3 Thou shalt have no other gods before me.

I mentioned yesterday that the divide between commandments one and two can be easily missed. Today we will look at just the first commandment, and tomorrow the second, and we will seek to understand the difference between them.

The first commandment is actually very brief, captured entirely in a single verse. In my Western civilization, which was founded upon Judeo-Christian theology, the idea of other gods is strange and bizarre. From my youth I have understood there to only be one God, and so devotion to any others sounds totally illogical.

For the Israelites fresh out of the land of Egypt, though, it was a different matter. They had been surrounded by the likes of Horus and Ra, and they were on their way to Canaan where they would encounter the likes of Baal and Ashtaroth. The people would be tempted, and too-often fully seduced, by these false gods. They would abandon the God who had created, called, and redeemed them.

Today we might not so clearly personify our false gods, but that doesn’t mean that we don’t have them. If we think a false god as the supreme authority in our life, the thing whose demands trump all other contradictory voices, then I would say today we have false gods of The Self, Science, and Ideology. The Self when we abandon all principles and virtues simply because we want to satisfy our own selfish interests. Science when we treat it as an opinionated entity that has dethroned God. Ideology when we are more dedicated to the rules of our chosen group than to fundamental truth.

It’s not as if there isn’t value in the self, or in science, or in some ideologies, but to have anything that is our supreme authority, our god that we defer to, even above the Lord who created the heavens and the earth, is an exercise of evil.

We also worship a false god when we worship a misconstrued idea of who God is. When we see God as the punishing oppressor who has unrealistic expectations for our spiritual growth, that is not really God. When we see Him as the over-indulgent, permissive grandfather who doesn’t care whatever we do, that is not really God. In both of these cases, and any other gross misrepresentation of the Lord, we are worshipping a false god.