Exodus chapter 20 and verse 1. And God spake all these words,
saying, I am the Lord thy God, which have brought thee out of
the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage. Thou shalt
have no other gods before me. Thou shalt not make unto thee
any graven image or any likeness of anything that is in heaven
above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water
under the earth. Thou shalt not bow down thyself
to them, nor serve them. For I, the Lord thy God, am a
jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children
unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me, and showing
mercy unto thousands of them that love me and keep my commandments. Thou shalt not take the name
of the Lord thy God in vain, for the Lord will not hold him
guiltless that taketh his name in vain. Remember the Sabbath
day to keep it holy, Six days shalt thou labour, and do all
thy work. But the seventh day is the Sabbath
of the Lord thy God. In it thou shalt not do any work,
thou, nor thy son, nor thy daughter, thy manservant, nor thy maidservant,
nor thy cattle, nor thy stranger that is within thy gates. For
in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea and all that
in them is, and rested the seventh day. Wherefore the Lord blessed
the Sabbath day and hallowed it. Honour thy father and thy
mother, that thy days may be long upon the land which the
Lord thy God giveth thee. Thou shalt not kill. thou shalt
not commit adultery, thou shalt not steal, thou shalt not bear
false witness against thy neighbour, thou shalt not covet thy neighbour's
house, thou shalt not covet thy neighbour's wife, nor his manservant,
nor his maidservant, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor anything
that is thy neighbour's. And all the people saw the thunderings
and the lightnings and the noise and the trumpet and the mountain
smoking. And when the people saw it, they removed and stood
afar off. Amen. May the Lord bless to us
this reading from his word. Last time we spoke, we spoke
of how the Lord had given these Ten Commandments to his people
Israel at Mount Sinai, or Horeb, as it is also called. And these
Ten Commandments reveal the holy nature of God. And they set out
the rules and principles by which the children of Israel were to
worship God and obey his will. They were being told what was
the will of God for them, and they were expected to be obedient
to that will that had been revealed to them. And we saw last week
how that the people said, all that the Lord hath spoken, we
will do. But we shall discover that they
did not live up to their word, but they quickly became disobedient
to the word of God. But these commands that are before
us today in this chapter, Exodus chapter 20, they are an important
statement of the glory of God and the holiness of God. And
this very first command is what I want us to think about today
because it speaks about complete dedication to God. Remember that
the Lord had told the children of Israel that they were subject
to him and indebted to him for three reasons. We saw that in
the opening verses of what we read again today. First, God
was their creator, God. He says, I am the Lord, I am
the creator. And so all things that are created
owe a debt of subjection to their creator. The second obligation
that lay upon the children of Israel was that they were a covenant
people to God. The Lord said, I am the Lord
Thy God. And that little word, thy, speaks
about the fact that they had been brought into covenant relationship
by the covenant promises that had been given to Abraham, Isaac,
and Jacob. So again, once again, I remind
you of this, Jacob's name was changed to Israel, and these
are the children of Israel. And so they came under the covenant
obligations and the covenant privileges that had been given
to their forefathers. And the third way in which this
relationship was forged was by the fact that God had delivered
the people out of Egypt. He had saved them from bondage
and from Pharaoh. So now the Lord God goes on to
tell them what he, as their God, demands of them, and it is their
complete and utter commitment and loyalty. And he says in this
opening commandment, thou shalt have no other gods before me. And I want us just to pause and
think about that little phrase for a few minutes today and just
open it up slightly and perhaps we will get some lessons from
it. I think there are several important things that we can
draw from this short statement. Thou shalt have no other gods
before me. The first one is this. The Lord
required devoted and dedicated worship and obedience from the
children of Israel. He only, is what he's telling
them, he only is to be had and owned and acknowledged and
served and worshipped as God. No other gods were to be involved
in their religious service. The Lord God is telling them
here, and he is telling us through them, that the Lord is not one
amongst many gods, but he is the one and only true God, and
he is the only one to be worshipped. All other gods are not real gods. Now there are plenty of gods. There are plenty of gods that
are proposed and thought of as being gods. There are many religions
in the world and all of them have their own gods. But what
the Lord God is telling the people of Israel is that All other gods
are pretend gods, pretend deities, or what the Bible calls strange
gods. And the children of Israel and
the people of God are to have nothing to do with these strange
gods. Rather, thou shalt have no other
gods before me. Now remember, the children of
Israel had just come up out of Egypt. That was where they had
been liberated from. And there were many gods in Egypt
that were worshipped by the Egyptians. And the children of Israel would
have seen all of that ceremony and ritual and the worshipping
that went on in Egypt. And indeed, some of the activities
may well have been very attractive and desirable to the children
of Israel. They may even, at some stages,
have been involved in them. But that was not to be their
relationship with God. These many gods, it's called
polytheism, that's the word that's sometimes used for the worship
of many gods, polytheism. The nations all around about
Israel were worshippers of strange gods. All of these nations had
multiple gods that they worshipped. We mentioned Egypt but the peoples
of the land of Canaan where the children of Israel were going
to, the promised land, They also had many gods. They had a god
for this and a god for that. They had a god of life and a
god of death. They had a god of the sea, they
had a god of the weather, they had a god of the sun, a god of
the moon. They had old gods, they had new
