Well, I'd like to say before I get started today that I've had a bad cold this week and a little bit of a tickle in my throat. So if I cough and do other things up here, contort myself to try to clear my throat, you'll understand, won't you? I say that to make my wife relax because she always gets very uptight when she hears me tightening up here with my throat. So honey, just relax, it'll be alright.
And I also said to my father-in-law that if I can't make it through the message that he'll come up and finish it for me. Now he's nervous. Would you open your Bible, please, to Exodus chapter 20, verses 1 through 3. It is impossible to overstate the importance of the Ten Commandments with regard to their impact upon the world. The Ten Commandments form the basis of law, social order, and our concept of justice throughout the world of Judeo-Christian culture.
The Ten Commandments are protective of life, liberty, relationships, and personal property. They also exalt the value of life and the dignity of the individual, man or woman. The Ten Commandments are recorded in two Old Testament passages, in Deuteronomy 5 and where we are and where we will be in our study for the next few weeks, in Exodus chapter 20. Then 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. As we look at these words, it's important to note the context, Exodus chapters 1 through 18 record the stay of the Israelites in Egypt after the death of Joseph, their eventual enslavement and oppression cruelly under Pharaoh, the raising up of a deliverer in the person of Moses, the awful plagues culminating with the death of the firstborn, and the institution of the Passover feast in Israel, and the release and miraculous escape through the Red Sea.
Three months after they came out of Egypt, they arrived at Mount Sinai. In chapter 19 verse 1 it says, in the third month after the sons of Israel had gone out of the land of Egypt, on that very day they came into the wilderness of Sinai. In verse 2 it says, and there Israel camped in front of the mountain. Moses went up onto the mountain to talk with God. God said, I want to make a covenant with the people of Israel.
That is the covenant that begins to be established in chapter 19, the covenant of the law. The Ten Commandments, which are stated at the beginning of this covenant, form the moral foundation for the covenant. That is even symbolized by the placement of the two tablets containing the Ten Commandments in the Ark of the Covenant. You will recall that God, as a part of all of this, commanded his people to make a box of acacia wood, 45 inches long, 27 inches high.
They were to overlay the wood inside and out with pure gold. A lid was replaced on this box out of solid gold. It was called the Ark of the Covenant. The lid served as the mercy seat. It was there that the blood of the sacrifice was sprinkled on the Day of Atonement for the nation's sins. But that throne of mercy, the mercy seat as it was called, was also the throne of God's government in that theocracy which he was establishing.
So that after the tabernacle was set up, in that inner compartment called the Holy of Holies, there was this Ark of the Covenant and God's presence, visibly seen in the Shekinah glory over that Ark as God appeared over the mercy seat. And just a few inches below that, resting in the Ark, several items including the two tablets with the Ten Commandments. So you see even there, God's government of his people rested upon the moral foundation laid down in these Ten Words as they are called.
Now the question that might come to your mind is, of what value is a study of the Ten Commandments to Christians? Don't we live in a different age? And the answer is, of course we do. Although the covenant of law has been superseded by the covenant, the new covenant of grace based upon the finished work of Jesus Christ, this statement of moral code nonetheless has never been repealed. Indeed, nine-tenths of it was restated in the New Testament for this age.
Nor can this moral code be repealed, since it expresses the very holiness of God in terms of human ethics. So what we see here is how God expects us to live in light of the righteousness and holiness which is his. But the Ten Commandments reveal more than the holiness of God. There's a sense in which they also reflect the love of God. They tell of how we should supremely enjoy life. John MacArthur says, the Ten Commandments were nothing more than ten aspects of love verbalized.
The first four commands showed the characteristics of love toward God, and the last six showed the characteristics of love toward others. And I think he has a point. In fact, you may recall that when Jesus was asked to name the most important commandment, what he did was to summarize the Ten Commandments. Jesus' summary of the Ten Commandments was, love God and love your neighbor.
Love. So there's a very real sense in which the Ten Commandments not only reveal the holiness of God, but the love of God as well. We study the Ten Commandments not to place ourselves under the Old Testament legal system, but rather to gain an understanding of God's standards in all times with respect to ethics. To understand what God says is right or wrong in his eyes. The first commandment is found in verse three, you shall have no other gods before me.
