"The One God"

THE ONE GOD

TEXT: Exodus 20:3-6; Matthew 5:17-20

For the next few months, we will be winding our way through the Ten Commandments, taking breaks for special occasions and guest speakers, and then coming back to it. In a way, that’s how we function with the Ten Commandments in our lives. They are always there, at work in the background, until they are either challenged or broken. Then they take center stage.

The Ten Commandments, or Ten Words, as the Jews call them are given as the sign of the first covenant that God makes with Israel as a nation. Jesus is clear, however, that even though he brings a new covenant, that doesn’t mean the old one is gone or obsolete. Obedience to the words that God spoke to Moses on Mt. Sinai are still the sign of covenant relationship between God and God’s people. That means that if we Christians want to be part of that covenant, we had better sit up and pay attention.

As a culture, when Americans consider the Ten Commandments, we generally leap right down to Commandments 6-10, the commandments about murder, adultery, stealing, and the like. Many of those things we have labeled “crimes,” and our insistence that they should be visible in courts of law reinforces that notion.

Like we talked about last week, however, while the Ten Commandments contain laws, that isn’t really their function. They represent a code of behavior for those who are willing to accept a covenant relationship with God, and the first four of them deal strictly with that religious relationship.

I have always believed that if you want to be able to keep commandments 6-10, which are the rules that help us to live in community in peace, you have got to start with the first four. If it were up to me, I would take all the energy Christians give to putting the Ten Commandments up in courtrooms and move it to hanging the first four commandments on the walls of churches. I think if we kept those, we wouldn’t have to worry about the other six. In fact, I think if we just managed to keep the first two, we would be well on our way. So that’s where we look this morning.

God begins with self-identification, which we looked at last week. “I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt.” This is the liberating God, the one who has wrought miracles and cared for the people of Israel in their most desperate hour. That God wants a relationship with the people, but to stay in that relationship, we have to hold to certain things. The first and most important commandment is this: You shall have no other gods before me.

When we hear that commandment, our minds usually jump to images of pagan cultures with many gods. We hear the commandment as saying we should worship Yahweh and not Zeus or Vishnu or Thor. Since most people in America are not tempted by those other gods, we push the commandment aside as irrelevant, along with the second commandment not to make a graven image...not to have an idol.

That’s a huge mistake, because I doubt there ever was a society that had more other gods and more idols than 21st century America. In fact, I find I have more in common with a neo-pagan who worships a whole array of gods and goddesses than I have with some who profess to be Christian but have never even considered putting the God of Jesus Christ first in their lives. Because that’s what it means to have no other gods...it means living our lives in a way that shows our allegiance to the God of Jesus.

Anyone or anything else that bumps God from top spot is an idol and breaks the first commandment. Money and Power are the names of some of our contemporary gods. Very good and wonderful things can become idols and make us break the commandment. Family members, work, sports, country...even church and the Bible can become gods for us...even life itself. To say that something is an idol or a god for us, is not to say that the thing in and of itself is bad. It only becomes bad when it takes first place in front of the one, true God.

There is a very simple way to identify the things in our lives that cause us to break the first commandment. Imagine that Jesus is standing directly in front of you. It’s not a twist of the imagination...for the sake of the example, imagine that you can be absolutely sure that this is Jesus and that God is giving you a commandment. Jesus stands there and says, “I want you to give up something, and I’ll come back tomorrow to tell you what it is.” Your mind starts to race in the next 24 hours, and I’m guessing that there are some things that you would willingly let go.

But then there would be other things. Things that, if Jesus should name them, you would argue and justify and beg to keep. In fact, there may be something that Jesus could ask that you would actually refuse to give up...that you just can’t see that you could live without. That wonderful thing has now become the god of your life...the thing that you would do anything to keep, the thing that you would protect at all costs. It is your god.

We see this played out in the New Testament story of the Rich Young Ruler. A rich young man comes to see Jesus and asks what he needs to do to inherit eternal life. Jesus tells him simply to keep the commandments, referring to the Ten. The young man makes the amazing claim that he has done just that since his youth. Jesus has incredible insight here, and he puts that claim to the test. He starts with the very first commandment, to see if there is any god that this young man has put above Yahweh. “You lack one thing,” says Jesus. “Go and sell all that you have and give to the poor. Then come and follow me.” Ouch!