gods, but none of them were real gods. They were not personal
gods with wisdom and power and purpose. They were not the one
true God. And the first thing that God
insisted upon in the Ten Commandments was that the children of Israel
did not join these nations, did not join these polytheists. to worship their false gods,
but rather that they dedicated themselves to the worship and
service of the one true God. And here's another lesson that
we can learn. From this phrase, the Lord shows
that the children of Israel were not to accommodate these other
gods. Now what do I mean by that? I
mean this because there is only one living and true God. The
people were not to incorporate the worship of the other gods
into the worship of the one true God. Now you might think, well
why would they do that? Because that was a way in which
they might be able to ingratiate themselves, they might be able
to live at peace with the nations around about them, even although
they were worshipping different gods. You see, what often happens
is that people would bring their little gods into their religious
practices in the way in which other religions did. But God is saying, don't do that. Don't bring any other gods into
my presence. The worship of the one true God
was to be distinctive. God had appeared to Israel. He had revealed himself to Israel. He had told Israel his name. God is the Great I Am, the Jehovah,
the self-existent and the eternal God who is holy and just and
faithful and true. And God would tolerate no rivals
for the people's worship or their affections. No other gods should
be worshipped alongside the Lord or with him or set before him
because God is eternal and he sees all things and he knows
all things even the secret thoughts of the hearts of all who come
before him. No one was to say, for example,
I worship my own God, but he's just a symbol of the one true
God. They were not to say, I worship
lots of gods, but they're only pictures to help me to focus
and concentrate and think about the one true God. And you see,
that's how people have brought other gods into the worship of
the one true God. They say, we're not really worshipping
this God. We may have this God here, we
may have this God in our house, we may have this God in our religious
buildings, but really we're looking beyond that to the one true God. God says, oh no, that doesn't
work. Because of the deceitful hearts of men, I will have no
other God before me because I am the one true God and I am a jealous
God. So this first commandment teaches
us the unity of God, the unity of the divine being, that there
is one true God. And he sets, or the verse, the
commandment, sets before us the only object of our religious
worship. Hear, O Israel, the Lord Our God is one Lord. It does not, however, oppose
in any way the doctrine of the Trinity and the persons of the
Godhead. So we believe that the one true
God is God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. And the Father is God, and the
Son is God, and the Holy Spirit is God. But there are not three
gods. Rather, there are three persons
in the Godhead. And these three are one God. And this is what this opening
commandment teaches us. Here's another little thing for
us to remember. While this law was given to the
nation Israel, whom God had chosen for his own people and to whom
the promises were made for the sake of Abraham and Isaac and
Jacob, this law and these truths about God are still true today
for all people. There is only one true God for
you and for me as well. There is only the Creator of
all things. And because the Creator has revealed
Himself, because the Creator has shown us Himself and given
us His name and taught us what He is like, We are obliged to
believe what he has said. We are obliged to honour him
and to worship him and to obey him. Lord Jesus Christ spoke
about this during his ministry. He was asked by someone in Matthew
chapter 22, verse 36, Master, which is the great commandment
in the law? Jesus said unto him, Thou shalt
love the Lord thy God with all thy heart and with all thy soul
and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. The trouble is that we do not
and cannot honour, worship and obey God as we should. and as
we are obliged to. The children of Israel couldn't
in their time. No one has ever done it since
and we cannot do it today. It is beyond our ability because
we are sinners and because by nature we are rebels against
God. My nature, the nature of me,
the person, the man, my nature wants to put me first and to
place God somewhere down the line. And we are therefore, right at
the very first commandment, guilty of breaking it. We don't honour
God as we should. We don't worship God as we should. And we don't obey God as we should. And we learned last week that
if we are guilty of breaking one law, we're guilty of breaking
the whole law. And this is why we need a substitute
and a representative. This is why we need the Lord
Jesus Christ. Because the law of God, holy
as it is, the law of God, glorious as it is, will condemn us as
guilty because we cannot live up to its standard. We need mercy,
we need forgiveness, and we need grace. And none of those come
from the law. but all of those are found in
the person and work of the Saviour, our Lord Jesus Christ. And this
is so important, and I know I say I'm speaking to the young people
here, and I hope that the young people grasp what I'm about to
say, and I hope that the older people grasp it as well, but
we must never mix up law and gospel. The law will always condemn
us, it will never make us righteous. It will always condemn us of
falling short. It is the gospel which brings
us to God via the Lord Jesus Christ, by the work of the Lord
at the cross. It is the blood of the Lord Jesus
Christ that has freed us from condemnation and it is the perfect
righteousness of the Lord Jesus Christ with which we are covered
and clothed. It's good for us to learn about
the law because it teaches us about God's nature and about
our own nature. but it is more important for
us to learn about the Lord Jesus Christ because it is by Him that
we are saved and by which we are made righteous. The Apostle
Paul says in Acts chapter 13, And by Him, that is, by the Lord
Jesus Christ, all that believe, all who have faith in Him, are
justified from all things, from which ye could not be justified
by the law of Moses. The law of Moses will never declare
us to be righteous. It will never justify us before
God. It will always condemn us for
our falling short of God's holy, perfect standard. But by him,
the Lord Jesus Christ, All who have faith are justified from
all things. May the Lord bless these thoughts
to us today. Amen.