Exodus 20:1-3
“Who’s Number One?”
March 10, 2002 - Fourth Sunday in Lent

         One of my childhood memories is standing in front of a sign posted at Disneyland and crying my heart out. That sign guarded the entrance to the sports car ride, in which one could pilot a little car, complete with gas pedal and steering wheel around a track with a rail running between the wheels to keep you on course. I could see myself in one of those cars, zooming along. What a dream! But the sign had a line drawn about four feet off the ground and the rule was that no one under that height could ride. Even being tall for my age, I fell a few inches short. I had a long way to go, a year or two at least, before I could satisfy that rule.

         The Ten Commandments are recognized by both Jews and Christians as God’s basic standard for human living. The draw a line to which God’s people are expected to measure up. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus made it plain that His purpose was not to abolish the Commandments but to strengthen them. All who come to Him are expected to recog­nize and observe the Commandments not only externally, but in their hearts. In this season of Lent, as we deal with our sins, the Commandments show us once again that we have a long way to go before we satisfy God’s Law.

         The importance of the Ten Commandments is widely acknowledged. For Jews, they are at the heart of faith. A synagogue often has a representation of the two tablets at the front of their sanctuary, just as we have the Cross. For Christians, the Commandments form part of the teaching of all churches that retain some catechetical instruction like our own Confirma­tion program. In infant baptism or dedication services we ask parents to promise to teach them to their children. Even in the secular world, the Ten Command­ments have a recognized place in the formation of civil law, and are written in stone on the wall of the Supreme Court building in Washington, D. C.

         I am guessing, though, that the Ten Commandments do not figure very strongly in how most of us live. A Gallup poll several years ago showed that while a strong majority of Americans believe the Ten Commandments are authoritative and relevant to life today, only a small percentage of could name even four of the Commandments.

         During one of Jay Leno’s “in the street” interviews he asked two college age women if they could name one of the Ten Commandments. “Freedom of Speech” was their best guess. A member of his studio audience responded with “God helps those who help themselves.” Which proverb, by the way, a Barna poll shows a majority of Americans be­lieve can be found somewhere in the Bible (it’s not there!).

         So despite a general agreement that the Commandments are important, there is a woe­ful ignorance of their content. Such ignorance implies that there is a corresponding lack of a genuine role for the Commandments in daily life. Most of us are not even in the condition of the Pharisees in our Gospel reading from John 9. They knew the command­ments well, and were concerned when it appeared Jesus was breaking one of them. They worried about measuring up to God’s Law. Most of us don’t even consider it.

         Therefore, it is my hope that the next few weeks will help us reconsider where we are in relation to God’s standard. How far short of the spiritual line do we fall? In the process, let us learn and apply the Ten Commandments more consistently to our lives.

         We are following Moses and the children of Israel in their exodus from Egypt and jour­ney to the Promised Land. We have arrived at the center of the story. Everything that has happened up until now – the providential protection of the baby Moses, his meeting with God at the burning bush, the great plagues visited miraculously upon the Egyptians, the glorious walk through the Red Sea, and God’s constant provision of food and drink on the way – has all been leading up to this, the giving of the Law.

         From the moment of the burning bush, God promised Moses that the sign of His pres­ence with Moses would be a return to that same mountain. Now the people are here. Now God has spoken to them all. This is the crux, the whole point of the Exodus. God wanted to create a people who live according to His Laws, a righteous and holy people. He desired to bring forth a nation which exemplifies all the best God intended for human life, devotion to Him and love and respect for each other. The Commandments are the founda­tion of His founding of Israel.

         Therefore, for today and the next nine weeks, we will look at each of the Ten Com­mandments, ask ourselves whether we measure up, and seek to renew our covenant to live by the Word of God, especially by those Words which He gave to Moses as His regulations for our life and well-being.

         We turn, then, to the first Commandment. I have read it for you, from verses 2 and 3 of chapter 20 of the book of Exodus. You may also find it and the rest of the Ten repeated in Deuteronomy chapter 5. That is what the title “Deuteronomy” means, the second giving of the Law.

         Right away, however, we meet a challenge to our understanding. It turns out the so-called Judaeo-Christian tradition is not in complete agreement about what the first Com­mandment is. It is not just a matter of what it means, but actual disagreement about where in the text it begins and ends.

         In fact, there are three different and time-honored schemes for numbering the Com­mandments, which depart from each other in terms of how numbers One and Two are read, as well as numbers Nine and Ten. The Bible is very clear in telling us that there were Ten Commandments, in Exodus 34:28 and Deuteronomy 4:13. However, nowhere does it tell us how to divide and number the words Moses brought down the mountain.

