Sermon: No Other Gods Before Me

Scripture Text: Exodus 20:1-3

Quotes for Reflection

Kevin D. Young, The Ten Commandments
The good news of law, C. S. Lewis once remarked, is like the good news of arriving on solid ground after a shortcut gone awry through the mud, muck, and mire. After fumbling about in the squishy, stinky mess, you’re relieved to finally hit something solid, something you can trust, something you can count on.

John Frame, Doctrine of the Christian Life
The document begins with God’s name: Yahweh, the Lord. As God so identified himself to Moses in Exodus 3: 14–15, so he now identifies himself in the direct hearing of all his people. This identification ensures, first, that the covenant is a personal relationship. 15 Ultimately, we are to obey the law, not just because its principles are true, but because of the one who commanded them. I have argued that the personality of God is indispensable to ethics. Worldviews that reduce the personal to the impersonal lose any basis for ethics. Ethics is based on a family relationship. In this world, we learn ethical standards in the family, in a context of love and loyalty. 16 Similarly at the ultimate level, we learn right and wrong from a heavenly Father, an absolute personality. Only such a personal relationship can communicate principles that are absolutely authoritative.

Thomas Chalmers, The Expulsive Powers of a New Affection
There is not one of these transformations in which the heart is left without an object. Its desire for one particular object may be conquered; but as to its desire for having some one object or other, this is unconquerable. Its adhesion to that on which it has fastened the preference of its regards, cannot willingly be overcome by the rending away of a simple separation. It can be done only by the application of something else, to which it may feel the adhesion of a still stronger and more powerful preference. Such is the grasping tendency of the human heart, that it must have a something to lay hold of - and which, if wrested away without the substitution of another something in its place, would leave a void and a vacancy as painful to the mind, as hunger is to the natural system. It may be dispossessed of one object, or of any, but it cannot be desolated of all.

Application Questions

1. When you consider the Ten Commandments, what comes to mind?

2. How does the context of Exodus inform and reshape your understanding of God’s law?

3. As you consider the first commandment, what will you turn away from and turn toward as we begin the rhythms of Lent?