Jesus has just stepped on the young man’s god. He considers the request, hangs his head, and walks away sad. He cannot do it. Not only can he not do what Jesus asks, he realizes that he has not kept all the commandments since his youth. He hasn’t even kept the first one. He has put his wealth before God.

I’m not saying this is easy stuff, and I’m not saying that God WILL ask us to give up all the precious things in our lives. I am saying that we have to get our priorities straight. Our families are vitally important...and family relationships make it into two other commandments...honoring father and mother and staying clear of adultery...but they are not to have first place...not our parents, not our children, not our spouses. Throughout history so many people have put money and possessions before God that the Bible calls money the root of all evil. Physical life has always been the top god for many people, which is why we stare in awe at the lives of the martyrs. Why wouldn’t they just say they didn’t believe in God when that would have saved their lives? They could have done so much more good alive than dead! We don’t understand.

I am the Lord your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt. You shall have no other gods before me. None. Zero. The God of Abraham, Moses, and Jesus gets top slot. If you want to live life differently, that’s fine, but you can’t consider that you are part of the covenant of God’s people. The people of the covenant work hard to keep God at the top. We don’t always succeed, but we are always trying...always examining our lives to see what else might have taken our allegiance.

In an odd way, even Yahweh can become an idol, which is why the second commandment comes hot on the heels of the first. Yahweh is not to be carved in stone. No graven images. Across the years Protestants have gone in some pretty destructive directions with this, thinking that any religious art is forbidden by this commandment. This summer I felt sick as I visited cathedral after cathedral where Protestant reformers had swept in and defaced all the carvings, pulled down the statues, smashed the stained glass windows. At one cathedral, there was a parade of figures carved in relief above a doorway. None of them had heads...reformers had cut them all off. To this day you will see churches where there are no religious images whatsoever, not even a cross.

I don’t think that’s what is meant by this commandment. Certainly there is a danger in religious symbols becoming more important than the thing they symbolize. We always have to be careful of that. We have to constantly remember that those who have painted God as an old man with a long beard and white hair did not have God sitting for a portrait in front of them.

To me, the second commandment is a reminder of the same truth given to us on Easter morning. God is alive. The minute you carve an image of God into stone, you have taken a living, dynamic, infinite being and made it finite...controllable...dead. I don’t think God meant to forbid images so much as God meant to forbid GRAVEN images...images that are so set in stone that God cannot be seen any other way or in any other place.

The Bible is full of images of God...as father, mother, rock, fire, lamb, vine, wind, lion...even a chicken. I love those images. Every new image brings out a different facet of God’s character, and taken together the prism of light is more beautiful than anything we can possibly invent on our own. But when we take down one of those images that flash around the heavenly throne and make that THE ONLY image. When it becomes graven...carved in stone so that it must be this and no other. Then we have created an idol. We have limited God to this one thing...and since God is alive and limitless, that is not the God of Jesus at all.

In these first verses of the covenant between God and God’s people, we have the foundation for our relationship with God. First, we see that even before we know who God is, God is at work on our behalf. “I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery.” Next we learn that this God will have no rival. “You shall have no other gods before me.” There can be other minor gods. There can be other important things in your life that you would go to great lengths to love and support. But when push comes to shove, Yahweh has to be the most important thing in your life. Number one. At all times.

But, even as we give God the honored place, we have to keep our humility. We have to understand that while we know and experience some of God, the vastness of God is beyond our comprehension. We see in a glass darkly...a dim mirror is all that we have, so that many parts of God are unknown to us. We must never think that our view is the only view or the complete view. We must never cast the image we see in stone, and say that there is no truth in other images. God is not a dead idol, at our beck and call. God cannot be contained, carved in the rock, sealed in the tomb.

If we could manage to do that much, I don’t think there would be much problem in keeping all the rest. Amen.