Commandment # 1

Exodus 20:3 Thou shalt have no other gods before me.

Introduction/Application

The object our worship - the one true God.

to know and acknowledge God to be the only true God and make Him our God and to worship and glorify only Him!

by thinking of only Him

meditating on Him alone

honoring Him by adoring, choosing loving, desiring Him alone

fearing Him

believing, trusting, and hoping in Him

delighting, rejoicing and being zealous for Him

calling upon Him

praising Him and giving all our thanks to Him

yielding all obedience and submission to Him and pleasing only Him

by sorrowing when in anything He is offended

walking humbly before Him

more gods than one or instead of the true God the omission or neglect of anything due God

by holding false opinions of God

by ignorance, forgetfulness, or willful rebellious attitude toward God

holding thoughts of God that are not worthy of His glory

by profaneness or hatred of God

by self-love, self-seeking or all other inordinate setting of our mind, will and affections on other things

by unbelief, heresy, distrust and despair in God

hardness of heart. Pride, lukewarmness, and deadness in God

praying or giving any religious worship to saints, angels, or any other creatures

consulting in any way with Satan

making men and the ways of man the source of rule

impatience with God and His timing; charging God foolishly for the afflictions and evil of this world

ascribing the praise of any good we are, have or can do to fortune, luck, idols, ourselves or any other creature.

Exodus 20:3 We have seen in the introductions that we have studied how the Decalogue applies to us today. God gave principles, laws, statues, and testimonies, and then spent meticulous time giving the case laws behind these statutory laws so that Israel would understand the principle behind each law and be able to apply the principles to everyday life. We saw that God treated the OT people like children—establishing a relationship with them and clearly defining the house rules. We saw that in the NT God began to treat them like older children and adults. The house rules were still in tact, but the death, burial, and resurrection of Christ brought ‘maturity’ to the law as the #145;pictures’ of Christ were replaced by the reality of Christ. We see this with our own children—there must be a firm teaching of what it means to submit to the house rules before maturity will set in.

This brings us to a question then. "Are there other gods?" How would you answer that question? Yes and No. Well, we intellectually know there is no God and so we can like Elijah in 1 Kings 18:27 And it came to pass at noon, that Elijah mocked them, and said, Cry aloud: for he is a god; either he is talking, or he is pursuing, or he is in a journey, or peradventure he sleepeth, and must be awaked. However, on the other hand why does God say in 1 John 5:21 Little children, keep yourselves from idols. Why would God warn us about something that doesn’t exist? Why would He spend time and effort forbidding us from something that has no foundational merit? Apparently, those who profess Jesus as Lord and Savior must guard against associating with idols.

1. Phil 3:18 - "God is their belly" inner appetites; people that crave their own personal pleasure over the claims of God on their lives. I worry about our country—our own mentality about life! How many times do we make a decision about what we do based on our belly or inner appetites. In our country, we pay people who entertain us millions of dollars, while we scrape to pay teachers, police, and pastors.

2. Col 3:5 - "covetousness, which is idolatry" Inherent in covetousness is a desire for something more. Gratitude is dead—it is the first to go in Romans 1 - "neither were thankful." It goes with gripping and a spirit of unsatisfaction. Our base passions and lusts are insatiable—never satisfied. When we serve the gods of this world, these passions have power over us driving us to greater insatiable lusts, ever spiraling from God. It doesn’t begin with horrible sin, it begins with replacing God as God with something that is not God.

3. Job 31:24 - wealth, gold, "you are my confidence" One writer has said that "man’s heart is an idol factory." I am very concerned about man’s worship of wealth and possessions. God’s Word doesn’t say that money is the root of all evil, but it is the passion—the love of money that is the root of all evil. I am concerned that we are so enamored with the gifts from God more than with God Himself. Job was a perfect example of this. God pointed out to Satan that there was not a more god-like man than Job, but Satan’s reaction was-"Hey it is only because he likes what you do for him." Satan knew too well, that this was and is a truth about many of us—we like what God does for us better than God Himself. Look at our culture today—we have our 401K’s; 2 cars; computers, satellites, insurance deals—and the worst thing is the attitude behind them that says, "I deserve this; I have a right to this." We have this Y2K ordeal coming over the horizon. It is interesting to see Christians squirm about this. If God chooses to completely wipe out and cripple us, would we have a problem about this? Would we be more concerned about our losses than the glory of God being revealed? You begin to see very quickly what god it is that we serve. When we have a nation killing millions of children daily, why should it shock us to see children killing children? When we base the education of our children on the crackling foundation of humanism, why should it shock us that it produces a core of self-serving young people—a group of workers that will strike and make things miserable for an entire nation because things don’t go their way. This ought not to be a shock for us. It ought to be that we are shocked if out nation doesn’t go down. Jeremiah 2:13 For my people have committed two evils; they have forsaken me the fountain of living waters, and hewed them out cisterns, broken cisterns, that can hold no water. I was recently watching a small documentary on the Titanic and the narrator made several comments about it’s indestructibility. I couldn’t help to think of the true irony—in many ways, it was a modern-day tower of Babel. Technology and human ingenuity cannot be God.

