You Shall Have No Other Gods

Well, you all may have noticed that Pastor Dave is not here today. He and his family are visiting one of the churches in our presbytery. And so that is where they are this morning. Our sermon today is the second one in a series on the Ten Commandments. Today we're going to take a look at the First Commandment. And what I want for us to do as we look at the First Commandment and think about it Consider your life and if God is the priority in your life. Have you placed someone or something above God? Is God alone the master of your heart, your life, or do you have divided loyalties? And I mean you. The commandments are written in the second person singular, which means it's written to individuals.

When it says, you shall have no other gods before me, he's talking about you having no other gods before him. Now, while the law certainly applies to nations, and we would naturally desire the laws of our nation to reflect the Ten Commandments, the Ten Commandments were given to the people of Israel, but they're addressed to the individuals who are standing there hearing the word of the law proclaimed. read and we look at the Ten Commandments, it is us as individuals, not simply as a nation. Does our nation have other gods before God? Clearly it does. But the question is, do you? Is God the supreme authority in your life, or are you mixing it with other things? If you would, please stand for the reading of God's word and read it with me. It's a short passage.

Then God spoke all these words, saying, I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery. You shall have no other gods before me. This is the word of the Lord. Thanks be to God. You may be seated. Father God, be with us as we study your word. May we obey it, and may we grow from hearing it. In your son's name, amen. So the last time I preached on the Ten Commandments, we dealt with the prologue. And briefly, in the prologue, then the Lord God spoke these words. What did he speak? He said, I am. And this is hearkening back to earlier in Exodus, when Moses sees the burning bush, and he goes up and he talks with the Lord, and then the Lord sends him back to Egypt.

But when Moses goes back, he says, the people are going to ask me who sent me, who's sending you. And the Lord says, tell them I am. None of us are able to say I am because we are not infinite. We are not, we're finite creatures. And so when the Lord says I am, it's a claim to absolute authority. The next thing he says is you're God. which is a reminder that God is a personal God. He's a God who cares for individuals. He's not just saying, I am sent you, but I am your God. So not only is God infinite in overall creation, he's also a personal God who's speaking to you as an individual. The next thing he does is he says that he brought you out of the land of Egypt.

This is really important because then what follows are ten commands to the people. But it's clear that the ten commands, the ten words that God gives, aren't given as some way to achieve righteousness or work your own salvation. Because the salvation has happened. I brought you out of the land of Egypt. The people have been brought out, set free, and now the response to this freedom should be... to live in accordance with the way that God desires, the one who has bought and redeemed his people. That's taught to us through the Ten Commandments. And this idea in Scripture of being brought out of the land of Egypt is not just a physical, historical event. It's a spiritual description. Everyone who has been in bondage to sin, who has been called by God and experienced salvation, They've been given faith. You have been set free from your sin. That is being set free from Egypt. This is a theme that continues through Scripture where Israel and God's people are warned again and again, don't return to Egypt. And that's literally not to return to Egypt, but there's also the idea that Egypt represents sin and death and slavery. And so we aren't to go back to it. And so if you have experienced the freedom of Christ, then as...

We look at these Ten Commandments. These Ten Commandments aren't a way that we somehow try to earn our salvation or earn righteousness with God. But our obedience to the Ten Commandments is predicated on the fact that God has set us free. That he's brought us out of the land of Egypt so that now we respond in faith. We respond in love. We respond with obedience. Sin is bondage. Freedom. is following God's commands. Now, if you look at the Ten Commandments as a whole, there are three ways that people tend to divide them. The way that I am preaching through them and dividing them is the historical Protestant way of dividing them. Now, in Exodus 34, it tells us that the Lord wrote the Ten Commandments.

