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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Among their efforts is identifying the men who their members should not vote for if they are nominated for committees or agencies. For instance, one well known Ruling Elder with a well-earned reputation for faithful service to the Lord and the PCA was recently nominated to serve on the Standing Judicial Commission. In one email the leader of the NP wrote that this brother, “is the primary GRN organizer and agitator, the prime organizing voice against CTS and mover of the Nashville statement. He would be, I cannot stress enough, a disaster for the court.”

“Therefore, having this ministry by the mercy of God, we do not lose heart. But we have renounced disgraceful, underhanded ways. We refuse to practice cunning or to tamper with God’s word, but by the open statement of the truth we would commend ourselves to everyone’s conscience in the sight of God.” (2 Corinthians 4:1-2)
It’s been said that politics is like sausage. You don’t want to see it made. Unfortunately, church politics can often be like that as well. This is particularly true when church officers demand secrecy.
On the evening of October 26, I (along with others) was sent a cache of emails exchanged among the leadership of the National Partnership. If you are not familiar with the National Partnership (NP), they are a rather secretive organization operating within the PCA which seeks to shape the denomination according to their vision. For instance, the NP has been enthusiastic in their support of Revoice and other efforts to broaden the doctrinal “tent” of the PCA. You can read a little about the NP Here and Here.
Now, back to the subject at hand. The emails in question run from 2013 to July of this year. They are emails exchanged through a password protected website between the leadership of the National Partnership. They are a window into the political activity of the secretive organization. Why one member of the group decided to make those emails known I do not know. But I was grieved to the heart as I read them. They reveal a level of political maneuvering that can fairly be described as cynical.
Interspersed among the emails is a rather triumphal claim that they, the National Partnership, represent the majority of the PCA. Apart from the party spirit betrayed by such chest beating one must wonder why it is, then, that they must operate under cover of secrecy. I would like to ask any member of the National Partnership if they are troubled by the revelations of non-disclosure agreements that have been employed by churches like Mars Hill? Do they believe it is appropriate to saddle the members of their group with secrecy?
The emails reveal why the NP has had such success in recent years in advancing their agenda. These men are highly organized. Some of them spend hours each week working to influence votes on the presbytery and GA levels. Among their efforts is identifying the men who their members should not vote for if they are nominated for committees or agencies. For instance, one well known Ruling Elder with a well-earned reputation for faithful service to the Lord and the PCA was recently nominated to serve on the Standing Judicial Commission. In one email the leader of the NP wrote that this brother, “is the primary GRN organizer and agitator, the prime organizing voice against CTS and mover of the Nashville statement. He would be, I cannot stress enough, a disaster for the court.”
Not surprisingly, the NP stands in strong opposition to the passage of Overtures 23 and 37 which were approved overwhelmingly at this year’s General Assembly. These clear and necessary overtures are meant to help sessions and presbyteries by providing guidelines for examining the character of candidates for ordination. It goes without saying that the NP’s opposition to these overtures gives insight into their vision for the PCA.
Another troubling feature of these many emails are the number of times the NP’s political leader refers to having “NP representatives” on the various committees and agencies. Please understand the significance of such statements. There is a secretive organization operating within the PCA which has labored to get their “representatives” (those working for NP ends) on PCA committees and agencies. How is this anything other than a party spirit? How is this not divisive? What do the many faithful lay men and women in the PCA think of such strategies? What are we to think of an unaccountable and secretive organization referring to its members as “representatives” of – not the PCA – but of the secretive organization?
Also troubling is the ubiquitous use of terms like “NP churches,” and “NP Presbyteries.” You read that correctly. There are pastors in the PCA who refer to PCA Presbyteries with NP members as “NP Presbyteries.” I wonder what our TE’s and RE’s who do not align with the National Partnership think of the presbytery they faithfully serve as being thought of as belonging to this unaccountable organization? If you understand Presbyterianism this sort of terminology is brazen to say the least. It’s certainly not Presbyterian.
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The resolutions about money, sex, and power aren’t all that surprising, or even probing. This deadly trio, while ruinous, does not represent the deepest sins of the heart. They are manifestations of unbelief and rebellion, but they grow in the soil of “the great evil,” as C.S. Lewis calls it: pride. So, it’s actually this third resolution — the one that many eyes might overlook — that may be the most preceptive and profound, the most searching, the most unexpected and significant of the four: to not talk down churches and pastors.

Ever heard of Elmer Gantry?
If not — or if the name only vaguely rings a bell — then you might, like many today, lack an important bit of context for understanding the origins of the so-called “Billy Graham Rule.”
The choice of the singular “Rule” also may represent two additional misunderstandings. Graham and his three closest ministry associates made four resolutions, not one — and importantly, they did not call them rules (to enforce on others) but resolutions (embraced for their own lives). Graham says it was an “informal understanding among ourselves.”
Just as He Was
In his autobiography, Just as I Am, published in 1997, Graham himself tells the story of the beginning of the now (in)famous “Rule” that bears his name. During a two-week crusade in Modesto, California, in October of 1948, the 29-year-old Graham found himself at a critical juncture.
He had been working as an evangelist for a large and long-established ministry called Youth for Christ. Now, he was beginning to launch out on his own, to begin a new work as an independent evangelist, and he and his team felt the weight of the public scrutiny they’d be under. And they longed not to become, or even appear to be, what characterized some evangelists in the first half of the twentieth century. They heard their share of stories, and personally knew evangelists whose “success” became devastating. Such men slid from one small degree of compromise to the next in their desires for money, power, and illicit sex, all under the cloak of Christian ministry and seeming fruitfulness.
Graham and his team were not the only ones aware of such stories. Twenty years before, in 1927, author Sinclair Lewis (1885–1951) — the “red-haired tornado from the Minnesota wilds,” as H.L. Mencken called him — published the satirical novel Elmer Gantry, dedicated to Mencken, his fellow satirist. The title character was a narcissistic, womanizing evangelist. And the book was as a sensation.
On the one hand, it was banned in Boston and denounced by evangelist Billy Sunday, Graham’s forerunner, as “Satan’s cohort.” On the other, it became the bestselling fiction work of 1927. And this just two years after the 1925 “Scopes monkey trial,” reported on by Mencken, as part of the growing social critique of “fundamentalist” Christianity. (The fictional Gantry would make another pop culture appearance in the 1960 summer film bearing his name, introducing the character, and his notorious lack of character, to yet another generation.)
Hallmark of Integrity
In the fall of 1948, as Graham contemplated leaving the security of a respected and rooted ministry to found his own evangelistic association, he saw an imposing obstacle on the horizon: “the recurring problems many evangelists seemed to have, and . . . the poor image so-called mass evangelism had in the eyes of many people.” Then he adds, “Sinclair Lewis’s fictional character Elmer Gantry unquestionably had given traveling evangelists a bad name” (127).
Importantly, Graham says these resolutions among the four founders “did not mark a radical departure for us; we had always held these principles.” Yet the act of resolving, and doing so together, had purpose and effect. “It did,” he says, “settle in our hearts and minds, once and for all, the determination that integrity would be the hallmark of both our lives and our ministry” (129). (The 500-word section in Graham’s autobiography on the four resolutions is available online at billygraham.org.)
First Up: Money
What, then, were these four resolutions (rather than one rule) that made up the “Modesto Manifesto,” as Graham and his team came to call it?
First, they renounced “the temptation to wring as much money as possible out of an audience.” I’m not aware of any public outcry then or today against this first resolve. Traveling evangelists had little accountability in those days.
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