Exodus Chapter 20 verse 5 Holy Bible

Exodus 20 : 5 Bible Verse Songs

• How He Loves by Passion + Crowder
• You Are God by Nathaniel Bassey
• Jealous by Maverick City Music + Kirk Franklin

Pulpit Commentary

Pulpit CommentaryVerse 5. - Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them. Every outward sign of honour was shown to images in the ancient world. They were not regarded as emblems, but as actual embodiments of deity. There was a special rite in Greece (Theopoea) by means of which the gods were inducted into their statues, and made to take up their abodes in them. Seneca says of the Romans of his own day - "They pray to these images of the gods, implore them on bended knee, sit or stand long days before them, throw them money, and sacrifice beasts to them, so treating them with deep respect, though they despise the man who made them" (Ap. Lact. 2:2). I, the Lord thy God am a jealous God. God "will not give his glory to another" (Isaiah 42:8; Isaiah 48:11), will not suffer a rival near his throne. He is not "jealous." as the Greeks thought (Herod. 7:10, § 5), of mere success, or greatness; but he is very jealous of his own honour, and will not have the respect and reverence, which is his due, bestowed on other beings or on inanimate objects. Compare with the present passage Exodus 34:14; Deuteronomy 4:24; Deuteronomy 5:9; Deuteronomy 6:15; Joshua 24:19; etc. Visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children. Exception has been taken to the plain meaning of this passage by a multitude of writers, who dread the reproach of the sceptic, that the God of the Old Testament is a God careless of justice and bent upon revenge. But neither does society, nor does civil justice itself, regard the visiting of parents' sins upon their children as in all cases unjust. Society by its scorn punishes for their parents' transgressions the illegitimate, the children of criminals, the children - especially the daughters - of adulteresses. Civil justice condemns to forfeiture of their titles and their estates, the innocent children of those executed for treason. God again manifestly does by the laws which obtain in his moral universe, entail on children many consequences of their parents' ill-doing - as the diseases which arise from profligacy or intemperance, the poverty which is the result of idleness or extravagance, the ignorance and evil habits which are the fruit of a neglected education. It is this sort of visitation which is intended here. The children and grandchildren of idolaters would start in life under disadvantages. The vicious lives of their parents would have sown in them the seeds both of physical and moral evil. They would commonly be brought up in wrong courses, have their moral sense early perverted, and so suffer for their parents' faults. It would be difficult for them to rise out of their unhappy condition. Still, "each would bear his own iniquity." Each would "be judged by that he had, not by that he bad not." An all-wise God would, in the final award, make allowance for the disadvantages of birth and inherited disposition, and would assign to each that position to which his own conduct - his struggles, efforts, endeavours after right - entitled him. To say that the threat "applies only to such children as follow the sins of their fathers" Kalisch) is to empty the passage of all force. It applies to all; but the visitation intended consists in temporal disadvantages, not in the final award of happiness or misery.

Ellicott's Commentary

Ellicott's Commentary for English Readers(5) Nor serve them.--The idolatry of the ancient world was, practically, not a mere worship of celestial beings through material representations of them, but an actual culture of the images themselves, which were regarded as possessed of miraculous powers. "I myself," says Arnobius, "not so very long ago, worshipped gods just taken out of the furnace, fresh from the anvil of the smith, ivory, paintings, stumps of trees swathed in bandages; and if I happened to cast my eyes on a polished stone smeared with olive oil, I made reverence to it, as if a power were present therein, and addressed myself in supplication for blessings to the senseless block" (Advers. Gentes, i. 29). "People pray," says Seneca, "to the images of the gods, implore them on bended knees, sit or stand long days before them, throw them money, and sacrifice beasts to them, so treating them with deep respect" (Ap. Lactant., ii. 2).A jealous God.--Not in the sense in which He was regarded as "jealous" by some of the Greeks, who supposed that success or eminence of any kind provoked Him (Herod. iii. 40, 125), but jealous of His own honour, one who will not see "His glory given to another" (Isaiah 42:8; Isaiah 48:11), or allow rivals to dispute His sole and absolute sovereignty. (Comp. Exodus 34:14; Deuteronomy 4:24; Deuteronomy 5:9; Deuteronomy 6:15; Joshua 24:19.) . . .