The First Commandment

Invite you to take your Bibles and turn with me to the Old

Testament book of Deuteronomy. Deuteronomy chapter 5.

Deuteronomy 5 · chapter mention

If you're using the red Bibles, you can see the page printed for

you in the Bible or in the in the bulletin of where you can

find it in the red Bibles around you.

Deuteronomy chapter 5. Beginning our summer series

Deuteronomy 5 · chapter mention

going through the 10 commandments.

And today we start with the first commandment.

Listen as I read to you the first verses of chapter 5.

And Moses summoned all Israel and said to them, Hear, O

Israel, the statutes and the rules that I speak in your

hearing today, and you shall learn them and be careful to do

them. The Lord our God made a covenant

with us in Oreb. Not with our fathers did the

Lord make this covenant, but with us, who are all of us here

alive today. The Lord spoke with you face to

face at the mountain out of the midst of the fire, while I stood

between the Lord and you at that time to declare to you the word

of the Lord, for you were afraid because of the fire, and you did

not go up into the mountain. He said, 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. Let's pray together.

Father, we thank you for this portion of Your word, this

portion of Your law. We thank You for giving it to

Your people so long ago. We thank You that we have it

today. As we take time to meditate upon

it today and throughout the summer, would you, through the

work of the Holy Spirit, open our eyes and our hearts to see

wonderful things. Remind us of who you are.

Remind us of who we are. Remind us of all that you have

accomplished for us, especially through the Lord Jesus Christ

and His work here on earth. Pray all this in His name, Amen.

A parable is told. A man owed a great debt to a

wealthy businessman. The man couldn't pay the debt,

and so he was put into prison. He stayed in prison for a long

time. Every day he woke up with iron

prison bars in front of him, doors that were locked.

Every day he woke up knowing that there was no way that he

could ever pay off his debts, no way he could earn his freedom.

He was stuck in prison. But one day, the jailer came to

his cell with unexpected news. His debt had been forgiven.

He was free to go. The prisoner walked out of the

prison into the sunlight for the first time in a very long time,

and a wealth of the wealthy businessman met him and greeted

him at the the gate of the prison.

I'm the one who paid your debt, he says.

Come with me. I have a home prepared for you.

I have a job for you. I have a family that will

welcome you in. In an odd turn of events, the

man who had been freed from prison responded.

Thank you for paying my debt. But I think I'll go back and

live with the warden in prison and we see how crazy that would

be, right? That how ridiculous that is.

The one who paid the man's debt, the man who rescued him from

prison deserved the free man's loyalty.

The one who oversaw him in prison, the the warden, deserved

none of his loyalty. That's similar to what we have

in Deuteronomy chapter 5. And with the first commandment

Deuteronomy 5 · chapter mention

and with all of the commandments, God's people had

been enslaved in Egypt for 400 years, like prisoners locked

away in a culture of many false gods.

But the Lord rescued them. He, he redeemed them.

He freed them from their slavery, from their prison.

He led them out of Egypt. And after wandering in the

wilderness for 40 years, he, he led them to Sinai.

The people were about to enter the Promised Land, and the Lord

graciously and mercifully gave them His law, His instruction.

His instruction for how they were to think and to live.

What would cause them to thrive and to flourish?

What would enable them to bring glory to the Lord?

After hundreds of years living in the land of polytheism and

even participating in service to false gods, the Lord begins by

telling them You shall have no other gods before me.

Again and again, the people would choose to go back to their

old ways of living a life of slavery and imprisonment, not

loving and serving the one who redeemed them.

But what is absolutely critical for us to understand as we come

to this first commandment, as we look at all of the 10

commandments, what is absolutely critically important for us to

see and to remember is that the Lord doesn't call for worship

and allegiance from strangers in these commandments.

He called for worship and allegiance from a people that He

had redeemed, people who had experienced that the grace and

the love of God that the first commandment is not simply obey

me, it is you are my people. I am your God, I love you, I

have redeemed you, you are mine. So worship and serve me alone.

And brothers and sisters in Christ, it's even easier for us

to understand this foundational truth because we have seen the

full extent of God's love and grace to his people and to us.

We know about Jesus. We know about the cross.

We know about his death and crucifixion.