         The numbering we followed here this morning, and which I teach my Confirmation class, is the oldest division of the Commandments. The ancient Jews and most Protestant churches use this method. The first Commandment is read to comprise verses 2 and 3, a command to have no other gods. and the second Commandment is found then in verses 4 through 6 and is the command not to make idols.

         But another numbering is adopted by modern Jews following a tradition of later rab­bis. For them, verse 2 alone is the first Commandment, in effect a command to believe in God. The commands against other gods and against idols are therefore seen as two aspects of the same idea, and are therefore combined as the second Commandment.

         The biggest difference from the plan we have adopted here is found in the division of the Commandments created by St. Augustine and now used by the Catholic church and also by the Lutheran churches. Like the modern Jews, Augustine believed that the rejec­tion of false gods and the prohibition against idols were two sides of the same coin. How­ever, he read the whole text from verse 2 through verse 6 as the first Commandment. That meant something else had to change for the number to still come out ten. The only possi­bility was an adjustment to verse 17, dividing the command against coveting into two com­mands. So Catholics and Lutherans read “You shall not covet your neighbor’s house,” and “You shall not covet your neighbor’s wife,” as Nine and Ten respectively, two separate Commandments.

         The problem for the Catholic/Lutheran view is that the coveting of house and wife are reversed when the Commandments are repeated in Deuteronomy. That makes sense if they are just details of a single command not to covet. However, because of the reverence for these Ten Words, it is hard to understand how two separate Commandments could be re­versed in order.

         I know that the discussion we just went through sounded more like a college lecture than a sermon full of inspiration for your daily living. But you are intelligent people and I know you can follow it. I also know that you will understand my explanation of why it is im­portant. We should stick with the traditional Protestant reading of the first two Com­mandments because the world around us is increasingly pagan. The temptation to worship other gods and the temptation to make idols is as strong as it’s ever been.

         You see, it is possible to honor other gods without committing idolatry, and it is possi­ble to commit idolatry in the name of the one true God. They are distinct sins and they re­quire two commandments. This morning we need to consider what it means to turn from God to a false god, without worrying about the question of idols.

         In the list of the Commandments you found in your bulletin, they are printed in brief. All the explanation and warning which surrounds them in the Bible is stripped away in or­der to make them easier to remember. However, that “extra” material must not be ig­nored. God delivered the Commandments in a context which is necessary for us to really grasp them.

         Therefore, verse 2 is a crucial introduction to the statement of the first Command­ment in verse 3. The directive not to worship other gods only makes sense if you know who is the God we are supposed to worship. And it is essential to see how the Bible identifies the real God. “I am the Lord your God who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery.” The thing to recognize is that the One who is to be worshipped by Israel is identi­fied by what He has done. The real God is the one who saves.

         As strange as it sounds, we are very tempted by the worship of gods who do not do any­thing. Such a god has tempted Americans from the beginning of our country. While many of the founders were devout Christians who believed the God and Father of Jesus Christ was at work in the creation of our nation, a number of them, like Thomas Jefferson, believed in a different god. They were deists.

         Deism is belief in a god who created our universe, but then had nothing further to do with it. This deist god set the galaxies and stars and planets all in motion, but then he left it to run on its own, like you or I might do with the dishwasher. We load the dishes, we add the soap, we set the controls, but then we press “Start” and walk away. We almost never open the door to check if the dishes are getting clean or to make adjustments in their ar­rangement. Likewise, the deist god never opens the door to our world, never intervenes in what is going on. He made the world and its laws, got it rolling, and the rest is up to us.

         Like I said, deism is a great temptation in our country. It is a sad part of our heritage. George Washington, Ben Franklin, Thomas Paine and Ethan Allen were all deists. Part of American drive and energy has been due to the often unspoken conviction that if we do not help ourselves, nobody else will. I suppose that one reason a majority of us believe that “God helps those who help themselves” is a Bible text is because so many of us are really at heart deists.

         In many ways it is pretty comfortable to have a god who never does much of anything. True, a deist god will not figure very largely in the solutions to our problems. But neither will he cause us any problems. He won’t place us in any spiritually problematic situations and he won’t ask us to do anything difficult. The god of deism stays neatly up in heaven and leaves us down here free to do as we please.

         Against all that, the God of Israel declares what He has done. As we have seen al­ready, He was constantly upsetting His people’s lives. He antagonized the Egyptians and made their cruelty worse. He forced the Hebrews out of their homes and into the desert. He made them screw up their courage and walk through a lake. He took them places where they had nothing to eat or drink. The real God was inconvenient, interfering, a real busy body. No wonder the Israelites were continually tempted to worship some other god. But no other god ever did anything, no other god delivered them from slavery, no other god saved them.

