Thou shalt have no other gods before Me (Exodus 20:3; Deuteronomy 5:6)
Created in the image of God, we are innately religious. There’s in us a natural inclination towards worship. We are imago Dei—image-bearers of God— and seek communion with the God whose image we bear, albeit often in the wrong path. There is a void between us and God (Romans 3:23) and we will go every length to fill that void. St. Augustine, in his Confessions rightly captured this: ” Thou hast made us for thyself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it finds its rest in thee.” The yearnings of our souls can only be satisfied in God, yet we will not come to Him. Rather, we craft all manner of means to find fulfilment outside God. We chase the wind (Ecclesiastes 2:26).
Therefore, in the first commandment, God directs us to himself: “Thou shalt have no other gods before me.” In the culture that surrounded the Israelites, there was a pantheon of gods worshipped by the surrounding cultures. This commandment primarily calls the attention of the Jews to the living God who is One (Deut. 6:4). God the Creator of heaven and earth and all in it is One and not one of many gods. This is a central belief of the Christian faith. We are monotheist and not polytheist.
This belief translates into an exclusive devotion and worship of God. When God commands we shall have no other God before him, He demands exclusive devotion to Himself. Our devotion must be undivided. Jesus explicitly pointed this out when he said “No one can serve two masters, for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and money.”(Matthew 6:24 ESV). As true as this is, human beings have the ability to devise “masters” in addition to God.
The human mind, stuffed as it is with presumptous rashness, dares to imagine a God suited to its own capacity; as it labours under dullness, no, is sunk in the grossest ignorance, it substitues vanity and an empthy phantom in the place of God.¹
Bearing this in mind, therefore, the essence of the first commandment is a total devotion to God and a prohibition to set our affection on any other thing that will take the place of God. The phrase “before me” in the commandment points to the prohibition of anything in our lives that will take first place or priority over our relationship with God. First things first, that’s the import of the first commandment (Matthew 6:33).
Clearly, the demand of God in the first commandment is absolute worship. Our worship must be to God alone. “Man’s chief end is to glorify God and to enjoy Him forever.”² If this is not how you are living your life, then perhaps you have other gods before God and you need to repent.
Next week, Lord willing, we will consider the second commandment.
Notes
- John Calvin, Institutes Of The Christian Religion. trans Henry Beveridge ( Peabody: Massachusetts, Hendrickson Publishers, 2008), 55
- Westminster Shorter Catechism, Q&A 98
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