We know about the resurrection. We know about the gospel the

Lord calls to us, his people, and he says to us, because I am

your God and you are my people, because I love you with a love

from before the foundation of the world, because you are mine

and I am yours. Worship me alone.

What is true about who God is and what He's done for us leads

to what we are to do. The indicative, what is true

leads to the imperative, what we are to do.

And it's never the opposite. This is the foundation of the

first commandment. This is the foundation of all

the 10 commandments, all of God's law.

Because we are the Lords, because of his great love with

which he has loved us, because the gospel is true, we are to

obey God's commandments. So with that clearly in our

minds, let's look at this first commandment and let's consider

several things. First of all, what is the basis

for the first commandment? And secondly, what is the extent

of the first commandment? Thirdly, what happens when it's

broken? And then lastly, what's the

solution to keeping it? So first of all, the basis of

the first commandment, the basis of the first commandment, and

really all of the commandments is nothing less than the

character of God, the very nature of who God is.

And notice we're told a number of things about God's character

in these verses leading up to and around the first

commandment, Verse 2, the Lord our God.

And in your Bibles you will see that the Lord is in all capital

letters. That's to let us know that

that's that powerful word, Yahweh.

This is the Lord God Almighty. This is the creator of the

universe. This is the ruler of the

universe. This is the one who sustains all

things by the word of His power. He is omnipotent.

He is sovereign, He is omniscient, He is omnipresent.

Listen to how the Westminster Confession of Faith describes

Yahweh in and of Himself. Infinite in being, glory,

blessedness and perfection, all sufficient, eternal,

unchangeable, incomprehensible, everywhere present, Almighty,

knowing all things, most wise, most holy, most just, most

merciful and gracious, long-suffering and abundant, and

goodness and truth. Has all life and glory,

goodness, blessedness in and of Himself, and is alone in and

unto Himself all sufficient, not standing in need of any

creatures which He has made, nor desert deriving any glory from

them, but manifests His own glory in, by, unto, and on them.

He is the alone fountain of all Being, of Whom, through whom and

to whom are all things, and has most sovereign dominion over

them, to do by them, for them, or on them whatsoever Himself

pleases. In His sight all things are open

and manifest. His knowledge is infinite,

infallible, and independent of His creatures.

He is most holy in all His counsels, in all His works, and

in all his commands. This is who Yahweh is.

He created us. He, He redeemed us.

He rightly owns us. He deserves our allegiance, our

service, and our worship. He has every right to set the

terms of our relationship with Him.

You are to have no other gods before me, He says.

He's not just the Lord God Yahweh.

He's also the Redeemer God. Notice in verse 6 the Lord, as

he's giving them this first commandment, He points his

people who are about to enter into the promised land back to

the exodus. He's reminding them how the Lord

redeemed his people. And we know it to an even

greater extent. How the Lord paid our debt that

we could never pay. How He purchased us with the

blood of our Savior, the Lord Jesus.

We belong to him. He deserves our love and

worship, our exclusive love and worship.

He's not only the Lord God and the Redeemer God, He's also the

jealous God. You can see that at the

beginning of verse 9. It's actually in the part

talking about the second commandment that we'll look at

next week, but it still points to the character of God.

He's a jealous God, not jealous like we get jealous.

His jealousy is never sinful, His is a holy jealousy.

This is the God who will not give away his glory to any

other. This is why we are not to have

any other gods before him. The Lord is jealous for His

honor and for his glory and His worship and he will always get

it. He is the Lord God.

He is the Redeemer God. He is a the jealous God.

He is also the covenant keeping God.

You can see that in verse 2 as he reminds the people of how

they had made a covenant with them.

God made a holy bond of union with his people.

He promised to be their God and for them to be his people.

A covenant that the Lord would never break or betray, even

though His people would all the time.

It wasn't other false gods that had made a covenant with these

people. No other false gods had made

promises to these people. It was only the one true God,

Yahweh, who is the covenant keeping God faithful in His

covenant keeping. And that leads to another

quality, character quality that we see here of God.

He is a personal God. Notice in verse 4, the Lord

speaks face to face with His people.