What are lessons to be learned from this first commandment?

1. Recognizing God as God excludes any other possibility of God. Joshua 24:14-15 Now therefore fear the Lord, and serve him in sincerity and in truth: and put away the gods which your fathers served on the other side of the flood, and in Egypt; and serve ye the Lord. 15And if it seem evil unto you to serve the Lord, choose you this day whom ye will serve; whether the gods which your fathers served that were on the other side of the flood, or the gods of the Amorites, in whose land ye dwell: but as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.

2. It is not a matter of both-and, but either-or. You can’t have it both ways. You cannot choose Yahweh and at the same time hang on to the gods of Mesopotamia or Egypt. The same is true for God and Mammon Matt 6:24. The true God demands exclusive devotion.

3. It seemed that renewal was needed regularly. At Sinai the people of Israel all with one accord promised to love God (Ex 24:3). However, that did not signal the immediate disappearance of idol worship - Numbers 25:2 And they called the people unto the sacrifices of their gods: and the people did eat, and bowed down to their gods. Israel had been freed, but their heart was still in Egypt. How many people left Egypt? How many of those people saw the promised land? Two! (Heb 3:17-4:3)

4. This is an issue of the heart. There was to be no division in the heart. The little word ‘and’ is dangerous - Yahweh and Baal. The Shema in Deut 6 calls the Israelite to love the Lord with all of his heart, all his soul, and all his might. Of course, this cannot happen if one’s love is devoted to more than one.

5. On the negative side, we must shun practices that compromise the absolute claims of God on us. We must be sure that our concept of God and our practices that express it, are in agreement with God’s self-revelation in God’s Word. On the positive side, we must acknowledge all that the true God really is.

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I want to follow up on what we began last Sunday evening. I believe I told you that I was afraid that we could not cover everything last week, and my fear was realized by the end of the message that I had in fact not dealt with everything that God deals with in regards to this commandment. So, here we are—take two! We saw in the first commandment who we are to worship. Last week, we began to deal with how we are to worship the One true God. And without re-preaching the message, let’s look briefly at what was said. We said that images of God are not worshipped as God Himself, but are representatives of the deity, God doesn’t want us to have any kind of representation of Him because it is an attack upon His freedom as God, His Majesty as the Great One; and an attack upon His covenant with His people. This is the truest example of Romans chapter one of a world that has chosen to worship God on their own terms. In our passage, there are steps that identify the progression of this command. First, an image is made. It is not the real thing, but an image of the real thing. So far, so good. There is nothing wrong with image per se. We mentioned last week that there were specific OT pictures of God - the pillar of cloud and fire were ways of knowing the presence of God. The Ark and the Tabernacle had symbols to portray things about God—Moses lifted the serpent up in the wilderness—a foreshadowing of Christ. But the next step is crucial. Nowhere did God have in mind the worshipping of these things. Don’t serve and worship these things. For doing so evokes the next step—the jealousy of God.

For many of us, this doesn’t seem such a necessary commandment. We are not big on physical images. We have no physical representations of God and so are not tempted to worship these things. But, what about mental images? Is it possible to form a mental image of God that is not a true image and worship that image? Pictures in our minds of God that are incomplete, bogus, and just out and out wrong. "Metal images come from mental images." When we have mental images, we then shift our devotion from the real true revelation of God and embrace the part of God that we think is necessary and then we evoke the jealousy of God on our lives.