Perhaps it's worthy of note to say that Jews and Roman Catholics and Protestants divide the commandments differently. The Jewish people usually take verse two as the first commandment. Now, I think there's another purpose for verse two that we'll get to in a moment. But clearly verse three is a commandment, and I believe the first. You shall have no other gods before me. Literally God says, no other gods in my sight.
What he's saying is that you shall have no other gods in addition to me or in opposition to me. Now we understand something of the importance of that when we look back in verse two and we see the identity of the law giver. God uses two self-assigned proper names of himself here. He says, I am the Lord your God. Lord is all in capitals, notice. This comes from the Hebrew word that we usually pronounce Yahweh.
If you looked at it and brought it into English from the Hebrew, it would be just four consonants Hebrew does not have any vowels. Those have to be assigned. The language does not have vowels, and the consonants are YHWH. And as we try to say that in English, we assign vowels to it, and it's most commonly thought that A and E are assigned there as we would say it, and so it's pronounced Yahweh. G. Campbell Morgan suggests that the name Yahweh is a combination of three Hebrew words.
The first, he will be. Second, being. And the third, he was. That seems to me a reasonable explanation for the origin of Yahweh. It is a term that talks about the eternal self-sufficiency of God. He is the one who will be, the one who is, and the one who always was eternally self-existent. It is a name used of God 6,823 times in the Old Testament when I counted them yesterday. No, I read that. It is the name by which God revealed himself on Mount Sinai to Moses sometime before Exodus chapter 20.
Who shall I say has sent me? I am that I am has sent you. That is the name Yahweh as God explained it. I am, present tense. He is always the same, yesterday, today, and forever. This is the name that Jesus picked up on and as it is recorded in the Gospel of John, gave seven famous I am statements. I am. And then the second name that he assigns himself is the name God. This is the first one that he uses. Genesis 1,1. In the beginning Elohim. It is a word that is plural.
In the Hebrew when that is used it can mean the plurality or the plentitude of majesty. It also allows for the development of God's revelation of himself as a triunity. But the name Elohim does not really say three, it just says plural. And the thrust of it in the Old Testament seems to be that God is saying I am the majestic one. I am the mighty leader. I am the strong one. I am the one who is the supreme object of worship. I am Elohim.
It is a name that is used sometimes of men, sometimes of angels, but it is a name that is used most of the time for God himself. Elohim. I am Yahweh Elohim. And then God reminds them what he has done. He says the one who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage. Egypt for the Israelites was bondage and death. They had been redeemed by the blood of the Passover lamb and by the power of God revealed at the Red Sea. Now to us there is a typical significance.
In other words, we go back to that and there is a picture there that is made legitimate by what the New Testament teaches. And that is that we too have been redeemed out of an Egypt. Egypt in the Bible always speaks symbolically of sin and bondage. We have been redeemed out of our own personal Egypts by the blood of God's Passover lamb, the lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world by his great sacrifice on the cross of Calvary.
And we have been identified with him in his death and resurrection by the power of God so that we are a new people as pictured in their deliverance from the Red Sea. God is saying on the basis of who I am and what I have done, I give this commandment to you, no other gods in my sight. You see God's identity gives great meaning and power to it. Now secondly let's look at the meaning of the law given, having looked at the identity of the law giver.
The religions of the world in that day were polytheistic, that is they had many different gods. Now those of a higher critical background or those who are liberal in their theological persuasion try to tell us that man naturally speaking is polytheistic and that like man religion has evolved so that Israel came eventually through an evolutionary process to believe in one God, monotheism, and that we as Christians today have inherited this evolved concept of God.
Man began polytheistic they say and evolved to monotheism. That is absolutely not true. In fact the Bible says just the opposite of that. The Bible says that man began with the knowledge of the one true God and then degenerated from that knowledge, fell away from it to worship many gods. And it was through specific revelation to Abraham that God again revealed himself as one. It was not the result of evolution, it was the result of revelation that monotheism came to be.
