1st Commandment

Today's text is from the book of Exodus, chapter 20, verses 1 through 3.

Exodus 20:1–3

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.

This is the word of the Lord.

Good morning.

It's great to gather together with you all this morning.

It's a joy to be here on this Labor Day weekend.

My name is James Rathman.

I'm the pastor here at Redemption Church Denver.

And we are beginning this week moving through the Ten Commandments.

So we've been preaching through Exodus, and now we finally arrived at Exodus 20.

And so for the remainder of the fall, up until Advent, we're going to be moving through the Ten Commandments.

And we'll end with the 10th commandment.

So prepare for some short scripture readings, which has been a break from Exodus, which has been very long.

So let's uh uh would you pray with me uh before we begin looking at our text for this morning.

Lord God, as we gather together, we are reminded of your grace towards us and your hand in forming your church together and gathering your people together to worship you.

Lord, we remember last week when we learned about Mount Sinai, how they were gathered together as a people, and they heard your voice and it was terrifying, and the uh smoke and the fire caused the people to cry out that that you would not speak to them again in that way.

But Lord, we are gathered to you, we are gathered together here today at a better mountain.

Lord, we are gathered together at Mount Zion.

We are covered not in the blood of bulls and goats, we are covered in the blood of your Son, the all-sufficient sacrifice for our sins, so that we might boldly come into your presence.

Lord, how desperate we are for your presence.

Saint Augustine famously said, Lord, our hearts are restless until they find rest in you.

Lord, our hearts are restless.

Lord, we pray that you would help us to find rest in you, that you would lead us to yourself, that you would draw us out of sin, Lord, and into your glorious presence.

Lord, we praise you for your steady hand upon us, that we can always rejoice in you because you are never changing.

And Lord, we remember just to dwell in your world, the world that belongs to you, Lord, that the heavens declare your glory, Lord, the the stars above proclaim your handiwork.

Lord, we praise you for the fellowship that you have made us a part of, the love that you have poured into our hearts for one another, Lord, and the love that you have shown to us, Lord, might we love you the same.

Thank you, Lord, for your work in our hearts, and we pray that by this first command, Lord, our hearts would be shaped and conformed into the image of your Son.

We lift this up in Jesus' name.

Amen.

So when you hear the Ten Commandments, you have to remember that we are hearing these at Mount Sinai.

So if you were with us last week, we looked at what the Sinai experience was like.

The people are gathered together at the foot of the mountain, and God speaks to them directly.

They are given these commands that they had to prepare themselves and clean themselves, that they were to abstain from marital relations, that they were to not allow even an animal to touch the foot of the mountain.

If even an animal came to the foot of the mountain and touched it, then that animal was to be stoned.

Likewise, if a person touched the foot of the mountain, the person was to be stoned.

And then when the Lord spoke to them from the mountain, it was in terrible thunder and lightning and a booming voice that was to the people, it was a horrifying experience.

Such was the wonder and the might of the Lord as he revealed himself to them.

And when we hear the Ten Commandments, these are not things that were merely said to Moses, that Moses then relayed to the people.

These are things that Moses, excuse me, these are things that the Lord said to Moses in the Lord's own voice, so that all the people were able to hear it.

All the people heard the Ten Commandments.

So the words that we hear and that we're looking at today, we have to remember that these were heard from the mouth of God to the people that are hearing them.

So at one point on this same world that we're on now, there was a group of people gathered together at the foot of a real mountain.

And when they were gathered together at that, they heard these Ten Commandments from the very mouth of God.

It is an incredibly wonderful thing.

And we also have to remember, as we're, as we remember the setting of this, what book we're in.

A lot of times we think of the Ten Commandments as just sort of standing on their own, like they get their own book of the Bible or something, but we're still in the story of Exodus when we received the Ten Commandments.

And so we should be thinking, we're about to get ten of something.

When was the last time we got ten of something in this book?

What was the last ten things we got in this book?

Anyone remember?

Plagues, yeah.

The last ten that we got in this book was plagues.

And the ten plagues were an announcement to Pharaoh.

And they were telling Pharaoh, if you don't obey, then you will be destroyed.

You will be destroyed as a nation.

They were given ten instances of that.

These were words to the enemies of God, to the oppressors of God's people, and they were ten words of death to the oppressor to the oppressors of God's people.

Now God has his own people gathered together, who he has rescued.

And he gathers them together, and when he speaks to them, he is giving them ten more words.

But these are not the ten words of the destruction of a nation.

These are not ten words leading to death.

These are ten words of life.

These are ten words that are about the creation of a nation, ten words that are about the establishment of his people.

