Trusting the Ten #1: No Other gods

"You shall have no other gods before Me.”—Exodus 20:3

This is the first of the Ten Commandments. God directly gave these to Moses on Mt. Sinai. The Israelites had been freed from slavery in Egypt after some four hundred years. They had seen the plagues that God had brought upon the Egyptians and had passed through the Red Sea. Now they were at Mt. Sinai when God’s presence was revealed in the midst of thunders and lightnings and a thick cloud that enveloped the top of the mountain. God had spoken to Moses the Ten Commandments with the first, “You shall have no other gods before Me.” The Israelites were God’s special people, called out to be His “treasured possession among all peoples,” and a “kingdom of priests and a holy nation” (Exodus 19:5, 6). They were to display His name and show the world who God was by how they lived.

The first commandment was to remind them who God was. He was the only God, because besides Him there is no other. There are no other gods or goddesses, there is only one God who has revealed Himself through His Word, His creation, and His people. To believe that there is any other god is to believe and propagate a lie. And God does not lie. For God to lie would be against His nature, because as God He must be perfect, holy, and just. And for Him to be God means that He is a perfect being who delights in that which is true. As our Creator He wants the very best for us, which is Himself. As the Psalmist declared, “Delight yourself in the LORD, and He will give you the desires of your heart”—Psalm 37:4. Are the desires of our heart the temporal things that this world has to offer? The desire of our heart is for God. As Blaise Pascal, the French mathematician and believer said,  

“There is a God shaped vacuum in the heart of every man which cannot be filled by any created thing, but only by God, the Creator, made known through Jesus.” 

God made us for Himself and is wonderfully jealous for us when we delight in anything other than Himself. As James says,  

“Or do you suppose it is to no purpose that the Scripture says, ‘He yearns jealously over the spirit that He has made to dwell in us’?”—James 4:5.

God is jealous for us because He wants the absolute best for us. He is pained when we try to eat dirt when there is prime rib available. He is jealous as a spouse when we try and find our soul’s satisfaction in the arms of someone other than our spouse. Only in God is jealousy a good thing. Some believe that for God to be jealous is bad, but in God it is the absolute best because of who He is. He longs for us and has created us for Himself. And when we pursue or believe in false gods of consumerism, fatalism, the stars, the occult, or even ourselves as mini-gods and goddesses, He is grieved. He commands us not to seek after other gods because He wants what is best. And it is through the commands of God that we see we fall short. We want to be mini-gods and make into gods what are no gods at all. We want to pursue our soul’s satisfaction apart from Him. We want to fill our hearts with idols too numerous too count, vainly believing that they will satisfy that which our heart is longing for. But our hearts will not be satisfied until we come to Jesus Christ. It was Jesus who came to die for our sins. And it is He whom we worship. As God, He didn’t stand far off, letting us drown in our sin, but assumed flesh, stepping out of eternity into time in order to win us, to show us how much He loves us. The first of the Ten Commandments is God’s love letter to our hearts, revealing His care and concern so we might be prevented from trying to find satisfaction in that which cannot and will never satisfy. He wants us to see Him so that we might find our fullest joy and delight in Him. Amen.