And that's mentioned three other times in Scripture. So we all know that there are ten commandments. But how you make up the number of the ten, people have different ideas. The Jewish division is what we've read, verses 2 and 3. I am the Lord your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt. You shall have no other gods before me. That is the command. I am the Lord your God is a command in their way of understanding. That it is a command to worship God. I have no problem with breaking it up that way. Calvin says the same thing. Calvin's like, if you want to do it this way, it's six one way, half a dozen the other. The way the Roman Catholic Church does it, and I believe the Lutherans, is different. The Roman Catholic Church puts all three of these together, verses together, and they include the next couple verses about graven image. They put that all into one big commandment.

and sort of bury the part about making graven images. And then what they do is they split open the command to not covet into two different commands. That division I have a lot more of an issue with because I think it is a way to de-emphasize the fact that we should not have graven images. And I think that plays out in their understanding of images and idolatry. But that's the next sermon. So the Ten Commandments are divided into two tables. We just sang a song on the Ten Commandments. And this song is a good song. I've had us sing it last sermon, this sermon. I'll probably have us sing it every time I preach. I want to drill the Ten Commandments into your minds. You should know them. Every Saturday evening as preparation for Sunday morning in family worship, that's what we sing. We sing the Ten Commandments. And then yesterday I was having the kids quiz me.

Just, you know, what's commandment six? See if I can get it fast, right? But we should know the Ten Commandments, right? So that's why I have us sing that song. If you notice, the first section would be the first table of the law. The first commandment is no other gods before me. You shall have no other gods before me. Then you shall have no graven image. The third is you should not take the name of the Lord your God in vain. And the fourth is to honor the Sabbath and keep it holy. So all of these... This first table, their vertical relationship. These commandments are speaking about our relationship towards God. And they have narrowly thinking they deal with today, right? With worship and a worship service. But more broadly speaking, and we'll talk about this later, they actually have to do with all of our life and how we live and think and what we do. The second table, the first commandment is to honor our father and mother.

That would be the fifth commandment, but the first of the second table, right? Honor our father and mother. Do not murder. Do not commit adultery. Do not steal. Do not bear false witness. And do not covet. Now, if we were, and if you're in Sunday school, you heard this. In the New Testament, Jesus is asked, what is the greatest commandment? And Jesus responds by quoting Deuteronomy. This is part of the Shema in Deuteronomy 6. Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might. So he's saying this is the greatest commandment. And what this is is a summary of the first table of the law. And so if you think of it this way, all of the Ten Commandments are summed up in this great command. Love the Lord with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength.

You say, well, that's great, but what does that look like? Well, then the first table opens that up, and it gives us four, it breaks it down in four ways. And then, as I preach on these passages, we're going to break it down even further. But the overall heading is, love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength. The second commandment is like it. And this is, when Jesus says this, he's actually quoting Leviticus. You shall not take vengeance nor bear any grudge against the sons of your people, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself. I am the Lord. So love your neighbor as yourself is the second table. So we have these two broad headings of what the law is, and then each of the Ten Commandments breaks that down for us further. And we've been reading over the last few weeks, we've been reading through the Westminster Larger Catechism.

And what the Westminster Larger Catechism does is it takes each of those commandments that get broken down, it breaks them down even further and says, this is the positive side of what we should do, and this is the negative side. This is the negative command. So our first commandment, the one that we're studying today, you shall have no other gods before me, is negatively commanded to us. You shall not have any of the gods before me. But we can flip that. and say it positively as well. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength. And so in both of these ways, it's the same command, one stated positively towards us, one stated negatively. Now, what does it mean for us to have no other gods before God? The Hebrew is a very earthy language.

What it tells us here is that we should actually have no other gods before God's face. The idea being, we don't want anything blocking us from God. There's nothing that should be getting in between us and God. Nothing that obscures our vision. The second thing is that when God says, you shall have no other gods before me, this is a claim. to exclusivity. This isn't a popular message today. It wasn't a popular message then. God is saying that he is God and that you cannot worship any other God. Now, at first glance, the context of this command may seem somewhat distant and somewhat different from our lives today. You know, I think we probably all have some sort of understanding of Egyptian mythology, right?

