No Other Gods

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Transcript:

All right, we’re going to be in a few different places tonight. We’re going to look at Exodus chapter 20. It’s going to be our main text for tonight is Exodus chapter 20.

We’re also going to look at some verses in Mark chapter 12 and then a verse in Luke 16. So Exodus 20, Mark 12, and Luke 16. And I’ll remind you where those are when we get to them in case you didn’t catch all that.

But tonight I’m going to start a series on the Ten Commandments. we could all stand to learn from the Ten Commandments and how they apply to us today. I know I mentioned it to you a little bit this morning, and we don’t want to look at it as the Ten Commandments are our way to salvation.

That’s what one of the men who came to Jesus was doing when he said, how shall I inherit eternal life? He said, well, I’ve kept all the commandments since I was a little boy. First of all, that was a lie.

Maybe not a deliberate lie, but he was confused then about what it means to keep the commandments because according to Jesus’ definition, there’s none of us who can keep the commandments. None of us can keep the whole law perfectly. None of us can even keep these ten laws perfectly.

And so the Ten Commandments were never intended to be a way of salvation. Some people, again, in our society think like that man, that they’re going to heaven because they don’t steal, they don’t lie, they’ve never murdered anybody, and so they think they’re in good with God. we cannot reduce our relationship to God to keeping these ten laws externally.

And so what we’re going to do, though, is look at these ten laws and see what it is we can learn from them. What is God really saying? Because there’s the Old Testament interpretation, or I should say there’s the old interpretation that they had before Jesus that said, you know, we’ve got to keep these outwardly.

This is all about our behavior. And Jesus said, no, no, you’ve missed the point of it. It’s all about the condition of the heart.

Yes, we want to do these things outwardly, but it needs to come from within. Because you can do the right things outwardly and have a heart that totally hates God and is disgruntled toward him while you’re doing it. So what we’re going to do is we’re going to look at each of these Ten Commandments.

We’re going to see what they mean, what they mean in light of what Jesus taught in the New Testament and what they mean for us today, not as a way of salvation, but as something that we aspire to do out of gratefulness for what God has already done for us. That these are not the cause of salvation, but there’s something that we should strive toward as a result of our salvation. And so we’re going to start in Exodus chapter 20, verse 1, and 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 bondage, You shall have no other gods before me.

Now we’re going to stop there tonight as far as Exodus chapter 20. There are nine other commandments after this. But this is chapter 20’s introduction to the Ten Commandments and the first commandment as well.

Now the first commandment is just the part in verse 3 that says, You shall have no other gods before me. Everything before that is sort of an introduction. It’s sort of God’s justification, not that he owes us one.

You know, sometimes I, as a parent, will give my children an explanation for why I tell them to do things, but I don’t necessarily owe them an explanation. Sometimes I need you to do something just because I’m daddy and I said so. I know some people disagree with that, but sometimes I need them to just not run out across a parking lot because I’m daddy and I said so.

And I might give you the explanation as to why when we get in the truck, but for now, I just need you to do it. Now, God doesn’t owe us an explanation. He’s God, and if he says so, then that’s the way it is.

But he does, in this case, give us some sort of justification for why he’s saying these things. And really, it comes back to because he’s God. Because he’s God, we should have no other gods before him.

Verse 3 says, you shall have no other gods before me. That doesn’t mean that we can have other gods after him. That just means we are to put nobody else in his place.

That we’re to have nobody that we worship more than him, nobody that we owe more loyalty and allegiance to than him, nobody that ranks higher in our lives than God. And really, nobody should even come a close second in terms of devotion. God should be absolutely first without question and without rival. And the first commandment here is about more than just not worshiping other gods.

it’s about more than that it’s about complete loyalty to the one true God okay because there were people there have been people all throughout the scriptures and we could run across people today who don’t worship other gods they’re not out worshipping Allah they’re not out worshipping Buddha they’re not out worshipping trees they’re not out worshipping Baal like in the Old Testament they’re not bowing down to statues but as far as their loyalty to God it’s just really not there. Now, I’ve told you before, we’re all going to worship something. So what they may be worshiping is self.

That may be their God. But as far as all these other gods that people imagine, they don’t have one out there, but they’re not loyal to the one true God. So it’s not just enough that we don’t have statues and things that we bow down to.

If our loyalty is not first and foremost unmistakably to the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, then we are not keeping the first commandment. We’re not obeying his command. And again, I always want to go to the New Testament to see how does Jesus interpret this.

