Visual or Verbal

We live in an age that has replaced the verbal with the visual. We say that seeing is believing and we want to see the evidence. In churches we have followed this pattern and the spoken word is being replaced by drama and movie clips. So what is the problem? Why is it that the second commandment speaks against the visual representation that we may use to help us worship God. Someone said that we cannot worship the right God in the wrong way. God tells us clearly in His Word that He is a spirit and we must worship Him in spirit and in truth.
A few years ago in Thunder Bay we had an historical church tour and our church whose building was built around 1905 was one of the churches on the tour. The Ukrainian Orthodox church was also on the tour not because of it's age but because of its beauty. Inside the church there were many icons and when we asked about these icons we were told that they did not worship these icons as idols but they helped them worship the God behind the icons. So what is the problem? The problem is that God is a spirit and we are not to have any physical representations of Him.
In the Bible we read often about God appearing but never in a form that we could describe. He was in the burning bush but He was not the bush. He was in the Shekinah cloud but was He the cloud? We also read that God spoke or that His Word came to someone.
The Bible does not say that seeing is believing but it does say that we walk by faith and not by sight. John White in his book The Golden Cow says this about evangelism. "(We think) unless I could somehow get him to a meeting where...Unless I could somehow get him to read...Unless I could introduce him to ... What is wrong with my reasoning? It is wrong simply because it reveals that I can only believe an invisible God will work if I can see some visible means by which He will do so."
Remember, seeing is not believing but faith comes by hearing and hearing by the Word of God.