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The First Commandment I
I remember one day several years ago when one of my kids went running down the sidewalk right out onto the street. She was too young to understand the “look both ways” rule. There she was, ten feet out in the road. Had a car been coming she would have been dead, or the driver would have had an accident swerving out of the way.
So what did I do? Did I go up to my child and say, “My precious little girl, you could have hurt yourself running out into the road. We wouldn’t want anything to happen to you, so please, sugar plum, ask Mommy or Daddy before you go into the street next time, OK.”
No, it was more like this, in a deep pitch and stern tone and loud volume: “You are never to run out into the road again.”
Later I might later try to explain the whys and wherefores, but not right then. My command at that point has to be forceful, stark, severe, framed in the negative, and uncompromising. When life and death is at stake with my kids, I don’t play around.
And neither does God.
Last week we saw that when the law was given, it was given from Sinai, the mountain of holiness, in the context of thundering and shaking of the earth, in an atmosphere of trembling awe at the majesty and power of Jehovah God. The law came forth directly from YHWH. He had rescued Israel from the Egyptians, had brought her through the desert, had provided food and water, and adopted Israel as His child. He had rights as creator and redeemer to lead her in the way she should go. As we said last week, He had gotten her out of Egypt, now He had to get Egypt out of her.
The stakes are high. It’s a matter of life and death. He doesn’t mess around.
The First Commandments thunders forth.
You shall have no other gods before me!
Or, in a slightly more literal sense…
Let there not be to thee other gods to my face!
The First Commandment thunders forth from Sinai. It is abrupt, absolute, decisive, severe, categorical, and utterly exclusive.
Yes, the First Commandment is exclusive. The worship of the God of Israel is right; the worship of all other Gods is wrong. You may think this sounds narrow minded. Aren’t we supposed to be accepting of all faiths, to cherish diversity, to believe that none of us has a corner on the truth?
Yes, it is true, we are to love our neighbors who worship other gods. We are not to disassociate from non Christian idolaters. Otherwise, as Paul says, we would have to leave the world.
But let me ask you to ponder for a moment the possibility that the God of Israel is in fact the maker of heaven and earth, the one and only God. If this is true, the exclusivity is warranted, if it’s not true, it isn’t. The real issue is whether it is true that YHWH, the God of Israel is true and real. This is the question. We believe it is true, that He is there, and we have staked our lives upon it.
The First Commandment speaks to the heart and to the affections as well as to external obedience. The Second Commandment will address the particulars of making and bowing down to physical idols. The First Commandment prohibits all idols, including idols of the heart. An idol is whatever claims that loyalty that belongs to God alone. An idol is anything we are devoted to when that devotion is not a consequence of or a product of our obedient and exclusive devotion to God. I may be devoted to my spouse, but if I choose to please my spouse rather than obey God, I am idolizing my spouse.
In this sense, almost anything can be an idol -- a bank account, a child, a hobby, a football team, a standard of living, a job, a craving, etc. The First Commandment is not so much a statement about monotheism, the belief that there is but one god. This I believe is assumed in the commandment. The First Commandment really is a statement about monolotry, the uncompromising, absolute, and exclusive service of YHWH alone. It demands a choice. You will have no other gods! One thinks of Joshua’s great challenge to Israel to decide whom they will serve. This is the issue. In Joshua’s words:
Now fear the LORD and serve him with all faithfulness. Throw away the gods your forefathers worshiped beyond the River and in Egypt, and serve the LORD. But if serving the LORD seems undesirable to you, then choose for yourselves this day whom you will serve, whether the gods your forefathers served beyond the River, or the gods of the Amorites, in whose land you are living. But as for me and my household, we will serve the LORD (Joshua 24:14-15 NIV).
I said a minute ago that the First Commandment spoke to the hidden and internal affections of the heart. This internal nature of the commandment comes out in the final phrase. Note that it says we are to have no other gods “before Him.” Now what does this mean? Literally we might render the phrase as “to my face,” which we might translate as “in my view,” or “in my presence.” Since God sees everything, even the heart, this means that all idols of the heart and mind must go!
Sometimes you hear people say, as they are trying to get their priorities in order, that they are wanting to put God first, then family, then church, then work, etc. Now technically they should say something a little different. It is not God then family then church then work or whatever. It is God, only God, exclusively God, then because of that exclusive service of God, and out of loving obedience to Him, then family, church, and work.
YHWH God will not have us worshipping our families, our children, our spouses, our church, our country, our pastor, our jobs, our candidate, our businesses or whatever. Yes, we should strive to get our priorities in order and our daily act together so we can rightly fulfill our duties before God. But we do these things in order that we might rightly serve God alone.
This, if you want, is a great way to define the Reformed perspective. Because God is sovereign King, every area of life down to the smallest detail is to be lived out in service to and in obedience to Him, which means we must think hard about what this service to Him means in all that we do. No idols. All parts of life lived in service to Him. This is why we as a local church want to put emphasis on what you as a Christian person are already doing out there in your daily life. How easy it is to let busyness and activity, even church busyness, disguise and hide and cover up our idols, those places where we live unto ourselves, independently from our King.
I need to say something here about where this sermon is headed. My plan is to draw out the negative sense in the Old Testament and then the New Testament and then the positive sense in both. Then I plan to have an excursus on three positive aspects or positive fulfillments of this command – prayer, obedience, and thankfulness. I don’t know how far I will get today, so I may stop sort of in the middle. If so we will just finish up next time.
