The Face We Have Not Seen

Pictures of Jesus are everywhere. They hang in Sunday school classrooms, fill stained-glass windows, and appear all over the place around Christmas and Easter. Many Christians have never thought to question them. Yet the question is worth asking, because Scripture speaks to it directly.

The Second Commandment: No Image of the True God

The Hebrew word behind “graven image” in Exodus 20:4 is pesel, a carved or crafted image. It must be noted that the commandment leaves the word unqualified. It does not say “you shall not make a pesel of other gods.” The ban is on the object itself. Deuteronomy 4 makes the reasoning explicit: Israel “saw no form” at Horeb, and so they must make no form. The logic only works if the danger is imaging Israel’s own God.

Scripture afterward gives us three examples of images made for the true God without His command. Each was an attempt to worship the right God in the wrong way. Aaron made the golden calf and proclaimed “a feast to the LORD” (Exod. 32:5). Jeroboam set up his calves at Bethel and Dan with the same words, and his sin followed the northern kingdom for generations (1 Kgs. 12:28). Micah’s mother dedicated her silver “to the LORD” to make a pesel, and Micah was confident that “the LORD will do me good” (Judg. 17:3, 13). Each was made for the true God of Israel, and each was condemned by Him. Scripture gives us no command to make an image of God and no example of one being made rightly, whether for worship or otherwise.

The Third Commandment: A Dilemma

A picture of Jesus claims to represent God the Son. If we worship the image, we violate the second commandment. If we treat it as an ordinary representation, we now have to ask whether we are taking the Lord’s name “for emptiness.” To treat the name of the Lord as common is to violate the third commandment.

Some answer that we can respect an image without worshiping it, the way we handle a Bible with care. But this proves the opposite. We do worship when we read the Scriptures, because God authored them and appointed them as the means by which He speaks (Matt. 22:31). Since an image has no divine authority, treating it as though it has some special religious significance creates the very problem the commandments are meant to prevent. The image must therefore be treated as common—and in treating an image of God as common, we violate the third commandment.

The Ninth Commandment: False Witness

Scripture records nothing about what Jesus looked like, save that Isaiah tells us there was no beauty in His appearance that would cause us to desire Him (Isa. 53:2). The apostles saw His face, touched Him, and ate with Him, and yet they left no description of His appearance. This silence is striking when we consider that the first-century Roman world was full of realistic portraits, busts, and coins. The means to preserve a likeness were readily available, yet the apostles gave the church no physical representation of Christ. Every picture of Christ is therefore an invention. To present an invented face as the face of the Son of God is to bear false witness about Him, similar to showing a photograph of a random woman as a picture of your wife.

The Christological Problem

A picture can only depict a human form. So an image of Christ must either claim to depict His divine nature, which cannot be contained in any image, or depict His humanity alone, separated from His divinity. The first is impossible, since Christ’s divine nature cannot be represented by an image. The second effectively separates His humanity from His divinity and therefore divides the person of Christ. This is the error of Nestorianism, the fifth-century teaching associated with Nestorius, which separated Christ’s two natures so sharply that He became two persons rather than one. The church condemned it at the Council of Ephesus (431) and guarded against it at Chalcedon (451), which confessed Christ as one person in two natures. John Murray pressed this point in his essay “Pictures of Christ,” and it has never been adequately answered.

“Books of the Illiterate” Teach Only Error

Pope Gregory the Great defended images by claiming that in them “the unlearned can see what they ought to follow [and] even those who knew no letters could read.” Images soon became known as the books of the illiterate. The problem with calling images ‘books of the illiterate’ is that books can teach either truth or error. Calvin acknowledged the comparison but argued that these books can only teach error (Institutes 1.11.5–7). Habakkuk had already described the graven image as a ‘teacher of lies’ (Hab. 2:18). The Heidelberg Catechism makes the same basic point from another direction: we must not be ‘wiser than God,’ who has chosen to teach His people through His Word. In short, why look to uninspired “books” which can, and often do, error, when we have been given an inspired and infallible book containing the very words of God?

The Witness of the Early Church

The first three centuries of the church provide little evidence that images were used as objects of Christian worship, and the Fathers who addressed the practice spoke against it. Clement and Origen insisted that God is honored in the soul, not in crafted objects. The Council of Elvira (c. 306) ruled that pictures should not be placed in churches, and the reasoning is explicit: “lest what is worshipped and adored be depicted on the walls.” Eusebius refused Constantia’s request for an image of Christ. Epiphanius tore down a church curtain bearing a painted figure. Augustine said those who sought Christ on painted walls had gone astray.

This does not mean no Christian made images. The paintings at Dura-Europos (c. 240s) and in the Roman catacombs show that some did. They began as attempts to honor both Christ and the Christian martyrs, but even this use would prove to be the germ from which all later image controversy would grow. What began as a seed of illustration and honor grew into the veneration defended at the Second Council of Nicaea, where the image and the prototype became indistinguishable in the mind of the worshiper. This demonstrates the wisdom of God in forbidding images, even those made with the best of intentions.

