This is a conversation between Ralph Allison and Charity, a Professor CIE.
Ralph: Thank you for clarifying that. That's number one. Second one: "Do not make for yourselves any images of anything in heaven or on earth, in the water, under the earth, Do not bow down to any idol or worship it. I am the Lord your God and I tolerate no rivals. I bring punishment on those who hate me and unto their descendants down to the third and forth generation. But show my love to thousands of generations of those who love me and obey my laws."
Charity: The Creator would have never said that. The Creator does not punish. The Creator has us to aid him. The Creator is Love and nothing else. Therefore The Creator does not care if you make anything that is an image.
Ralph: These are like statues, what they call idols.
Charity: Do you not have those now in your churches?
Ralph: (Picking up Russian picture on block) This is a very common one in Russia, this type of picture. They have these in their churches all the time.
Charity: But this is not of The Creator.
Ralph: No, that is Mary and the baby Jesus. But I'm saying that's a sample of the kind of art work that they have in the Russian churches we saw, walls and walls of them, Icons. They do this as a regular business.
Charity: The Creator does not care if you do anything like that. The Creator does not care if you make any kind of idols or anything else. The Creator is not a human being and therefore not prone to caring of an image or a picture.
Ralph: Not being a historian, I can't speak for sure about what they were doing in those days. I have the feeling we are talking about how there were lots of groups of people, the Hebrews we are talking about, and they had these statues of the various gods that they had in their region. They were worshiping these statues as ISIS and all the various Egyptian gods, that they had statues of around the pyramids.
Charity: That is was the time that we had tried to take them away from worshiping ourselves, instead of The Creator.
Ralph: This I think is in response to the fact that most of the people in the people at that time were worshiping these gods, god of the sun, gods of this and gods of that, which, as you say, is what they were representing. And so they said, "Don't worship any idols, I am the only one you should worship. I'm not an idol, I'm not a rock, I'm not a carved piece of wood."
Charity: The Creator would not say that.
Ralph: So that's the second commandment, it says basically, "Do not worship any graven images" which is the usual phrase, which means a rock, a carved shape of some god, which is a common practice among the Egyptians
Charity: OK
Ralph: and they were coming out of Egypt at this time.
Charity: We've answered that then.