You Shall Have No Other Gods Before Me

27 July

Exodus 20:3, Romans 1:18-25

The most interesting thing about the first commandment is not what it says. It's what it assumes.

It doesn't say: you must have a God. It doesn't say: make sure you worship something. It assumes that you already do, and simply calls you to direct that worship toward the one who is actually worth it. Every one of us is a worshipper. We don't get to choose whether we worship. We only get to choose what we worship.

We Were Made to Worship

Romans 1:18–20 gives us one of the most penetrating diagnoses of the human condition in the Bible. Paul's argument is that God has made himself known: through creation, through the world itself, through the testimony of life, and that human beings didn't fail because we lacked information. We failed because we suppressed the truth. We stopped acknowledging God for who he is.

The implication is that worship isn't something we learn or opt into. It's something we already do. Our hearts are always directed toward something. John Calvin described the human heart as an idol factory, constantly producing substitutes for God, filling the hole with whatever's available. Career, relationships, approval, success, comfort, control. We don't remove God from the centre of our lives and leave it empty. We exchange him for something else.

It's easy to feel like the first commandment is irrelevant. Few people now offer sacrifices to Baal. It’s very unlikely there are Asherah poles in your backyard. But the commandment isn't really about ancient religious rituals. It's about what your life revolves around.

Look back over different seasons of your life and you'll often be able to see it clearly in hindsight. That period was really about that relationship. That year was really about getting that job. That phase was really about what other people thought of me. It's easier to see in the rearview mirror. The harder question, and the one this commandment is actually asking, is what is it right now?

We Replace God

Romans 1:21–23 traces the pattern. We know God, Paul says that knowledge is inbuilt, not acquired, but instead of honouring him, we exchange him. That's what it says in verse 25: exchanged. They exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshipped created things rather than the Creator.

We don't stop worshipping. We substitute. And the substitutes are rarely obviously bad things. They're often good things: family, work, relationships, security, identity, that have quietly moved into a place they were never designed to occupy. Good gifts that have become gods.

Jesus gives a useful diagnostic tool in Matthew 6 when he talks about worry. He doesn't frame worry as a personality trait or a mental health category, he treats it as a spiritual symptom. What you worry about reveals what you worship. You never worry about something you don't care about.

If your deepest fear is rejection, approval may be your functional god. If your deepest fear is failure, success may be sitting where God should be. If your deepest fear is losing control, control itself may be what you're really trusting to save you.

It's worth sitting with that. What do you daydream about? What would devastate you to lose? What do you turn to when life gets hard? Those aren't neutral questions. They're diagnostic. They point directly at what your heart is actually treating as ultimate.

We Are Ruled by What We Worship

Here's the thing about the gods we choose: they don't stay in their lane. Romans 1:24–25 describes God giving people over to the desires of their hearts , not as a punishment exactly, but as a consequence. What we worship rules us. The things we thought would give us freedom turn out to be the things we can't stop thinking about, can't live without, can't seem to get enough of.

Jesus puts it starkly in Matthew 6:24 — you cannot serve two masters. Not you shouldn't. You can't. Worship is exclusive. There's always a functional God in our lives, always something that gets the final say, always something that our decisions ultimately orbit around. The first commandment isn't just addressing one sin among many. It's addressing the sin beneath every other sin. Why do we lie? Because we worship approval more than God. Why do we envy? Because we worship what someone else has. Why do we cheat? Because we worship success. Every other commandment in the ten is ultimately downstream from this one.

The irony is brutal: the things we thought would set us free enslave us. Success is never quite enough. Approval needs constant replenishment. Control keeps slipping through our fingers. Comfort leaves us wanting more. We exchange the Creator for created things and end up being ruled by them.

True Worship Restores Freedom

This is where Paul's diagnosis becomes good news. If false worship enslaves, true worship liberates. The problem in Romans 1 isn't that people are worshipping, it's that they're worshipping the wrong thing. The solution isn't less worship, or no worship. It's right worship.

And here's what makes that possible: we can't fix this ourselves. The human heart doesn't stay empty. You can't just clear it out and hope nothing moves back in. We need rescue. We need someone to actually change what our hearts are oriented toward, not just tell us to try harder.

That's what Jesus does. He perfectly worshipped the Father — never substituting, never exchanging, never letting anything else occupy the centre. And then he went to the cross for our failure to do the same. At the cross, our sins were forgiven and our hearts were changed. True worship becomes possible not because we've figured it out, but because Jesus did it for us and in us.

The first commandment is rooted in redemption, not obligation. God doesn't say: obey me and then I'll save you. He says: I have already saved you, so live as my people. In Exodus, he frames the commandments by saying: I am the Lord your God who brought you out of Egypt. The rescue came first. In the same way, on this side of the cross, the invitation is not earn your way to God through right worship. It's: I have sent Jesus to restore you to relationship with me, so now live as my people.

That's why this commandment isn't a burden. It's an invitation. An invitation to stop trying to fill a God-shaped hole with things that were never designed to fill it. An invitation to freedom, not freedom from authority, but freedom under the right one. When God is first, everything else finds its proper place. Good things remain good gifts rather than becoming gods. Life begins to work the way it was designed to.

You are already serving something. The question worth asking tonight is whether it's saving you or enslaving you.