And the reason we're being on Egypt is because they're very shortly removed from Egypt. In Egypt's religion, they had over 2,000 deities. And they had major ones and minor ones. The major ones, there's actually a connection between each of the plagues and gods saying, I'm God, not your God. And so each one of the plagues relates to themes and controls that... the Egyptian deities had. But imagine that. Imagine coming out of a culture where you've lived for 400 years, where there are over 2,000 gods worshipped. And you're coming out of that, and there's a god who's saying, I am the Lord your God. And the contrast between one and 2,000. But Egypt isn't unique in this. All of the ancient religions, and cultures that were pagan had many deities. When we move all the way up to Romans, the time of Rome, they would incorporate all these gods in, and the exclusive claims of Christianity, of Christ to being one God, drove the Romans nuts. They actually called Christians atheists because they couldn't comprehend the idea of worshiping one God.

exclusively. So the most simple and the first application is that we shouldn't worship any God other than God of the Bible. Worshiping Zeus, Baal, Moloch, Astra, Allah, Buddha, etc. are direct violations of the first commandment. Now, part of the reason that I think this may seem a little different or foreign is because saturated with statues of gods in the way that we think of paganism. There aren't physical idols and little alcoves with incense burning in all our houses in the way that we think of it, in the context of the way the Egyptians did it, or maybe the Buddhists do it, or the Greek gods. But this command isn't as simple as just saying we shouldn't have Little idol statues or a false god that we worship. Often, even in paganism, they weren't really so stupid as to think that the idol itself was the thing that contained the power. The idol was a representation of their god. And the power was behind the idol that they worshipped. And that if you dishonored the idol, you were dishonoring the god that stood behind it.

So the first way that it's broken, though, is by having some sort of false god. Another way that you break this commandment is by being an atheist. In atheism, not only are you, you're not necessarily putting a god before God, you're removing God. And you're instituting something else complete in his place. And so one of the first, maybe one of the more common ways that our culture violates the first commandment is through atheism. It's through rejection of God as God. Another way that this commandment is violated is pluralism and syncretism. The idea with pluralism is that there are multiple gods, all of which are valid, and there's multiple sources of truth. And you cannot say that the truth of the Bible is superior to someone else's truth. That doesn't work with the first commandment because what God says, is that he is God. There isn't another source of truth. There isn't another valid God that can be worshipped alongside of God or with God but at a slightly lower level. It's exclusive. You're only to worship God. And syncretism, which is another very common thing, is when you have a religion and you just add tenets of other religions. That looks kind of cool.

This looks kind of cool. There's stories in the Old Testament where they fight in the plain and they get defeated. Oh, maybe their gods are gods of the plain. Maybe we'll fight in the hills. Maybe their god's weaker there. And maybe we should add some of the plain god to our religion because he seems powerful over there. And so there's this syncretism where we just want to add different aspects of different gods. or ideas to our worship. But both of these are complete odds with having no other gods before God. They make God one among many. And God is preeminent. He will not share his glory. Examples of this are when we think or when others say that all religions are the same. Or, you know, yeah, we worship different things, but we're all going to go to the same place in the end.

Those ideas are violations of the first commandment, saying that we're all sort of equal. All this is equal. Syncretism can be seen if you have the thought or if you're talking with someone and they say, well, my God would never da-da-da-da-da-da. What they're doing is they're taking what they're thinking and they mix it in with, they supposedly are taking the God of the Bible, perhaps, but they don't think that. What is said there is true, and they want to add in how they feel. And so they're trying to blend these different things. With the many gods that were prevalent, and then we can add in pluralism and syncretism, imagine the anger or the hubris, the pride, that people think when the Israelites say, we have one God. Not one that's equal with your God.

