Sunday
Sunday
Commandments 1 and 2
You shall have no other gods before me. You shall not make for yourself an idol…. You shall not bow down to them or worship them.
Exodus 20:3–5
To forbid the worship of other gods “before” or “beside” Yahweh implies that there are no other gods. “I am the LORD, and there is no other” (Isa. 45:6).
We do not need to worship the sun, the moon, and the stars to break this first commandment. We break it whenever we give first place in our lives to anybody or anything other than God. Instead, we are to love him with all our powers, making his will our delight and his glory our goal.
If the first commandment demands our exclusive worship, the second requires that our worship is spiritual and sincere. For, as Jesus said, “God is spirit, and his worshipers must worship in spirit and in truth” (John 4:24). The prohibition of idols should not be interpreted as forbidding us to make any visual representations but rather as forbidding us to worship one. It also surely forbids external forms that have no inward reality, drawing near to God with our lips when our hearts are far from him (Isa. 29:13; Mark 7:6).
Two problems confront us in the second commandment. First, it is here that God describes himself as “a jealous God” (Exod. 20:5). There is no need to be offended by this, however. Jealousy is the resentment of rivals, and God is jealous in this sense. He refuses to share his glory with another because there is no other with whom to share it.
The second problem is that God is said to punish children for the sins of their fathers. This may appear unfair. But it is certainly true that children suffer the consequences of their parents’ sins. These may be transmitted physically (by inherited disease), socially (in the poverty caused by excessive gambling or drinking), psychologically (by the tensions and conflicts of an unhappy home), and morally (in behavior learned from a bad example).
For further reading: John 4:19–24