Commandment 1: The God of Your Heart (10 Commandments)

Introduction

The book of Exodus is a story about God’s people leaving Egypt and their whereabouts in the desert over the next several decades. Partway through their wilderness journey, God takes Moses up the mountain and renews the covenant he made with that people. However, they are independent now and need law in written form. So, as the central piece of that covenant, God gives the moral law, a written expression of his character that puts to writing how mankind is expected to live before God and one another. This is the ten commandments.

The first commandment, “You shall have no other gods before me,” is the first building block upon which all the rest sit. Although this might sound convenient, a quick look at Israel proves this, though not in a happy way. Very shortly after they get this law, they begin following after the gods of the peoples they conquered. Once that happens, they begin to worship images, fornicate, steal, lie, break the sabbath, and violate all the other commandments. It works like dominoes. Once the first one gets knocked over, the rest of them will fall.

Perhaps this is you. Although you may not belong to another religion, making something else your god is much easier than you think. Our task today is to answer the question: Who is the God of your heart? And further, is it who you think it is, or might you be self-deceived?

Who is the God of Your Heart?

Your heart is like a miniature palace. You have important rooms, dedicated to your most treasured things: perhaps your family, a particular hobby, or a trusted friend, or whatever is of greatest priority in your life. But every heart has a throne room. An often hidden but undeniably strong impulse in every person is to serve a master. This is one reason why the life cycle of most every nation in history ends in empire or dictatorship. We burn with desire to have one singular master, a great purpose that all our other purposes serve. That is what will sit on the throne of your heart. Whatever is sitting on that throne is the god of your heart.

Mankind throughout the ages has been so prone to this type of sin. How many people do you know of who have bled and died for some other purpose? Other religions have martyrs who died for their god, activist groups have countless people who have walked headlong into strife over what food to eat or who should be allowed to say or do something. The Westminster Shorter Catechism helps express this concept. It asks what is forbidden in the first commandment, and part of the answer is “the giving of [God’s] worship and glory to any other, which is due to him alone.” This doesn’t just mean you can’t have another God—it means you cannot even treat anything else like God. Ultimate glory, honor, reverence, and worship are for God alone, so giving that to anything or anyone else is sinning.

This type of sin has disastrous consequences, and a great story from ancient Roman history shows just how disastrous they can be. In 53 BC, a Roman general named Marcus Licinius Crassus was one of the Triumvirate, an alliance of three influential leaders at the time who ruled Rome. The other two were Julius Caesar and Pompey the Great. As time passed, Crassus became jealous of their success and even though they were all working together for Rome’s good. His thirst for military honor led him to start the battle of Carrhae, an invasion of Parthia. After marching 35,000 men through the desert for days, he had them begin a fight they had no strength to win, and after several blows and deceptions from the Parthians, over 30,000 of those men were dead and Crassus was put to death with molten gold poured down his throat, a grim symbol of his excessive thirst for glory and riches. This battle not only lost the Romans a great deal of troops and a leader, but led to the downfall of the Republic of Rome and the inauguration of the Roman Empire.

How could Crassus go from someone ruling peaceably with the other two men to being so greedy for gain that he ended up destroying the government of Rome and the lives of tens of thousands of men? The answer lies in what sat upon the throne of his heart. He used to want what was right. But over time, he wanted riches and honor more than what was good for Rome, so when that became his god, he served it faithfully to his own destruction.

Friends, you will serve your god faithfully, whoever or whatever it is, so make sure you have the right God. Maybe your god is not glory or fame to the level of Crassus, but know that you are capable of similar destruction if someone else takes up residence on your heart’s throne. Maybe your god is money, so you work so much that you neglect your friendships and end up alone and miserable. Your god could be sexual pleasure, so you sleep around and destroy your marriage, catching your children in the after effects of your sin. Or perhaps you have redefined God just a little so that he is more appealing, and that modified god sits there, acquiring your worship. Maybe you have the American Jesus who wants you to have nice things and an easy life; maybe you have the smart Jesus who wants you to know more about the Bible than other people do. Perhaps your Jesus is unique, someone only you know. For Israel, one of their gods (besides the literal false gods they acquired) was being like the nations, so they begged for a king before God wanted them to have one and ended up in excessive destruction and idolatry for generations afterward. Of course, calling these other things gods does not mean they are actually gods—it just means that we have given to them what we should have given to the Lord: worship and glory and praise. But when we serve them, they become masters to us like the Lord, and every master besides Him will lead us to a cruel and destructive end. Beloved, your God must be real. He must be the true God, and he must sit on your heart’s throne.