But we have a God who is superior, who's the true God, who's exclusive. See, God demands exclusive love, loyalty, and worship from his people. And this is radically different from the world in which the command was given, and it's radically different from our own world. It's an offensive, exclusive claim, and one which people find offensive. And it's a tension that I imagine you feel today. When you're interacting with your family, with your coworkers, maybe with your friends at school, you often can feel the pressure of believing in a God who commands all worship for himself, and that if you don't worship him, you're going to hell. So when the Bible teaches that homosexuality is a sin, it's not just a preference, and you have family members who claim to be homosexual, or bisexual, or whatever, there's a tension. Because we're saying there's one God, and he's the source of truth. Or divorce, having lots of kids, the nature of men and women, all these areas where the world is attacking the truths of Scripture, we can feel this tension to give in, to not stand on the truth of the one true God, but to want to...

somehow mollycoddle. We want to soften what the word of God teaches. We want to add things. We want to not emphasize the truth of God's word. And in doing so, we're adding and we're obscuring, we're putting things between the one true God and us. We're not loving him with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength. We're adding different things to try and ease the tension that we feel. But to shift on any of the truths of Scripture, to refuse the Bible's teachings, that is, God's commands, and to follow someone else, we no longer have God before us, but we've allowed, or perhaps we've even placed, another God between us and God. Now, the idea of exclusivity is something that I do want to open up a little further, because I think that it is often where Christians fail to keep the first commandment.

And what we'll see is that when we break the first commandment, we've broken all the commandments. And so there's a couple diagnostic questions for us to ask. And the first is, what do you love? What do you love? Remember, hear, O Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is one. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your might, with all your strength. That is... you shall have no other God before me, stated positively. So at any point where we find ourselves loving something more than God, we've broken the first commandment. So what do you love? Ephesians says, for this you know with certainty, that no immoral or impure person or covetous person who is an idolater, right? Covetousness is idolatry.

It's loving. And notice as we go through this, right? We're talking about the Tenth Commandment while we're talking about the First Commandment. Because the Tenth Commandment is tied into the First Commandment. Anyone who's a covetous man, who is an idolater, has no person that is a covetous man or an idolater has an inheritance in the kingdom of Christ and God. So what we see is, if we are covetous and we love... the things of this world, we've become an idolater. We are not having God exclusively reigning over us. We've added in stuff. This is more clearly seen even in the story of the rich young ruler. As he was setting out on a journey, a man came up to him, that's Jesus, and knelt before him and said, good teacher, what shall I do to inherit eternal life? Jesus said to him, why do you call me good? No one is good except God alone. You know the commandments.

And now notice the commandments that Jesus goes through. This is really striking. He says, do not murder, do not commit adultery, do not steal, do not bear false witness, do not defraud, honor your father and mother. So he takes him through the second table of the law. All of the laws dealing with man-to-man interaction. The rich young ruler says, teacher, I have kept all of these things from my youth on up. Jesus looking at him. felt love for him, and they said to him. Now notice, what do you expect? Jesus took him through all the first table, so maybe he's going to now be like, aha, or the second table. He says, look at all these second tables, and the guy says, I keep the second table. So now you sort of expect, well, maybe Jesus is going to now take him through the first table. What does Jesus say? Looking at him, Jesus felt love for him and said to him, one thing you lack, go, sell all you possess, give to the poor.

and you will have treasure in heaven, and come, follow me. But at these words he was saddened, and he went away grieving, for he was one who had owned much property. And in a way, Jesus does take him through the first table, because he says, come, follow me. And so you see Jesus is equating himself to God here, and saying that, all right, now follow the first table of the law. Well, how is he to follow the first table of the law? Well, what he had done is he had material things, his possessions, which were keeping him from making God the sole rule and authority of his life. He wasn't worshiping God. He had added his material things. And so what Jesus is saying is what you need to do is get rid of your stuff. Stop loving your things and follow me. But he refuses. He had a lot of stuff. It was really nice stuff. And it made his life really comfortable.

