No gods Before Me

 Over the next several posts I want to look at the 10 Commandments.  These commandments are so familiar and yet likely rather unfamiliar to us.

In Exodus 20 before God issues the 10 commandments He says:

"I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery." Exodus 20:2

The Lord begins like this to establish that He has the right to give commands to the people of Israel.  Yahweh says that He is their God, He is their creator and supernatural leader.  He says that He is the God who brought them out of slavery in Egypt.  In this statement He says that He has redeemed them, or purchased and rescued them, out of slavery and therefore now has rights over them.  God could very well say the same to me even though I have never been enslaved in Egypt.  God made me and He rescued me out of the dominion of darkness and brought me into His kingdom (Colossians 1:13).

God has the right to tell us what to do.  He had the right to dictate the kind of people Israel would be as He established them as a new, free nation.  So, what does He require of us in the 10 Commandments?

"You shall have no other gods before me." Exodus 20:3

God called Israel out of a land of polytheism into strict monotheism.  There is but one God and Yahweh is Him.  The people had seen Yahweh's dominance over the Egyptian gods of the Nile, the sun, frogs and whatnot during the ten plagues.  Israel was not to return to bowing down to any god but the real God.

Not many of us have other gods we say we bow to.  Not many of us would say that we struggle with polytheistic tendencies.  But do we?

I believe we do have other things that tend to be functional gods in our lives.  While we may not call them gods, we have things that function as gods.  When life gets tough we lean on the god of financial security.  When we want joy we look to the god of perfect Instagramable moments.  When we want wonder we turn to the god of sports excellence.  When we want direction we turn to the god of politics.  We are experts in turning the many goods in our lives into gods in our lives.  We turn innocuous things into toxic objects of worship and adoration.

But I argue that the biggest threat to keeping the first commandment is a would-be god much closer than the bank or the stadium.

Self.

Our culture is run by the priests of self worship.  We are implored to pursue our own happiness.  We are saluted and applauded for defining our own identity.  We are urged to determine our own destiny, to be the master of our fate the captain of our soul ("Invictus" by William Ernest Henley).  We are encouraged to find our own truth.  In the Garden of Eden the serpent  tempted Eve by suggesting that God was afraid that we would be like him and discover that we were just as capable as He is (Genesis 3:5). 

Today the pharisees of the Church of Self reenforce the worship of the god in the mirror and all the sacrifices the Trinity of Id, Ego and Superego require to be satiated.

"You shall have no gods before me."

This short, simply commandment requires our utmost attention.  This sentence demands that we focus our gaze on the God that rescued us out of slavery.  This sentence makes the believer recalibrate his or her worship regularly.  It makes us ask: what do I cherish, what do I find security in, what do I find joy in, to what do I sacrifice?

Next post we will look at the next commandment, but for now this commandment has given me plenty to consider and plenty to repent from.  

Be monotheistic in every sense of the word today.