TEN 1: The First Commandment

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B: Exodus 20:1-3; Mark 12:28-31

N: Invite card

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How many of us could name all ten of the Ten Commandments in order? Not necessarily verbatim, but the key ingredients of them? Do the Ten Commandments even really matter to us any more? Are they useful for teaching our children, dads, or instructing us on how to live? Should it even matter if we know them or not?

This morning, we are starting a new series that should take us ten weeks to complete called, “TEN: A Look at God’s Unwavering Commands.” We will spend the next ten weeks, one week each on the Ten Commandments from Exodus 20, each week also considering the fact that there are passages in the New Testament that correspond to those commandments. I thought that this morning, we would start the series with a reading of the Ten Commandments in their entirety for our focal passage, even though our direct focus today will be on the first commandment.

So in honor of the Word of God this morning, if you are able, please stand while we read Exodus 20:1-17. :

Exodus 20:1–17 CSB

1 Then God spoke all these words: 2 I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the place of slavery. 3 Do not have other gods besides me. 4 Do not make an idol for yourself, whether in the shape of anything in the heavens above or on the earth below or in the waters under the earth. 5 Do not bow in worship to them, and do not serve them; for I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God, bringing the consequences of the fathers’ iniquity on the children to the third and fourth generations of those who hate me, 6 but showing faithful love to a thousand generations of those who love me and keep my commands. 7 Do not misuse the name of the Lord your God, because the Lord will not leave anyone unpunished who misuses his name. 8 Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy: 9 You are to labor six days and do all your work, 10 but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord your God. You must not do any work—you, your son or daughter, your male or female servant, your livestock, or the resident alien who is within your city gates. 11 For the Lord made the heavens and the earth, the sea, and everything in them in six days; then he rested on the seventh day. Therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and declared it holy. 12 Honor your father and your mother so that you may have a long life in the land that the Lord your God is giving you. 13 Do not murder. 14 Do not commit adultery. 15 Do not steal. 16 Do not give false testimony against your neighbor. 17 Do not covet your neighbor’s house. Do not covet your neighbor’s wife, his male or female servant, his ox or donkey, or anything that belongs to your neighbor.

PRAYER

Quick Series Overview

Imagine for a minute that you are a Jew in Israel during the time of Jesus. You are sitting and listening to Jesus teach and answer questions. He’s accessible—meaning that you can ask Him a question if you’d like. Any question. Close your eyes and imagine that moment. You can ask Jesus any question you want… what do you ask Him?

We find a time just like this in the Gospel of Mark, where a scribe had this very opportunity to ask Jesus a specific question in a moment of accessibility with none other than the Son of God, and this scribe receives a very clear answer:

Mark 12:28–31 CSB

28 One of the scribes approached. When he heard them debating and saw that Jesus answered them well, he asked him, “Which command is the most important of all?” 29 Jesus answered, “The most important is Listen, Israel! The Lord our God, the Lord is one. 30 Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength. 31 The second is, Love your neighbor as yourself. There is no other command greater than these.”

In giving this answer, Jesus essentially summarizes the Ten Commandments for the scribe, and He gives what we call the Great Commandment as two categories: vertical—how we are to relate to God (“Love the Lord your God...”); and horizontal—how we are to relate to one another (“Love your neighbor as yourself.”). Likewise, the first four of the Ten Commandments are vertical, teaching us how to love God:

You shall have no other gods besides Me.

You shall not make any idols.

You shall not misuse the name of the Lord.

You shall honor the Sabbath and keep it holy.

And the next six are horizontal, teaching us how to love others:

Honor your father and mother.

Do not murder.

Do not commit adultery.

Do not steal.

Do not give false testimony.

Do not covet.

As we approach the Ten Commandments in this series, it’s easy for us to dive right in on what we call the “First” Commandment, contained in verse 3. But an important aspect of the Ten Commandments is contained in verses 1 and 2, the preamble to the Commandments I suppose, and I would say that we do our study of Scripture a disservice when we just blaze past those two verses in order to get to the meat of the Commandments themselves. These two verses set up the First Commandment, and thus, serve to set up all of them. Thus, this is where we should start our series on the Ten Commandments.

In verses 1 and 2 of Exodus 20, we see God revealing Himself in six ways, and these six ways make up our outline this morning. I’ve had all of these start with P so they are easier to remember: God’s proclamation; God’s Person; God’s people; God’s position; God’s power; and God’s provision. It’s ok if you don’t write all of those down… I’ll go one point at a time. Just wanted to show you the path first, since it’s got lots of stops.

1) God’s proclamation: “...God spoke...”