Not that the Old Testament was wrong, but Jesus often gave more information. Jesus often put it in a way that I think is clearer for us today. Jesus put it in a way that oftentimes is more challenging today.

We look at some of these that we’re going to look at, and he says, you know, the Old Testament says, thou shalt not kill. You shouldn’t commit murder. That’s really easy.

I’ve never once committed murder in my whole entire life. It’s been a really easy commandment to keep. But Jesus takes it a step further and says, let’s look at that.

Let’s look at how that applies to the heart. And you shouldn’t be angry with somebody else without cause. Oh.

And suddenly that becomes a problem for me. Suddenly that becomes a challenge to the righteousness of my heart before God, and it becomes convicting to realize that I have not lived up to God’s law, because in my heart I’ve been angry. Have you ever been angry enough that you’ve wanted to kill somebody in that moment?

Can’t say it happens a lot, but it’s happened. And most of you are sitting out there shaking your heads yes. The rest of you will talk about the Ninth Commandment and lying later.

But when we come to see what Jesus has to say, again, it’s not that the Old Testament was wrong. I believe in the inerrancy and authority of all of Scripture. I believe that Scripture has no mistakes in it.

It’s not that the Old Testament is wrong. It’s that Jesus sheds even more light on it in its interpretation, which I think challenges us even more. And so we’re going to always look at what he has to say about it.

And on this first commandment, what Jesus has to say about it, there are many places where Jesus addresses the idea of worshiping the one true God and showing loyalty to the one true God. But one of the places we’re going to look at tonight is in Mark chapter 12. Mark chapter 12, verses 28 through 30.

We’re just going to look at a little bit of it tonight. because we’ve studied through, not this passage, I think we read it out of Matthew, but we’ve studied through this exchange that Jesus has in just the last few weeks. Mark chapter 12, starting in verse 28, says, Then one of the scribes came, and having heard them reasoning together, perceiving that he had answered them well, asked him, Which is the first commandment of all?

What he’s asking Jesus, this scribe, what he’s asking Jesus, not is what is the first commandment. He knew the answer to that. If he’s talking about the first in the list of the Ten Commandments, what he’s talking about is first and preeminent.

Some translations will say, what is the greatest commandment? And Jesus answered him, verse 29, The first of all the commandments is, Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. And he’s quoting Deuteronomy 6.

4 there. And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength. This is the first commandment.

So what is the greatest commandment, Jesus says? To love God with everything you have. To love God with your whole heart.

To love God with your whole mind. To love God with your whole strength. Basically everything you have to be oriented toward the love of God.

Now, I’d say that interpretation, that application of the first commandment is a taller order than what we would understand from just reading the first commandment itself. You should have no other gods before me. Perfect.

I don’t worship Baal or Buddha. We’re good. And Jesus says, oh, no, what that means is in your heart, the condition of your heart, are you worshiping God with everything you have?

And suddenly I have to look at that and say, yeah, no, I’m not doing that. And what’s more, I believe I’m not capable of doing that all the time perfectly, because I have this sin nature. I have this heart that’s inclined toward sin, as we all do.

And so if that’s the greatest commandment, if we could narrow the commands of God down to that one commandment, and really the one that comes with it, love your neighbor as yourself, as he says in the next verse, if we could narrow Scripture down to just those two things, as I’ve shared with you before, we’re incapable of doing either of those perfectly. And once again, the law of God is designed not only to show us how holy God is, but also to show us that we’re just sinners. No matter how good we look on the outside, we might be able to follow it if it was just talking about, you know, you’re not worshiping Baal or Buddha.

But when you talk about the condition of the heart, it shows us that no matter how good we are on the inside, we are all sinners on the inside. We have all fallen short of the glory of God. And so when we look at it this way, looking at what Jesus said about this commandment, we see that it’s not just not worshiping other gods.

It’s not just talking about this outward act of worshiping other gods. It’s talking about the inward concept of absolute, complete loyalty to the one true God, which is a much harder standard to meet. And folks, we can’t be completely loyal to God if we’re worshiping anything else.

I shouldn’t even have to say that, because if we’re worshiping something else, all our worship is not going toward God. If we have allegiance to something else, then all of our allegiance is not going to God. It’s such a simple concept, I shouldn’t even have to say it, and yet it’s so hard to follow.