The rich young ruler was divided. He was trying to serve both God and mammon. He was not perfect. He was not wholehearted. He was a double-minded man. Brothers and sisters, we live very comfortable and very wealthy lives. And while it's not wrong in and of itself, I didn't read you the last verse of this interaction. The last verse says, And Jesus looking around said to his disciples, How hard it will be for those who are wealthy. to enter the kingdom of God. I'm afraid that often our lack of a love for God is tied directly to our wealth and our comfort. These things can be incredibly, incredibly deceitful. Wealth makes us think that we're free and happy when we're enslaved to it. And this isn't tied to a specific dollar amount. You can be poor and have comforts that you will not give up just as much as the wealthiest man in the world. How much of our fear of the future is linked directly to

the disruption of our comforts. Examine your heart. Do you hold your things so precious that you're unwilling to use them in the service of God? Because if you do, you're just like this rich young ruler who is saying wealth is his God. He wants to serve God. He's trying. But he is unwilling to let go of his love of stuff. Timothy warns us, though, that In the last days, men will not just be lovers of stuff, but will be lovers of pleasures rather than lovers of God. So what do you love? Well, do you love God or do you love your pleasure? Paul contrasts those who love pleasure with those who love God. Have you ever considered that your pleasure and the things that you seek to bring about your pleasure are a violation of the first commandment?

What do you go do to relax? You're stressed out at work. You're tired. You've had a long day with the kids. Where do you turn to find relaxation and comfort? That would tell us what we love. That would tell us what are we pursuing. Do we turn towards God or do we turn towards movies, music, sex? What company do you find pleasure in? In Philippians, Paul warns us that our gods can be our bellies. This is connected to this. Our belly being your physical desires, the things that drive you. Well, that could be food, sex, alcohol, medicine. What is enslaving you? What desire just controls you?

You're controlled by your belly, by your physical desires. Then what you've done is you've elevated your belly to be a co-ruler in your life with God. One of the other hard things that we have to ask when we're asking ourselves what we love comes in Luke. Jesus says, if anyone comes to me and does not hate his father, mother, wife, and children, and brothers and sisters, yes, even. Your own life. He cannot be my disciple. It's a weighty passage. This means that we must put God and the things of God above pleasing those closest to us. God has to have first priority in our life. He is not willing to accept second place. He is not, and it's not just second place. He is not willing to have anyone or anything put on a pedestal with him.

We shall not have any other gods before him. So that means, right, as we think about this, what are ways that we might put family and our love of our family co-equal with God and try and blend our worship of God with our love of our family? Well, there's many, many ways. There are ways we may need to offend our family because of what we say, because of the lifestyle that they're living, and we can't condone it. and we have to warn our children because of the lifestyle that members of our family have chosen. It may be that we have conflict with our children because we tell our kids, you may not do this. This is the Lord's Day. We have a church event this day, so you may not go and play with your friends that day because we need to be at Awana or youth group or all these. You see, this is a tension. Are we going to put a priority on worshiping God?

and doing things with our brothers and sisters at church? Or are we going to put a priority on the people around us and what they think is important, whether it's family members or friends? Who are we going to offend? Maybe you're going to be late to a family gathering because you need to be at church. This is really practical. Are we going to skip church to make our mom happy? Don't do it. Don't put your mom and her desires with God. God wants exclusive worship. Thomas Watson says that we make a God out of that which has most of our heart. And so that question, what do we love? Do we love stuff? It's not wrong to have stuff. Do we love pleasure? It's not wrong to have pleasure. God's not a stingy God. The things that I've been talking about, part of the deceitfulness of them is that they're all good things. That they all have a place.

if we give them an inordinate amount of our heart, if we give them an inordinate amount of our time, then they can very easily usurp our love for the Lord. And that we become pursuing these things, which are benefits and things that God adds to us, but they're added to us as we seek first the kingdom of God. Another question for you to ask, a diagnostic question, is what do you trust? When you're scared or you're troubled about what's going to happen today, tomorrow, next week, next month, next year, whether it's in your life or the life of your kids, or you're concerned about your country. Where do you look for comfort and strength? What sustains you? There are many, many things in Scripture that we are tempted to put our trust in. There are many things that the Scripture warns us about that we're tempted to put our trust in. Things that easily ensnare us and pull our attention away from God. Psalm 20.