Immediately before this, in Exodus 19, we are given the opportunity to stand in awe along with the Israelites as they arrive at Mount Sinai, where they would enter into the Sinaitic or Mosaic Covenant with the Lord. God had, less than two months before, visited the last plague on the Egyptians (which we read about yesterday in our church reading in Exodus 11), the culmination of ten miraculous acts of deliverance by God on behalf of Israel. And now, God is going to do something truly incredible. He’s going to visit His people.

God gives Moses instructions for the people on what they are to do to be ready for this visitation, and they prepare themselves at the base of the mountain. God comes down on that mountain in an amazing display of smoke and fire, thunder and lightning. The Israelites are fickle, and so God sends Moses back down one more time to remind them of the rules regarding the mountain. And then we reach chapter 20:

Exodus 20:1 CSB

1 Then God spoke all these words:

For some of us, when we imagine the scenes of the Exodus, we perhaps picture the animated Prince of Egypt (which really only just ends with a nod to the giving of the Ten Commandments). I didn’t see the more recent Exodus: Gods and Kings film with Christian Bale (which apparently was terrible), so I can’t speak to that one. But for many of us, due to its longevity, we tend to imagine this particular scene—the giving of the Commandments—like The Ten Commandments with Charlton Heston, right?

According to Scripture, it wasn’t like that. Moses was down the mountain with the Israelites when God spoke. They all heard Him together. And that terrified them. They from that point said that they didn’t want to hear God’s voice any more: they wanted Moses to speak with God on their behalf.

Exodus 20:19 CSB

19 “You speak to us, and we will listen,” they said to Moses, “but don’t let God speak to us, or we will die.”

No one had ever experienced this before. This was brand new. There was no god of Egypt (where they had come from), no god of Canaan (where they were headed) that actually spoke. The closest thing they had seen was Pharaoh himself, who claimed to be the human incarnation of one of their gods.

God spoke to His people then, and He still speaks to us today. Consider what the author of Hebrews wrote:

Hebrews 1:1–3 CSB

1 Long ago God spoke to our ancestors by the prophets at different times and in different ways. 2 In these last days, he has spoken to us by his Son. God has appointed him heir of all things and made the universe through him. 3 The Son is the radiance of God’s glory and the exact expression of his nature, sustaining all things by his powerful word. After making purification for sins, he sat down at the right hand of the Majesty on high.

And the God who speaks goes on to identify Himself further, and to give the people of Israel these Ten Commandments, which the Hebrews do not refer to as the “Ten Commandments.” They call them the “Ten Words.”

But exactly WHOM is speaking? We see this and our other five points in Exodus 20:2:

Exodus 20:2 CSB

2 I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the place of slavery.

Yes, all five of our remaining points of God’s revelation of Himself come from this one verse, and the history it points to. First is God’s Person.

2) God’s Person: “I am the LORD...”

At the burning bush back in Exodus 3, when God appeared to Moses to give him the assignment to go to Pharaoh and demand that he let the Hebrews go, Moses asked God, “If I go to the Israelites and say, ‘God sent me to you,’ and they say, ‘OK, then what is His name?’ What should I say to them?” (3:13) God’s answer is to give Himself a name that Moses could tell the Hebrews when he spoke to them:

Exodus 3:14–15 CSB

14 God replied to Moses, “I AM WHO I AM. This is what you are to say to the Israelites: I AM has sent me to you.” 15 God also said to Moses, “Say this to the Israelites: The Lord, the God of your ancestors, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, has sent me to you. This is my name forever; this is how I am to be remembered in every generation.

In this answer, God first declares that He is not a someTHING—He is a someONE. He is not impersonal—He is intimate. He is not a force, a concept, or an idea—He is a Person, who not only has a voice, but also has a name: Yahweh, the great “I AM.” Unlike all of the other ideas about gods that Israel had seen in Egypt for the last 400 years, Yahweh is real, personal, and present. And He defines who He is, as I mentioned last week. We do not, by either our belief or unbelief, change one iota of who He is, because God doesn’t exist because of our faith, as if we “believe Him into existence”—no, He has always been and will always be who He is. He came down to meet Moses at the bush and at the mountain. He revealed His name. He is the Lord, Yahweh.

And when God spoke the Ten Words to the nation of Israel, He did so in person, reminding them of how He had called Moses out of that very desert, to that He could go and be a part of God’s work on behalf of His people:

3) God’s people: “...your God… brought you out...”

The Lord says that not only is He a Person, but He reminds Israel that He has chosen them to be His people—a people who belong to Him by covenant for His purposes, a people who have just been the recipient of proof of the fact that they are His. They didn’t deserve it or earn it: it was simply by His love for them:

Deuteronomy 7:7–8 CSB

7 “The Lord had his heart set on you and chose you, not because you were more numerous than all peoples, for you were the fewest of all peoples. 8 But because the Lord loved you and kept the oath he swore to your ancestors, he brought you out with a strong hand and redeemed you from the place of slavery, from the power of Pharaoh king of Egypt.

