Redimete Diem!

Just How Important

is This?

The 1^st Commandment

You shall have no other gods before Me.

Ex. 20:3

              The 10 commandments given to Moses on Mt. Sinai are traditionally divided into 2 sections – the first 4 make up the first of those sections for they deal primarily with our relationship to God while the last 6 make up the second section for these commandments deal primarily with our relationship to one another. When Jesus was questioned about the commandments he affirmed this and summed them up along this division:

You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul and mind,

and

You shall love your neighbor as yourself.

                But even as we think of these things we must remember that our obedience to these Commandments are not something we do simply to get God’s attention or earn his approval.  The law of God is not opposed to the grace of God: “For by grace you have been saved through faith, and that not of yourselves; it is the gift of God, not of works, lest anyone should boast.” (Eph. 2:8-9)  The Commandments do not first tell us what to do, they first tell us who Jesus himself is and what he did.  It was Jesus who lived the Moral Law of God perfectly,  his  food  and drink were to do the

will of the Father.  And for the joy set out before him – the joy of saving you from your sins and bringing you to himself –for that joy, he endured the cross, despising its shame and gained the victory for you and me and sat down at the right hand of God the Father.  Our greatest joy is knowing that by our faith in Jesus, his righteousness has become our own – we didn’t earn it, he did, and therefore, our obedience unto Jesus, by following his law, is out of our gratitude and zeal to live the life that Christ has given us to live.  “For we are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand that we should walk in them.” (v. 10)

                That’s what you should think of when you come to the 1^st Commandment: “You shall have no other gods before me.”   This  is  not something you must do if you want to go to heaven, this is what you choose to do because of what Christ has done for you.  In other words, for the Christian, saved by the grace of God, obeying the 1^st Commandment is a choice you make.

“I Do”

                Let me give you an analogy from the vows a person takes for marriage.  When a man and woman get married, they make certain vows before God.

                1)  The man and woman make a choice to be one with one another.  The woman doesn’t marry the man in hopes that by doing so he might one day love her back, they make the vow because they already do love one another.  They won’t merely live together in one place they choose to be one with one another –everything in their lives will be shared, you won’t be able to think of the one apart from the other.  In much the same way, the Christian chooses to be one with his Lord.  He chooses to love the one who first loved him.  He chooses to be identified totally with God in his life –nothing in his life is separated from his bond with the Lord.

                2)  The man and woman make this choice to the exclusion of all others.  When this man & woman choose one another in marriage they are also rejecting all other possibilities and choices they could make.  No one  else  may  ever  share  in  this  marriage  in  any  way  –  they belong totally and completely to one another.

When Joshua spoke to the Israelites, he said: “Choose this day whom you will serve.”  He said that because choosing for God meant rejecting all others.  And he didn’t mean “just then” or “for a while”, he meant from now on and for ever more.

Love is All Encompassing

                Now, what does it mean to love the Lord?  It means much the same as it does to love someone else in marriage.
                1)  The emotion of devotion.  Love is not always feelings.  Feelings are fickle, they come and go.  Hollywood says: “Listen to your heart, listen to your feelings.”   The  Bible  says:  “Don’t  trust your heart, do not be self-deceived.”  Nevertheless, there is an emotion to love, isn’t there?  If there wasn’t, not too many people would ever get married.  There is a feeling of attachment, of security, of “warm fuzzies” that is supposed to be there and will grow deeper over time.
                2)  But more than emotions, love means commitment.  Your choice for this person, for your Lord, is for keeps.  When Elijah faced the prophets of Baal on Mt. Carmel it wasn’t just a debate or contest, both sides knew that the one worshipping the false god would die.  When you choose whom you will love, who will be your God, it is more than just choosing what team you will root for this year, this choice is who you are, who you will be.
                3)  You demonstrate your commitment every day by honoring your Lord.  When you commit yourself to your mate everything in your life is oriented around his/her well-being.  You seek to honor him/her in everything you do.  When you choose to love the Lord, you yield your will to him.  Jesus said, “If anyone loves Me, he will keep My word; and My Father will love him, and We will come to him and make Our home with him.” (Jn. 14:23)
                4)  Love means to trust your life to the other.  There are many routine ways this is true, of course.  Whenever you ride in a car with someone  else  driving,  you  are  entrusting your life into his/her hands.

But we also see other ways in which this is much more dramatic.  When Gail Sharp was in the hospital recently, she was totally unable to speak for herself.  Her life was literally entrusted to her husband, Dick, who had to make decisions on her behalf.  When we say we love the Lord we are saying we trust our lives, now and always, into his hands.  We are not our own, we are his.

                Finally, how can we love God with all our heart, mind and strength?  Jesus tells us what this means in Mt. 5:48: “Therefore you shall be perfect, just as your Father in heaven is perfect.”  The word “perfect” in Scripture doesn’t mean without any mistakes or imperfections at all as much as it means “whole”, not compartmentalized.  In other words, your choice to love God effects everything else – how you live, how you choose your friends, your job, the place where you will choose to live, it even effects how you will go about looking for a person to marry and the commitments you will one day make to that person in marriage.

