September 3, 2006
The First Word: No Other Gods
Exodus 20:1-3

Something genuinely outrageous occurred in 1973. I thankfully graduated from high school that year, but that’s not what I have in mind. In 1973, Fritz Peterson and Mike Kekich, both pitchers for the New York Yankees, swapped their dogs, their children, and even their wives. Having been married myself for nearly 30 years and having performed more weddings that I can recall at the moment, I simply cannot imagine such a thing. Swapping dogs? Maybe. Swapping children? Depends on the day! But swapping wives?

Deb and I were married in May, 1977, at the old Grantham Church. We were, as coincidental as it might seem, married on the same day—May 29—and Pastor Ives officiated at the ceremony. We wrote our own vows to each other, and in them we promised to love each other as long as God gives us breath—to stick together through thick and thin. And we have. Many of you have made similar promises to a man or woman, including some of you whose weddings I have performed myself. “Do you pledge to this special person your complete faithfulness through all the changing experiences of life?” I’ve asked some of you from this very spot. And everyone, up until now, has answered, “I do.” In one wedding, the couple wrote their own vows and each declared to the other without any hint of ambiguity or reservation: “I will be faithful to you and you alone.” How in the world, I wonder, could Fritz Peterson and Mike Kekich, having taken similar vows, swap wives? But here is an even more baffling question: How can people who claim to have experienced the saving grace of God in their lives trade him in for someone or something else?

As I mentioned last week, what we find here in Exodus 20 is a treaty or covenant. It is, however, a covenant rooted in grace rather then law. Never were the people of Israel asked, let alone expected, to keep these “Ten Words”—these ten commandments—as a means of earning God’s favor. Instead, God came to them while they were yet enslaved in Egypt and set them free, well before the matter of expectations or commandments was ever placed on the table. Only after he delivered the Israelites did God give them these commandments for their own good and protection. These Ten Words are the gracious instructions of a loving friend, not the burdensome demands of a ruthless tyrant.

And the first of the Ten Words? “…you shall have no other gods before me.” Consider this opening word, first of all, from a formal point-of-view. If you recall, I suggested last week that these ten words are patterned after ancient Near Eastern treaties between powerful kings and weaker vassals. We have in fact found many examples of such treaties, and each of them contains various stipulations for the vassal to follow. These stipulations vary somewhat from treaty to treaty, but one particular stipulation appears at or near the top of the list of virtually every treaty: “Do not enter into a similar covenant with any other king or nation.” “If you are entering into a covenant with the great Sennacherib, king of Assyria,” Sennacherib would insist, “then you certainly cannot form a similar covenant with the Pharaoh of Egypt, or the king of Moab, or the ruler of the Hittites. You cannot be in covenant with the Pharaoh and me!” In the same way, the first of the Ten Words insists that Israel be in covenant with the Lord alone. Whether this commandment in this context denied the existence of other gods, or more likely, allowed for them but prohibited the Israelites from worshipping them, is an important historical question. However, such a distinction, as Walter Harrelson rightly points out, does not greatly affect the core significance of the commandment. The Lord simply will not share his rightful position in the hearts and minds of his people—Israel and us!—with any other god—period! This is the starting point, the foundational word. None of the following commandments matter or make sense if this first one is ignored.

It is common, as you no doubt know, to respond to this First Word by isolating the various contemporary dieties that may come between us and God. After all, many of the ancient Near Eastern gods so threatening to the Israelites are still alive and well in modern culture, although we sometimes call them by different names. Baal, the Canaanite god of fertility, continues to lure us away from the Lord by extolling the pleasures of sex and money. Marduk, the Mesopotamian sun god, calls us to trade in our commitment to the Lord and instead seek power and worldly success. Osiris, the Egyptian god of life and death, whispers in our ears and insists that we, not the Lord, control our own destinies. These and other gods, so familiar to the Israelites and their neighbors, live on in American folklore—we even hear their names in various video games, movies and science fiction books.

