Images of Whales

[Miller]

In thinking about images of Christ and discussing this with my wife she looks at Exodus 20:4 and asks what about animals as this commandment mentions things in the water below? I don't know the answer. What am I missing? Why can we make images of Flipper and Shamu?

 

[Me Died Blue]

Another passage that sheds much helpful light on the meaning of the Exodus 20 command is Deuteronomy 4:15-18 (emphasis mine): "Therefore watch yourselves very carefully. Since you saw no form on the day that the Lord spoke to you at Horeb out of the midst of the fire, beware lest you act corruptly by making a carved image for yourselves, in the form of any figure, the likeness of male or female, the likeness of any animal that is on the earth, the likeness of any winged bird that flies in the air, the likeness of anything that creeps on the ground, the likeness of any fish that is in the water under the earth."

Their lack of being shown any physical form of God is given as the specific grounds or reasoning behind the forbidding of images resembling things on this earth, which makes it clear that it is fundamentally forbidding the making of such images as supposed representations of God.