Now in Romans chapter 1 God talks about this, I'd like you to turn there with me because some of you are in seminary where you confront this. In Romans chapter 1, look at verse 18, it says, For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men who suppress the truth and unrighteousness because that which is known about God is evident within them for God has made it evident to them. Notice within and to.
For since the creation of the world, his invisible attributes, his eternal power and divine nature have been clearly seen, being understood through that which has been made so that they are without excuse. For even though they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks, but they became futile in their speculations and their foolish heart was darkened.
Professing to be wise, they became fools and exchanged the glory of the incorruptible God for an image in the form of corruptible man and of birds and four-footed animals and crawling creatures. Where did polytheism and idolatry come from? It came from the rebellious, sinful heart of man when he rejected the knowledge of the one true God. Now, Israel in that day existed in a sea of polytheism. Their monotheism had been passed on to them by their fathers.
Remember that Abraham too was an idolater. So God revealed himself to Abraham, gave a promise to him, called him out of the Ur of the Chaldees and Abraham by faith responded. So you see the meaning of the first commandment is this. It was given to reinforce and to preserve the revelation which God had given of himself. It was to protect the uniqueness of their theology and their faith.
It was a reasonable command if God is who and what he says, for there cannot be two gods who are equally supreme. There cannot be two gods who are infinite. If he is Yahweh Elohim, then there can be none like him if those names mean what they say. Therefore he says, no other gods in my sight. Every man does worship a God. G. Campbell Morgan says this in his helpful little book called The Ten Commandments. Every man needs a God.
There is no man who has not somewhere in his heart, in his life, in the essentials of his being a shrine in which a deity is a deity in whom he worships. It is as impossible for a man to live without having an object of worship as it is for a bird to fly if it's taken out of the air. The very composition of human life, the mystery of man's being demands a center of worship as a necessity of existence. All life is worship.
There may be a false God at the center of the life, but every activity of being, all the energy of life, the devotion of powers, these things are all worship. There is a center, a motive, a reason, a shrine, a deity somewhere, something which man worships. God loved his people too much to allow them to worship other gods, to go astray after false gods.
He demanded of them their singular worship to protect them from immorality and darkness, from tragedies and oppressions, from victimizing of the false gods. God loved them too much to want them to experience all of that. So he says, have no other gods before me. Thirdly, I'd like to talk about the application of the law given. Does this law seem a little dated to you?
It would seem in looking at these words in verse 3 that therefore another time, another place, I mean when was the last time that you were tempted to worship Zeus? When was the last time you offered a sacrifice or were tempted to offer a sacrifice to Hermes? Remember that happened in Acts chapter 14 with Paul and Barnabas being thought to be gods. When was the last time you passed a temple which was overtly dedicated to a pagan deity?
Doesn't it seem that this law is just a little bit antiquated for us? I mean we've come a long way baby, right? Polytheism just isn't our thing. It's remote to our culture we think. We're advanced. We're technological. We're intelligent. We're civilized. We're Christian. Why we've moved from polytheism to monotheism and there would be some who would say we've even moved on to atheism. For in some circles to believe that there is no god means that one is an intellectual. He's called a brain.
God calls him a fool. Isn't it interesting that the first commandment does not say, and thou shalt believe in the Lord thy God? It doesn't say that. It presupposes a belief in God. Why? Because a command to believe in God is unnecessary. The truth of God is apparent in creation and is written on the conscience. So not to believe in God requires one to deny the obvious and overrule the testimony of his own conscience. Creation was created to worship and to worship the true God.
But there are many other gods these days. Oh, our gods are less visible, less apparent perhaps, but they are just as real. They're powerful in our day. Even some who claim to be monotheists are practically speaking polytheists. Indeed we may even discover that some of us who call ourselves Christians are in truth worshippers of other gods. Because you see other gods include whatever is the greatest thing in one's life. Other gods include whatever receives the most attention.
Other gods include whatever the pivot is around which all else revolves. Other gods include whatever claims one's affection and resources preeminently. You see that is a god. Intangible, yes, but just as real as any pagan deity worshipped in an idol. Indeed today man worships himself and in doing that he's created his own pantheon of deities. I'd like to consider three of the gods that are worshiped these days. I'm going to use ancient names for them to illustrate something.