This is not describing how the people are to be out of this is not just describing the disorder of the people, he is bringing them into a right order in his presence.

In fact, we should think of the Ten Commandments as God doing, God acting, just as he said he would act towards his people when he rescued them out of the land of Egypt.

He had promised Moses this in Exodus 4, 22 through 23.

He said, Then you shall say to Pharaoh, Thus says the Lord, Israel is my firstborn son.

And I say to you, Let my son go, that he may serve me.

If you refuse to let him go, behold, I will kill your firstborn son.

These are the stakes.

Firstborn sons were the stakes of the Exodus.

But notice what the Lord says.

What what this the way that God is acting towards his people is all described in this.

God looks at his people and he says, These are my firstborn son.

This is how precious they are to me.

These are the heirs of all that I have.

Think of all that God has.

It is many, many things.

And his people are the heirs of this.

And he treats them as such.

Now, what do you do with a son?

You know, if you look at the book of Proverbs, it's just over and over again, it's it's a father's speech to his son.

A father sitting down with his son, and he's saying, Let me tell you what it's like out here.

It's you're gonna be blown away what it's like out here.

Some of my memories as a child around the dinner table were my my dad would teach my sisters and I, we would role-play how to negotiate.

And that's because my dad was in the car business.

And so we would practice being in the car business together.

And he'd say things like, say, like you're you know buying a bike somewhere, and uh you'd walk in and you'd say, like, hey, you know, look around at it a little bit and say, like, how much for this bike?

And then they'd say, How much for this bike?

And he goes, now here's what you do.

You'd go, whoa man.

Whoa.

That is insane.

Well, okay, I guess I'm not I guess I'm not looking at this bike.

That's how you open the uh negotiation, and we would practice this as a family.

And so what you do with a son is you uh you sit them down and you teach them, here's what it's like out here.

I'm gonna I I want to equip you for the way of life.

And that's what my dad was doing in that moment.

He was equipping me for the for the way of life.

Because he's thinking, I I don't want you to be taken advantage of out there.

I maybe want you to take it, maybe do a little taking advantage of, you know, car business.

But I don't want you to be taken advantage of.

I want to I want you to be the one out here who can who can work and who can create, you know.

And that's what God, that's the way you treat a son you love or daughter you love.

And this is the way that God treats his people.

He rescues them and then he treats them like a son.

So that's the way you should hear these Ten Commandments.

What God is doing is He's He's not laying out uh traps or tricks, he's laying out the very path of life for his children.

And the way that he first begins this the the Ten Commandments is he reminds them of who he is to them.

And he reminds them of what he has done for his people.

This is not advice from a stranger.

This is advice from a loving father, from a true God, and a true God who has proven himself as trustworthy to you because he has rescued you.

That's why in Exodus 20, verses uh one and two.

Hey, I fixed it on there.

On mine it says verses one to three.

In Exodus 20, verses one and two it says, 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.

This is the introduction to the Ten Commandments, the preamble.

The context of the Ten Commandments is this I am the Lord your God.

This is God's covenantal name, Yahweh.

When you see Lord translated in some of your translations, it will be Lord in all capital letters.

Uh when you read it in Hebrew, you don't say Yahweh, you say Adonai, and there's some weird uh uh things happening with the vowels, which there always is in Hebrew, which is painful.

And there's uh and so he is using his covenant name.

He is saying, he is saying, uh, I'm not a generic God, I am your God.

You can say as a Christian, you know, I was thinking about this when we were when we were worshiping together this morning.

We we are not just this is a hard thing to grasp, so I'm just gonna try and say it and hope you catch it.

We are not just worshiping God.

Of course we are.

We are not just worshiping God, you are worshiping my God.

You can say of God, He is my God.

My God.

And that is the way that the Lord wants you to understand him.

He doesn't want you to understand him as just some some generic category of God.

This is not the God of the philosophers in which we play, in which we make riddles with to figure out whether he's really there or not.

This is my God.

My God is there when I turn to him.

You know, this is not just the this is not just father.

This is my father.

There's a difference between fathers and my father.

The difference is you can turn to them.

They're the ones that you know will be there.

And so he says, I am the Lord your God, and what has he done?

Who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery?

It is so important for us to remember.

What he wants the people to remember here is if God had not acted, we would still be enslaved.

If God had not rescued us, we would still be in Egypt under the yoke of slavery.

But God did rescue us.

And it's so important to see that this announcement of his rescue, and the very act of rescue itself comes before the presentation of the Ten Commandments.

That the act of rescue is prior to the Ten Commandments.

Now that's so important because we have to remember in our minds that the Ten Commandments are not given as a means of salvation.

