that is in the water under the earth.”

The fact that the people saw nothing was the ground Moses used, in this instance, to condemn the making of ‘carved’ images. After all, they did not actually see God, how could they possibly make a carved image of him, unless they filled in a lot of blanks with their own flimsy speculation.

Over the course of generations, that could be tragic. People might begin to neglect the the words they heard from God, and pay more attention to the form they’d created for him from their own minds.

As I read this this morning, it dawned on me that, in a way, we break this commandment quite regularly. Although, not quite in the way that Moses laid it out.

Today, while we have the complete Word of God, much of the church has a habit of going beyond what the scriptures actually say in an attempt to fill in gaps that God intends would remain open.

We have to be careful to remember that—like the Israelites who were permitted to make ‘carved images’ in one sense, they were not allowed to place them in the position of any kind of deity (especially God)—we also are allowed to speculate on spiritual things. We are even allowed to use our best judgments to make decisions and find the right path. But, we’re never allowed to elevate these speculations to the level of authority that the Word of God exclusively holds.