         That same desire to find a comfortable, lazy god who doesn’t do much was at work in the Pharisees who confronted the healed blind man. His testimony was simply that God working in Jesus had done something, had made him see. The blind man knew that God could do a thing like that, but the Pharisees hated the idea. God was not supposed to be active. He may have spoken to Moses long ago, but He hadn’t said or done anything for a long time now. They threw the blind man out and rejected Jesus in favor of their more comfortable notion of a God who finished all He had to do long ago. But the blind man saw what the Pharisees didn’t. Jesus saved him. And only the true God saves.

         Now I want to acknowledge that deism is not the only way to break the First Com-mand­ment. All sorts of other gods surround us just as the Canaanite gods surrounded the children of Israel.  We are tempted to worship money and sex and power. There is a large cult which invites us to worship ourselves. There is even a revival of paganism which gives us the opportunity for devotion to gods and goddesses and spirits in a way one might have thought was long gone in the modern world. Most recently, the expanding lottery in­dustry calls us to believe in the god of luck.

         However, I believe that the god of deism is the greatest threat to your and my keeping of the commandment in America in 2002. Part of the danger is how easily deism’s god is confused with the God of the Bible. If somebody asks you to take part in a black mass de­voted to Satan or to light candles in honor of the earth spirit Gaia, I am confident that you would recognize those acts as departures from true faith and violations of the command to have no other gods.

         But when you or I are invited to worship at the church or synagogue of our choice, to get in touch with our “higher power” however we construe it, or to offer praise alongside people of other faiths in an inclusive manner which gives offense to no one, that is when we are in grave spiritual peril. We may grow confused about who our God is. In those mo­ments we are being asked to abandon the God who brought Israel out of Egypt and who sent Jesus Christ to die on the Cross and rise again for our salvation. We are being encour­aged to turn aside from our living, active, saving Lord, and to give our allegiance to a bland, do-nothing deity guaranteed not to bother us, nor to help us, in any significant way.

         God declared to the Israelites that He is the God who brought them out of Egypt. That was their salvation. They were to keep the Ten Commandments because they had been saved by God. Our reason for keeping His Commandments is no different. God has saved us. In Jesus Christ, He has redeemed us and saved us out of sin into a new kind of life, a life expected now by grace to measure up to His Law. The first rule of that Law is to have no other gods.

         I never get tired of the story of Polycarp.[1] He was a disciple of the Apostle John and lived to be an old man in the city of Smyrna, which is in what we now call Turkey. One day the crowd at the arena began to cry for the blood of “atheists.” That is what they called Christians, because Christians did not believe in the many gods of the Romans and Greeks. They called for Polycarp by name and a sheriff was sent to arrest him.

         The sheriff’s own sister was a Christian and so he was somewhat sympathetic. He asked Polycarp what the harm would be in simply saying “Caesar is Lord,” and burning some incense on the emperor’s altar?

         Polycarp refused and was led into the arena. The governor gave him  a chance to save his life. First he was ordered to say “Away with the atheists!” Polycarp pointed to the pa­gans in the stands who were calling for his blood and said “Away with the atheists!”

         The governor gave Polycarp another opportunity. “Curse Christ,” he urged him. Poly­carp replied, “Eighty and six years have I served him and he has done me no wrong, and can I revile my King that saved me?”

         Polycarp was then threatened with being thrown to the beasts. He said, “Bring them on.” The governor then directed him to be burned at the stake. Polycarp said that they were trying to frighten him with fire that burns for an hour, while forgetting the fires of hell which never go out.

         As the flames went up around him, Polycarp prayed, “Lord God Almighty, Father of Jesus Christ, I bless you for deeming me worthy of this hour… May I be received into your presence as an acceptable sacrifice, you who are the true God… I praise you, I bless you, I glorify you through Jesus Christ.”

         Eighty six years Polycarp served Jesus Christ and at the end would serve no other God. He knew Jesus was the one true God who had saved him and would save him. The First Commandment calls you and I to the same sort of faithfulness, because there are no other gods who save, no other gods who do anything.

         I don’t know what sacrifices you will have to make in order to worship God alone and refuse the other gods. I am sure that like it cost Polycarp it will cost you something. But whatever it is will be worth it. Only Jesus is truly God. Only He saves. And He will save you.

         Amen.

Valley Covenant Church
Eugene/Springfield, Oregon
Copyright © 2002 by Stephen S. Bilynskyj