Faithbase

Hello and welcome to thinking about the Bible and we're thinking about God's law and today we're looking at that first commandment. We've covered some of the background, we talked about how God had rescued the children of Israel out of Egypt, but more profound, and that's the word I used, like to use that word I guess, is the fact that Jesus Christ rescued us out of a life of sin, out of the kingdom of darkness, and has brought us by his shed blood, by his substitutionary death, into the kingdom of light. Those of us who confess Jesus Christ as Lord, believe in our heart that God raised him from the dead, we are indeed saved. And we talked a little bit about this in the series thinking about love, about how the way that we show love to God, and we didn't really get into this too much, mostly we're focused on showing love to our neighbor, but showing love to God is largely acts of obedience. Of course we love our neighbor as a means of loving God, but when we look at the the word of God, look at the law of God here, here's one of the ways that we show our love to him. But the first commandment, you shall have no other gods before me, you shall have no other gods before me. Now in the ancient world, it was a polytheistic world, and unlike the moderns, those who lived in that ancient world were constantly aware of the so-called gods that held sway in their life. All of life really was a religion, all of life was religious, at least we could say it that way, but really all of life was a religion in that everything that a person did was somehow connected to a god or gods. Especially in Canaan, the many gods that were represented there or were found there were tied to agriculture, because that's how people lived, they had to grow their own food, and obviously agriculture was something that each person, that every person was much more closely connected to than we are today. And so many of the gods had to do with agriculture, and so they're asking for the blessings of the particular gods or sacrifices and so forth. But God says you shall have no other gods before me, literally in the Hebrew, before your face or face to face. And so this first commandment, God is demanding exclusivity, he wants an exclusive relationship with his people, a direct relationship with the living God is what is in sight here, not to be something to be debated theologically, this was for the common man, they wouldn't be asking well are these real gods, these other gods, and how is that playing to the whole idea of monotheism, and that wouldn't have been the idea that they would have had come to mind, they simply would have said Yahweh is the one true God, all these others are pretenders. And so there was a call to a life of communion with Yahweh, with the one true God, then he would not have his people be shared with any other. So very quickly, how about you? Is your relationship with God exclusive, or are there other things that you and I put in the place of God, that things that are more important to us than that relationship with God? You shall have no other gods before me, and in this day and age we'd have to worry about, I hope, worshiping a god of agriculture, or maybe a god of our bank account or something, but ah, there we have a situation where maybe money, maybe security in the form of money, or in the form of a good job, or whatever, not that we shouldn't have a good job, not that we shouldn't set money aside, but the idea of worshiping God in an exclusive way means that we don't allow anything, good, bad, or indifferent, to come before him or to come between us and our Lord God, and that relationship must remain as clear as possible as we are in relationship with him in Jesus Christ. God bless you, we'll see you tomorrow, I want you to think today, if you will, about what are the things in your life that you might be allowing to push between you and the Lord God, because you want to be sure to have no other gods before him. So think about that, is that commandment real and effective in your life? God bless you, I'll see you again in the next episode.