We may not worship in exactly the same way, nor may we use the idols which were common in ancient, the ancient days of Israel. But I would submit to you that in a certain sense the same gods that were worshiped then are still worshiped today. The first god I'd like to name, and the ancient name he's known by, is Mammon. The name Mammon originally meant a trust, like what you would give to a banker. But it came to mean what is trusted instead of God, and it was used that way in Jesus Day.
It refers to money and material things. I would suggest to you that Mammon is perhaps the most popular god that people worship in our day, even people who call themselves Christian. Mammon is an inordinate accumulation of possessions for one's own use. I want to hasten to say it's not wrong to have things. It is not wrong to accumulate things.
If that is done as stewardship, if it's done in the context where God is seen as the owner and I am but being a faithful steward that I might increase in order to give, that kind of accumulation is wise stewardship. It's not sinful. But when the things that I accumulate begin to direct my life, then it becomes an idol. When Mammon and possessions and money become the basis for actions and decisions, then those things have become other gods, and God says, no other gods before me.
Are you serving gold or God? Well really, very seldom is it put in such direct terms. It's more subtle than that, isn't it? One does not have to be wealthy either to serve Mammon. Indeed, some of the people who are the most devoted adherents and worshippers of Mammon are the poor. The worship of things. Douglas Beier, who is a pastor in California, compares the subtle bondage of this worship to fly and fly paper. The fly lights upon the sticky substance.
And having lit, he says, my paper, only to discover the paper thinking my fly. And so we say my things, my money, but I wonder what our things and our money might be thinking. My slave, my worshiper. There may not be a God that is more tempting than this one to every person sitting in this room this morning. I would venture to say that there are some of us who have fallen before this God. Oh no, there's a place for Yahweh Elohim. This is the God we worship, Mammon.
A second God that was known in that day and widely worshipped in Canaan, Phoenicia, that area was the God Baal. There are many different Baal gods, but basically the Baal God was the God of rain and fertility. And the worship of Baal involved the most lewd, depraved kind of sexual behavior. That was all a part of it. I want to start by saying that the gift of physical love is a gift from God, and it is a wonderful expression of love between a man and woman.
But like every other good thing that God has given, sin seeks to twist and pervert that and to take it out of its place, its context. Sin seeks to tempt us to misuse God's good gift for selfish pleasure. And yet it is so attractive and so alluring that to say a word against it seems overly restrictive, doesn't it? It seems Victorian. It seems obsolete to talk in terms of this being a God because it is so popularly worshipped in our world.
All you have to do is watch television for one hour during prime time, and you will see that to be true. You watch it for five minutes in the afternoon. Fulfillment of pleasure, even if that pleasure is God-given and intended for good. Fulfillment of pleasure as an end in itself is the essence of idolatry. When sex is misused, it becomes a cruel, demanding God. Douglas Beier says, No idol betrays its worshipper so quickly and obviously as the God of sex.
No other false god makes greater promises and fails so painfully. The sexual revolution of the mid-twentieth century, which promised to cure people's Victorian sexual hangups, has created in fact a worse situation. It has left in its wake more unwanted pregnancies, more venereal disease, and more broken homes, broken hearts, and broken lives than plagued our hung up forebears. Are you worshipping at this idol? Is this God in some form the one that really controls your life?
No other gods before me. There's a third God I'd like to mention. This one's a little more difficult to trace perhaps, but I think it's relevant to our day. People in that day worshipped in their pagan cultures the god Malik. Malik was essentially an Ammonite god worshipped by the sons of Ammon. The worship of Malik was unbelievably cruel. It involved human sacrifice. Malik was sometimes pictured in his idol as one with arms outstretched.
The idol would be heated until it was red hot, and then parents would come and in worship of Malik, place their children in the arms of their god. They would be burned alive. Now you say, look, that's a long way from where we are today, in one sense. But isn't it true that there are people in our society today who offer their children in the sterile, polite atmosphere of an abortion clinic? Aren't there those who offer human sacrifice through the destruction of the divorce court?
