The First Commandment

This morning, we're continuing our look at the ten commandments. Before we do, perhaps by way of context, I just want to explain that as we look at this first commandment, we'll see that we find this on what is called the first tablet. Remember the story of Moses and the Exodus? God asked Moses to come up to Mount Sinai where He would give His law to Moses and the people, and Moses came down with two stone tablets. This first command, we find on the first tablet.

Now there's some debate on this, but generally, we see that the ten commandments are divided into two parts. They are commandments that are directed towards our relationship with God. And then there is a second half, or a second part, that is related to our relationship with one another. The first four commandments are generally understood to have been put on the first tablet, and they relate to how we correspond with God, how we interact with God, how we see ourselves in relation to God. Then commandments five through to ten are part of the second tablet.

And so this morning, I just want to say that as we investigate the first command, we have to see it as part of the first four commandments as they are speaking about our relationship with God and God's relationship with us. In his fascinating book called Modes of Faith, Theodore Ziolkovsky, that's a big name, Ziolkovsky, reviews the lives of several nineteenth century European writers who had all lost their faith in God. As you know, during the eighteen hundreds, there was a strong movement away from the institutionalised church, the organised church. And it was the time of the enlightenment, of Darwinism, of, you know, science replacing religion. And these men were people living in their times, so to speak.

And this author, Ziolkovsky, traces their movement into liberalism and their strong push towards atheism. Now what the author finds is this: that whilst these authors had dismissed the God of the Bible, the God that they had grown up hearing about, ironically, Ziolkovsky, looking at their lives, found that they just attached themselves to another god. A god who soon took the place of the God that they had moved away from. He found the motives for their embracing, and remember, these are very well regarded and you'll know some of their names, very well regarded authors. H.G. Wells, for example, who wrote very instrumental, very moving books of that time.

He found the motives for this embracing of the so-called secular or non-religious movement was actually just a replacing of a new mode of faith. So these authors talked about art in the same way one would talk about God. They talked about travel to such an extent that it was escapism. It was travel that was boundless. They talked about socialism.

They talked about politicised myth and the hope for a utopian society. H.G. Wells. These writers, some of whom you would have heard of, didn't suddenly believe in nothing upon losing their faith. They found a surrogate faith to replace God. The first commandment this morning, on the first tablet, talking about our relationship with God, we see that God writes this. Let's open to Exodus 20. God has this to say, the first commandment on the first tablet.

Let's start at verse one. 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. Now, we are going to, as we investigate this passage, we're going to look at the first commandment in two ways. Firstly, we're going to see the negative, or the prohibition of this command, and then we're going to see the positive directive of this command.

We're going to look at two sides of the same coin. The first thing we see is God prohibiting something. What does He say? You shall have no other gods before Me. The verse in Hebrew is emphatic, putting the word no right at the start.

No other gods shall you have before Me. Remember, it's God Himself speaking and He makes it clear that there is absolutely no room for other contenders in His kingdom. You shall have no other gods is the same language used here as the holy Scripture uses when talking about man and woman and marriage. You shall have no other husband. You shall have no other wife but your one wife, your one husband.

It's the same structure. It is the same word and it's couched in the same covenant language. As a husband and a wife covenant to be together, so God covenants with Israel and Israel covenants with God. God will have no other people and Israel is to have no other God. When God says, You shall have no other gods before Me, He doesn't mean that I am to be first on the pecking order.

You know, before Me, don't have any other gods. After Me, that's fine. What God is saying, and the language might be a little bit unclear in English, but He's saying, in My presence, in front of Me, you shall have no gods. Now, if you understand God as the omnipresent, omniscient God, the God who is unchangeable and everywhere and knows all things, it is impossible to have gods that aren't before Him. He is everywhere.

It means no gods. You cannot hide these gods. This command then firstly means that we should worship and we should acknowledge God as God, God as our only God. Now we may say, I've never prayed to Allah.

So this command is fairly easy. We may say, I don't have a statue of a Buddha in my Zen garden where I charge my crystals. So the first commandment is fairly easy to uphold. I don't pray to other gods. I don't worship other gods. But we know that there is something very significant being commanded here, don't we?

The first commandment is dealing with the problem of the human heart that has existed in every single generation, at every life stage, and it comes down to this concept: divided loyalty. Divided loyalty. It's a part that may in some way perhaps mentally affirm that God is indeed there. We have grown up with God. We acknowledge that it is good for us to be in church on Sundays.

It is good for us to pray. But we also have that part where we walk a fine line with agreement with an unbelieving world. We want simultaneously to say that we are on the Lord's side whilst we also know that we walk on the world side. This divided loyalty rears its head in all sorts of different ways. Today, we can hear Christians even saying things like, our rationality and our judgment sometimes needs to correct the misconceptions of the Bible, which after all is a very old book written by ancient people about the way they perceived God.

