“Do not have other gods besides me.” (CSB – Read the chapter)

When the apostle Paul was talking about marriage with the Ephesian church, he described it as being a reflection of the relationship we have with Jesus. The thing about being in a marriage is that as much as our culture today would like to pretend otherwise, it is a definitionally exclusive relationship. When you are married to someone, you are married to just them and no one else. If you try to expand beyond that, you may have something else, but you don’t have a marriage anymore. Trying to continue calling whatever else you have now marriage will just dilute the definition and ultimately cause issues for you and the people who are in your direct sphere of influence. There’s a reason, then, the first commandment of God’s big ten puts a major limitation on Israel’s ability to relate to other gods. Let’s talk about it.

Let me start by taking a second to clarify what we are going to be about for the next three weeks and a day. When God invited the people of Israel to enter into a covenant relationship with Him in which He would be their God and they would be His special people, a people who were going to be the recipients of His attention, protection, and blessing in a way no other group of people in the world were going to experience, the first thing He did was to clarify for them what the boundaries of this new relationship they were entering were going to be. We have talked about this fact about relationships before. All relationships have boundaries. All of them. If there is a relationship, that relationship has a boundary. The real question is whether or not we understand what those boundaries are. If we do, and if we are willing to live comfortably within them, then we will be able to enjoy that relationship for a very long time. If we don’t, or if we are not so willing, we are going to have a pretty rocky go ahead of us.

Because of the nature of the relationship they were going to have with God, He wanted the people to have as clear an understanding as they could of where their boundaries with Him were. This was not a relationship they were going to want to leave. And if they did, the cost was going to be high. This wasn’t necessarily because God Himself was going to blast them for it (although He would use that language over the course of outlining the boundaries for them), but because when they were with Him He was going to extend to them some pretty significant protections from the brokenness of the world around them. If they left the boundaries of the relationship, most of those protections were going to be lost, and without those, they were going to have a pretty hard time making it as a people. Israel was neither big nor powerful as compared with the various nations around them. If they didn’t have help, they were toast.

The Ten Commandments served as the big picture of what was in and what was out. And the very first of these was to make clear that they were to have no other gods besides God. Well, what does that mean? Israel lived in a polytheistic world. Not only did all the nations around them have gods they worshiped other than Yahweh, they had more than one god. In fact, they had lots of gods. They had whole pantheons of gods. That was just how the world worked. Absent a more robust scientific understanding of the world and how it worked, humans assumed that divine beings of varying sorts made things happen. But the notion that there was one deity who did it all seemed pretty far-fetched. After all, we are only capable of doing so much. So, they came up with multiple different gods and goddesses.

What’s more, Israel had been living in a cultural context that was thoroughly pagan and polytheistic for 400 years. That was all they knew. Yes, they seemed to have maintained their worship of Yahweh in some limited capacity, but it’s not hard to imagine that at some point along the way, they started to understand Him in basically the same terms as everybody else understood their gods. Yet the truth about the world, though, was that none of these other gods existed. They weren’t real. They were figments of our imagination. They were useful, if incorrect, tools to help us make sense of the world in a season when that was the best we could do.

What God wanted Israel to understand, and indeed what Israel themselves needed to understand, was that none of this thinking on the part of all these other people was real. Simply dropping this idea on them, though, wouldn’t have worked, and God knew that. It would have been like telling someone today that the color red is really green, and the color green is really red. The Israelites had only ever known that the world was governed by hundreds of different deities, most of whom were regional in their focus. They weren’t going to simply give up that understanding of the world on the spot no matter how good of a show God put on for them. So, He had to take a different approach.

Instead of dropping the truth bomb on them that all of these other gods were nothing more than figments in the imaginations of the people who worshiped them, He told them they weren’t to be worshiping them as well. If they were going to be in a relationship with Him, it was going to be an exclusive relationship. Maybe there were other gods out there in the world around them, but they weren’t to pay them any attention. They weren’t to give them any devotion. They weren’t to be afraid of them or their power. They were to act like they didn’t exist. No other gods besides me.

There are lots and lots of reasons for this command, but let’s focus on just one this morning. This reason is something that is still true for us today. This command may not be something we are expected to obey in the form we see here, but the boundary it identified for living in a relationship with God hasn’t changed. Our reason for not having other gods besides Him aren’t the same as they were for Israel, but we still can’t have other gods besides Him if we are going to be in a relationship with Him.

Here’s why: We become like what we worship. Whatever it is to which we give our greatest and highest devotion is going to shape our character. In fact, anything to which we give any amount of devotion is going to shape our character. How we look, how we act, how we think, the kinds of things we value, what kinds of things we hold as right and proper and which are off limits, and more are all going to be determined by the target(s) of our devotion.

Because of this, the character of what we worship matters. A lot. If we worship something or someone with bad character, we are going to share in that moral rot. Whatever your particular perspective on the matter, it is undeniable that the conservative political movement in the United States is in the midst of a great debate between a more thoughtful and reflection classical conservatism and a more populist and reactive conservatism. The reason for this is primarily because of the impact on Donald Trump on the Republican party. A great many people have given a great deal of devotion to him, and his character has shaped their own because of it. Whether or not that is a good thing is not something I’m considering at the moment. The effect itself is the point right now. The same thing happened in the Democrat party with Barack Obama. We become like what we worship.

Well, God is different from anyone or anything else. No one and nothing is like Him. More to the point, He is better than anyone or anything else in terms of His character. He is good in a way the rest won’t ever be. He is wise and just and loving and compassionate and holy and righteous and the list goes on from there. Nothing else hits that mark. Nothing else we worship including the various gods we create are ever anything more than reflections of who we are, and we are broken by sin. If we worship something that is a product of sin, we are only ever going to become more sinful. God is holy and righteous. When we worship Him, we become less sinful, and the world around us becomes a better place. We become better people.

If we try to worship something else alongside God, we will be trying to give our devotion to two entirely different things. We can’t maintain that kind of a split for long. We’ll either settle in one direction or the other as our primary influence. Usually we wind up settling for the easier, lower option. Because of all of this, the very first thing God wanted Israel to understand about living in a relationship with Him was that they had to get rid of everything and everyone else. If they tried to double up their attention, it wasn’t going to work. They were going to drift away into sin and once they were in sin, they were not going to be in a relationship with Him any longer.

The same is true for us today. If we try to worship anything other than God, we are going to be gradually pulled away into sin and away from our relationship with Him. That will hurt us. It will hurt our families. it will hurt the church. It may lead people within our sphere of influence to think incorrect thoughts about God such that they drift from a right relationship with Him. It’s bad for everybody when this happens. So, what or who is it that you are worshiping? To what do you give your devotion? Think carefully on that because it’s really easy to smuggle things in the door without realizing we’ve done that. Jesus wants your whole heart. Make sure you give it to Him.