Aren't children likewise offered up in our day to parentless, hectic schedules of a two or three job home? Isn't Malik worshipped in our day through the torture chamber of a crazed maniac, as in the San Francisco area in this last year as it was discovered? Isn't Malik worshipped in the abusive violence of home where wife and children are physically and or verbally assaulted? Isn't that the worship of Malik?
Isn't Malik worshipped in the irrational hate and the indiscriminate murder in a crowded airport or on a city street? And isn't there the offering up of human sacrifice and terrible cruelty through drugs, those who use and promote that? And alcohol, pornography, rock music. Someone told me recently that at some of the rock music concerts there are actually altar calls for the young people to give their lives to Satan. Cannot we trace the worship of Malik to our day and things like this?
I believe we can. But you see the supreme personal deity of man in our day is really self. Oh Baal and Malik and Mammon are there, part of the pantheon. But the supreme God, the Zeus of our day is self. When a man says, well what's in it for me? Why does that help me attain my interests, my goals? How will it affect me? Isn't that self centeredness evidence of self worship?
Isn't this the kind of worship that Paul suggests in Philippians 3.19 when he says, whose God is their belly, in other words whose God is their own selfish appetites? The essence of self worship is autonomy from God. Even giving him a place out of courtesy is of insufficient of course. God is not interested in a place in our lives. He's interested in the place of control. He wants the throne room and the rights to direct. He doesn't want a place given to him out of courtesy.
Pastor Byers says, God can do little with a person who is self satisfied or self confident. God cannot possess the self possessed. Those who worship in that way worship themselves with all their hearts, strength, souls and minds and themselves only do they serve. Why does God make this the first command? Why does God insist on worship only of himself? I'd like to suggest three reasons for that. First because he is Jehovah Yahweh Elohim. We don't have to go beyond that. We will.
But the facts are that God is the supreme object of worship. He is Yahweh, the self existent one who created. He is the I am that I am. And if he says no other God is before me, that's all that's necessary. It's for him to say that. There's another reason that I believe God says it. That is because he's redeemed his people. God says it to you and me today because he has redeemed us from our personal Egypts. The blood of his lamb has been sacrificed for us.
He has purchased us with an awful price. And so he says, I am the one who redeemed you, no other gods. Here's a third reason that God says worship only me. That is that he doesn't want us to have to experience the emptiness, the frustration, the brokenness, the loneliness of other gods. You see other gods give promises, but they're unable to fulfill those promises. You think about the promises of mammon in your life or the promises of Baal that you have listened to.
Or you think of what Malik has suggested to you or what your Zeus self has said to you. Has that false god come through on one promise? Rather, your god has left you used, miserable, deceived, and enslaved. My friend Jesus Christ is the great liberator. He's the one in whom there is true freedom. But you must worship him only. He permits no other gods. Are you controlled by alcohol, by drugs, by cigarettes? Are you controlled by them? The Lord says no other gods before me.
Are you enslaved to rock music? The Lord says no other gods before me. You seek after applause and recognition? Is that what you seek after? The Lord says no other gods before me. Is your number one priority sports? No other gods before me. Does your schedule revolve around your television set on Sunday afternoon, Sunday evening, Wednesday night, other times? The Lord says no other gods before me. Are you trusting in your security of investments and savings account? Is that your trust?
The Lord says no other gods before me. Is your heart possessed by pride in your intellect, in your education, in your achievements? The Lord says no other gods before me. Let's pray. Loving Heavenly Father, Yahweh Elohim, graciously reveal to each of us the other gods that we are worshipping. Even though we are unwilling to look and reluctant to admit, do not allow us the awful luxury of escaping that point of conviction.
Do not allow us, Lord, to continue in that idolatry which will ruin our lives, which will lead us to frustration and emptiness and brokenness and result in our being used and devastated. Lord love us more than that. Love us to bring us back to the point of faithfulness. Lord love us and give us hearts of repentance, deep and genuine, until we worship You alone and there are no other gods. In Jesus' name, amen.