January 15 Sermon: Who We Worship

Let me tell you, I have been teaching the Ten Commandments a lot. I mean, I have taught it a lot. As I think about doing Youth ministry for 17 years, being here and then teaching Catechism class. I've taught them many times, and I don't know how long ago I came come up with this exercise that I do when I teach the Ten Commandments. But it wasn't this decade that I came up with, and it wasn't the previous one either. So, I've been doing it a while.

 But what I do is I give the students a sheet and it's got ten lines on it, and they are to write out the Ten Commandments in order. Tell them if you can do it from memory, that's good. If not, go to Exodus 20, write them out, put them in order. Then when we get done with putting the commandments in order, what we do is I tell them, now what I want you to do is to put a number next to the commandment based upon how easy you think it is to keep. So, if it's the easiest one to keep, put a one by it.

 If it's the hardest, put a ten by it. Now, you can kind of predict with me how this kind of goes with kids. I mean, it's different with younger kids than with old. Like with junior high students as opposed with high school students. With junior high students, the 6th and 7th Commandment usually are one and two.

 They don't plan on murdering anybody, and they're not married to commit adultery.

 Then with high school students, usually they sometimes have a better understanding of what Jesus has to say about lust and anger and the Sermon on the Mount. And so, sometimes they'll move those commandments down a little bit. Now, just for the record, the other predictable part of this whole exercise is guess which one's number ten. Honor your father and mother every stinking time. But anyway, the one commandment that often ends up towards the top is the first commandment as the easiest.

 And why wouldn't we expect this to be the case? You shall have no other gods before me. Most of us has never even maybe even had the name of another God cross our lips, much less have it cross our lips in worship, right? We don't have idols adorning our mantles in our homes. We don't have little shrines to whoever it might be in our houses.

 We don't have that. We're Christians. We have only ever known the God of the Bible, and most certainly we have never lifted our voices in praise of anyone. But God himself is God. We know.

 And so we come to this commandment and we think, yeah, that one can be towards number one on the list. That one's a pretty easy one to keep. But yet, as I look out here at you, I can kind of think what you're thinking. It ain't that easy, is it? We know that we have not kept this command.

 We know that we put other things in the place of god. We know that we aren't able to keep this perfectly. In fact, John Kelvin has a famous saying or a famous quote from the institutes of Christian Religion, and he says, man's nature, so to speak, is a perpetual factory of idol. Some translations say man's heart is an idle factory. And you're nodding.

 You know it. This is who we are. This is what we do. Despite our thoughts that of all the commands, number one is one of the easier ones to keep. We know the truth.

 We know that our hearts are perpetual factory of idols. And I would actually make the case that when we look at the rest of the ten commandments, when we get to two through ten, that when we violate the rest of the commandments, we're often or we are actually in violation of the first one. Because when we make the decision to violate another commandment, when we do that, what ultimately are we doing? We're saying that we make the rules, that we are autonomous, we don't need God, we don't need his authority. I am autonomous.

 I am God. I set the rules. And so at the end of the day, this first commandment is at the center of the rest of them. Who is going to have authority? Is God in his word?

 And what he has to say? Is he going to have authority in our lives or in our autonomy, which is functionally, another word for sin, right? Or in our desire to be God ourselves? Are we going to set ourselves up? Are we going to try and usurp the throne of the almighty and put ourselves in his place?

 So we arrive at this first commandment, and it's necessary that we acknowledge this truth because it's who we are. It's how we have failed. And as I mentioned last week, if we fail to understand who God is, we're going to have a crisis. And like I said last week, it's a crisis of anthropology. It's a crisis of understanding who man is, understanding what our end goal is.

 We struggle to know what it means to be human. And this comes from a lack of understanding. Or maybe even better, maybe it's far better to say it this way. It's more than just a lack of understanding who God is. It's a rejection of the God who is revealed to us clearly in scripture.

 And so we struggle, maybe individually, but collectively as a society, to understand who we are, what our purpose is and where we're going. And if we don't know who our creator is, then how can we know who we are? If we're designed and if we are loved, then you and I have a clear purpose. And humanity has a clear purpose. But if we're nothing more than cosmic accidents, then why should we think that our lives are anything more than accidents?

 Why should we think that we have a higher purpose?

 This is why it's so important that we know who we are and where we are going. And this all starts with knowing who it is that made us. And this isn't tough. We get this. I can see as you look back at me, yes, this is true.

 We have to know who God is if we're going to understand who we are. But it's important that we note that this isn't just a 21st century problem now, it's different in the 21st century. Technology has taken some of this and made it even more confusing than it is. But this is an old question. I mean, it's what the philosophers talked about.

 Plato was asking these questions. Aristotle descartes. I think, therefore I am. These are important questions, right? But we have an answer, and it goes back to the English Reformed.