This is really what it means for the Lord to make a covenant with

His people. He he enters into a personal

relationship with His people. You will be my people and no one

else's, and I will be your God. And that relationship, that

personal relationship is even further explained and deepened

with the coming of the Lord Jesus, a Savior who knows each

of our names, who counts the hairs on our head, who has given

us the Holy Spirit to dwell in US and to be with us.

This is a personal God. This is the basis for the first

commandment. This is the basis for all of the

commandments that the very nature that the character of

God. But then notice that we're also

told something here about the extent of the commandment.

Verse 7 is the commandment itself.

You shall have no other gods before me, no other gods, he

says. Now this is not saying that

there are other gods, just that people back then, people today

believe that there are other gods, other gods to follow and

to love and to worship. We read in the Old Testament

about many of the different gods that were around Israel and

Egypt named gods. We read about the same or the

different gods of the nations around Israel that had names,

but they didn't actually exist. People just believed that they

were real and served these other fake and false gods.

The one true God, the Lord God Almighty Yahweh, says He alone

is to be served and worshipped. This is the extent of the

commandment. Now, before we to quickly

dismiss these people who believed in false gods in the

Old Testament era as naive, simplistic, what are the other

gods that we have in our culture today?

John Calvin famously said that the human heart is an idol

factory, that we can churn out idols all the time.

We can make gods out of our careers and vocations.

We can make gods out of success. We can make gods out of our

families, our children, our spouses.

We can make gods out of money and wealth, out of some skill or

ability that has been given to us.

We can make an false God out of our church, out of the

denomination that we're a part of.

What are the things that you are tempted to make a God in your

heart and in your life? Because the one true God says

that we are to have no other gods before him.

That's only part of the extent of this commandment.

He says we are not to have any false gods before him.

The the Hebrew word there has the sense of before the the face

of God, before the presence of the Lord.

We are to have no false gods, no other gods.

And think of this, there is no place where we are not before

the face of the Lord. There is no place you can go.

There is no distance you could get to, to be away from the

presence and the face of the Lord.

Remember the words of Psalm 139. The psalmist says, If I ascend

to heaven, you are there. If I make my bed and shall, you

are there. If I take the wings of the

morning and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea, even

there your hand shall lead me, and your right hand shall hold

me, for you formed my inward parts.

You knitted me together in my mother's womb.

My frame was not hidden from you when I was being made in secret,

intricately woven in the depths of the earth.

There is no place where we are not before the face of the Lord.

So there's no part of our lives where we can have other gods

that we love and serve and worship and obey.

No part of our lives. Christianity is not a both and

religion. It is an either or religion.

You can't both serve the Lord and worship the Lord and also

serve and worship the false gods and idols in your heart.

Either you worship and serve Yahweh or you don't.

This is the extent of the first commandment.

As we think about the basis of this commandment, as we as we

think about the the character of God, the nature of God, as we

think about the extent of this commandment, as we feel the

weight of this high standard, as we think about how easy it is

for us to break the first commandment, maybe we wonder

what's the result of breaking it.

Well, we can see the result pretty clearly by looking at

just one example of when it was broken.

The life of Solomon, one of the greatest kings, one of the

greatest leaders of the ancient world, most powerful king that

Israel ever had. He owned thousands of horses and

Chariots. He crushed every enemy.

He greatly expanded the Kingdom during his rule.

He was wealthy beyond measure. He had palaces filled with gold

and riches. He possessed true spiritual,

godly wisdom. The Lord told Solomon to ask for

whatever he wanted, and what did he ask for?

He asked for wisdom. It shows that he had a heart

that genuinely was interested in in wanting to serve the Lord, a

heart that desired to have no other gods before the one true

God. The Lord gave Solomon great

wisdom and wealth and power. Solomon used all of it to build

the great and beautiful House of the Lord, the Temple.

Solomon was a man of prayer and the Lord greatly blessed him.

But the Lord told Solomon, walk in my ways, serve me alone, walk

with integrity of heart, and I will establish your throne

forever. Have no other gods before me,

and if you choose to serve other gods, Solomon, I will cut you

off and reject your reign. In other words, he told him to

obey the first commandment. Listen to these words from First

1 Kings 9 · chapter mention

Kings Chapter 9. As soon as Solomon had finished

building the House of the Lord, and the King's house, and all

that Solomon desired to build, the Lord appeared to Solomon a

second time, as he had appeared to him at Gibeon.