One thing that’s interesting to note about this statement in our focal passage this morning: “your” and “you” are both second-person singular in the Hebrew. There is a great dual-action use for this: God was speaking to ALL of His people as one, because they were all together at the base of the mountain. So in this way, the second-person singular would have meant the nation of Israel collectively, and that’s normally how we read it. But think about it this way for a moment: if each Israelite was standing there listening to the Lord as He imparted the Ten Words, is it possible that they would have heard the “you” and “your” individually as well? That God was making this declaration not only about the nation of Israel, but also about the members of the nation, calling them EACH and ALL His own people?

I think that the Lord does this today. He speaks to us collectively as the church, but also individually as His children. We have a responsibility to listen and follow our Lord in both respects, because of His position:

4) God’s position: “…your God...”

When God declares that He is God, He is not simply making another statement of His name or telling us what to call Him: He is making a statement about His position. He is saying that He alone is sovereign, that He alone rules over all of the cosmos. God isn’t just what we call Him: it’s one of His titles. Consider what Isaiah would later say in Isaiah 45:5:

Isaiah 45:5a (CSB)

5 I am the Lord, and there is no other; there is no God but me.

God does not say that He is one of many gods. He doesn’t say that He is the best among all the gods. He says that He is God, and that there is no other God except Him and Him alone. We considered this fact a little last week during our look at Acts 17 for the last message in our Proclaim series. God reigns over all things in all places in all times, regardless of whether the people in those things and places and times acknowledge Him or worship Him. He is King over all things, and there is none other like Him.

He had just proven this fact through what He did in Egypt. In her recent book on the Ten Commandments, Ten Words to Live By, Jen Wilkin writes this:

Each of the ten plagues was more than just a dramatic sign to Pharaoh that he must release the Hebrews. Each was a symbolic defeat of an Egyptian deity. Osiris, whose bloodstream was believed to be the Nile, bleeds out before his worshipers when Yahweh turns the Nile to blood. In reverence to Heqet, the frog-goddess of birth, Egyptians regarded frogs as sacred and not to be killed. Yahweh slays them by the thousands. Egyptian gods governing fertility, crops, livestock, and health are all shown to be impotent before the mighty outstretched arm of Israel’s God. In the ninth plague of darkness, Yahweh demonstrates his rule over the sun god Ra, whom Pharaoh was believed to embody. And in the final plague, the death of the firstborn, God shows Himself supreme over the entire Egyptian pantheon by demonstrating His power over life and death. One God toppling all rivals. (p. 23)

Which brings us naturally to our fifth point:

5) God’s power: “…who brought you out of the land of Egypt...”

Reading through the ten plagues this week during our church-wide reading, I was really struck by the power that God puts on display for His people and for the Egyptians in bringing His people out. It’s incredible. Blood. Frogs. Gnats. Flies. Death of livestock. Boils. Hail. Locusts. Darkness. And finally the death of the firstborn throughout Egypt. That would have been completely amazing all by itself. But His displays of power didn’t stop there. He had promised that the Israelites would go out from Egypt with great wealth, because the Egyptians themselves would send them out with plunder. And that’s what happened. God went before them as they left in a pillar of cloud by day, and a pillar of fire by night. When Pharaoh changed his mind and pursued Israel in order to kill them, God blocked Egypt’s advance with fire while at the same time parting the Red Sea so that the Israelites could cross, and then collapsing the sea on the Egyptian army as they tried to pursue.

Exodus 14:31 CSB

31 When Israel saw the great power that the Lord used against the Egyptians, the people feared the Lord and believed in him and in his servant Moses.

But He wasn’t done there. When they were in the wilderness, the Lord provided water for them to drink from a rock. He provided quail in miraculous numbers. He provided manna to them as they wandered. He defended them in battle, and now He had brought them to the place where He would declare His covenant with them.

All of these actions revealed God’s power. He has authority over all things, and there is nothing that He desires to do that He cannot do. Just as there is no one else who compares with God’s position, there is no one else who compares to God in power:

Jeremiah 10:6–7 CSB

6 Lord, there is no one like you. You are great; your name is great in power. 7 Who should not fear you, King of the nations? It is what you deserve. For among all the wise people of the nations and among all their kingdoms, there is no one like you.

And finally, as God leveraged His position and His power for His people, we see that their freedom was God’s gracious provision:

6) God’s provision: “…out of the place of slavery.”