I fear, however, that we run the risk of missing the very passion of this First Word when we emphasize this formal view and quickly identify the “other gods” that we are too avoid. This text is, to be sure, patterned after ancient Near Eastern treaties, but Nahum Sarna, a prominent Jewish scholar, suggests that the actual wording here calls to mind another type of covenant with which we are all familiar: marriage. Translated literally, the verse reads, “You shall have no other gods before my face.” Hebrew, as I’ve sometimes said before, is a picturesque or imaginative language. The picture here is a rather simple but profound one. We must not let anyone or anything come between us and God. We must not let anyone or anything blur our vision and prevent us from gazing upon God. “Do not let anyone or anything,” God warns, “block my face.”

We often think of marriage imagery when we speak of the relationship between Christ and the Church in the New Testament. Citing such passages as John 3:29 and Ephesians 5:25-33, we imagine Christ as the Bridegroom and the church as his Bride:
Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up
for her, in order to make her holy by cleansing her with the washing of water by
the word, so as to present the church to himself in splendor, without a spot or
wrinkle or anything of the kind….
In reality, however, such imagery actually has its roots back in the Old Testament. In the words of Isaiah:
For your Maker is your husband,
The Lord of hosts is his name;…
For the Lord has called you
Like a wife forsaken and grieved in spirit,…(54:5-6)
The prophet Hosea, speaking for God, states the same idea even more explicitly:
And I will take you for my wife forever; I will take you for my wife in righteousness and in justice, in steadfast love, and in mercy. I will take you for my wife in faithfulness; and you shall know the Lord. (2:19-20)
These Ten Words in Exodus 20, then, resemble wedding vows. When you read this First Word from a less formal, more personal point of view, the entire atmosphere changes. “You shall be my treasured possession out of all the peoples of the earth,” God assures the Israelites, much like a bridegroom speaking tenderly to his beloved. God and Israel are in a sense face to face, the bride and groom. And God doesn’t want anyone or anything to block the vision between them. He knows, as we pastors realize all-too well, that such special relationships can be quickly and severely threatened whenever that line of vision is jeopardized or blurred. When the eyes of a husband or wife increasingly wander onto someone or something else, the resulting gaze leads eventually to infatuation and ultimately to unfaithfulness. I’ve seen marriages, a few even in this church, fall apart when the line of vision is blocked between husband and wife. When someone or something else gets in the way and steals one’s affections and occupies one’s thoughts, dissension, disputes and disaster typically follow.

Reading this First Word in this way helps us, if you jump ahead with me for a moment to verse 5, to understand this strange and even unexpected connection between God and jealousy. Jealousy is perhaps one emotion that you would not readily associate with deity. But by jealousy the writer here does not have in mind the petty feelings of insecurity that sometimes arise among young daters. I recall one young man who was one year behind me at Messiah back in the 70’s. He was dating a pleasant and gracious girl, but his jealousy got the best of their relationship. He would turn red if he saw her talking with another guy, and he micromanaged her schedule, wanting to know where she was and what she was doing virtually every minute of the day. Just thinking about it is enough to drive me crazy!

Set that picture of petty jealousy aside for a moment—God is not an insecure micromanager of the relationship that he invites the Israelites and us into. Think instead of a perfectly legitimate and understandable demonstration of jealousy. Imagine your spouse so in love with his profession that he never has any time left to spend with you. Imagine someone about whom you care deeply ignoring you or abandoning your friendship. Imagine instead finding your spouse—God forbid—in bed with another person. Can you begin to sense your emotions rising? Jealousy, properly understood, is a rightful response when you feel totally violated. It is an expression of disgust and anger when someone or something to which you alone hold sacred rights and privileges extends those same rights and privileges to someone else. Are you willing to share you spouse—intimately—with someone else? God is not willing to share us either.
He has wooed us. Courted us. Delivered us. Loved us. And in return, he will accept nothing less than our total affections.

I remember well standing in front of the church on May 29, 1977, waiting for my bride to walk through the door. When she finally appeared, I realized in a powerful way that she belong to me—only me. I would not share her intimate love with anyone else.

So it is with God when he looks at us. “I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery. I have loved you with an everlasting love, and I have kept my promises to you and your ancestors. Do not let anyone or anything distort or destroy the line of vision between us. Do not have any other gods before me.” Deuteronomy states the very same commandment positively: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might.” Like a new bridegroom staring breathlessly into his lover’s eyes, so God looks at us.