God did not give the Ten Commandments to His people while they were still in Egypt, and then say, I'll be back in 400 years and we'll see how you all do with the Ten Commandments.

And if they had not had any other gods before him, if they had not worshipped idols, or if they had remembered to keep the Sabbath day holy, if they had not committed adultery or lied or coveted, then God might say, Okay, since you measured up to this, then perhaps I will rescue you.

That is not the way that the Lord presents the Ten Commandments.

The Lord already rescued them.

So what must the people think?

What must they consider?

Why is it that God rescued us out of the land of Egypt?

It is because of the Lord's covenantal faithfulness.

It was because of God's faithfulness to them.

It was not because they had passed the test of faithfulness to God.

In fact, throughout the attempts, throughout the even the plagues, the people are saying, we're done.

We don't like this.

When Moses first tries to deliver them, they don't want Moses to deliver them.

When they are first brought out of the land and there's no water, they immediately turn on God, and then the same when there's no food, and then the same when there's no water again.

This is not, their rescue was not because of their faithful obedience.

All they could say is that they were rescued because God was faithful.

The whole, all of the Ten Commandments rest on this.

That this is guidance, commands, from the one who has been faithful to us, from the one who is our rescuer.

We have to recognize that.

We have to know the one who is giving the commands.

We have to know the disposition in which he is giving the commands in order for us to receive them properly.

That's why God lays them out in this way.

Now, before we jump into them, I just want to say some things about the Ten Commandments.

My heading for this section is some things about the Ten Commandments.

Matthew 22, 37 through 40, it says, And he said to them, that's Jesus, You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.

This is the great and first commandment.

And the second is like it you shall love your neighbor as yourself.

On these two commandments depend all the law and the prophets.

Is that a familiar verse?

What are the two greatest commandments that Jesus says everything hangs on?

To love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength, and you are to love your neighbor as yourself.

These are the two great commandments.

So that means that these two great commandments, to love God and to love our neighbors as ourselves, these are the summary of the Ten Commandments.

And the Ten Commandments are the summary of the whole moral law.

So all of the Ten Commandments are summed up in this: to love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength, and to love your neighbor as yourself.

The summary of the Ten Commandments is love.

And what's described in the Ten Commandments are the objects of your love.

Who are you to love?

Firstly, primarily, you are to love God.

That is what commandments one through four most clearly describe.

That's what the first four commandments are all about.

To have no gods before him, to not make idols, to not take his name in vain, and to remember the Sabbath day.

And then the final commandments, the last six commandments, turn towards how we are to love our neighbors.

And that begins with honoring our mother and father, not committing adultery, not committing murder, not bearing false witness, not coveting.

I think I left something out.

That's gonna happen a lot this week or these next ten weeks.

And all of these are summed up in love.

So the Ten Commandments are summed up in a command to love.

They're all interrelated with one another.

Because we can see that in order to truly love our neighbors, this must come from a love for God.

How can we claim to love our neighbors truly without seeking their highest end?

And their highest end is to be reconciled to God.

So in order to love our neighbors truly, we must love them as the Lord loves them, calling them into the love of the Lord.

Likewise, how can we claim to love God if we do not love the ones who bear the image of God?

So these are interrelated commandments that are all summed up in this command of love, to love God and to love our neighbors.

But we should recognize this is not intuitive to us.

In fact, even the context is is not intuitive to us.

What we think is, what we would expect is not.

If I were to say the the what we're getting is a a summary of love and of how we ought to love from the God who is love.

And this takes place on the other side of Him liberating you.

If I were just to describe that context, I don't think our what we would expect from our own minds would be, okay, that makes sense.

Then the next thing we'll get are commands.

Those don't fit the same category in our minds.

We would think if you were just liberated, then as an expression of this liberation and of teaching you how to hit how to fully receive this liberation from slavery, I think our first expectation would be not that you were given a bunch of commands, but that you were shown a bunch of options.

When I was first coming to school out here at CU Boulder, I remember this for some reason, and I was flying out here from Florida and sat next to an older lady on the plane, she's probably like my age, and we and when we were, I was talking with her, and she goes, you know, college?

This is the time you gotta try everything.

Anything you get a chance to try, you gotta try everything so that you can discover who you really are.

You know, you gotta try everything.

And uh I and it was one of those things where it's like, I feel like I kind of know what you mean.

You know, like not like different math problems.

You know, it was not what it was, it was um uh a little more blue than that.

And she uh uh but this is the what what's happening is the the where the the shape of going off to college is like you're throwing off the constraints of your parents' house.

You're you're free now.

There's this new liberty that you have.

And so what we say to people who experience things like that is here are your options.

Go find your liberty, express yourself in this freedom.

