Because Christ is one unified Person, you cannot separate His humanity from His deity. You cannot worship His human body without worshipping God the Son, and you cannot depict His human body without attempting to depict God the Son. Therefore, any picture of Jesus is either an idol (an attempt to depict the divine) or a lie (a depiction of a merely human Jesus separated from His divine person).

In our study of Chapter 21, we examined the Regulative Principle of Worship—the biblical rule that we may only worship God in the ways He has explicitly instituted in His Word. This principle is the direct application of the Second Commandment.

While the First Commandment tells us who to worship (God alone), the Second Commandment tells us how to worship Him (without images or human inventions). However, the historical Reformed application of this commandment often shocks modern believers. The Westminster Standards unequivocally forbid the use of any image of God, including physical pictures, statues, and even mental images of Jesus Christ.

To understand why the divines took this firm stance, we must look to the Westminster Larger Catechism (WLC 107–110), the broader Continental Reformed consensus, and root our understanding of worship in the profound Christology of the Confession (WCF 8).

The Catechism teaches that the Second Commandment forbids any representation of any Person of the Trinity, outwardly in art or inwardly in the mind; and that because Christ is a single, indivisible divine Person, any attempt to depict Him either creates an idol of a false god or commits the heresy of dividing His human nature from His divine Person.

The Duties of the Second Commandment (WLC 107–108)

The Second Commandment declares: “Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing… Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them” (Ex. 20:4-5).

Historically, the Roman Catholic Church has argued that this only forbids making images of false gods. But the Larger Catechism (Q. 108) shows that the commandment is much broader. The positive duty required by this commandment is “the receiving, observing, and keeping pure and entire, all such religious worship and ordinances as God hath instituted in his word.”

This profound connection between the Second Commandment and the Regulative Principle of Worship is rooted in how God chose to reveal Himself. Moses explicitly warns the Israelites in Deuteronomy 4:15–18:

15 “Therefore 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, 16 beware lest you act corruptly by making a carved image for yourselves, in the form of any figure, the likeness of male or female, 17 the likeness of any animal that is on the earth, the likeness of any winged bird that flies in the air, 18 the likeness of anything that creeps on the ground, the likeness of any fish that is in the water under the earth.

Notice the logic of Moses’s argument: At Mount Sinai, the people heard God’s voice, but they saw no form. Therefore, they must not create a form. Because God revealed Himself by His Word (to be heard and believed), it is a corruption of His worship to invent an image (to be seen). God regulates His worship and demands that we approach Him on His terms. To introduce an image into worship is to say that God’s ordained means—the Word, the Sacraments, and Prayer—are insufficient, and that we must add a visual aid of our own devising to “help” us worship.

The Heidelberg Catechism

Lest one think this strict prohibition is a theological quirk of the Scottish and English Puritans who wrote the Westminster Standards, it is important to note that this is the universal consensus of the historic Reformed faith. The Dutch and Continental Reformed tradition, represented by the warmly pastoral Heidelberg Catechism (1563), takes the exact same position.

In Question 96, the Heidelberg Catechism asks what God requires in the second commandment, answering: “That we in no way make any image of God, nor worship Him in any other way than He has commanded us in His Word.” Question 97 adds that while creatures may be imaged, “God forbids the making or keeping of any likeness of them, either to worship them or to serve God by them.”

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