Jesus said in Luke chapter 16, if you want to turn there, we’re going to look at one verse, he said, no servant can serve two masters. He’s talking about a parable that he’s just explained about some servants who some were faithful and some were not. And he says, no servant can serve two masters, for either he will hate the one and love the other, or else he will be loyal to the one and despise the other.

You cannot serve God and mammon. Mammon being a term for money, material things, stuff. We cannot serve two masters.

The principle applies here. We cannot serve God the way he deserves to be served if we’re serving something else. And a lot of times, as I said, we’re going to worship.

If we’re not worshiping God, we’re going to find something else to worship. Everybody’s worshiping something. It may be stuff, it may be self, it may be power, it may be position, it may be intellect.

There’s something that we are orienting our lives around, and that’s what we worship. And if we’re trying to worship something else on the side, we’re not truly worshiping God, because worship of God involves complete loyalty to Him. It can’t be divided.

See, this is what got King Solomon into trouble. Got King Solomon into trouble. God told him, God told all the Israelites not to go marry pagan women, not because God hated the pagan tribes, but because God knew that they were going to marry these women and they would lead them to the worship of their gods.

Say, well, why the women? Because men, you know your wives have a way of getting you to do stuff, even if you don’t want to. Right?

Maybe I’m the only one here, but sometimes Charles says, you know, I’d really like to move furniture today. Men, do we ever want to move the furniture, rearrange the furniture in the house? No.

We move in, we put it where it’s going to go, and it stays there until we die or move. That’s the way it’s supposed to be. But in my experience, my mother does this, the women occasionally want to rearrange the furniture.

And I don’t know a man who wants to rearrange the furniture, but do we do it? Yeah, because our wives want to. And there’s nothing wrong with our wives encouraging us to do things.

But God knew that if they married the Moabite women, if they married the Edomite women, if they married the Amalekite women, that they were going to come along and say, why can’t I have a little shrine in the corner of our house to whatever it is that I worship? And some of the men, unfortunately, were going to say, okay, honey, whatever you want. Yes, dear.

And that’s exactly what happened in Solomon’s house. Exactly. And Solomon married pagan wives.

Not only that, he married hundreds of women. Yeah. Now the Bible says that he was the wisest. It talks about him having wisdom beyond anybody else.

Sometimes I think he forgot that. Because he should have known God had said it was not a good idea for him to multiply wives to himself. So not only has he married pagan wives, but he’s married lots of them.

He has hundreds of them. And sure enough, they convinced him. You know what, let’s just set up a little shrine over here in the corner of the palace.

It’s just one little room dedicated to the. . .

One of the gods that he was allowing them to worship in his home, one of the gods that he might have been participating in the worship of himself, is a God that sometimes demanded child sacrifice. I mean, this was a God that all throughout the Old Testament, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob was saying, don’t listen to them, don’t go with them. When you find those altars, you tear them down.

You don’t let their priests live because they were wanting to sacrifice children to this pagan deity. So Solomon got all twisted up. Now Solomon, meanwhile, is still going to the temple.

He’s still worshiping God. He’s still involved in the sacrifices. He’s still trying to follow God’s law in all these other areas.

It’s just a little pagan altar here on the side. If Solomon is the king of Israel, if he’s giving 80% of his attention and worship to God, and it’s just 20% over here, Shouldn’t he be happy with that? No.

That’s not how God works. Because God deserves all of our worship. All of our devotion.

And because ultimately, his allegiance that was developing to these pagan gods was leading him to do things that God did not approve of. And that’s the way it is. We can’t be loyal to two masters.

We can’t serve two gods. We’re going to end up serving one or the other. we’re going to end up having our favorite, and we’re going to serve them.

And so God says, I don’t want half your loyalty. God wants the whole thing because we can’t serve two masters. And so we see that this commandment is about dealing with our absolute loyalty to God.

And in the preface to that commandment, it gives us some of the reasons why he is deserving of our loyalty, of our undivided loyalty. Look with me at Exodus 20, verse 2. I know we’ve looked at verse 3 here.

You shall have no other gods before me. But let’s look again at what we’ve just sort of skimmed over in verse 2, where he gives the reason for this, the reason for this. He says, I am the Lord.

I am the Lord. And we read that and we think, okay, he’s the Lord. That’s his title.

And we just sort of gloss over that. What we need to realize is that when we see in the Old Testament, Lord, and we see it in all caps, It’s the Hebrew name for God. And we’re not entirely sure of the pronunciation.

Sometimes you’ll see in English, you’ll see Jehovah written out. That’s an English adaptation, I guess, of the name. Many people think it was pronounced Yahweh.