Try all kinds of things so that you can discover who you are.

That's our typical advice.

But the Lord instead, at this moment, he offers commands.

And a lot of them are thou shalt not.

This is the shape of most of the commands.

Now, we relate commands like that to bondage.

That is what commands sound like in our ears.

But these are not commands of bondage, these are commands of liberty.

And the bondage would have been you're now free from Egypt.

Go live however you like.

You need to decide for yourself what Israel as my chosen people will be like.

And then what you decide, come bring that to me, and you'll that'll be great.

You know, you'll you'll get this real experience of liberty.

The reason we don't understand the commands in this context and why we think those are like oil and water is because the operative myth in our culture about freedom is that freedom equals lack of constraint.

That's what freedom means.

Freedom means lack of constraint.

And commands are a constraint.

It's what a command is.

Commands constrain, they are boundaries for the things that you do.

But the truth is, is that this understanding of freedom is a fundamental misunderstanding of the type of thing my mouth is a thing.

That is the type of thing that you are.

The type of thing that you are is not an unconstrained being.

You are an innately constrained thing.

Which is to say, you are the type of thing.

To be a human is to be a creature that was made for a purpose.

And if you are made for a purpose, then that means your freedom is in realizing or bringing yourself into conformity with that purpose.

And your purpose is what aligns with these commands.

You would love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength, and that you would love your neighbor as yourself.

Now, we since we think of freedom as having no constraint, this likewise means that our culture, because we consider freedom like this, our culture thrusts us into an identity crisis, where we don't know who we are, because we've removed our purpose from ourselves.

The way that we know our purpose, excuse me, the way that the identity and purpose, these are linked together.

You can you know this when you go and and you get a tool out of uh out of your tool out of the bag that you throw all your tools in indiscriminately.

Which is the way I do it.

When I reach in there, I pull out a hammer, and when I pull out a hammer, it does hammer things.

And that's why it's named hammer.

And there's a couple of things.

It can pull out a nail, or it can hammer a nail in, or it can nudge things that need nudging, and then that's about it.

That's that's hammer stuff.

That's when it's hammer time.

That was so horrible.

That was like there's this great little bit um uh in the show Detroiters, which I don't recommend, where a preacher tells a joke and everybody laughs like how you just laughed, and they're two comedians, and they walk up to an afterwards and they go, we just want to let you know that that wasn't actually funny, but it's just because you're a preacher, people laugh.

And it's the oldest gag in the book, and it's lame.

So I always I think about that a couple times a week.

So the identity of the hammer, the hammerness of it, is because of the purpose of the hammer.

And if you're using the the classic illustration, it's like you use your watch and you're trying to hammer in a nail, and you say, This hammer's terrible.

You'd say, Well, no, no, no, that's just not a hammer.

You're using it to do hammer things.

And then what we would say in our culture is, well, I'm free, I'm free to use myself to do anything that I would like.

That's what freedom is.

It's a lack of constraint.

And then there is a crisis of identity, because identity and purpose are wed together.

And we don't know who we are.

So what we've done, because the way that we define freedom is a lack of uh uh constraint, and constraint gives us, points us towards purpose, is we we have instead then, as a tried a way to try and sneak some identity in the back door, is we have we have said, maybe my identity is the thing which is most idiosyncratic and private about me.

That if I were to take the most idiosyncratic aspect of myself that I discover by just looking within my own heart, and then I express that out into the world, then I am using my freedom and I am establishing for myself an identity.

And what this creates is a is a disillusion of identities.

It creates ever-shifting sands of identities.

This is why in our culture we relate sexuality, which is idiosyncratic and private, with the core of our identity.

Because we're we know that we can't look to something outside of us to provide our identity to us.

But there's another way in which our identities must be socially experienced and socially validated because we bump into each other all the time.

You know, and we have to know names and things to call each other and that sort of thing.

And so we have this deep confusion that becomes a crisis of identity because we don't recognize that we are not self-made things, granted a fullness of liberty that means no constraint, but we are made by the true God who made you with intention.

And the intention with which he made you was that you would love him, you would love your neighbor as him as yourself, that you would glorify and enjoy him forever.

And God has revealed him, and it that means that you can be conformed as a person to the love of God, or you can be deformed as a person to the hatred of God.

And so it is not that the world, the world, if we were unmade things that just happened, then we would live in a world of pure potentiality.

But a world of pure potentiality is a world of no identity, and therefore a world of no relationship, and therefore a world of no love.

That is not the world we live in.

We live in a world which was made, and you are the type of thing which was made for an intention with a purpose.

And so the way that we live is it is not we often think of it as you are either under commands or you're free.