By God’s power, He had delivered His people out from under the boot of Pharaoh. He brought them to this place where they were no longer oppressed, no longer fearful, no longer enslaved. In His provision, He had given them freedom. By His work, He had rescued His people, He had redeemed them. And in so doing, He showed Himself again as the Lord who Provides, as He had with Abraham on Mount Moriah hundreds of years earlier as He redeemed the life of Isaac by miraculously providing a ram in His place:

Genesis 22:13–18 CSB

Abraham looked up and saw a ram caught in the thicket by its horns. So Abraham went and took the ram and offered it as a burnt offering in place of his son. And Abraham named that place The Lord Will Provide, so today it is said, “It will be provided on the Lord’s mountain.” Then the angel of the Lord called to Abraham a second time from heaven and said, “By myself I have sworn,” this is the Lord’s declaration: “Because you have done this thing and have not withheld your only son, I will indeed bless you and make your offspring as numerous as the stars of the sky and the sand on the seashore. Your offspring will possess the city gates of their enemies. And all the nations of the earth will be blessed by your offspring because you have obeyed my command.”

In both of these moments in Israel’s history, we see the message of the wonderful provision of God: His work to protect, provide for, and redeem His people. And in these things, we see the message of the Gospel:

1 Peter 1:18–19 CSB

18 For you know that you were redeemed from your empty way of life inherited from your ancestors, not with perishable things like silver or gold, 19 but with the precious blood of Christ, like that of an unblemished and spotless lamb.

Without Jesus, we are like Israel: enslaved to our passions and to the powers and desires of this world. Nothing that we could do could save us. Nothing could set us free. But in Christ, God condescends… steps down into our world in a very real, very personal, very practical way. He takes on our enemy, takes on our burden, and took our place to set us free. And He says to us: “Surrender yourself to Me, because I have already shown you how much I love you, and what I’m willing to do to have you. Stop trying to save yourself, because you can’t. Cry out to Me in faith, believing in the finished work of Christ.” Jesus died to take your place in punishment, taking your sins on Himself, to redeem you. And He defeated death, rising from the grave never to taste death again so that we can live forever with Him.

And this now brings us to our application and response, which is to obey the First Commandment:

Application: Following The First Commandment

God’s identity, His uniqueness, His power, His sovereignty lie behind all Ten Words. And it is from this perspective that we will be looking at each of them. This first command is given because of who God is and what He has done, our response should be to worship Him only:

Exodus 20:3 CSB

3 Do not have other gods besides me.

Reworded positively, we could say :”I am to be your only God.” God doesn’t say this in order to be a bully or a killjoy. He doesn’t say this because He’s overly prideful or bossy. He says it because He loves us. He knows that the reality is that there are no other gods. Anything and everything else that we might want to worship is ultimately going to be proven false.

Think about it in terms of Father’s Day for a moment. I’m a husband and a dad. In raising my girls, I have laid down very specific rules for them to follow. But fellow dads—we don’t lay down (most) of those rules because we want to flex our dad muscles or show how powerful and authoritative we are. No, we give those rules because we love our children, and we want the very best for them. Love without boundaries isn’t love: it’s a special form of neglect.

God puts this and the other nine boundaries on His people because He knows that it is only in following Him that they will be all that He means for them to be. He knows that keeping His commands is the best way for His children to live. This is why Jesus said that this is the first and greatest commandment:

Mark 12:29–31 CSB

29 Jesus answered, “The most important is Listen, Israel! The Lord our God, the Lord is one. 30 Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength. 31 The second is, Love your neighbor as yourself. There is no other command greater than these.”

God knows that if we get commandment one right, we will get the rest of them right as well.

Closing

So our question then is this: do we have other gods besides the Lord? Do we want other gods besides the Lord? We’re going to focus more on idols next week in the Second Commandment, but consider for a moment: God knows that our greatest tendency isn’t to walk away from Him completely, but to add to our worship of Him. We’ll still worship God, but we’ll worship other things as well. This was Israel’s big problem. So what are we adding to our worship of God? What else are we pledging our allegiance to that will ultimately fail us? Are we worshiping God and anything else? Maybe our spouse? Maybe our kids? Maybe our job or bank accounts, our phones or our tablets, our hobbies or our sports? God wants to be the one who receives all of your worship, and He is the only One who is worthy of it.

Before I close, I want to challenge the men this morning: Guys, you are called to be holy because God is holy. You are to called to be the kind of man that your wives, your children, your friends, your employees, and your supervisors would want to follow. And the way you’re going to do that is to follow this commandment: have no other gods besides the Lord, and commit yourself to submitting to the work of His Spirit in you to make you like Him. Love the Lord your God with everything that you are, and obey Him in all things. We all need to be like this for our families, our workplaces, our church, and our society. Make God first in all things.

Gospel call.

Church membership call.

Repentance call.

Offering during.

PRAYER

Closing Remarks

Bible reading plan: Exodus 12

Benediction:

Mark 12:30–31 CSB

30 Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength. 31 The second is, Love your neighbor as yourself. There is no other command greater than these.”