Ten Words that Matter: No Other Gods Before Me
Rev. Thomas Harper
June 11, 2017
Exodus 20:1-3
I’d like to turn your attention to the Scripture reading as we read from a passage from the book of Exodus.
Then God spoke all these words: I am theLordyour God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery;you shall have no other gods beforeme. Exodus 20:1-3 (NRSV)
My name is Thomas Harper and I’m an associate pastor here at St. Luke’s. Today we’re going to begin a new series called “Ten Words That Matter.” Over the course of the next ten weeks we’ll be looking at the Ten Commandments from the Book of Exodus.
Will you pray with me? Father God, open us up. Open up our hearts that we might receive a word from you today. Holy Spirit, I ask that you would speak now through me, or if need be in spite of me, so that we might know you better. That we might know your heart and your nature better. Through that knowledge, Lord, let us learn a little bit about ourselves as well. And finally, Father, may we then be compelled into action. In your name we pray, Lord Jesus. Amen.
Since I have the pleasure of kicking off this sermon series I really wanted to make sure I got the introduction just right. So I sat down with Dr. Pace before he went on vacation to get an idea of where he planned on taking us over the next ten weeks.
Here are some of the things that he told me: First and foremost, the Ten Commandments are about a covenant between the nation of Israel and God. I think oftentimes we think of the Ten Commandments as a list of laws that were handed down from God, that were intended to be kept and followed by all people of all nations throughout all eternity. But it didn’t start that way and we might miss something very important if we don’t look at the Ten Commandments as they were originally intended. A covenant between God and God’s people.
See, the Ten Commandments were there to teach a group of recently freed slaves who had grown up knowing only oppression of Egyptian culture and laws how to live in community with one another. They were to live different than their lives as slaves and be countercultural to the Egyptian culture they had grown up around.
And here’s the most important thing that Dr. Pace told me. This covenantal relationship came in response to their liberation not in order that they would receive it. If you remember, God had already delivered them out of slavery from Egypt, had already freed them from their oppressors when the covenant was made. “I will be your God and you will be my people.” And the covenant was then for them to live into the liberation that God had provided them.
Now I’m not sure that Dr. Pace is going to take us this way but by now it should be rather obvious some of the parallels for us as a Christian community. Similar to the Ten Commandments Jesus Christ in the Sermon on the Mount in the Gospel of Matthew was never intended to be for the masses, for the crowds, for the great gatherings of audience. If you go back and read it it says, “And Jesus, seeing the crowd, got up and went to the mountaintop,” which is likely a call back to Mt. Sinai. “And then he sat down and taught his disciples,” his followers how to live life.
See, the Sermon on the Mount was the Decalogue 2.0. It was not a rewriting of the Law but a perfecting of it. It was a deepening of the meaning behind a covenantal relationship with God and God’s people. Hey, you’re heard it said, “You shall not kill… you shall not commit adultery… I say to you that even if you have hatred in your heart for your brother or lust after another you are liable to the commandment.”
And similar to the people of Israel who were once slaves and are now free, this covenantal relationship that we have with Christ is in response to our salvation, not in order that we would receive it. We are to live countercultural to this world. And we are to live differently from than the sin that you used to be enslaved to. But not in order that we would be saved, but because we have been saved in Jesus Christ.
So that’ll take care of the introduction. From this point on we’re going to talk about the first commandment, “Thou shall have no other gods before me.” And I think this is a good place to start. I think there’s a reason why this is number one on the list.
I have to confess before we go any farther that when I was preparing for this sermon I was really struggling to differentiate between having false gods, worshipping false gods, or making graven images or worshipping idols. To our contemporary ears the first and second commandments can seem somewhat redundant. I don’t think they were intended to mean the same thing.
And even though I don’t have it all figured out and Dr. Christians is going to have to come clean up my mess next week, I’ll give it a shot. For me an idol is something that points us to God or to the gods that we worship. The problem with graven images and idols is that whenever we make those, they fall drastically short to what God really is. They limit God. And in our humanity we tend to want to worship the thing that points to God that we have created, that’s more tangible than the actual God that it points to. False gods on the other hand are when we worship something altogether different than our Savior Jesus, when we place someone or something in Christ’s rightful place in our hearts.
