Today, Saturday 12 October 2024 I had the privilege of listening to Jen Wilkin at the Irish Women's Convention. I make no apologies for copying out the words from Jen's book as they came alive to me and gave so much meaning to what I read and heard.
CHAPTER 1 - THE FIRST WORD
Undivided Allegiance
"And God spoke all these words, saying, 'I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery. You shall have no other gods before me."
Exodus 20 verses 1 to 3
The reality of a higher authority explains why the giving of the Ten Commandments doesn't actually begin with the utterance of the first commandment. Instead it begins with a brief history lesson recalling a costly liberation and establishing who is in charge.
A mere 50 days earlier, Israel had departed Egypt in the wake of the 10 plagues sent to accomplish her release. Fresh in their minds would be the memory of those dark days - the Nile running thickly red, dead frogs heaped in stinking piles, swarms of blighting insects, hail, diseases, darkness and death, Having gathered them at Mount Sinai, in thunder and smoke God reminds his people that it was by his mighty hand alone that their liberation was accomplished. Israel's only contribution to her freedom was to arise in obedience, as those walking from death to life. God introduces the Ten Commandments to his people by identifying himself as the Lord their God and prompting them with "Remember Egypt". Why? Because before Israel can pledge allegiance to Yahweh alone, she must recall her costly deliverance.
That deliverance entailed not just leaving behind the land of Egypt, but leaving behind the ways of Egypt. Each of the 10 plagues was more than just a a dramatic sign to Pharaoh that he must release the Hebrews. Each was a symbolic defeat of an Egyptian deity.
Osiris, whose bloodstream was believed to be the Nile, bleeds out before his worshipers when Yahweh turns the Nile to blood.
In reverence to Heqet, the frog-goddess of birth, Egyptians regarded frogs as sacred and not to be killed. Yahweh slays them by the thousands. Egyptian gods governing fertility, crops, livestock and health are all shown to be impotent before the mighty outstretched arm of Israel's God.
In the ninth plague of darkness, Yahweh demonstrates his rule over the sun god Ra, whom Pharaoh was believed to embody.
And in the final plague, the death of the firstborn, God shows himself supreme over the entire Egyptian pantheon by demonstrating his power over life and death.
I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of Egypt. The message to the Israelites at the foot of Mount Sinai is clear: before you can obey me as the God of the Ten Words of life, you must revere me as the God of the ten plagues of death. The response required is obvious too. If the God who toppled all rivals in Egypt has brought you out of Egypt by his mighty outstretched arm, the only logical response is to obey the first word: "You shall have no other gods before me."
Remember your costly deliverance. Pledge allegiance to me alone.
The first commandment, "You shall have no other gods before me" is spoken in the language of a sovereign to a servant. There can be no dual allegiances when it comes to serving Yahweh. By commanding a singular allegiance, God does not merely assert that he is superior to other gods. Nor, in the plagues, does he merely demonstrate that he is stronger than other gods. He declares that they do not exist. They are nothing more than the vain imaginings of a darkened mind The first word is more than a prohibition against worshiping lesser gods; it is an invitation into reality. "I am the Lord and there is no other, besides me there is no God" Isaiah 45 verse 5. Why should Israel worship no other gods before God? Because there are no other gods.
God has just routed his people's greatest enemy and put their non-existent gods to shame. But the truth that there is only one God to be worshiped must settle deep into the bones of the people of Israel, for God has brought his children victoriously out of polytheistic Egypt for the purpose of leading them victoriously into polytheistic Canaan.
After 400 years in Egypt, polytheism would be more familiar to Israel than the monotheism the first word expresses. It would feel more natural than the singular worship God commands, as sin in comparison to righteousness so often does. The land just across the Jordan beckons with the comfortable familiarity of many-god worship. The likelihood that Israel would return to the familiar is high.
The call to monotheism would not be a new idea to Israel at the foot of Sinai. The creation account of Genesis 1 contains the implicit command to worship only God. Like the 10 plagues, the 6 days of creation are purposely worded to topple any notion of worshiping sun, moon, stars, earth, sea, sky, plants, animals or humans. All of the heavens and earth are shown to be derivative, dependent upon, and in service to the God without origin who effortlessly speaks them into existence.
But God's people forget that pretty quickly - think of Jacob and the divided worship among the children of God. Between his exile in Paddan Aram and his return to Bethel, Jacob and his family had picked up a few household idol stowaways in their saddlebags. Though God had not explicitly commanded it, Jacob knows the idols must go - Genesis 35 verses 2 and 3.
The presence of idols among Jacob's family points to the operation of a "both-and" mentality; yes, we will serve Yahweh, but also, just in case, we will offer devotion to these other gods, as well.
Dual allegiance.
This mentality hides in the baggage of believers today just as it did in Jacob's family 3000 years ago. It's an age-old expression of what James 1 verse 8 refers to as double-mindedness. Double-mindedness occurs not because we replace God with an idol, but because we add an idol to our monotheon so that it becomes a polytheon. The repeated refrain on idolatry throughout Israel's history will not be that she ceases worship of God entirely but that she ceases worship of God alone.
The children of Yahweh today are not so different from the children of Yahweh then. Like Israel, we affirm that there are no other gods verbally and intellectually, but not practically. Practically, we live as polytheists. Our idolatry is a "both-and" arrangement:
I need God and I need a spouse.
I need God and I need a smaller waist size.
I need God and I need good health.
I need God and I need a well-padded bank account.
