Jason Locke's Blog

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 misunder...

Hope is a key attribute of believing people. It’s mentioned by Paul at the end of 1 Corinthians 13. “Now these three remain: faith, hope, and love; and the greatest of these is love.” Last week, we talked about faith. These days, hope is a substance of high demand and low supply. Historians could probably tell us about many other times of hopelessness. But when you listen to contemporary politicians, meteorologists, scientists, sociologists and the like, they express a great deal of pessimism about our climate, about race relations, about the Middle East, about the drought in California, and so forth. We specialize in cynicism even in the church. The sky seems to be falling. The wheels are about to come off. Paganism—and perhaps cannibalism!—are just a generation away. To face such skeptical thought, “hope” is the chief commodity of peddlers and fortune tellers. It’s what advertisers want you to buy. It’s what coaches sell their fans. It’s what politicians offer as the re...