Now, to draw out the particulars of what sorts of things are prohibited by the commandment, I would like to read several other Old Covenant commands also in the negative or prohibitive sense. Remember, the Ten Commandments are just the kernel of the moral law, the bare framework if you will. Even in the Old Covenant Law it took many more specific commands to fill out the meaning of each of the Ten Commandments.
Exodus 20:23 Do not make any gods to be alongside me; do not make for yourselves gods of silver or gods of gold.
Exodus 22:20 Whoever sacrifices to any god other than the LORD must be destroyed.
Exodus 23:13 "Be careful to do everything I have said to you. Do not invoke the names of other gods; do not let them be heard on your lips.
Exodus 23:32 Do not make a covenant with them or with their gods.
Deuteronomy 6:13-14 Fear the LORD your God, serve him only and take your oaths in his name. Do not follow other gods, the gods of the peoples around you;
Joshua 23:7 Do not invoke the names of their gods or swear by them. You must not serve them or bow down to them.
What I would like you to remember here are the verbs. What are we not to do? We are not to invoke other gods, sacrifice to them, serve them, follow them, bow down to them, swear by them, or worship them. I’m going to look in more detail at three of these verbs, invoke, sacrifice to, and serve.
First of all, we are not to invoke other gods.
To invoke means to petition or call upon for help or support, to appeal to, or to call forth by incantation.
This of course is why all kinds of divination in the Bible are prohibited. Divination is the attempt to discern truth or discern events in the future or to get special guidance in a decision by trying to get signs interpreted. This is passionately and utterly condemned all through Scripture. This includes things today like palm reading, ouiji boards, tarot cards, crystal balls, necromancy, seances, astrology, and the psychic network. Kids, don’t mess around with that stuff, even if it seems harmless. Why? Because demons and evil spirits work through these things to gain a foothold. It has always been so, and it always will be so. Do not think you are immune to the effects of these things.
Invoking also refers all superstitious ways of seeking help, things like carrying rabbits feet, crossing fingers, knocking on wood. This also includes appealing to Mary or to the Saints. There is to be no invoking of other figures for help and assistance. There is to be no acknowledging of other gods as having provided such. As it says in Hosea "I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of Egypt. You shall acknowledge no God but me, no Savior except me.”
I would like to mention here one of the truly unfortunate and dangerous things about many present day kids’ movies, particularly those made by Disney in the last ten years or so. In the Lion King for example you have that ape medicine man mixing potions and reading his crystal ball, calling upon the deceased father for aid and help. You see a similar thing say in Land Before Time. Parents you should beware of these influences, and minimally you should make sure that your children understand what’s wrong with what these movies depict. Can you know that they will not also be enticed to seek guidance in these ways?
OK, the second verb I wanted to look at was the verb “sacrifice.” We are not to sacrifice to other gods.
A sacrifice is an offering of something precious to a god or deity or idol of the heart. Usually in the pagan sense these offerings are made to try to gain favor, influence events, get pregnant, have a good crop, defeat the enemy, or whatever. The goal of all pagan sacrifices is the manipulation of the god in question. The idolater gives up a first born child, say, in order to get many more children. Certainly this level of sacrifice would please the god of fertility.
A sacrifice is giving up of one thing for a greater thing. A sacrifice can be a good thing. In a sacrifice bunt we give up the privilege of reaching base in order to advance a runner to second or third. We sacrifice a present fulfillment in order to reach a more important future goal. Parents sacrifice many personal dreams in order to provide for their children.
We are in fact to present our very lives, body and soul to God as a living sacrifice. We are to lay down our lives for Him. Jesus Christ lay down hid very life as an atoning sacrifice for our sins, sacrificing his life, even that most intimate of bonds with God the Father, as an atoning sacrifice, fulfilling the curse of the law. It’s not that sacrifices are wrong in themselves. It depends on what is being sacrificed and to and for what the sacrifice is being made.
What are prohibited are sacrifices made to other than the true God. Sacrifices in this sense can be internal as well as external. So in this sense we can sacrifice our families for the sake of a job, we can sacrifice our financial security to gratify a material longing, we can sacrifice the beauty of the earth for a quick profit, we can sacrifice a child for a sense of personal peace. The First Commandment prohibits such sacrifices. I am to sacrifice to God alone, or in order to be humbly obedient to Him alone.
Third, we are not to serve other gods.
To serve a god in the truly pagan sense is to furnish or supply an idol with something it supposedly needs. Priests in pagan temples would serve the idols by leaving food and sacrifices. We had next door neighbors in Vancouver who make special foods which they placed at the feet of little statues in their house.
But more generally, to serve a god is to bow before the god as one from whom you take orders, whose supposed agenda you pledge yourself to help fulfill, whom you will accept as your final authority. Who or what is the final authority? When we have a choice, whom do we obey, the word of God or our fleshly desires, the word of God or our schemes, the word of God or our children, the word of God or our spouses, the word of God or our bosses.
The language of service is the language of kings and kingdoms of masters and subjects. We are to be devoted subjects. We are to be single-minded in obedience. Yes, we are to live in humble service to others. We are to accept human authority, and the authority of human institutions, in our lives, and to be kindly submissive to these authorities. But we humbly submit to these authorities out of obedience to God. And when that which has authority over us leads us to follow in a way contrary to the will of God, then we have to decide whom we will follow, whom we will serve. Remember Joshua’s words, “Choose you this day.” You shall serve no other god before me!
(This is continued in “The First Commandment II”) |
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