 When the English Reformed gathered in 1646 to make the Westminster Confession, they were clearly asking this question that I'm talking about here, because the first question of the Westminster Shorter Catechism is this. Now, in the original English that they wrote it, this is an updated version, but the original language of the Westminster Shorter Catechism, the first question is what is the chief end of man? But here, this modern language version says, what is man's primary purpose? And the answer, man's primary purpose is to glorify God and to enjoy Him forever. Now, in this modernized version, it really gets to the heart of it, because we are obsessed with the idea of purpose, aren't we, in our day?

 And so this is a great restating of that first question. Our primary purpose is to glorify God and to enjoy Him forever. Think about the clarity that that gives us. We were created to glorify God and to enjoy Him forever. That's clear, that's focused.

 Most of the time when we talk about purpose, people will throw at all kinds of stuff. And if we imagine them throwing it at us, it's like trying to catch sand, right? There's all these different ideas. This is like catching a beach ball, right? Man's primary purpose is to glorify God and enjoy Him forever.

 It is clear, it's to the point. In a purposeless, in a chaotic and what seems to be a random world, this simple statement provides focus to who we are and where we're going, doesn't it? So we find this idea embedded for us as we look at the first commandment. These are just eight words. Just eight words.

 It's real simple. You shall have no other gods before me. And from this, there is a natural monotheistic implication to this statement, isn't there? Because if God is, if God is, if God exists, he is the one who has power. He is the only one.

 He is the one who not only has the power to create, but we have to remember the important things that God tells us here in the book of Exodus, and particularly here. He is the one who had the power to bring his people, the ones who are receiving this law, he had the power to bring them out of slavery and out of bondage in Egypt. And so if he's able to do that, then he must be the one true God. Now, you and I don't have the time this morning because it would take a lot of serious consideration about it, but there's a lot in here in this statement that takes us back to the beginning of Exodus, to the plagues. Think about the battle that is happening.

 Remember, we have to go back to Genesis first. Real quick. What was going on in Genesis? We looked at this when we went through the book of Genesis, this war between the God of the Bible who's going to rescue his people through the seat of the woman and then the serpent trying to crush the work of the one who's going to crush his head. There was this constant struggle between the children of God and the children of the serpent.

 And at the beginning of Exodus, what do we see? We see this empire, Egypt has overcome the people there in slavery, and the serpent is trying to kill their babies. He's trying to kill, to kill the offspring of the Israelites. Notice the significance of that. The offspring is going to come through the seed of the woman and they're killing the babies.

 Right? Well, so there's this war between the pagan gods of Egypt and the one true God, the one who is going to rescue his people. And every one of the ten plagues is some sort of attack on the pagan gods of the Egyptians. Oh, Pharaoh and Ra, you think you're the god of the sun? Got news for you, dude.

 I'm going to have a plague of darkness. You get the idea. They are an attack on the paganism of the Egyptians. All these plagues are dismantling the false gods of the Egyptians. And so, we see this embedded in this verse beforehand, a reminder to the people.

 I am the Lord, your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery. I am the God who has decimated, has completely obliterated the gods of the Egyptians. Yes, you were many, but you were weak. You were in slavery. There was nothing you could do to save yourself.

 It seems as though the Egyptians have the power, that the gods are on their side. But remember what happened in Egypt. I destroyed their gods. I was victorious over every last one of them. He not only decimated them, he brought them to nothing.

 And so this first commandment, we see from this statement here that this follows the flow of the story of Exodus. If he's going to give his people a command, it makes sense because it's going to be here. I have brought you through this. We had the plagues, I destroyed the gods of the Egyptians, I brought you through the water, I have fed you in the wilderness, I have given you water in the wilderness. I am the one who delivers you, I've brought you out.

 And because of this, you shall have no other gods before me. And again, there is monotheism built into this command. And it only makes sense. How could it possibly be that all these pagan gods of the nations existed? How could it be that there's all these little gods everywhere and not one was able to rise up in the heavens and crush the other one?

 One's got to be powerful and the other if humans can't make peace treaties, there's no way the gods are going to make peace treaties. None of this makes sense from our monotheistic, our Christian worldview. We understand this, and because that is our worldview, because we are monotheistic people inherently with our worldview rooted in scripture, we struggle to even to begin to understand pagan religion. And paganism in paganism, there was this understanding that in these polytheistic pagan systems that everything was eternal, that everything was eternal, and these things came out from this eternality, for lack of a better term, they sort of evolved. And there's nothing that is outside of that creation.

 Again, you and I have a biblical world view. We understand all of this from a monotheistic framework. And so we have this idea of God being outside of his creation. He created, he spoke, and then it came to life. That is how we view the world.

 From them, everything is one. Everything is essentially able to be God. Now, there are gods, there's different level of power, but you and I could ascend to that level if we're enlightened. This is the general world view of the people surrounding the Israelites. This is how things worked.

