John Calvin Commentary Acts 17:29

"Being then the offspring of God, we ought not to think that the Godhead is like unto gold, or silver, or stone, graven by art and device of man." — Acts 17:29 (ASV)

Therefore seeing that. He concludes that God cannot be represented or portrayed by any carved image, since He wills His image to exist in us. For the soul, in which the image of God is properly engraved, cannot be painted; therefore, it is more absurd to attempt to depict God. Now, we see what great injury they do to God who give Him a bodily form, since man’s soul, which scarcely resembles a small spark of the infinite glory of God, cannot be represented by any bodily form.

Furthermore, since it is certain that Paul in this passage inveighs against the common superstition of all the Gentiles, because they sought to worship God under bodily forms, we must uphold this general doctrine: God is falsely and wickedly misrepresented, and His truth is turned into a lie whenever His Majesty is represented by any visible form, as the same Paul teaches in the first chapter to the Romans (Romans 1:23).

And though the idolaters of all times did not lack their excuses and justifications, yet the prophets, not without cause, always raised the same objection against them that Paul now does: that God is made like wood, or stone, or gold, when any image is made to Him of dead and corruptible matter.

The Gentiles used images so that, in their lack of understanding, they might better conceive that God was near to them. But since God far surpasses the capacity of our mind, whoever attempts to comprehend Him with his mind deforms and disfigures His glory with a wicked and false imagination. Therefore, it is wickedness to imagine anything about Him according to our own senses. Again, what is worse, it appears plainly that men erect pictures and images to God for no other reason than because they conceive something carnal about Him, by which He is blasphemed.

The Papists also are today no more excusable. For whatever justifications they invent to excuse those images by which they attempt to represent God, yet because they are enveloped in the same error in which the people of old were entangled, they are pressed by the rebukes of the prophets.

And that the pagans used the same excuses in times past, with which the Papists try to cover themselves today, is well known from their own books. Therefore, the prophets do not escape the mockery of some, as if they accused them of too great a crudeness, indeed, burdened them with false accusations. But when all things are carefully considered, those who will judge rightly will find that whatever evasions even the most clever men have sought, yet they were caught up in this madness: that God is well pleased with the worship performed before images.

Whereas we, with Erasmus, translate it numen, Luke uses [θειον] in the neuter gender for divinity or Godhead. When Paul denies that God is like gold, or silver, or stone, and adds afterward, graven by the skill or invention of man, he excludes both matter and form, and also condemns all human inventions that disfigure the true nature of God.