And so our sense of propriety and judgment today stands to correct what was written then. But the truth is we either worship God as He reveals Himself or we don't worship God at all. We either worship God as He is or we don't worship God at all. Pastor and author Mark Dever writes a story of him at theological college. And part of his training was that they would go and take part in lectures of doctoral students who would give lectures on their doctoral work.

And he says in one of these lectures, a person doing their speech was given the opportunity to have interaction with other students. And Dever writes that he made a statement about a doctoral seminar regarding God. It was a doctorate in theology. And Mark Dever made a statement, and then Bill, a fellow student, responded politely but firmly to him that he liked to think of God a little bit differently than Dever did. For several minutes, Dever says, Bill painted a picture for us of a friendly deity.

He liked to think of God as being wise but not meddling, compassionate but never overpowering, ever so resourceful but never interrupting. This, said Bill in conclusion, is how he liked to think about God. And Mark replied, Thank you, Bill, for telling us so much about yourself, but we are here today to study about God. Worshipping other gods.

The first commandment God gives to His people does not necessarily mean the worship of Allah and Buddha to the exclusion of God. It also means we worship a God, a power, a force, a philosophy, an idol created in our image. A god who really is ourselves. This conversation between two Bible college students showed the outcome of divided loyalty and it presses against us what it means to obey the first commandment, that we are to worship God as He has revealed Himself fully, wholeheartedly and with abandon. The breaking of the first commandment is often a death of a thousand cuts.

This is the sinister thing about this. It is a death of a thousand cuts, a little diversion just every now and then. But after a while, our actions will betray our true divided affections for God. Some of us sitting here this morning may have been drunk last night. Some of us sitting here this morning may have said we know all about who God is.

We know everything that God has to say about Himself. We know all that God has to say about over-indulgence and excessive substance abuse. But here this morning, God says to you, I will entertain no enemy god in My presence. Some of us may have filled our hearts and minds this week with pornography. God in this passage says, I will indulge no rival to My throne.

I am God. There is no other. Hear Him this morning, friends, as I'm telling you this: that God says to you that He is your only satisfaction. He is your source of hope. He is your source of all enlightenment.

He is your source of security. Hear Him as He says, Let Me be your affirmation. Let Me tell you how much you are worth. You don't need to find that in someone else, in something else. He says to us in the first commandment, I am your shepherd.

Let Me lead you. So we are commanded not to divide our loyalty. And we've heard it in the negative, but now let me put it in the positive. And that is to love your God. We are to worship God with undivided loyalty because we love Him above all other things.

This is why Jesus, remember when He was asked in Matthew 22, what are the greatest commandments? What are the greatest laws? What did He say? Remember? Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and love your neighbour as yourself.

He says, that's the first and the second tablet. It's a summary of the law. Love your God. Why is God worthy of our love? Martin Luther, the great reformer of our church, wrote a piece called The Treatise on Good Works.

So how to live a good life, where he talks about the ten commandments. And in it, he goes to show that breaking all the commandments, breaking commandments two right through to ten. Think, you know, You shall not covet. Think, You shall honour your father and your mother. Think, You shall not create idols.

He says that breaking all of these is really the breaking of the first commandment. The breaking of the commandment to worship God and Him alone. He said, we never break the other commandments without first breaking the law against worshipping other things than God. In other words, all that God desires for us flows from us holding onto Him as our greatest joy. Holding onto Him as our greatest satisfaction.

Beneath any particular sin, and I can ask you to go and think about this, beneath any particular sin is the rejecting of God as your greatest satisfaction and indulging in self-worship. Now friends, if the first commandment then really is so central that it flows and it colours and it empowers every other command that is to follow, if the words You shall have no other gods before Me is so important, how can God ask this of us? What gives Him the right to ask this of His people? How could He say to Israel, Forget all that you have learned and remember the context. Israel had come out of Egypt.

They had grown up with the Pharaohs. They had learned the worship of the sun god, Ra. And they are told, Get rid of all that. Worship Yahweh. How could God ask this of them?

Putting aside all the new gods that you have heard about, all the old gods that you have heard about, all the new gods that you will hear about when you come into the new land, the promised land, the land flowing with milk and honey. When you see their people flourishing, you may be tempted to think, Look at the gods blessing them. In that land, you shall have no other gods but Me. How can God expect them to have undivided loyalty because of this? He loved them first.

You see, before the ten commandments, we find a short preamble, don't we, that we read just this morning again. Verse two, this is the preamble. This is the introductory sentence. I am the Lord your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery. These are words in a sentence, perhaps, that we often skip over.

If we've learned and memorised the ten commandments, if we've heard it over and over again at church, we skip over that. But Exodus and Leviticus and Numbers and Deuteronomy is full of this repeated statement. I am the Lord your God who rescued you, who brought you out of the land of slavery. Why does God repeat these words? Because He wants His people to know the extent of His love for them.

