Ten Words #1: No Other Gods

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The first commandment is “You shall have no other gods before me” (Exod 20:3). As we plow into the Ten Commandments or 10 Words (in Hebrew), we arrive at this very simple statement. What does it mean? Don’t we already know that there are no gods but God? Is this word even relevant for us?

This begs a very important question: Are there other gods? I’m guessing that not many of us worship Baal or Molech or Ra or Artemis or Zeus. Most of us have come to believe that there is no other god. We are not like “primitive pagans” or animists who believe in various spirit gods or who worship the earth as if it were a god.

Are we off the hook? Is it possible to say that this is remedial territory for us and that we have progressed far beyond this first command?

“Not so fast,” says the apostle Paul! In Romans 6, Paul discusses the tension between being a slave to sin versus being a slave to righteousness. The two are incompatible, Paul writes, yet some Christians apparently misunderstand this. They think that sin is something to occasionally enjoy BECAUSE of their freedom in Christ.

But sin, according to Paul, is not just a pleasurable vice that we can toy with. Sin is a power that seeks to control. It is a rival to God and produces nothing good in us.

Hmm. Sin is a power. It is a rival to God. It produces death within us.

This sounds to me as if there indeed ARE other gods. We just don’t call them gods. But they act as gods to us. They are false gods that seek to control our lives and define everything that we do. These gods are real because they exercise power over us. They distract us from our service to the one true God. They go by many names: baseball, sex, food, work, F-150, vanity, vacation, drinking, etc.

So as we think together about the First Word (“no other gods before me”), it’s a good time to take inventory and make sure that there truly are no greater gods in our lives. We should work to ensure that nothing gains ascendancy over our commitment to God. And we should remember what this looks like in real life according to Paul in Rom 12:1, “Present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship.”

Are you in fact offering your whole life as a sacrifice to God? Does God have your full allegiance?

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