In our minds, we rationalize that the "both-and" still offers God some form or degree of worship, so everything must be okay. Yet, according to Genesis and Exodus, to cease to worship God alone is to corrupt any worship still offered to him.
In Matthew 6 verse 24, Jesus teaches us that "no-one can serve two masters, for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to one and despise the other." We may think dual allegiance is desirable, but Jesus assures us it is not even possible. We are created for single-minded allegiance. We are designed for it. We are made in the image of one God, to bear the image of one God. We cannot conform to both the image of God and the image of an idol.
We are not designed to be polytheists, nor can we sustain the weight of a many-God lie in our minds. When we cling to God and ...., we become "unstable in all our ways" James 1 verse 8.
It often takes a crisis to point out our folly.
There is nothing like a financial crisis to teach us our worship of money and comfort in addition to God.
There is nothing like a wayward child or a divorce to teach us our worship of having a perfect family in addition to God.
There is nothing like the aging process to teach us our worship of health and beauty in addition to God.
It is at just such a crisis point that we find Jacob ready to expel the household idols. Penitent, he has just come face-to-face with his own failures. His daughter had been violated, and his sons had responded with terrible vengeance when he himself failed to seek justice. Jacob is a man broken of his self-reliance and soured on his own cunning He is a man familiar with crisis. He is a man at last learning to pledge allegiance to God alone.
Whatever instability may be needed to bring us to repentance, the final solution to our practice of polytheism is found in Jacob's story.
"So they gave Jacob all the foreign gods they had and the rings in their ears and Jacob buried them under the oak at Shechem." Genesis 35 verse 4
Jacob could have destroyed the idols in any way. He might have burned them, thrown them in a lake, or hacked them to bits. Instead, he buries them under a landmark tree known as a place of idol worship. Determined to put the past behind him and live in the truth that God is his only hope, Jacob symbolically holds a funeral for the idols in the very place they were typically worshiped. With pointed irony, the place for idol worship symbolically becomes a burial ground for it.
To rid ourselves of idols, we must put them to death.
Jacob holds a necessary funeral and so must we. The apostle Paul urges us to do so:
Put to death therefore what is earthly in you: sexual immorality, impurity, passion, evil desire and covetousness, which is idolatry. On account of these the wrath of God is coming. In these you too once walked, when you were living in them. But now you must put them all away; anger, wrath, malice, slander and obscene talk from your mouth. Do not lie to one another, seeing that you have put off the old self with its practices and have put on the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge after the image of its creator." Colossians 3 verses 5 to 10
Notice Paul describes a list of idolatrous behaviours quite similar to the sins we will find forbidden in the Ten Words. Paul does not mean for us to put to death behaviour only, but the idols of the heart that hide behind them. He is urging believers to be students of our behaviours as indicators of what (or who) we worship in addition to God.
The first word serves as the umbrella statement for the other nine. If we obeyed the first word, we would automatically obey the others. It establishes the proper posture before God that enables the proper motives and behaviours to obey the other nine.
We were created in the image of God. The more we worship an idol, the more we will conform to its image. To put to death an idol is to be restored to the image of God.
Like Jacob, we must bury our idols. By the power of the Spirit we must bury our both-ands and keep them buried, learning from our past mistakes and growing in righteousness with each passing day. The first word prepares us for the other nine by demanding our undivided allegiance to the God of our costly deliverance. Without that pledge on our lips and in our hearts, all obedience to the commands that follow will be an exercise in empty moralism. The first word is a pledge of allegiance to the kingdom of God, here and now.
In Eden, the first commandment was perfectly validated and obeyed. In that pure heaven for that brief interlude, there were no other gods before God. Image bearers bore his image undiluted and undefiled. But dual allegiances sprang from the double-tongued lisping of the servant. Adam and Eve succumbed to the lure of God-and-fill-in-the-blank, and Eden's pure worship was lost. We feel the loss of it every day - battling for single-minded devotion, seeking to obey as our single-minded Saviour taught us and showed us to obey.
One day his kingdom will come in fullness, on earth as it is in heaven. That day, single-minded and whole-hearted allegiance will be fully restored. In the New Jerusalem, we will at last and once again have no other gods before him. Revelation 21 verses 18 - 19 and 23
John's description takes the things we esteem the highest in this life and reduces them to the level of commonplace. All of these elements - gold, precious stones, the celestial bodies, rulers, crowns - are what humans throughout history have worshiped, the stuff of our dual allegiances. These are the idols of this world.'
The New Jerusalem is a first-is-last place, where the things we have exalted will be cast down to the level of their real worth as mere metal and stone, as mere human authority, as mere created lights that move at the command of their Creator. It is a place where precious metals and stones are trodden under foot as common road dust, where our crowning personal honours are cast at God's feet, where the people and objects and institutions to which we have ascribed our worship will fall from their lofty places.
It is a place whose inhabitants at last obey the first word "you shall have no other gods before me." It is Eden restored.
Jesus who kept the first word in every way, taught his followers to pray that God's kingdom might come "on earth as it is in heaven" Matthew 6 verse 10. Why wait until the next life to count as worthless what God counts as worthless? Why wait until the next life to esteem what God esteems? The first word invites us into the blessed reality of no other gods now. It is our undiluted worship that marks us as his children in a crooked and depraved generation.
Today is the day for toppling our idols of power, wealth, security and comfort. Now is the time for treading in the dust the gods of our sinful desires. To live this life unbound to the things of earth is to anticipate the indescribable joy of an eternity in which every earthly pleasure bows to the pleasure of being finally and fully in the presence of the one and only God. Choose this day whom you will serve. Pledge your allegiance.
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