That's not the case.

You are either under deformative commands, which is that you are seeking to conform yourself to some purpose that you created for yourself, which is you didn't create yourself, so it will be a deformative purpose, or you are under good commands, which form you to the purpose for which God intended you.

So it's not whether you're under commands or not, it is which commands you are under.

And that is why when God liberates his people to be out from under the oppressive commands of the Egyptians, the oppressive life of slavery, he does not liberate them into a world of no commands, because that would just be cursing them to their own idiosyncrasies.

Instead, he liberates them into his commands, the commands of their creator, the one who made them, who knows what their purpose is, so that when they are conformed to it, they are living within the pattern of life.

At our uh men and boys campout on Friday, which was really fun.

Uh, Capture the Flag is probably my favorite sport.

We played Capture the Flag and Sebastian broke his arm, and I'm you're gonna be an object lesson for this sermon.

So look at every look at that.

Everybody say, oh no.

So uh when Sebastian went to the doctor, I'm just gonna take this for granted, Bo, I could use you.

A lot of broken people, a lot of broken people at church.

Look, we come as we are.

When you when uh when you brought your broken arm into the doctor, which we should have made you do earlier, instead of just hanging out all night.

When you brought I hear the same thing happened at the women's dinners, by the way.

The um the doctor wasn't like, hey, your arm was constrained by the way by the shape of the bone.

Now your arm is unconstrained.

Where would you like me to put the cast?

Would you like me to put it this way?

Would you like me to put the cast this way?

Would you like me to No, there's the that's the doctor didn't ask that.

Because the doctor is going in and he has this assumption.

There's a there's an arm function.

And right now it's out of arm function shape.

And we want to put it back into arm function shape, and in and in putting this cast on it to conform it back into that shape, this is the position of life and flourishing.

This is the position of healing.

We understand this in all kinds of ways already, intuitively.

We know this is how the world works, but we deceive ourselves in our spiritual lives and with the concept with the conception of what freedom is.

These commands are the Lord putting us into the position of function.

The Ten Commandments should be understand as the explication, that is, the making explicit of the creational order.

They are taking things that are already implicit in the created order, that God had already built into creation from the very beginning.

And they are making these explicit.

They could be called here is how you be a human.

And these are implicit in the created world.

But the Lord takes them and he makes them explicit so that we might see and know what the path of life is.

The reason that the Lord must make these explicit is because our world, our hearts are broken.

We are injured, even dead.

And so what the natural order reveals to us, we are deceived in our minds and we believe lies about what freedom is, and about what constraint is, and about who God is, and therefore who we are, and what a true life of flourishing would be.

And what we do is we bind ourselves up outside of the position of function, and we receive death as a result of that.

That's why cultures become cultures of death, where what is celebrated, what is venerated becomes death.

The world is ordered by love.

The world is ordered by love, it is held together by the love of the Father.

Therefore, we ought to order our lives in accordance with the commands of his love.

Love and commands go together.

You can think of the Father and the Son again.

Love and commands go together, and within them there is true freedom.

We are restored to the position of function in our hearts so that we might have true life and true flourishing.

You will be bound.

You will be bound by something.

The question is what you will be bound by.

And this brings us to the first commandment.

Because this first commandment is really a question of what you will be bound by.

Who you will be bound to.

And the first commandment is this in Exodus 2.3.

You shall have no other gods before me.

First, notice the format.

Look at you're going to hear this throughout all the Ten Commandments.

It's God says things like, you, you shall, you shall not.

He's talking right to the people.

He's talking right to you.

You shall, you shall not.

And then he talks about me.

God himself is speaking and saying these things.

That's how we should hear them.

It is conversant like that.

You shall have no other gods before me.

Now, the question is, right off the bat, we should think, who can say something like that?

You shall have no one before me.

Who could say something like that?

You know, who could say something like that?

What should happen is when you when you hear something like that, I went back, I kind of half remembered that George Carlin had a stand-up bit on the Ten Commandments.

And I do a lot of my sermon prep with George Carlin.

And so I went and YouTube his Ten Commandments uh uh stand-up routine, and it is like the most midwit takes you could possibly imagine.

I don't know what was going on in the late 80s where people thought he was a genius.

This is not genius.

Here's uh what he's what he says in the he he lays out the these first commandments, and uh he goes, no other gods before me.

Oh, this is some primal language for an uneducated people just to control people and keep them in line.

I like what he did he honestly think nobody'd ever thought that before?

This is my routine against George Carlin.

That's what this is for them for this, for the remainder of the Sunday.

There's the the but the here's here's what I'm trying to pull together that made that come into my mind.

It is an absurd thing for anyone to say.