Who Should Be the God of Your Heart?

Since we saw the first commandment from a negative perspective, who should not be on your heart’s throne, let’s now look at it positively: who should be there? If you say “God,” you are correct, but merely knowing his name and that he should be your God is just a small sampling of what there is to discover here.

Again, the shorter catechism helps us flesh out what this means. Question 46 asks, What is required of us in the first commandment? and is answered that it “requireth us to know and acknowledge God to the the only true God, and our God; and to worship and glorify him accordingly.” This answer highlights three things about the first commandment: 1) God is exclusive, 2) God must be ours, and 3) God must be worshipped and glorified. Let’s take them one at a time.

1) First, ONLY God can be our God. The Lord has made himself abundantly clear throughout the Bible that he, and only he, may be revered as God. Just two verses after this commandment, in commandment two, God says “I the LORD your God am a jealous God.” In other words, you cannot share him with anyone or anything. He alone must receive what is due him. Israel was not the only one who had a tendency to forget that God could not be shared—people have tried to do this for all of history. Syncretism, the combining of religions, is nearly as old as dirt, and yet people still practice it today. Western society has become a melting pot of belief systems that seem to overlap one another more often than not. The LGBTQ+ movement is a perfect example: You can sexually identify however you want, practice witchcraft in the Occult, engage in Satanism, exercise demonic magic, or mix and match any one of these things to your liking. Another common practice is the habit of living a “God-and” lifestyle, mixing worldly conduct with just enough “Christianity” to make you feel good about yourself, not really committing to either one. But, God is clear: this will not do. A little of anything else is far, far too much. We live in a world where it is fashionable to affirm other belief systems, saying that they are all valid ways to live. A common way this shows up is when we say things like “well, that is good for you, and my way works for me.” But, we know that Jesus Christ said, “I am the way, the truth, and the life—no one comes to the Father except through me” (John. 14:6).

2) Second, God must be yours. The commandment says, “YOU shall have no other gods before me.” This is YOU. It does not say that it would theoretically be wrong if someone were to have another god—it says YOU may not have another one. The inverse of this is that you MUST have God as YOUR God—you have to belong to him. So, what does it mean to belong to God? A few things. First, you must have accepted his salvation. You can still affirm that God is true and that his way is the right way and not be saved. I was this way for a long time. You must have a personal relationship with God through Christ. When Christ paid for sin, he paid for the sin of real people. The offer for your sin to be paid for is real, and what Christ did in paying for sin is accomplish the ministry of reconciliation, as Paul says in 2 Corinthians 5, reconciling us to God by his death. You must take this offer if you would be reconciled to God and so call him YOUR God. Second, you must belong to his church. While you may acknowledge the truth of God and have met him in salvation, part of obeying the first commandment is to actively participate in the thing where he is most freely made available to you: the life of the local church. For you to partake of God when he offers himself, coming to corporate worship is a critical thing because gathering with God’s people is a way to publicly proclaim that he is your God. Third, you must live like his children. If God is to be yours, you must live like you are his. Paul instructs Titus several times in his short letter to him that the people in Titus’ churches are to “devote themselves to good works” because God has saved them. Their lives are to be like ornaments on a gospel-tree, making the it look beautiful to others by their conduct and character.

3) Third, God must be worshipped and glorified. We briefly hit on this just a moment ago, but part of having no other gods is rendering to God the worship due him. Think of a child who does not honor their parents. They simply refuse to listen to directions and are hesitant to acknowledge their authority in any situation. This child is acting like his parents are not actually his parents. Children are to render a certain amount of respect and honor to their mom and dad. Perhaps if someone walked up to them at a social setting, the child’s behavior may prevent people from recognizing that the child belongs with those parents—maybe they’d think he goes with another family. In a similar way, we live like we have another god when we do not worship and honor our God. Again, our hearts will always have something on their thrones that we want to praise and honor. So if something else gets our worship, and it will if God does not, then we have begun to live like God is not ours. We must be purposeful to worship and glorify God like he actually belongs to us.

I encourage you: examine your soul. Search your heart. Who sits on your heart’s throne? What has your attention? What occupies most of your thoughts? These are tough questions to hear if we will answer them honestly. Beyond this, think of what God requires of you. Are you purposing to actively have him as your own to the exclusion of all other things? Are you purposing to honor, worship, glorify, and enjoy him forever? May it be so that you are always seeking for God to be more and more yours, more and more glorified, and for your heart to belong more and more to him.

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10 commandments.