Tertullian · a new plain-English translation from the original language
Likewise, when he forbids the making of any likeness of things in heaven, on earth, or in the waters, he also shows his reasons — namely, to cut off the very substance of idolatry. For he adds: 'You shall not worship them nor serve them.' As for the bronze serpent, which Moses was later commanded by the Lord to make, that had nothing to do with sanctioning idolatry, but with curing those who were being ravaged by serpents. And I say nothing here of the figure of that remedy. So too the golden cherubim and seraphim, fashioned on the Ark as a plainly simple ornament suited to its furnishing, having reasons entirely different from the condition of idolatry on account of which the making of likenesses is forbidden, cannot be seen as clashing with the law against forbidden images, since they are not caught in that same status of image-making on whose account images are forbidden. We have already spoken of the rational purpose behind the institution of sacrifices — namely, to call people away from idols to God through those very rites — which, when he cast them off again, saying, 'What are your countless sacrifices to me?' he meant precisely this: that he had never demanded them for himself as such. 'I will not drink the blood of bulls,' he says — for elsewhere too he says, 'The eternal God will not hunger nor thirst.' For even though he had regard to Abel's offerings, and gladly smelled the sweet savor of Noah's burnt offerings, what pleasure could there be in the entrails of rams or the reek of burning victims? No — it was the plain, reverent disposition of the ones bringing what had come to them from God in the first place — the food itself and its pleasant aroma — that God reckoned as pleasing to him; not the acts he was demanding for their own sake, but that for the sake of which they were done, namely the honoring of God. If a client, offering a rich man or a king who wants for nothing some tiny, worthless little gift, does so anyway — will the paltriness and poor quality of the gift offend the rich man or the king, or will the gesture of homage please him? But if a client offers gifts freely, or even at command, in due order, and observes the king's high days, yet not out of good faith, nor with a pure heart, nor with wholehearted service in everything else either — will not the king or rich man rightly cry out, 'What are your countless gifts to me? I am full!' — and, 'Your feasts and your holy days and your sabbaths?' By calling them 'yours,' he means: things they had come to celebrate according to their own whim, not according to reverence for God, and had thereby made their own, no longer God's — thus showing that his refusal of what he himself had prescribed to be performed was conditional and reasoned.
23.