I think another reason why the first and second Commandments can seem so similar to our contemporary ears is because really nowadays there’s not a lot of competition for God in the traditional sense of the word. Back in the old world there were gods everywhere. Gods for every nation, every people, a god for every season or every temperament. But those old superstitions have now given way to modern rationalizations, and for better or worse we don’t feel that we need a bunch of gods anymore to explain how the world works. In fact, I think if humanity had it our way we would one day achieve that Star Trekkie Utopia where we could rationalize away the existence of a God all together.
But even though there are still religions today that worship different gods, or many gods, what we face today is not necessarily “who’s the one God” but “what is the nature of that God that we worship?” The three major world religions all arguably worship the same God in that we don’t imagine Jesus, Yahweh, and Allah up in the heavens duking it out for all eternity. No, what we differ on is what is God’s purpose on this earth? What is our response to this God who is reaching out to us?
But even though in our modernistic society there are not many traditional competitors in the ring for God, I think it is still very possible for us to put gods in our hearts before him.
Soren Kierkegaard, the 19th Century Christian philosopher wrote this: “Your life wills one thing. You will live according to the nature of what you worship.”
In other words, we all worship something. Whatever you worship will inevitably become your God. If that is not your creator then you may find yourself liable to the first Commandment.
So let me ask you this, friends. What are you passionate about? What do you focus on the most in life? Where do you find your joy? Your purpose? Your fulfilment in life?
There’s a good chance that the answer to that question may be the very thing that has removed Christ’s rightful place on the throne in your heart. So since we don’t have a lot of Zeuses or Baals running around nowadays, let’s identify some of the false gods that we face today.
I think a good place to start is just by simply looking in the mirror – us. One of the first false gods that we must all contend with is this idea that the world revolves around me and no one else, that we go about our day lifting up ourselves instead of the Christ who deserves the glory.
C.S. Lewis in his book The Great Divorce wrote that the whole of humanity boils down to individuals answering this simple question: “My will be done or Thy will be done, Father, on earth as it is in heaven.” I don’t think any of us are immune from this temptation. This temptation to make ourselves the center of our lives, rather than God.
Another list of false gods that we might worship are things like money, sex, violence. Now to be honest. Most of the time I think these baser things just point to something deeper underneath. They are the idols that we medicate ourselves that point to a deeper false God. But it is possible to worship these things.
People absolutely for a time bow their knee down to the gods of lust and greed because it’s tangible, it’s powerful. It burns hot for a while then it burns out and fades away. Most of us in life get to the point where we realize that all the money in the world, or all the sex in the world can’t bring us the fulfilment that we’re seeking in a God. And so these baser things can be false gods and most of the time we pick up on it pretty quickly.
When I was going to seminary in Dallas I attended Lovers Lane UMC and they were doing a sermon series on false gods. One of the Sundays they played a video before the sermon and during the video there was a narrator that was talking about this very strange temple worship that he attended. He said that people from all around gathered in this temple and were acting crazy. They were dancing, they were shouting, they were singing. And they would paint their faces and their bodies, and people from the congregation would then go down in the middle of the temple and sacrifice their bodies as an act of worship.
And as he was saying all these things there was an image scrolling across the screen of what I guess were various Mayan cultures of old, dressed up in elaborate feathers and garbs and making their sacrifices to their sun gods and various other gods.
But then all at once the narrator started over. And saying the exact same words as before, this time images of various college football games rolled across the screen. And it was eerie, my friends, how much what he said fit what we were watching. And it was one of those “gotcha” moments for me because I was so convicted. That was hitting kind of close to home.
Now once again lighten up, pastor… yeah, I know. Most of us don’t end up worshipping our love for sports or our hobbies. But let me warn you, we could. Sometimes it seems like we do. I mean, think about how we talk about these things. Think about how many people will cram into a stadium on Saturday in a torrential downpour with freezing weather to watch a football game, then they won’t roll out of bed on Sunday morning the next day. Do you know anyone who all they think or talk about is their alma mater? Or would name their child after the school mascot? Who would care more about where their children grow up to go to school than getting to know Jesus in their heart?
I think when friendly interstate rivalries devolve into something ugly off the field, when we treat each other badly simply because you went to that school and I went to this school, then I think our hobbies have gone to something a little deeper than just our hobbies.
And finally there are the deceptive false gods in our life. These are the gods where unlike the baser things like sex and violence and money that are easy to identify, that don’t last very long, that don’t have legs to it. These false gods can be dangerous because we can worship them our entire life and not even know it. Because they more closely resemble the very thing that we were meant to worship. So things like love for your wife or husband, or love for your children, if we’re not careful, could be deeper than what it was intended to be.
