No Other Gods II



Continued from last week's edition of no other gods...

 
No man can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other. Ye cannot serve God and mammon.
(Matthew 6:24)

Last week, we talked about the general purpose of the Ten Commandments as a tool for preserving our (the Israelite) covenant with God in the Old Testament. Now, we’re going to look at the specific purpose of the First Commandment.

The First Command was given to preserve our relationship with God; that we may honor Him alone as our Lord, making Him our no.1 priority! It also helps to keep our worship and service to God in check. This command was also translated as ‘YE shall have no other gods before my face’. 

Now, any other god is a false god because we know that there is only one true living God. It is anything that takes the place of God in your life. As Kelly Minter wrote ‘a professed god is who or what we say our god is; a functional god is who or what actually operates as our god’. You notice that God gets all the worship while these false gods get the service. Instead, God is supposed to get all the worship and service from us using all these things He has equipped us with (e.g. money is a tool for serving God not to be served).

To identify these other gods, seek out those things in your life that you treasure apart from God. They are the products of our modern day society and ourselves. They make us slaves to them e.g. money, fashion/clothes/makeup, food, family, technology, etc., and we are no longer mastered by God.

In seeking God’s face, all these things get in the way as deduced from our second translation of the command. In our relationship with God as in every one between a couple, all these things distract us from being with Him, talking, looking at each other and knowing each other better. You will need to get rid of some and put them in their places which is beneath the master’s feet.

Make God your priority, not one your necessities. He wants an unrivaled relationship with you! And you need to have no other gods before Him…



“The only thing worse than being under the control of something to no fault of my own is to be under the control of something I’ve actually created.” (Kelly Minter)



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