So the king sought advice. Then he made two golden calves, and he said to the people, ‘Going to Jerusalem is too difficult for you. Israel, here are your gods who brought you up from the land of Egypt.’
Isaiah 44:10 - Christian Standard Bible Anglicised Who makes a god or casts a metal image that benefits no one? Tuilleadh leaganachaKing James Version (Oxford) 1769 Who hath formed a god, or molten a graven image that is profitable for nothing? Amplified Bible - Classic Edition Who is [such a fool as] to fashion a god or cast a graven image that is profitable for nothing? American Standard Version (1901) Who hath fashioned a god, or molten an image that is profitable for nothing? Common English Bible Who would form a god or cast an idol that does no good? Catholic Public Domain Version Who has formed a god or cast a molten image, which is useful for nothing? Douay-Rheims version of The Bible - 1752 version Who hath formed a god, and made a graven thing that is profitable for nothing? |
So the king sought advice. Then he made two golden calves, and he said to the people, ‘Going to Jerusalem is too difficult for you. Israel, here are your gods who brought you up from the land of Egypt.’
An idol? #– #something that a smelter casts and a metalworker plates with gold and makes silver chains for?
Look, all of them are a delusion; their works are non-existent; their images are wind and emptiness.
‘Come, gather together, and approach, you fugitives of the nations. Those who carry their wooden idols and pray to a god who cannot save have no knowledge.
Like scarecrows in a cucumber patch, their idols cannot speak. They must be carried because they cannot walk. Do not fear them, for they can do no harm – and they cannot do any good.
Lord, my strength and my stronghold, my refuge in a time of distress, the nations will come to you from the ends of the earth, and they will say, ‘Our ancestors inherited only lies, worthless idols of no benefit at all.’
King Nebuchadnezzar made a gold statue, 27 metres high and 2.7 metres wide. He set it up on the plain of Dura in the province of Babylon.
Nebuchadnezzar asked them, ‘Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, is it true that you don’t serve my gods or worship the gold statue I have set up?
What use is a carved idol after its craftsman carves it? It is only a cast image, a teacher of lies. For the one who crafts its shape trusts in it and makes worthless idols that cannot speak.
You see and hear that not only in Ephesus, but in almost all of Asia, this man Paul has persuaded and misled a considerable number of people by saying that gods made by hand are not gods.
About eating food sacrificed to idols, then, we know that ‘an idol is nothing in the world’, and that ‘there is no God but one’.