A Word on Nativity Scenes

As Advent approaches, this question becomes very practical. Many Christians who would never hang a crucifix in their living room will set out a nativity scene without a second thought. Yet the figure in the manger is meant to be Jesus. It is an image of the incarnate Son of God, and every argument above applies to it. That He is depicted as an infant does not change who He is. The child in Bethlehem was no less the eternal Word than the Christ on the cross. Out of all the seasons of the year, it is fitting that the one devoted to the incarnation be the one where we are most careful not to misrepresent it. Families can still tell the story of His birth with joy: read Luke 2 aloud, sing the great hymns of the incarnation, and let the Word do what the figurine cannot: accurately portray Jesus Christ.

Seeing Him in the Word

Paul reminds the Galatians that “before your eyes Jesus Christ was publicly portrayed as crucified” (Gal. 3:1). The Galatians were not present at Golgotha, and no painter had visited them. Christ was portrayed before their eyes by preaching. This is why to hear faithful preaching is to hear the voice of Christ Himself (see here). This is how the church sees Christ. We behold “the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ” (2 Cor. 4:6), and “beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image” (2 Cor. 3:18).

This is the sight that belongs to faith. “Faith comes from hearing, and hearing through the word of Christ” (Rom. 10:17). Jesus Himself pronounced a blessing on “those who have not seen and yet have believed” (John 20:29), and Peter writes to believers who love Him “though you have not seen him” (1 Pet. 1:8). Like Moses, we endure “as seeing him who is invisible” (Heb. 11:27). A painted face does not add to this sight. It competes with it, putting a picture of man’s making where God has put His Word.

The Images God Gave

God did not leave His people without a visible image of Christ either. He gave one. The apostles handed down the Word and the sacraments, not a portrait. At the Table, Christ Himself appointed a visible image of His body and blood, saying, “Do this in remembrance of me.” In it we “proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes” (1 Cor. 11:26). Augustine called the sacrament a visible word. In the Word we hear the gospel, and in the Supper we see the gospel. The Heidelberg Catechism captures this comfort: “as surely as I see with my eyes the bread of the Lord broken for me and the cup given to me, so surely His body was offered and broken for me” (Q. 75).

Notice the difference between the image Christ gave and every image made by man. The Supper does not attempt to show us what Jesus looked like. It shows us what He did, and it shows us what He gives. It is not a likeness to be looked at but a meal to be received. Nor is it the invention of an artist; it is the institution of Christ Himself, joined to His promise. Any image we add is something Christ did not command. It is our own attempt to supplement what He has already given.

Answering Some Common Objections

“The Incarnation made God visible.” It did, but seeing Him did not authorize depicting Him. The apostles who saw Him most clearly made no physical image of Him. Why would we who have not seen Him?

“God commanded the cherubim and the bronze serpent to be made.” He commanded images of creatures, never of Himself. And when Israel began burning incense to the bronze serpent, Hezekiah broke it in pieces (2 Kgs. 18:4). Even an image God commanded became a snare, thus proving the point of the dangers of images.

“This is a matter of Christian liberty.” Liberty only applies where God has not spoken. Here He has both positively and negatively spoken by forbidding images of Himself and rejecting attempts to create them in Scripture.

“We don’t worship it.” Then we are left with the dilemma of the third commandment. If it represents God, you should worship it, lest you take His name in vain.

“This is just hostility toward art.” It is not. Many of the Reformers loved beauty. Zwingli was an accomplished musician whose lifelong love of music makes it difficult to interpret his opposition to images as a general hostility toward art (see here). The question was never whether art is beautiful or valuable, but whether we may represent God where He has not represented Himself.

Conclusion

It would be easy to hear all of this as loss, as though God were taking harmless things away from His people. But the opposite is true. When the church is content with what God has given and does not reach for what He has withheld, she is blessed and protected.

Scripture repeatedly warns against approaching the right God by a method He did not command. Aaron’s calf and Jeroboam’s calves were both presented in the name of the LORD (Exod. 32:5; 1 Kgs. 12:28). Micah’s image was consecrated to the LORD (Judg. 17:3). Nadab and Abihu offered “unauthorized fire before the LORD, which he had not commanded them,” and fire came out from the LORD and consumed them (Lev. 10:1–2). King Uzziah entered the temple to burn incense, a task God had given only to the priests, and was struck with leprosy (2 Chr. 26:16–21). None of them set out to serve another god. Each sought the true God by a way of his own devising. God’s commands guard us from that same error.

Additionally, Christ has given us more direction for the New Covenant worship. What Christ has commanded is more than enough, for in it He has given us Himself, not merely a picture of Himself.

Every Lord’s Day, Christ is set before His people. He is portrayed in the preaching of His Word as surely as He was before the Galatians. He is seen at His Table in bread broken and wine poured out. He is present by His Spirit among a gathered people who are being transformed into His image from one degree of glory to another. This is where Christ has promised to meet us: not in a gallery, but in His church, through Word and sacrament. So go to church. Sit under the preaching of the Word. Come to the Table. Those who have not seen and yet believe are blessed, and one day that faith will become sight. “We shall see him as he is” (1 John 3:2). Until then, we have been given everything we need to see Him now.