20 verse 7 says, Some boast in chariots and some in horses. We will boast in the name of the Lord our God. I remember a few years ago, I was scrolling through Facebook, and there was this video, and it was like, Should we be scared of China? And so I click on this link, and I realized it was a Navy ad. And I'm pretty sure it was a Navy ad. And it was like going through what we know. China's capabilities, but then it's like, well, look what America can do. And it's like going through all these ships and the power, and it was like very amazing, like the technology. And I felt myself going, yeah, I live in America. We got this power. This is power, right? And then that verse comes in my head, some trust in chariots, right? It's so easy for us to think we live in the most powerful nation. We're safe and secure.

But the outcome of every battle is determined by the Lord. So don't trust in your government. Don't trust in flesh and strength because those things are meaningless in comparison to the strength of our Lord God. And when we put our trust and hope in those things, guess what we've diminished? We've just added something toward our worship of God. There's something between us and God now. We go on. Unless the Lord builds a house, they labor in vain who build it. Unless the Lord guards the city, the watchmen keep wake in vain. How many of us are putting our trust in our strong right arm? I can work hard, so I can provide. You should work hard. You should provide. But your trust should not be in your physical strength because it can take it from you like that. Again, Matthew 13, 22.

The one on whom seed was sown among the thorns, this is the man who hears the word and the worry of the world and the deceitfulness of wealth chokes out the word and it becomes unfruitful. We've talked about materialism already and do we love it, but do we also trust in it? And this is dangerous in two directions, right? It's dangerous for the person who has wealth and thinks that they're safe and secure because they have it. It's dangerous for the person... who doesn't have wealth and thinks that all their problems are going to be solved if they could only attain it. Both people are putting trust in wealth rather than in God. Pastor Thomas Watson, a Puritan, says that money is dangerous because we think of it as our creator, our redeemer, and our comforter. And that money makes who we are. It gives us prestige. It creates us. It redeems us.

Our insurance policies and our 401k and our savings account protect us against all the bumps in life. So it saves us and it comforts us because we know that we can look to our ease and how many of our desires can be satisfied by this, right? And so it's so easy for us to put trust in money. So what do you love? What do you trust in? Finally, what do you worship? All sin is a violation of the first commandment. Because the first commandment calls us to complete obedience and loyalty to God alone. All sin is a failure to obey God's law or a transgression of it, which means that inherent to every sin is disloyalty to God and a rejection of him. But more positively on the flip side, what this means, broadly speaking, is that all life is to be lived in worship of God. And this is what Paul tells us in the book of Romans.

Therefore, I urge you, brethren, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living and holy sacrifice acceptable to God, which is your spiritual service of worship. And do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind so that you may prove what the will of God is and that which is good and acceptable and perfect. Your entire life is to be lived as a sacrifice to God. God is not satisfied with just a few hours of your time on a Sunday morning. He wants your whole life to be devoted to him and him alone. Your life should be devoted to serving him and to worshiping him. You should conform to him in all things that he has commanded. So I urge you, meditate on the Ten Commandments and understand them. Because if you understand them, you'll know what the will of God is. And you'll know how to interact in your lives and in the situations that come up.

This should make us a little uncomfortable. God commands that we put nothing between him and us. But I do want to say that you should never forget that the Ten Commandments begin with, I am the Lord, your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt. This means that God is personal and he's talking to you. We so often fail in loving God with all our heart, soul, and strength. And when we do, we ought to seek God's mercy and his forgiveness. And if we actually follow the first commandment, you will live a very different life than the rest of this world. And that's a good thing. Holiness is actually being set apart. It's actually not looking like the world. And so I ask you, what do you love? What are you putting your trust in? Do you have some hybrid approach? Like, I trust God, but I have my backup plans. I love God, but I also want to ingratiate myself.

I love God, but I also want to live comfortably. These things aren't compatible. We are to worship God alone. Let's pray.