 There was an eternality to literally everything. And these gods aren't all powerful deities like you and I imagine, deities, they're small, g gods, more powerful than you and I, but they aren't all powerful than not omnipotent like the God of the Bible. Now, I can remember, I can maybe even think of where I was the first time I heard about the New Age movement. I think I was in the cafeteria, which was also our study hall at the Worthy Elementary School. I was either late elementary or early junior high, you know, small school stuff, same building, right?

 And I heard about the New Age movement, and it really confused me because I heard about this idea of becoming a god. Well, I was a good kid who went to Wednesday night every week and memorized my Bible verses. I needed to get patches and other things to put on my beanie and my sash for whirly birds injected. This was important. I knew my Bible verses, and so I heard this idea that I heard this idea that these people believe they could become a god.

 And I'm like, how dumb are you? You're not all powerful. You don't say, let there be light, and there's light. I didn't understand this idea behind paganism, this idea that everything is eternal, that all is one, that there's all of this going on, that this is not only the paganism of the new age movement when I was a kid, and it's still around now, paganism hasn't gone anywhere. It's the same as what was happening in the ancient world.

 That was different. It looked different. It's passed off as a little bit more civilized now, obviously, but it's the same thing. The person in 2023 who believes they are a god or who believes that they can ascend to be a god through some sort of secret knowledge that they will get is no more delusional than the pharaoh was. It's easy for us to look at the pharaoh and go, what was he thinking?

 But we have the same thing now. All of this is going on. There's this pagan underlying assumption here in the commandments, and this is god saying, no, I am outside of creation. I am the one who makes all things. I am all powerful.

 I am the law giver. We'll get back to that. But this is, again, the underlying stuff that's going on in the world at that time. And there's a great and accessible book, I think it's very accessible, called against the gods. And in that book, this author says, really, this is the story that's going on in the whole old testament.

 It is god saying, you and your false gods, I'm going to bring them to nothing. When you start going through that lens well, first we have to go through the lens of following the messiah of the old testament. When you follow that against the god's idea that god is bringing to nothing, all of these false gods of the old testament, you really start to see it because you have the prophet saying, you can do nothing. Do something. You made a god with your own hands.

 Do something. Show us. Tell us the future. Make these things come to pass. And god is just essentially laughing in their faces saying this.

 Think of elijah and the prophets of baal. This is what is going on, this war between the one true god and all these pagan gods, this idea of everything being one. So we come to this verse, and it says, you shall have no other gods before me. He's saying, hey, I'm the one who saved you. I am the one who came and rescued you.

 You couldn't do this on your own. I came and I took you out of slavery. I took you out of bondage. And instead of screaming into the night like the pagan neighbors around you, listen to the god who speaks. Listen to the god who told the sun God.

 It's going to be dark and there's nothing you can do about it. Listen to the God who splits the Red Sea and the people of God walk through on dry land. Where were the pagan gods of the Egyptians while they were drowning? So from this we see that there are obviously many Ramifications for you and I, because as I said, paganism hasn't gone anywhere. It looks different.

 It is different. It seems more civilized, but it's still there. There's still this idea in the world that we are all one and we can ascend to higher planes of spirituality. We can do all these types of different types of things. But in contrast to that stands the truth that there is a God who is all powerful, almighty, who is outside of his creation, and he not only creates, but he speaks.

 And His Word comes to us not only as a word telling us who he is, but telling us that he is the One who saves from all of this. There are many Ramifications for us. And so, as I mentioned, I think that this all deeply affects not only how we view God, but how we view ourselves. To understand this, you shall have no other gods before Me shapes our worldview. And so as we think about the ramifications of this, if we consider as we consider the first commandment, I want to do it through the lens of that I talked about last week, these three uses of the law.

 So you recall, I'm going to remind you really quickly of what the three uses of the Law were. Last week. We had three images. And I also had an image that I gave you that is not a use of the law. So the first use of the law is a curb.

 And that use of the law is to keep the world from being overwhelmed with chaos. Remember this was from Martin Luther's shorter catechism. The law is a curb. It shows us where we go. It keeps us on the road.

 It defines the path. And it tells us that if you jump over the curb, you're going to have chaos. There isn't a road there. We don't want to jump the curb. This is societal.

 This is societal order. The second use of the Law is a mirror. That was our image. The Law shows us our sin. It shows us our need for a savior.

 Like I said, the image that I want to call to our mind is one of a mirror. We look at ourselves in light of God's law, and it shows us just how sinful we are. Thirdly, there is a map as our image. It shows us how to live. It shows us how to be holy.

 There's also the last image that I told you that we don't have, and this is very important. The image we don't have here is a ladder. We don't use the commands of God. We don't use the Ten Commandments as a way of us reaching to God is climbing to God. But instead these laws show laws show us our need for God and the truth that he has to come down and reach out to us.