If we are not careful, we begin to love the temple of God, the image of God, and we begin to shift our devotion to include only those things that will fall in line with that image. We transfer our affection, our emotions and our whole beings to that part of God. Why is this? I think that for the most part it is directly related to our faith in Him. We don’t like the fact that God does as He pleases. God says He will not be triffled with and this scares us. "We can’t have some God running roughshod over us completely out of our control. He has to fit our thinking, our likeness. God does what He wants to do. When we package Him, we begin to serve that package. Under this definition of something that is very close to God, yet not God Himself, what can become this ‘sacred cow’ or golden calf?

What is are some things that Christians worship? In 2Kings 18:4 it was a brazen serpent that at one time was used to give life! 2 Kings 18:4 He removed the high places, and brake the images, and cut down the groves, and brake in pieces the brasen serpent that Moses had made: for unto those days the children of Israel did burn incense to it: and he called it Nehushtan. In Jeremiah 7 it was the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord that they trusted in yet they were burning incense to Baal. We don’t do that, we have other ones that are just as creative. From general to specific!

1. America - God bless America—but it cannot bless any other nation. We sometimes think that if righteousness is lost in America, than righteousness is in trouble. Heretical.

2. Human Leaders - We see the fallacy in this very quickly. We have worshipped past leaders and follow their legacy. Reagan—o let’s return to the glory days. Past church leaders.

3. Political causes - raising the standards for our schools, equal rights, abortion, gambling, prostitution; All good things for believers to cry out against! All ways of procuring a more holy life!

4. Denominations - Right about now some will begin to get nervous. But hear me out. We can get so caught up with what God is doing here at Grace that we can get critical of anything that doesn’t resemble Grace. We can get so caught up with the attitude that we are right to the point that even no one can be saved unless they are saved in a Bible Church—or any other church is ‘liberal.’

5. Human Institutions - By this, I mean, our favorite radio preacher, our favorite author, our favorite evangelist, or our favorite Bible School. Is there anything wrong with having a favorite whatever? NO, and God uses these institutions.

The problem comes when the Gospel of Jesus Christ is no longer central in our thinking so that we ask "what does so, and so think?" God is no longer primary and the things of God become objects of loyalty and devotion.

How do we know when we have crossed the line?

2. How do they help during difficult times? Difficult circumstances brings out our reliance upon idols. The substance of an idol is not eternal. It doesn’t last through persecution; afflictions melt idols. We then get distrustful of God because our image of God did not pan out—bitterness sets in—all revealing that the grace of God is not at work in our lives because He has been substituted.

Exodus 20:5 - Everything is secondary to Christ. He is not saying throw out things in heaven, in earth or the water. These are all wonderful tools, but cannot become our objects of worship. Why?

A. God is jealous. We think of this as being selfish, petty, and not trusting. There is a good and right jealousy! A husband should care enough to be jealous and moved to protect that relationship if someone makes an advance towards his wife. This is what God means when He displays His jealousy. He prizes and protects our relationship with Him.

B. God sends visitors. The word ‘visit’ means to come knocking. What comes knocking? The sins of the fathers come knocking to the children. We all know that in the physical realm this happens, but God is specifically talking about the sin of idolatry that comes knocking. What it means is that when we replace God with something close to Him, our children do the same thing, only they do it with something further away from God—but away from God just the same. This happens all the time with well meaning people. They do not raise their children with a sensitivity to all that God demands in child rearing, and yet have good strict outside standards so that outwardly no one ever suspects that the child is rebellious—but the rebellious heart is never biblically and lovingly confronted and the child ends up pregnant as a teen, or walks away from church entirely. Why? Because the sins of the fathers of idolatry visits the children.

C. God shows mercy! How many generations does the sin show itself to? 3-4 This is truly merciful, isn’t it? Aren’t you glad that God doesn’t bring the sins of all past generations on us? How long does the mercy of God reign on those who are not idol driven? To thousands of generations. There are two important words: Mercy - this is a beautiful word that means a love based on loyalty. God loves us with a perfect loyalty. This is what He wants of us. Perfect loyalty to Him, not to the things He gives us. The other key word is ‘thousands.’ When he talking of thousands He does not deal with the number of 1000, but the idea is an endless amount. How can righteousness last that long? What about Noah? We come from him; Paul—what influence has he had on you. We will spend eternity with God because of the righteousness of Christ. The choice is pretty simple - 3-4 generations vs eternity! Death or life?