“You shall have no other gods before Me.”
Exodus 20:3
The first commandment is often expressed simply as “No other gods.” God, the creator of all things, is to be our number one thing, our only god. He is to be the center of our life around which everything in our life finds its place. We are not to have anything in our lives that is more important or takes precedence over God. He is to be our main thing, our relationship with Him is to be the primary thing that our life is about. We are to build our life on Him. He is to be our rock and our redeemer. the thing we count on the most, for all things. God is to be our most beloved thing.
When God asks Abraham to sacrifice Isaac (Genesis 22), he is asking Abraham to choose between God and his most beloved thing on earth, his son Isaac. In the garden of Eden, Adam had to choose between God and Eve, and Adam chose Eve, leading to the fall of man (Genesis 3). In the garden of Gethsemane (Luke 22:39-46) Jesus had to choose between God and his life, and He chose God, leading to the redemption of man. But on the mountaintop, Abraham is asked to sacrifice his son, his only son given to him to fulfill the promise God had made to him. And he was willing to go through with it. As the story goes, God stopped Him and provided a ram in the place of Isaac, symbolic of the Son of God soon to come and die on the cross as the sacrifice for all of humanity. Then many years later, God provided His only begotten Son to die in our place, that in Him we might have eternal life. As rich and as deep as the metaphor is in this story, there is even more.
Each of us has our Isaac, our thing that we cannot live without, that God will eventually ask us to sacrifice to Him. Perhaps it is security, money, control, sex, our work, our appetite, our family, our marriage, our children, our friends, fitness, comfort, a sport, achievement, success, our spouse, a parent, our house, our ministry, a car, etc. It can be almost anything I suppose. It is that thing that we cannot live without. It is the thing that if it were to completely go away, with no future prospect of ever returning, we might lose our will to live. When something has become this important to us, it has become an idol, it has become a god to us, and it is violating the first of the Ten Commandments, “Thou shalt have no other gods before Me”. We are now faced with a choice – do we choose God or do we choose our idol.
When we choose the idol, we are going the way of Adam, and our world pretty much falls apart. To pick an easy one, say for example that sex, which is a good thing that God invented, has become an idol to us and we are not content in our marriage, so we choose to fool around rather than keep the promise we have made to our spouse. We are now committing adultery and will reap the consequences of this action, which is usually divorce, estranged children, anger, resentment, depression, an ex-wife that hates us, etc. We lose half our stuff, lose respect in our community, lose the respect of our children, lose respect for ourselves, etc. – it is ultimately a bad deal. We in America have all seen this happen more than once because of the sexually charged no-fault divorce culture in which we live. So choosing the idol leads to death – in this case the death of our marriage and relationships with our children and possibly others, just as Adam’s choice of Eve led to spiritual death. God tells us to have no other gods before Him, and ultimately He will bring us to a place where we must choose between Him and our idol, just as He brought Abraham to the top of the mountain with Isaac. Why does He do this?
I believe God brings us to this choosing place, this mountaintop like Abraham came to, to set us free from the idol’s grip over our lives, to sever the death grip that it has on our heart. He brings us to this point in order to deliver us from the power that the idol will have over us if we continue to let it dominate our life. The reason that the First Commandment exists is to give us freedom from the tyranny of idols.
It turns out that we do not really own our idols, but rather they own us, and God knows this and wants to set us free from them so we can truly live as free men and women in Christ. This is why God tells us to have no other gods before Him. It is for our own good.
Over the decades I have watched many people let their idol or idols destroy their life, and it is not something anyone should want to happen in their life. It can take weeks, months, years, decades, a half century…..but ultimately, if an idol remains in a person’s life, it will eventually own them and destroy their life in one way or another. That is one of the reasons the First Commandment is so important. “No other gods!” Martin Luther even went so far as to state that all sin is the result of breaking the First Commandment, and that all sin is rooted in idolatry.
The First Commandment is like an on/off switch for freedom or slavery. If we keep it, we are free, if we break it we are a slave to an idol. Either God is our god, and we are free, or our idol is our god, and we are a slave to it – it owns us. There are no other options. We obey one or the other, worship one or the other. Simple enough. Ironically most of the false gods that we take on promise freedom even though they lead to bondage, slavery, destruction, and death. As an example, think of the promise of drugs to set us free, when in reality they not only enslave us to the drug habit but may even lead to actual imprisonment – taking away our freedom to live in society, we end up in a cage, the opposite of freedom.
