Getting off to a right start is one of the foundational truths in life. It’s true in nearly all aspects of life. The right start benefits us in life itself, sports, careers, school and relationships. You can certainly rebound from a poor start, but your task at hand is always much easier if you start off on the right foot.
So it is with the Ten Commandments. God lays the foundation for spiritual freedom in the first two commandments. But before we get to what those two commandments say and what they mean, we first need to understand why they were written. The Bible tells us that the Israelites at one time in their history were slaves to the Egyptians. There isn’t a positive spin on this enslavement. It was a brutal, hard-hearted, Israelite-hating slavery that lasted for 430 years. Think about that. 430 years a people group were tortured, beaten, given the minimum amount needed for survival, told when to go to sleep and when to wake up. Generation after generation would experience the chains of slavery. That is until God decided to move on their behalf, using Moses and Aaron as his beacon of light.
For the first time in 430 years the Israelites now found themselves to be free from the bondage of men, but ironically they were still slaves. Only this time, they were slaves to a more ruthless master than Pharaoh. This master was the one who promised the world and delivered death. This master was the one who promised fun but delivered chaos. His name…sin. Sin’s master is Satan. And he was and is incredibly active in the lives of the Israelites and in our lives today.
But God, being merciful saw the dilemma his people was in and offered them a solution. The Law. Before you draw the wrong conclusion, it’s important that we clear something up. The Law wasn’t given as the solution in and of itself. It cannot save, it cannot impart righteousness and it cannot give grace. The bible describes the law like a mirror. A mirror can’t make you pretty. It’s purpose is to show you what’s out of whack. It reveals areas that you need to clean up. In the same way the Ten Commandments show us where we have missed the mark and fallen short. But they send a much bigger message than the hopelessness of pointing out our failure. The law points us to the one who fulfilled it, Jesus Christ. Everything is about Jesus, even the Ten Commandments.
The first two commandments are best summed up with the phrase, “First things First.” God is laying the foundation for us by essentially saying, “Let’s get off to the right start.” First, he says–“You must not have any other god but me” (Exodus 20:3). God isn’t saying, “I know there are several gods out there…we hang out all the time. But as far as you’re concerned, I’m the only one you need to worry about.” Instead, he’s talking to a people who for 430 years watched as the Egyptian culture worshipped everything from the sun god to the moon god. They would worship the fertility god and the river god. Everything in the Egyptian culture was a god, even Pharaoh himself. So, God is essentially saying, “I know you’ve seen a lot of people worship a lot of gods…but you need to know, that I’m it. I’m the only God. I’m the one that made the stars, the moon, the skies, the water and the land. And I’m the one that made you. Don’t fall prey to the thought that there’s another god…I’m it.”
The second command is similar to the first, “You must not make for yourself an idol of any kind or an image of anything in the heavens or on the earth or in the sea” (Exodus 20:4). Idols would be the things that people would make that they would worship, not like the unseen gods referenced in the first commandment. These were the visible, man-made items.
Essentially, the first two commandments are about setting the record straight and starting off on the right foot. God had earned the right to speak into the lives of the Israelites. He had shown them firsthand that he was The Mighty God. And now he’s telling them that they needed to recognize Him and Him alone as such. And to do that requires that we worship Him. Worship is more than singing songs, it’s doing anything that brings Christ glory. That could be abstaining from a particular sin (inactive worship) or participating in something that he has commanded (active worship).
God has earned the right to speak into our lives simply by the mere fact that he is God. As such, he has earned our worship and we have a responsibility to worship him with our lives today.
So how will you worship God on this day that he’s given you?