Exodus 20:4
Exodus 20:44You shall not make for yourself an idol in the form of anything in the heavens above, on the earth below, or in the waters beneath.
JWs read the second commandment as prohibiting the making of any religious image or likeness — full stop. The cross, religious statues, and icons are all condemned as violations. Displaying a representation of Christ or a cross is treated as equivalent to idol worship, regardless of whether the object receives veneration. The Watchtower applies this to reject the cross as a pagan symbol and to condemn all representational religious art.
is the decisive text: Jehovah himself commanded Moses to "make a copper serpent and put it on a pole." Seven hundred years later, Hezekiah destroyed it — not because it was an image but because "the Israelites had been burning incense to it" (). The Watchtower's own Insight on the Scriptures acknowledges this. The same God who gave commanded golden cherubim on the ark (), cherubim woven into the tabernacle curtains (), and a temple filled with carved lions, oxen, and palm trees (1 Kings 6-7). If the second commandment forbade all representational art, the tabernacle would have been the most idolatrous building on earth. The prohibition is on worship-images — objects made to receive veneration — not on representation per se. In , Jesus used the commanded copper serpent as a prophetic type of his own crucifixion: "just as Moses lifted up the serpent."