Here’s what I mean. We were created to love our children and our family. And it’s a powerful thing because it taps into, gives us a glimpse of, the eternal love and relationship we were meant to have with our Creator. But if we stop there, end up worshipping each other rather than the God that it was intended to give us a glimpse of, then we might have found ourselves liable.
I always tell couples as I prepare to marry them in premarital counseling, “Don’t ever forget that it is God that is the first love of your heart, and not each other.” So often I think couples fall into that fairy tale trap of, “Okay, now it’s your job to make my happily ever after.”
Friends, we were never intended to make each other eternally happy. We can’t do that. And if we look to our spouse to be our fulfilment in life, if we look to our spouse for everything, then you will inevitably be disappointed.
But here’s the flip side to that. If you love God first in your marriage and seek your fulfilment and purpose in God first, then your secondary love, your spouse, will be greatly enriched. You will find yourself loving your spouse better than you ever could have before when they were taking the throne in your heart. “When the first things are put first, the second things are enhanced, not diminished,” as C.S. Lewis put it.
And so, my friends, the better we love God the more we cultivate that relationship, our first true love, the better you will find yourself loving those around you.
And to our children; I have to admit this is a hard one. I’m just starting to figure out how hard it is, not to make your children your everything. So I’m not going to talk about them that much because I don’t feel qualified to tell you how not to make your children your God. I love my girls and they seem to be so much a part of my heart. That’s not a bad thing but I think the same rules apply here, friends. If your children are your everything, if it is the place you go for all your joy, purpose of fulfilment, you may have a false god on your hands.
Because here’s the thing. As strong as that relationship is with your children and as much as that taps into and glimpses into our covenant relationship with God, that gift was never meant to be ours forever. If we hold on too tightly and worship our children, there we are again.
So again, let me ask you – what do your worship? What do you care about? Where do you find your purpose and fulfilment in life?
When I met with Rev. Horton we sat down to talk about this sermon and we asked ourselves that simple question – what do you worship? And it turned out to be pretty hard to answer that. Partly because you have to be really vulnerable with each other. And you have to be really honest with yourself. But it was also hard because most of the first things that we were coming up with weren’t actually the false god in our heart. They’re really just the symptoms that point to something deeper. We had to work to get underneath to the real false god. And I won’t tell you what Rev. Horton said because that’s not my place… but you can email me if you want to…I’m just kidding.
Here’s my false god. I think when I boil down everything in my life my false god, the thing I’m in danger of worshipping, is my comfort. When I think about everything to my fear of change, the way I get anxious about money sometimes, think about my family, my job, my vices or my life, I just want to be comfortable. And there’s a fear inside me that hangs onto that and is afraid that God is going to come around one day soon and disrupt my god of comfort.
So what about you? If during this service you’ve had any of those little pinpricks from the Holy Spirit, those little feelings that kind of hit close to home moments? I want to remind you now of this, friends. Remember the most important thing is that this covenantal relationship that we have with Christ is in response to our salvation, not in order that we might receive it. That means that the paperwork has already been filled out and turned in. That means that when we loosen our grip around God’s arm, he grabs us all the more tightly.
How we live matters, and there can be real pain that comes if we don’t live into that redemption. But you were saved for this very purpose – to know and love the true God in your heart. To reject all the other false gods that are in the world today and to love recklessly like Christ did the world that so desperately needs to know Christ.
The Apostle Paul in his letter to the church at Corinth wrote this: “Hence as to the eating of food offered to idols, we know that no idol in the world really exists. And that there is no God but one. Indeed, even though there are many so-called gods in heaven and on earth – as in fact there are many gods and many lords – yet for us there is one God. The Father for whom are all things and for whom we exist. And one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom are all things and through whom we exist.”
So, church, we are God’s people and he is our God. May we more and more live into that covenantal relationship that Christ has provided for us.
Let us pray. Lord Jesus, I thank you that when we feebly reach out to you, you drastically reach down to us. I pray that you would reveal to us the things that might be in danger of taking your place in our lives. The things that we hold onto a little bit too tightly. And then, Lord, call us gently back to our first love, using that and enriching the secondary things in our lives, for your glory and your people that they may know you. In your name we pray, Lord Jesus. A