So when God commands His church, You shall have no other gods before Me, He's telling them, Love Me as I loved you. I'm the Lord, He says. See that? I am the Lord. And God uses the covenant name of Himself, Yahweh, here.

I am the Lord. I am the one who has revealed Himself to you specially. The one who knows you intimately. The one who promised to your forefather Abraham, I will be your God. I was the God who heard you in Egypt when you cried out.

Under the oppression of slavery, I heard and I remembered this promise. I am Yahweh, your God. The one who knows you. And He says, I am the Lord, your God. How could Israel bind themselves to God with undivided loyalty?

How could they believe and respect and love this first commandment to have no other gods but Him? Because God is their God. And how did they know He was their God? Because I brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery. How can we, as Christians then, hold to God as our only God with undivided loyalty, with undivided affections, for whatever else may come into our life because God has bound Himself eternally to us first.

He has loved us first, and He calls us to love Him. God is God, and there is no other. To be fair in and of Himself, God could have given these commandments because He is God, couldn't He? He didn't have to put in that second sentence.

He could have said, I am God. Worship Me or else. I am God. I created you. There is no other creator.

Revere Me. Respect Me. But all of God's requirements, as perfect and as fair as they are, it is His love that motivates us. He shows His love in this: not that Israel loved Him, but that He loved them first and He rescued them from their fate. He loved them undividedly. And now He says, Love Me undividedly.

And that formula is familiar, isn't it? Christian, we are called to obey and to love our God. We are called to obey and rejoice in the first commandment to love God with all our heart and our soul and our mind. Because we see in one John 4:10, This is love: not that we loved God, but that He loved us and sent His Son to be an atoning sacrifice for our sin.

I am the Lord, your God, who brought you up out of the land of slavery. Slavery to sin. Slavery to the things that destroy. Slavery to the things that will break you down. Love Me.

And so we have to know and we have to believe in order to truly be able to obey this first commandment. We have to believe that God has rescued us eternally and loves us fully. I have redeemed you, He says, and therefore, you are Mine. In light of this incredible mercy and grace, why would I choose then to love and to worship and to adore anything or anyone else? May God be your greatest thought.

May God be your greatest desire when you wake up in the morning. When you go to bed at night, may He be your greatest satisfaction and longing. And may the things that clamour and fight and contend for our affections, may the things that drag our hearts away, may they be put in their right place. May they be shunted off to the farthest recesses of our lives in light of His glory and His grace. As we wrap up, I'm reminded of a story when I was really young.

Like, it's probably one of my first memories as a child, maybe age four or five. This little quirk that I had, and maybe you can relate to this as well. And I don't know if this was just me and my bad maths or whether this was just really, really clever parenting from my parents, but when I was still very young, if I had, say, a chocolate bar and my parents wanted for some good reason to divide and to share this chocolate bar with my brothers, they would take it and cut it into pieces. So if I needed to share it, I was happier when this was cut into five smaller pieces where two pieces were given to my brothers and I kept three. Now, you know, for basic arithmetic, this makes sense.

They get two and I get three. I have more. But one chocolate bar, obviously, later on you realise, one chocolate bar divided up into fifteen different parts is still one chocolate bar. Similarly, we only have the one heart. The more it is divided does not mean the more you can give to God.

I can't tell you this morning all the ways you may be tempted to divide your loyalty. I don't know what's going on in your heart, but I can tell you that that heart can literally be divided into thousands of different pieces. But in place of habits and plans, in place of things that will drag you away from God, let me tell you, let me encourage you to be disciplined in bringing those pieces back. Unite them. Solder them together.

Put sticky tape on them and give it to God because He alone is worthy of that heart. He alone is capable of satisfying that heart. Scrape together those different tangents of our hearts and minds so that we may align it with this one command: to love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind. God, we only have one heart to give. We wrestle and we struggle, God, because we don't see You and we don't know You fully.

We are distracted, we are tired, we are worried, we are stressed. God, there is a part of us that so wants You and we know that You are the only good, that You are the only one that can truly satisfy. Forgive us for doubting. Forgive us for ignoring. And Father, I pray for all of us that we may taste and see that You are good.

Lord, that You would so kindly show us that You are worthy of our trust. And so those things that make us worried and stressed, Will I find a partner? Will I find money? Will I find friends? Will I find a career?

These things that drag us away. Can I find fun and joy and excitement? These things that make us worried and stressed, Father, that divert our attention and give us that death of a thousand cuts. Father, will You please show us in those situations that You are worthy of our trust? And that if we simply hold to You, You will give us the desires of our hearts, as the Psalm says.

May our desires align with Yours. May we find great joy, satisfaction, and peace in having no other gods beside You. Amen.