                The 1^st Commandment, to have no other gods in your life, is the greatest and most comprehensive commandment of all.  It effects everything  else.   You  can’t  understand  or  obey  the  other commandments until you first embrace this one.  If you are a Christian it is because Jesus kept this commandment perfectly and gave you the gift of his righteousness by his grace.  And that means that you now must choose to respond to that grace and make your life one with your Lord and Savior.

“Sir, Give Me This Water”

                Now I want to draw some observations of the 1^st Commandment from the episode of Jesus with the Samaritan woman at the well in John 4.  In order to see our lesson here, I’m going to start with the heart of the story and work backward.

                Verse 26 – “Jesus said to her, ‘I who speak to you am he.’”  Jesus, the Son of God sent from heaven, reveals himself to this woman.  All along in this story, it is evident that it is Jesus who is pursuing her, not the other way around.  It is the grace of God that is being poured out to this woman.

                The greatest way God can say “I love you” is to show you Jesus, bring you face to face with him, allow you to see who he is.  If you remember, I said before that the commandments do not first tell us what to do, they first tell us who Jesus himself is and what he did – they show us Jesus.

                Verse 22 – “You worship what you do not know.”  Like everyone else, the woman was used to talking about “religion” – in other words, just the differences in people’s opinions, the different choices people make, the different backgrounds they have, the different gods they grew up  with,  the  different  ways  they were taught to understand their

god, the different opinions on the usefulness of religion at all!  Jesus cuts through all that.  He is dismissing everything that people hold to, everything they have opinions about.  He is saying that such things only display people’s ignorance, He is even saying that such sincerity, such devotion to ignorance is useless.

                If Jesus had left her at this point, he would have left her hopeless.  But that was not his intention.  The idols of this world are nothing, they must be stripped away if a person is to be made ready to see and be confronted by the living Jesus.

                Verse 18 – “you spoke truly.”  Now we see what she really believes in, trusts in.  She argued with Jesus that she was a good Samaritan  but  the  truth  is  in  how  she  chooses  to  live  her life.   Her actions, her lifestyle, her choices all prove there was no love for any god there at all that was any stronger than her love for herself.  Her words mean nothing.

                That is so often the case today, isn’t it?  What a person does with his/her body tells us what/who they believe in much more clearly and honestly than do their words.  Don’t whisper to me when no one else can hear that you believe in Jesus, that you are a Christian when I can look at what you do, what choices you make and I can so easily tell where your heart truly is.

                And yet, Jesus knew this of her.  This proves my point about the Commandments very well.  If Jesus came requiring this woman merely to obey the 1^st Commandment, he would not have wasted so much of his time.  Jesus was calling her to fix her eyes on him and once finding his love for her to be genuine, to then choose to follow her Lord with her life as well as words.

                Verse 15 – “Sir, give me this water”  When Jesus talked with her, she admitted she was thirsty.  Is religion just a choice?  just an option?  If the well she had come to had poison in the water, would it have mattered if she had taken a drink?  If some people choose to worship one god and others choose to worship no god at all, can’t they both be right?

                Perhaps you have heard of the use of this illustration – “God resides, as it were, on a mountaintop” we’re told, “but there are many roads to the top of the mountain – one is Christian, another Buddhist, another Islam – the road you take is not important – what matters is that you get to the top, that you get to god.”  Or the argument that “there is one god but he goes by different names – some call him Allah, others Jehovah, others something else – but it is the same god.  It doesn’t matter what you call him, just so you call upon him.”

                There is, indeed, a universal need for God – sinful man is inherently thirsty & longs to be filled.  But we must not make the mistake of thinking that just because all men are thirsty whatever they choose to drink will fill them up.  The woman admitted she was thirsty but she still didn’t know what would satisfy that thirst, she needed to be shown.

                Verse 6 – “It was about the sixth hour.”  It would have been very unusual for a woman to come out to the well of the city at this hour and even more unusual for her to come alone.  When we read later in the story of her reputation perhaps that had something to do with it.  This woman’s sin had reaped its most obvious consequence – she was alone, without friends, without God, without hope.  She came alone and she came then even to avoid the others.

                Sin, worshipping that which is not the true God, reaps its consequences  in  even  the  most  basic  parts of our lives.  Oh, she could have put another label on it – “The women of the town don’t like me.” or “It’s easier when there is not a crowd at the well.”  But the truth of the matter is, not having a fellowship with God had its effect in breaking off any relationships she might have had on earth.  At first, misery loves company – but after a while, you learn the truth: misery is only happy when it’s alone.

                Are you alone?  Is your sinful heart, your sinful choices tearing apart your world?  Come, I want to show you Jesus.  Have you ever seen the 1^st Commandment in that light?  as an expression of Jesus’ love for you?  as a remedy, not just a law, to your true spiritual needs?  What choice are you willing to make now?

 

From Studies in the Book of Exodus, by Pastor Dave Barker, November, 2000.