We don’t know for sure because the Jews were afraid to pronounce it, so it hasn’t been passed along to us. But in Hebrew, it’s four letters, Yad-Heh-Vav-Heh. And those letters are his name.

When you see Lord in all caps, what you’re looking at is God’s actual name. God is his title, but that’s his name in Hebrew. And those words mean something in Hebrew.

What they talk about is God being self-existent. And what self-existent means is he’s not created by something else. You and I are not self-existent.

You and I were created by someone else. Even our species was created by God. We are dependent on God for our existence.

If there was no God, we would not have spontaneously come into being. God, on the other hand, is self-existent. Nobody created God.

And I know that messes with a lot of people’s brains. Well, if everything has to have a cause. Everything that has a beginning has a cause.

This is where I settle in philosophy. Everything with a beginning has a cause. God has no beginning and therefore needs no cause.

So what we’re looking at here about God being self-existent is we’re looking at somebody who is uncreated, who is eternal, and who relies on nobody else for their existence. They are completely independent and self-sufficient. He doesn’t need us.

He doesn’t need anybody. He just is. Whether we like it or not, He is.

Whether we believe in Him or not, He is. Whether we worship Him or not, He is. and so what we’re talking about here is the only one who is worthy because all the other gods in the universe are made up let you in on a little secret Baal, somebody made him up Molech, somebody made him up Buddha, somebody didn’t make him up but somebody made up the idea that he was God or a God and by the way not all Buddhists worship Buddha as a God you go through the list if it’s not the God of Abraham of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob somebody invented them.

They are a figment of somebody’s imagination. Zeus, Jupiter, you go through the list of the Roman and Greek gods. Nobody’s worshiping them today because nobody thinks they’re real. Because they’re not.

Somebody made them up. Somebody made up the stories. And so we have a comparison here between the true God, who is so powerful that he needs no one, who is eternal, who wasn’t created by anybody, versus all these other gods who are just figments of somebody’s imagination.

So when he says, I am the Lord, don’t just write that phrase off and say, okay, he’s the Lord, he’s in charge. It means more than that. It means he is the only one who is worthy of our worship.

Why should we be loyal to him alone? Because he’s the only one who’s worthy. He’s the only God powerful enough to deserve our worship.

Because God made man. The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob made man. All these other gods were made by man.

Why would we worship something that we made? So he says, I am the Lord. I am the Lord, your God.

He’s speaking here to Israel. Now, we read that, and in a Western mindset, we think because he’s the God of the universe, that he’s, of course, he’s our God. He’s our God.

He’s everybody’s God, whether they recognize it or not. He’s speaking here specifically to Israel, and he’s saying something more than that, more than just he’s the God over creation. He’s speaking to Israel and saying, I am your God.

He made multiple covenants with the Israelite people, with the Jews, with the Hebrews, whatever terminology you want to use. He made numerous covenants with them throughout the Old Testament, and he said to them repeatedly that if they would keep his laws, if they would follow him, if they would serve him, that he would be their God and they would be his people. So when he tells the people of Israel at the beginning of the Ten Commandments, I am the Lord your God, what he’s doing is he’s talking about the special relationship that existed between him and them.

And what we can see from that is the fact that God is a God who knows us and a God who wants to have a relationship with us. Why should we be loyal to him? Because he knows us.

Hear this, he knows us and he loves us anyway. He knows us and he loves us anyway. And he wants us to know him.

He is a God who wants to have a relationship with us. Does he need to have a relationship with us? He doesn’t need anything.

But he’s a God who wants to have a relationship with us. He is a God who had a very special relationship with the nation of Israel that he was talking to at this time. And it points to his personality.

And by that I don’t mean whether he was nice or happy. I mean his personality meaning he is a person who is knowable. And that doesn’t mean he’s a human being.

It means that he is a being who is personal and knowable. Those that do, the subset of Buddhists that do pray to Buddha, they don’t think Buddha is a personal God who knows them. Buddhism doesn’t even teach that personal consciousness continues even from one moment to the next, let alone from one lifetime to the next.

Those that worship Allah don’t really talk about him having a relationship with them as a father, like the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob talks about to us. We’re really talking about a unique God who would take the time to know us and to make himself known to us, a God who wants to have an intimate relationship with us. That was true of Israel, and it’s true of us today.

When he says, I am the Lord your God. Why should we be loyal to him? Because he’s a relational God.