And it is the most controlling thing you can imagine.

It is the most binding thing you could say.

You should have no one before me.

But what George Carlin did in his assessment of that was he thought, God is another thing like I'm a thing.

God is another being like how I'm a being.

And so if he's saying that, this is just tyranny.

This is just control.

But God is not like us.

God is the only being who can say this, and it is it is the exact right thing for God to say.

This is the path of liberty.

This is the path of freedom that we would have no other gods before God.

Because God knows He is the true God, He is our true creator, He is our only Savior, He is the being in which we are designed to find our highest satisfaction, to find our greatest end.

And if we have anything before him, then we will live in bondage and slavery and death to that thing.

And you can even picture it.

I was thinking, like, man, can you like who would say something like this?

I was trying to imagine, you shall have no other gods before me.

Can't you imagine like a movie villain saying that?

Or how terrifying of a thing that would be for someone to say to another person?

It's like a horror movie, you know, that to say this, like that, like they're trapped in the basement or something, and you say, You have no other gods before me, and then they walk up the stairs of the basement and close the door.

That would be scary.

Because we we have this sense, you know, or like when you watch a cult movie, Carolyn.

Carolyn's on staff here, we watch cult movies to see if we can make any adjustments, or if there's any.

And when and you see that there will be somebody there, and somebody will have completely submitted themselves to this person.

And it's it's it's heartbreaking and horrifying.

And you think, and you what you're looking at there when you see that is this is somebody who has been fully captured.

They have no gods before this person.

They have placed this person into the position of God.

Now, if we were to hear somebody, if we were to, if somebody were to come along or some system were to come along and say, you shall have no other gods before me, then it uh then you know we should we should start to feel like that's this is a terrible ask, this is a horrific ask.

I can't even imagine, you know, I would never submit to something like that.

I wish that were true.

The truth is this is the ordinary state of our hearts.

That people or promises come along all the time, constantly, and they say, here's the promise of life.

Here's the promise of life.

Put nothing before me, and I will give it to you.

And the truth is we submit ourselves to that constantly, and we become enslaved to it.

We submit ourselves to the promise of approval from others, so we won't enter a hard conversation with even a loved one.

Because the truth is we do not love them.

We have the truth is we are treating them as God to us.

They are the one who is able to bestow life and truth and goodness.

They are the one who is able to bestow blessing upon us, and then they become God to us.

We do this with our finances, where there becomes almost nothing we wouldn't sacrifice in order to have the security of our finances.

Because our money stands before, and it makes sense to do, because you know what problems money solves?

All of them.

It's in Ecclesiastes.

It is in Ecclesiastes.

I preached it to you.

And so it makes sense that we could submit ourselves to this, and if I submit myself to this, then I will be saved.

I will be rescued.

And what happens is we become bound by these things, completely bound by them.

We do this with just our our ordinary daily routines.

You know, my routine got off.

And I know that like my ability to have mastery over my time and for and to keep everything in the right order, that that is the promise of life.

The promise of life is there.

And all of a sudden we are bound.

We are bound.

We do this with our emotions, where we we are convinced that we cannot experience negative emotions, that God would not have it such that we experience any negative emotions.

And so we are running from ourselves, constantly in flight, constantly in pursuit of distraction.

And in that running, we are we are like a pursued slave.

Because we have in we have made this the God of our lives for the promises that it offers us.

It is right to make God.

The God of you, because of the promises that he offers you.

It's not just that, but it's a part of it.

And so we are designed to hear a promise and conform ourselves to what the promise requires in order to receive it.

But our hearts are broken such that we do this with all things except for the one that we were made to do this for, who is the true God.

Do you know what it would be like to obey the first commandment?

To have no other gods before God.

The freedom that that would mean.

Fear of man, eliminated.

Fear of the future, gone.

Emotional pain and suffering, I can deal with it.

The difficulties of community and of loving one another, I can pursue it.

All of the commands flow from this.

You know, this is right on the other side of being taken out of slavery.

These are words of freedom.

And I think that this is the great word of freedom that could be spoken over your life.

That you would have no other gods before God.

That there would be no rivals.

All other gods that come to you.

And these are the these are superstitions.

These are just, these are cultural lies of where your true freedom is, where your true identity is.

If instead we receive these things just from God, this is the ultimate freedom that God is calling us into.

No other gods before God.

That type of person can't even be manipulated.

You know, that's a negotiator.

No other gods before God.

Calvin gives us four things that are really helpful for breaking this down, I think.

Here is um for how this can positively look.

How can we practice this commandment, having no other gods before God?

He says this means at least four things: worship, trust, invocation, and thanksgiving.