False gods make false promises. They are a lie and they cannot deliver the happiness they promise us to cause us to pursue them. The fame and fortune never delivers the promised happiness – ask anyone who has made it to the top. The awesome new car or house does not deliver, just go buy one and see how you feel after a while. That new boyfriend or girlfriend cannot give you the life you think it will, and if you try to get it from them you will crush them and destroy the relationship in the process. We cannot look to anything but to God, our creator, for life, for meaning, joy, fulfillment, purpose, true wisdom, forgiveness, peace, etc. He is the only one we can look to for salvation. And the first commandment tells us we have a choice to make. Will we put god first, or will we put something else before Him? So why does this matter so much that it is the first commandment?
It matters because we will all face this decision one day, the choice between God and our idol, or idols if we have more than one. And the decision that we make on this will set the course of our entire life. It will color every aspect of who we are, how we act, what we think, who we are, etc. Which we choose to obey will determine the course of our life from that point onward. It may be that we face this choice in a big, one time moment, or perhaps it is a choice that we make gradually over time. We may face it many times, or just one time.
We may have one primary idol, or we may have many idols. Each of us has our own situation to contend with. But we will all face this choice at one time or another, between God and our idol. We may even face it more than once. And our decision sets the course of our entire life – either away from God if we choose our idol, or towards God if we choose Him. Our choice moves us towards freedom if we choose God, or moves us towards slavery if we choose the idol. It is a big deal. Maybe the biggest decision we ever make in our lives. It is more important than our choice for our profession, where we live, our friends, who we marry, etc.
I remember running into a friend during the middle of the day and catching him with his latest mistress. He was getting pretty old now, and I remember thinking to myself, “She is not very pretty, I guess as you get older you have to start settling.” His idol owned him. He was a slave to it, and remained so till the end of his life. It had driven him to settling for less than he normally would have settled for. We may start off with steak, but we typically end with eating table scraps from the floor at the hands of our idols. I have seen this many times and in many ways. When our reputation is our idol, we may lie, cheat, or steal to protect it, for example. The Bible says, “There is a way which seems right to man, but its end is the way of death.” (Proverbs 14:12) Remaining a slave to our idols results in slavery and death, so choose life, choose freedom, choose to put God first, to put Him above everything else in your life. It will serve you well.
The first commandment is about God the Father, the first person of the Trinity. He is to be our god, and we are to have no other gods before Him. The Israelites had picked up false gods in Egypt, and God starts off telling them they must let them go and put Him first. Similarly, we show up with the false gods of our day when we come to Jesus, and we must let them go and put God first. God is the only safe place for us to place our hopes and dreams for our life. He is the only foundation that will support the house of our life for the duration of our time here on earth. He is the only source of true wisdom for life. He is the only god who we can safely build our life on. He is the only god who truly loves us and wants what is best for us.
Bringing this home:
What Isaacs do you have in your life? What can you not imagine living without? What has its tentacles wrapped around your heart? What do you think about in your spare time, when you are daydreaming, lying in bed before you fall asleep. What drives you to do what you do? Has God brought you to a mountaintop and asked you to let this idol go? If He has, I challenge you, I urge you, I beg you, to choose God rather than your idol. Let your idol go, and choose God and His word, His commands. By doing so you will step into a new freedom that you have perhaps never known, a freedom from an idol that may have bound you your entire life. You may find that once your heart is set free from the idol, God is now free to give it back to you because it poses no danger to you now, just as He did with Abraham, giving Isaac back to him. Once you have sacrificed it to God, it cannot enslave you anymore because it has lost its power – it is no longer an idol to you. It no longer grips your heart, no longer drives you. You are free. But you must let it go first, just as Abraham let Isaac go.
“Now, therefore, fear the Lord and serve Him in sincerity and truth; and put away the gods which your fathers served beyond the River and in Egypt, and serve the Lord. If it is disagreeable in your sight to serve the Lord, choose for yourselves today whom you will serve: whether the gods which your fathers served which were beyond the River, or the gods of the Amorites in whose land you are living; but as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.” Joshua 24:14-15
“Therefore everyone who hears these words of Mine and acts on them, may be compared to a wise man who built his house on the rock. And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and slammed against that house; and yet it did not fall, for it had been founded on the rock. Everyone who hears these words of Mine and does not act on them, will be like a foolish man who built his house on the sand. The rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and slammed against that house; and it fell—and great was its fall.” Matthew 7:24-27
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