No true picture of Jesus exists, so the ones artists do make merely reflect the artist’s own image of our Savior rather than what God has sovereignly revealed by his word. An image also cannot truly reflect the deity of Christ , only his humanity, which again serves only to limit our knowledge of Christ Jesus. Believe God and trust him when he forbids images and reveals to us that faith comes by hearing, not by sight.

The second of the Ten Commandments directs us against images. It expressly forbids the use of images in the worship of God. But does this means images such as pictures to help us learn about God are also forbidden?
We must be careful to avoid placing our own wisdom and desires above God’s.
The plain teaching of Scripture forbids the use of visual images in regard to the worship of God:
“You shall not make for yourself a carved image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth.” (Exod. 20:4)
In fact, the Bible also is clear that faith comes by hearing, not by sight:
So faith comes from hearing, and hearing through the word of Christ. (Rom. 10:17)
…for we walk by faith, not by sight. (2 Cor. 5:7)
God has chosen to reveal himself by means of the spoken word.
It is not by the sight of pictures or other visual forms that a person comes to faith, but by God’s appointed means of hearing his word, the gospel message.
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The book’s weight rests on the rational and liturgical moves a pastor should make in commending the Christian faith: for example, sound arguments for the existence of God, solid historical evidence for the resurrection, apologetic training, and a winsome Easter service. These are nonnegotiables, of course. But in my experience, unbelievers are more often won over by a Christian’s good character than by her good arguments.

“Why should I trust a man who lived 2,000 years ago, hung out with social outcasts, and got himself killed?”
“Even if there is a God, I’d be only 40 percent sure he’d communicate with us.”
“Isn’t the resurrection of Jesus just an inspiring concept?”
“What do Christians have against the LGBT+ community?”
As a pastor in one of America’s most educated and least religious states, I often hear these questions. In many cases, the inquirer is a sincere agnostic who wants to know whether the Christian faith is intellectually plausible, ethically just, and morally compassionate. But in many other cases, the questions come from church members.
These people are committed to following Jesus, but they feel the pressure of navigating their faith in an increasingly post-Christian culture. They regularly ask me about issues such as the reliability of Scripture, the problem of evil, and the relationship between Christianity and science.
As a pastor, I want answers too. When I was a young graduate student, my doubts about Christianity prompted me to investigate the rational basis for my faith and eventually to discover it was deeper, richer, and more beautiful than I could’ve imagined. So, like all Christians, I long to commend Christ in all his fullness and splendor to everyone I can.
This is why I find Dayton Hartman and Michael McEwen’s book, The Pastor as Apologist: Restoring Apologetics to the Local Church, so relevant. Their central aim is “to recover an ecclesial approach [to] apologetics where apologetic engagement and Christian philosophy is intertwined with the ministry of the local church and not completely detached from it” (26). This book equips pastors to weave apologetics into their preaching and even into the administration of church programs.
Reclaim Apologetics for the Church
The local church is seldom considered the center of apologetic work. For most, the word “apologist” conjures up a picture of a high-profile Christian intellectual with several academic degrees, a broad reach, and a packed speaking schedule. That’s an image far different from a local pastor in his weekly work of shepherding the flock.
Hartman and McEwen, both pastors, want to shift apologetics back to the local church, and that’s a good thing. After all, the bulk of the work of commending the faith is not done by high-profile speakers but by little-known pastors. The authors write, “There is no spiritual gifting defined as ‘Christian Thinker.’
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What is clear is that the situation now is more extreme than we usually allow ourselves to think and we need to get into the right frame of mind about who our friends and enemies are. As a Reformed guy in a currently independent Reformed congregation I recognize the major Reformed denominations, as a whole, must be regarded as hostile, even as individual people and congregations in them are friendlies. And the people and congregations of rival Protestant streams that hold fast to the common faith of our fathers (and that includes morality as much as theology!) are also friends fighting their own set of hostiles. I have your back, insofar as I can help you. I hope you’ll have mine.

Anglican, Baptist, Lutheran, Methodist, Presbyterian, or Reformed- it doesn’t matter. In 2024, wherever you look in Protestantism it is some variation of the same sad story. Apart from some micro or regional denominational iterations or independent congregations carrying on their respective traditions alone, all the nationwide, legacy denominations are fried or nearly fried, doctrinally and morally speaking. It goes without saying that this is true of the Mainline churches, and has been for decades. I am not primarily thinking of them, but more specifically have their “conservative” cousins in mind- the ones that likely exist because of some previous split with an apostatizing Mainline denomination and that were founded with the explicit intention of conserving the historic teachings and practices of their respective traditions.
I am prompted to make these observations after the latest betrayal of the faith by the bishops of ACNA, which unanimously selected a pro-women’s ordination and race woke archbishop last weekend, despite a significant internal division about the WO issue, and woke batshittery in general, throughout the communion. One observer commented:
“ACNA is unserious about the orthodox faith and traditional Anglicanism. Conservative resurgence is on a ventilator now. But maybe it always was. There are no ACNA based bishops. Knock it off.”
You could swap out ACNA/Anglicanism/bishops with almost any other denomination/tradition/top officers and the statement would be just as true. This is happening everywhere in conservative Protestantism. The Left advances within them inexorably, the conservative wing of leadership talks a big game about standing firm or taking it back, said leadership caves or fights incompetently, the faithful laity and less influential leaders are betrayed. At best, the orthodox might have a good year or two at synod, GA, or whatever, and the lurch seems to be stopped temporarily. But it always resumes because the troublemakers are never rebuked, discipline, or purged. They continue to plot and caucus and manipulate the levers of soft and hard power while the cucked conservatives refuse to sully their hands with such ungentlemanly tactics and box out the few based people in their ranks who would.
Yes, faithful minorities within each denomination hang on no matter how bad it goes. Yes, these churches are not all equally far gone. But the elite apparatus in them all is riddled with regimevangelicals and pretend conservatives that won’t really fight them, and the necessary resources and manpower to reverse the leftward momentum has already been eroded away. They are all of them living on borrowed time. The days of the major “evangelical” bodies in every Protestant stream are numbered. The orthodox parties within them will eventually be brought to heel and made to accept the current heresy, convincing themselves that it was a principled compromise and they will not allow any further drift next time, so that they can sleep at night. Those with more integrity will be driven out by disciplinary action or compelled to withdraw by conscience or disgust as dialogue becomes diktat and orthodox doctrine moves from the standard to just one option in a “big tent” to being proscribed altogether. And then these “conservative,” “confessional,” “traditional,” “Bible-believing” denominations will go full Mainline, joining the family of Regime-approved state denominations before their eventual demographic death.
Is this the end of Protestantism? No, I don’t think so. I believe the future of Protestantism is going to be orthodox believers of various traditions informally partnering and standing together against a hostile culture and a hostile set of state churches. Many congregations have already departed from these failed denominations. Some are going it alone for now. Others have found or formed new networks and alliances. I do not believe independency is any kind of ideal for church polity, but it seems to be an understandable necessity for many congregations in this time. Why join a legacy denomination when every option you have is currently sinking?
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