That God has the full rights to these.

First, full rights to our worship.

Worship means praise and sacrifice.

What you honor and what you would make sacrifices towards.

God is saying, I hold the central spot.

I hold the top aim in the hierarchy.

So this means that everything else must be brought into alignment with finally having no gods other than Him.

That your family, your work, your education, your friendships, these are all brought into alignment by this highest aim, who is the true God.

He is the one we sacrifice to, he is the one we worship.

We feel like we don't have other avenues of worship, because this is a very strange thing that you're doing this morning.

Many of your friends probably don't do this.

Come together and sing to God.

We have all kinds of other avenues, opportunities for what we would sacrifice to.

Consider just your own giving.

Is there what is the proportion of giving to your future self or giving to God?

There should be some proportion of both.

What is the proportion?

What are we sacrificing and demonstrating as our highest value?

The sacrifice of your this is this is the one that I barely even want to say, but you know what worship is?

Just like the basic, if we want to just like dead simple.

Paying attention.

That's the heart of worship.

And it's even in the word, right?

Sacrifice, the way that we say it.

You don't you you pay attention.

It's a cost.

Oh man.

If we could obey this commandment, if God had our attention, consider your anxieties and the things that you pay your attention to, that you pay offerings of attention to, in hopes to receive blessings of life from.

Of the fears that are just around the corner, whatever it is.

God is saying, pay attention to me.

Give to him your attention.

Oh, what a blessed life.

Second is trust.

We must trust God and entrust ourselves to God.

To have no other gods before him means that we entrust ourselves into his hands.

We say, He is my God.

And God is the type of thing that's in control of everything.

And my God is the one who loves me and has saved me.

And he has made promises to me for my good, not because of anything I elicited from him, but out of his faithfulness, out of his loving kindness.

And so that is someone I can entrust myself to.

Many of us have had situations and experiences, and it causes us to be unable to enter relationships of trust with people.

The way that we've responded to them is we have said, I will not enter relationships of trust with people like that.

You know what I've learned is you can't really trust anybody.

You can't really trust anybody.

And you know what?

You know why that really takes is because yeah, you're right.

You're right.

Everyone will let you down.

Everyone will let you down.

This is something you learn.

There's this great little um, I almost I'll say it.

It's a maybe it's a helpful example.

But there's this um uh uh think of it like here's what happens.

This is the normal pattern of what we do with humans and each other.

I the tendency is if we find somebody and we entrust ourselves to them, then we tend to idolize that person.

Then when that person lets us down, we demonize that person.

And then we think, I will get out of that cycle.

And the way that I get out of that cycle is I never entrust myself to anyone.

The reason that we and then and then you become isolated.

You're you there's no real relationship anywhere.

And the pain of relationship that you are trying to avoid is now matched by the pain of your own self-protection.

So what do we do?

Because it's very dangerous to be in relationships with one another.

We hurt each other.

What you do is you entrust yourself to God.

He is the one that you are ultimately entrusted to.

And you look at him and you say, Were his relationships like?

And it's like, wow, pretty difficult.

What am I like in relationship to him?

Pretty flighty, sometimes annoying.

How does he treat me?

He remains faithful to me.

Every time I turn to him, he is there waiting.

Even when I have been rebellious and acted as an enemy towards him, when I turn to him, he is there to receive me as a son.

I can entrust myself to him.

And because my heart is entrusted to him, I can trust others.

Well, what if they disappoint me?

What if they hurt me?

Well, that's okay.

I'm cared for by the Lord.

The Lord is the one who holds me.

I can be hurt by people.

And I know what it's like to hurt people.

I do it to people, I do it to the Lord all the time.

The Lord's grace is sufficient to hold me in his presence.

I entrust myself to him.

Otherwise, your your life will be this pattern of idolizing and demonizing.

We'll be idolizing and demonizing.

Next is invocation.

This means that God is the name we invoke for our help.

He is the one we turn to for our help.

Now we are drunk with technique.

We have so there are so many, like my whole algorithm is just people being like, don't read ebooks, read paper books, and then you need to journal in this way.

And you when you wake up, you need to have a cortisol spike with sunlight, and then you want that to taper throughout the day.

And then there, and there's just so much technique for how to be a person.

We're we're flooded with it.

I've talked about this with Megan about children's books.

It's like children's books are a catastrophe right now because they're all moral lessons.

So it's like you sit down with a imagine if every time somebody sat down with you to like have a conversation, they taught you a lesson.

I know it's a bit like that with me in this circumstance.

But imagine if every circumstance was like that.

With every it that's like what kids, whenever they sit down to read a book, it's like, okay, it's oh fun, puppies about sharing.

