1st Commandment: No Other Gods

The Ten Commandments don't come out of nowhere. They are what God says to Israel after he rescues them out of Egypt and then brings them to the foot of Mount Sinai. And God's offer is this, listen to my voice and keep my covenant. Okay. The terms of the covenant are gonna set you apart. This will be a holy nation set apart. It'll be a priestly kingdom and then my representatives to the nations. So that's God's offer. And the Ten Commandments are the first of these terms of the covenant. And they begin this way, Exodus 20 verse 2. I am Yahweh, your Elohim, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery. So notice what we begin with is who God is to the people. This is a family whose fundamental identity is we used to be slaves. So we are a liberated people. Yahweh is our liberator. Which means that one way to think about the Ten Commandments is it's like a freedom ethic. It's the ethic of the free. How to live as a free people. Yeah. Also this thing of I am Yahweh, your Elohim. I'm yours. There's a phrase that's gonna get repeated throughout Exodus, Leviticus, Deuteronomy, the prophets. This phrase where God will say, I will be your God and you will be my people. And this is really similar to the well-known phrase from the Song of Songs. I am my beloved's and my beloved is mine. This is covenant language. Okay.

So there's no command here. The first words of the Ten Commandments are not a command. They're just a statement. So with that in mind, let's now hear the first actual command of the Ten Words. There will not be for you any other Elohim before me. Now that little phrase before me, al-pnei or al-pnei is a very common prepositional phrase. This is the grammar term to refer to something being in physical location, like right in front of you. Okay. Most literally means in front of my face. But this phrase also can mean against the face. Okay. So let's say you have a hostile army coming towards you. They are also before your face. Before your face, but they're coming against you. Against your face. Okay. Yeah. Okay. So this phrase al-pnei also, this is going to be confusing to us, can be used not in the sense of in front of you, but in the sense of beside you. It is sometimes used in the sense of instead of. It's very flexible. It's very flexible, but you can actually plug this idea of no other Elohim into every one of those meanings and it works. So don't put anything else in front of me, beside me, against me, instead of me. There will not be for you any other Elohim. No thing else is your life. Okay. And Elohim is the Hebrew word that just means spiritual being.

Yes. And it is used to refer to the one God of Israel, creator of all, but then also to other spiritual beings, real or imagined. We do know that there's other spiritual beings. We call them the host of heaven. Yeah. And then they're also called by other like titles in the Bible. So messengers, that is angels. You have the divine council members, like the sons of God, spirits. This is the class of creatures that are spiritual beings. Deuteronomy 10, 17, Moses says, Yahweh, your Elohim, he is the Elohim of Elohim. Yeah. He's in a class of its own. Yes. Any other spiritual being other than Yahweh isn't on the same rank as Yahweh. Yeah. And is not worthy of your ultimate loyalty and allegiance. Okay. In our context, we kind of dismiss this idea almost too much of other spiritual powers. Yeah. But we do actually still have these higher powers, higher ideals that command our loyalty. And when humans give our imaginations and desires and allegiances to anything that's not source of all reality, it will eventually lead us on a path that dehumanizes us and other people. I guess it's kind of easy to see that with sex, for example, or with money. With greed. Yeah. Or with power. When those become ends in themselves, it leads to our destruction. Yeah.

It's possible to live your human existence in a lie, thinking that someone or something or some power has a claim on me that actually doesn't. But when I get in touch with the one who truly has a claim on my life, because... they're the author of my life, then I'm living in the truth, and I'm living in the road to freedom. That's a concept that we're watching come into birth right here as we hear God say these words. These are world-shaping words, and it's just the first command.