And the Lord said to him, I have heard your prayer and your plea,

which you have made before me. I have consecrated this house

that you have built by putting my name there forever.

My eyes and my heart will be there for all time.

And As for you, if you will walk before me as David your father

walked with integrity of heart and uprightness, doing according

to all that I have commanded you in keeping my statutes and my

rules. And I will establish your royal

throne over Israel forever, as I promised David, your father

saying you shall not lack a man on the throne of Israel.

But if you turn aside from following me, you or your

children, and do not keep my commandments and my statutes

that I have set before you, but go and serve other gods and

worship them, then I will cut off Israel from the land that I

have given them. And the house that I have

consecrated for my name I will cast out of my sight, and Israel

will become a proverb and a byword among all peoples, and

this house will become a heap of ruins.

Everyone passing by it will be astonished, and will hiss.

And they will say, Why has the Lord done thus to the land and

to this house? Then they will say, Because they

abandoned the Lord their God, who brought their fathers out of

the land of Egypt, and laid hold on other gods, and worshipped

them and served them. Therefore the Lord has brought

all this disaster on them. With all of his wisdom,

God-given wisdom, with all of the blessing from the Lord, with

everything that was at stake, it's perplexing what happened.

Gradually, slowly over time, Solomon began serving false

gods, the God of wealth. He began to see his wealth as

his own, to do with whatever he wanted.

He built extremely opulent palaces for himself, buildings

in the Kingdom. He served the God of power.

The Lord commanded Solomon to keep the army small so that

Israel would know their dependence upon the Lord for

their victories. Solomon.

Solomon amassed an enormous, massive military power.

He served the God of sensuality and sex.

The Lord told Solomon to be faithful, not to intermarry with

the Pagan nations around them. Eventually, Solomon is recorded

to have had 700 wives, 300 concubines, many of them from

Pagan nations. And what was the result?

What was the result of breaking the first commandment?

The Lord took the Kingdom away from Solomon.

The Lord punished him, and the consequences impacted not just

Solomon. Even as the first King's passage

said, it impacted all of the people for generations of the

people, eventually leading to the splitting apart of Israel

into two kingdoms and the downward spiral of both kingdoms

that we saw throughout our study of Isaiah.

And the result for Solomon himself, it was notable.

He became a man who was filled with emptiness and despair and

even hatred for life. Listen to these words that

Solomon wrote. I said in my heart, Come now, I

will test you with pleasure. Enjoy yourself.

But behold, this also was vanity.

I said of laughter, It is mad, and of pleasure.

What use is it? I searched with my heart how to

cheer my body with wine, my heart's still guiding me with

wisdom, and how to lay hold on folly till I might see what was

good for the children of man to do under heaven during the few

days of their life. I made great works.

I built houses and planted vineyards for myself.

I made myself gardens and parks, and planted in them all kinds of

fruit trees. I made myself pools from which

to water the forest of growing trees.

I bought male and female slaves, and had slaves who were born in

my house. I had also great possessions of

herds and flocks, more than any who had been before me in

Jerusalem. I also gathered for myself

silver and gold, and the treasure of kings and provinces.

I got singers, both men and women, and many concubines, the

delight of the sons of man. So I became great and surpassed

all who were before me in Jerusalem.

Also my wisdom remained with me, and whatever my eyes desired, I

did not keep from them. I kept my heart from no

pleasure, for my heart found pleasure in all my toil, and

this was my reward for my toil. Then I considered all that my

hands had done and the toil that I had expended in doing it.

And behold, all was a vanity and a striving after wind, and there

was nothing to be gained under the sun.

So I hated life, because what is done under the sun was grievous

to me. For all his vanity and striving

after the wind. I hated all my toil in which my

toil in which I toil under the sun, seeing that I must leave it

to the man who will come after me.

What has a man from all the toil and striving of heart with which

he toils beneath the sun? For all his days are full of

sorrow, and his work is a vexation.

Even in the night his heart does not rest.

This also is vanity. Those are the words of a man who

was a breaker of the first commandment.

He had many other gods before the one true God.