This is where they're exhausted.

This is morally exhausting.

It's like you're con somebody constantly looking over your shoulder.

We invoke technique.

I think this is the this is where we first turn when we sense that things are off.

And I think that's that's so that we can think we are the gods of this life.

This life is finally figure outable, and I am the god of it.

And the the technique is just around the corner where I can finally get this thing structured just so.

And then that relational thing won't happen again, and then this financial situation won't happen again, and then this, and then we can get it structured, and you know, I have this sickness.

Well, it's probably because, you know, how many of you guys have this conversation with your kids?

Like, are kids sick?

Why?

Well, it's because they're a child.

Kids get sick.

This is what it's like out here.

And uh there's uh, but we we think we can technique our way out of it.

We to have no other gods before we is means that first, first, uh, if we could if we could practice this, first we we invoke the name of God.

God, would you help?

You are the one who holds us, you are the one who cares for us.

To do that, we must think he's trustworthy, he loves me, he cares.

You must have stories like, you know, I think he probably would help us even with this one.

I don't think it's too small for him.

Remember before we had even asked, when he rescued us out of Egypt?

Remember how he came and sought us like that?

That's what they can say.

How much more can we say in Christ Jesus our Lord?

They can say they were taken from a place of slavery.

We can say, when my sin stood between me and God, God even took care of that at great cost to himself.

This means that his love towards me is inexhaustible.

He is the one who is in control of all things.

Here is another problem that I'm facing.

Why don't we invoke his name?

I I want I want you to sense the liberty in this command.

That you would imagine what a life would be like that followed the first commandment.

And what it would be like is you would be like, you would face situations and you would say, I will turn to the Lord, my God, who saves me and is here, and he hears me and he cares, and I will entrust myself to him, and I will worship him because he is mighty to save.

Consider what a life formed like that would mean.

Look how petty, and you can do the techniques.

Coffee, morning sun, that's not so bad.

You know, I'd like to do that anyway.

It's fun to have a reason.

Finally, thanksgiving.

To have no other God's form means that we give thanks to him.

We thank him.

Lord, how incredible it is that you saved us, that while we were yet sinners, that God demonstrates his own love toward us, and that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.

Lord, thank you.

Thank you for your provision.

Thank you for your care.

Lord, thank you that these problems that we face, that you promise to care about them and to see us through them.

Thank you, that we can entrust our children to you.

Our lives are to be formed by this gratitude and thanksgiving to God.

That's what it means to have no other gods before Him.

He's the one that gives thanks and He that we give thanks to, He receives it and it satisfies.

Everything else in life, you worship anything else in life and you give thanks to it, you make an offering to it, and it immediately demands more.

Immediately.

Have you ever painted your house?

Or a room in your house, and then you stand back from the room and it's like, great, we've made this, you know, offering of paint to this room.

And then all of a sudden the room speaks back to you.

The curtains now look terrible.

You know?

It immediately demands more.

You know, I just brought I just got a new truck for yeah.

And before I had it, I was not interested in buying things for it at all.

Didn't even think about it.

Didn't cross my mind.

And then it made truck offering, and I walk out to it, and I'm like, one and a half inch lift in the back, two and a half inch lift in the front would fit 35s.

And then, you know, and all of a sudden, it's just more and more and more.

These things that we make offerings to.

But your career is the same.

You idolize and you demonize.

The thanksgiving that we give to God terminates and satisfies.

This is the end of our thanks, of our sacrificial offering.

We give to him, and there is satisfaction.

Here's how Jesus interprets this commandment.

Exodus 624, Matthew 6.24.

I said Exodus here.

No one can serve two masters, for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other.

You cannot serve God and money.

I want you to identify the other masters.

I want you to consider the promises that they are offering to you and consider the demands that they make on you.

And ask yourself, just plainly, just ask.

These could be addictions, pornography.

Just look with clear eyes at the master and say, What is he giving me?

Is this life and freedom?

And you will be able to see plainly, it is just death.

Look at the commands of the Lord.

It is the path of life.

That's what this first command is about.

So with that, let's pray.

Holy Father, we thank you, Lord, that you have shown yourself to be so trustworthy, Lord, that you are worthy of all worship, trust.

It is your name that we are to call on.

You are worthy of the fullness of our thanksgiving.

Lord, you provide the fullness of satisfaction for our hearts.

Lord, I pray that by the power of your Holy Spirit, that you would train our hearts to have no other gods before you, that we would get a constant pattern of repenting, naming and repenting the gods that we have placed before you, and turning and invoking your name, Lord.

And we pray, we praise you and thank you that you always meet us there.

We lift this up in Jesus' name, Amen.