 And so after that quick refresher, I want us to think about the first commandment in light of these three uses really quickly. Now, I think you probably understand right off the bat how difficult it is to really consider and wrap our minds around the idea of the first use with you shall have no other gods before me because we really can't expect a world that is denying God to really truly understand this, right? You and I can't understand this. Without the work of the Holy Spirit in us, we can't do this. And actually there's debate on all of the first table laws and what the first use of them is because they're all about worship.

 How do we think the world should react in worship? So this is going to be difficult, but I think there's something really important. I didn't want to skip over the first you did because there's something really important. As I said, there is monotheism. There is the idea of one god embedded in this command.

 And if there is one God, there is one lawgiver. We can see in society what happens when there isn't an objective truth, when there isn't an objective law, it's up for grabs. If you and I are all gods, then everything is up for grabs. And so it's important that we have an understanding and the importance of society of understanding that this is not a reality in our world, that everything is up for grabs. I'm a god, you're a god.

 But instead that there is an absolute law giver and there is an absolute truth to these laws. And we can see this idea is pointing us to Romans one. Okay, Romans one, what does it say? For what it can be known about god is playing to them because God has shown it to them. We see in cultures throughout history there's a general sense of morality that goes in the same direction.

 In most cultures, murder, stealing and even adultery is considered to be immoral. Why is that?

It's because for what can be known about God is playing to them because God has shown it to him. There is this sense that we know God and there is something embedded in all of creation that shows the truth of this great lawgiver. And so as we think about this command, we can see that as the first use, the second use. You know where I'm going. You know this.

 I mentioned it at the beginning. Our hearts are idle factories. When we look in the mirror of the first commandment, we can see that we don't keep this command because nine times out of ten the idol we've made is looking back at us in the mirror, right? We have set ourselves up as the authority. And when we look at the majesty of God and how he's revealed Himself to us in His Word, we find that we do not just give Him the devotion that he is worthy of.

 We set ourselves up as the authority. And so we've started off looking at God's law. And right off the bat we find that we are incapable of even keeping the First Command perfectly. We can't do it. And so we see in this that we are in desperate need of a savior.

 We can't even keep the first Command. But this is why Jesus came. This is why the God who is took on our flesh and came near to us, because we have hearts that are idle factories. He came to us and he kept this law on our behalf. He bore the wrath of God for the punishment that we deserve for it.

 And so we see our sinfulness. But it also points us to the truth that there is a God who Is. And he is the One Who brings us out of the house of bondage, he brings us out of slavery, he brings us into his kingdom. This is who he is. And so that brings us to the third use.

 We seek to know the one true God as he is revealed in His Word that we might worship Him faithfully. If this is the true God, if this is who he is, and he is the One who has rescued us from our bondage, then he is worthy of our worship and no one else is. And so if we're going to worship Him, we need to know who he is. We need to know his character, we need to know what he requires of us. We need to know how we are to worship, our duty to God.

 We need to know our duty to man, how he expects us to treat each other, because this defines who we are. This is vital for you and I as believers. And this also shows us something amazing about the people of Israel who this command is given to. Like I said, they were stuck in bondage and amidst where they were in pagan Egypt. What happened?

 The one true God came and pulled his people out. He rescued them. He came to them with his word. He revealed Himself to them and he confirmed that they were his people. How?

 By his miraculous rescue of them. And we see in that God set his people apart. And what it means to be holy is to be set apart for God, set apart for worship of God. And so if we're going to truly worship Him, if we're going to be his set apart holy people, we need to be knowledgeable of who he is, that we might worship Him in spirit and truth. And it's all rooted in the truth that he has saved us, that he has set us free from sin, death, hell and the devil.

 He is our rescuer, and so we desire to worship him for who he is and what he's done. So may you and I walk away with this command in our hearts and in our minds this week, remembering that he is the God who is. But just like he rescued the Egyptians, he has rescued us. And so he calls us to worship. And what a privilege it is to not only be the people that God has rescued, but to be able to worship him for who he is.

 Because we don't want to worship the idols of our hearts. We don't want to worship the ideas that man has about who God is. We want to glorify God and enjoy him forever. Amen. Let us pray.

 Almighty and everlasting God, we thank you for the gift of your word. We thank you that among all the peoples of the world, you have come to those who you have given faith to and given us this message that you shall have no other gods before me. And we thank you that we know the reason that that command comes to us is because you are the God who has called us, that has forgiven us, that rescues us.

 So may we glorify you in our lives and may we find joy in being your people. Not just today, but may that be an overflowing joy that we look forward to in eternity is in the name of Jesus that we pray. Amen.

This message was delivered on January 15, 2023 by Pastor Mark Groen at First Reformed Church in Edgerton, MN. First Reformed is a congregation in the Evangelical Presbyterian Church.