And we look at someone like Solomon and all that he had, and

we wonder, how could he do it? How could he do it with what was

at stake, with having the wisdom of God?

How could he explicitly do what the Lord commanded him not to

do? But we know.

We know how Solomon could break the first commandment because

we're Breakers of the first commandment as well.

What is it that you love? Origin, the 3rd century

Christian scholar and theologian wrote.

What each one honours before all else, what before all things he

admires and loves, that for him is God.

What do you love? What do you admire before all

else? What do you desire above all

else? Who is the most important person

to you? Whatever it is, whoever it is,

that is your God. Or we could ask it this way.

And what do you place? Your greatest trust and hope,

Your health, your wealth, The government, your family, your

spouse being in control, Matthew Henry wrote.

Pride makes a God of self. Covetousness makes a God of

money. Sensuality makes a God of the

belly. Whatever is esteemed or loved,

feared or served, delighted in or depended on more than God,

whatever it may be, we in effect make a God.

In what do you place your greatest trust and hope and

love? If we're honest, we acknowledge

we break the first commandment all the time.

So we have to find out what's the solution for keeping it

Well, Paul gave us part of the solution in the passage that we

read earlier in the in the service in First Corinthians

1 Corinthians 10 · chapter mention

chapter 10. What did he say?

Flee from idolatry? He said flee from idols, flee

from false gods. Now, if you think about what

that truly means, it doesn't necessarily mean that we get rid

of whatever we're making an idol of, whatever we're making a God

of. It might not be possible if it's

our vocation or it's a spouse or a child, but at the very least,

what it means to flee from idols, it means to stop making

whatever it is or whoever it is a God for us.

Flee from making it an idol in our lives and in our heart.

Leaning, leaning against and rooting out that which we make

an idol or God in our heart. That involves honestly

acknowledging it, owning it, confessing it, repenting of it,

turning away from the false God, and rooting it out of our lives.

But here's the problem, brothers and sisters in Christ, when we

root out and weed out an idol or a false God, unless we replace

it with something, all we've done is created a whole that our

heart will fill with another idol.

What we need, and this is the second part of the solution, is

we need an expulsive power of a new of a better affection, a

greater love. That's actually the title of a

sermon by Thomas Chalmers, the 18th and 19th century Scottish

pastor. The Expulsive power of a new

affection. Chalmers contended that the only

way to truly remove a false God or idol from our lives is to

have to replace it with a different love, with a greater

love, with the expulsive power of a better affection, Chalmers

said. This, This we trust, will

explain the operation of that charm which accompanies the

effectual preaching of the Gospel.

The love of God and the love of the world are two affections,

not merely in a state of rivalship, but in a state of

enmity, and that's so irreconcilable that they cannot

dwell together in the same bosom.

We've already affirmed how impossible it is for the heart,

by any innate elasticity of its own, to cast the world away from

it, and thus reduce itself to a wilderness.

The heart is not so constituted. The only way to dispossess

dispossess it of an old affection is by the expulsive

power of a new one. So what is the new, the better

the ultimate affection that has this expulsive power to replace

our false gods and our false idols.

John tells us in first John chapter 4.

1 John 4 · chapter mention

In this the love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent

his only Son into the world so that we might live through him.

And this is love, not that we have loved God, but that he

loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins.

John gives us the greater love that has this expulsive power,

God's love for us that is demonstrated in the Gospel.

We so often fail to love the Lord more than the false gods

and false idols in our lives. And yet we are told that God

loves us and sent Jesus, his only Son, who perfectly kept the

first commandment, never serving or worshipping or obeying false

gods or idols, and then giving his life, dying for us, paying

the debt that we had because of our sin, because of our breaking

of the first commandment. Jesus paid that debt.

He paid the ransom. He paid the penalty.

He received the judgement and the wrath of God, because the

Lord God Almighty loves you. And it is an everlasting love.

Brothers and sisters in Christ, this is the expulsive power of a

greater, the greatest love. And the more that God's love for

us and the extent of his grace for us works deeply into our

hearts and our minds, the more we will be motivated and

empowered to persevere. And having no other gods before

the one true God, the God with whom you are in covenant with,

the God with whom you are in a personal relationship with, the

God who has redeemed you and who has loved you with an

everlasting love. Let's pray together.