He’s the only God who knows us. And he says, I am the Lord your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage. So again, he’s talking here to Israel, and he says, I am the Lord your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage.

Not too long before this, as a matter of fact, I think probably a year or less, a year or less before this, they had been in bondage in Egypt. They had been slaves. The system of slavery in Egypt was designed to be brutal, to exterminate the Jewish people.

Yes, they liked the fact that they had slave labor and there was the economic benefit of it, but Pharaoh started this because he wanted to work them so hard that the population would stop growing and die off because Pharaoh, who arose after Joseph died, Pharaoh was afraid of the numbers of Jewish people that were in his country and he said what we’re going to do is work them, not for economic benefit, but work them to death so that they’ll stop being a problem. And when it wasn’t killing enough of them, he said we’re going to step it up. And when that still failed to kill enough of them, he said we’re going to go in and slaughter their male children.

So don’t misunderstand. Talking about something incredibly evil here. And God said I am the one who brought you out of that.

I’m the one who saved you from that. They didn’t save themselves from that. They’d fought the whole way.

They doubted the whole way. And as soon as they got out to wandering in the desert, they started complaining, we should have stayed in Egypt. They didn’t rescue themselves.

They didn’t even think it was possible. It was God who had a plan, I believe, before the foundation of the world, and it was God who started putting this plan into place more than 80 years before to make it happen. It was God who orchestrated things so that Moses would grow up in the house of the Pharaoh and learn the ways of the Egyptian court.

It was God who got Moses out of that and reconnected him with his Hebrew roots and then sent him out in the wilderness so he’d know how to lead the people through the wilderness. And it was God who called him through the burning bush. God called Moses and Moses really didn’t seem to think it could be done.

Moses came up with every excuse he could to not do what God was calling him to do. And it was God who not only prepared Moses through 80 years of his life to go back and lead the people out of Egypt, but it was God who gave Moses all the tools necessary. It was God who gave Moses the staff that turned into a serpent.

It was God who gave Moses the ability to stick his hand in his cloak and pull it out and be leprous and stick it back in and have it be clean again. It was God who sent the plagues, who sent the locusts, the flies, the frogs, the bloody water. It was God who sent the angel of death.

It was God who protected them with the pillar of cloud by day and the pillar of fire by night. It was God who parted the Red Sea so that they could cross. And it was God who covered the Red Sea back over again to envelop Pharaoh’s entire army.

It was God. It was God. It was God.

At every step through the Exodus, it was God who delivered them from first to last. It was God who saved them from slavery in Egypt. Nobody else was capable of doing what God had done. God, when he says, I am the Lord your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage, why should we be loyal to God?

Why does he deserve our loyalty? Because he is the only God who can save. He’s the only God who can save.

It was true at Mount Sinai, and it was true at Mount Calvary. He is the only God who could save. You and I couldn’t save ourselves from our sin and its consequences any more than the Israelites could save themselves from slavery in Egypt.

And just like God came through and had the plan and carried it out perfectly and was moving things into place hundreds of years beforehand so that he could carry out his plans and save us without any help from ourselves. Just as he did that at Mount Sinai, he did that at Mount Calvary. when he sent Jesus Christ to earth, God the Son, to take on human flesh through a miraculous work of the Holy Spirit.

Nobody put Jesus Christ in Mary’s womb but the Holy Spirit of God. And it was only because of the power of God, it was only because he was God in human flesh that Jesus Christ was able to live a perfect sinless life. And it was by the determinant, it wasn’t an accident, it wasn’t something where God said, oops, I didn’t see that coming, but let’s make something good out of it.

It was, as the book of Acts says, by the determinate counsel and foreknowledge of God that Jesus Christ went to the cross and shed his blood and died on that cross for our sins. It was the power of God that raised him from the dead three days later. And it’s the grace of God that offers salvation to you and me, that offers forgiveness to you and me.

When we’ve done nothing to earn it or deserve it, we’ve done nothing to contribute to our own salvation. Why should we be loyal to God? Because again, he is the only God who can save.

And for our salvation, just as for the salvation of the Israelites from Egypt, God has done everything that is necessary. God has done everything that’s necessary. Why wouldn’t we?

Instead of asking the question, why does God deserve our loyalty? Why does God deserve our worship? I think the better question is, why wouldn’t we want to worship a God like that?

Why wouldn’t we worship the God who did all that was necessary to save us from bondage, to save us from sin and from death and from hell? Why wouldn’t we be loyal to a God like that?