Number One

“I am the Lord thy God, which have brought thee out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage. Thou shalt have no other gods before Me." (Exodus 20:2, 3)

When the average person thinks about the first commandment we automatically go straight to the, “Thou shalt have no other gods before Me”, leaving out the why. However, I have found the ‘why’ to be the anchor of this command. God has asked us to obey His commands and understanding that He made us to be logical creatures, He knows that in order to obey we need a motive. The purpose for ancient Israel to have only one God is that this is the God who freed them from slavery. He heard their cry in Egypt, chose a messenger, performed great miracles on their behalf and set them free. (Exodus 1-14).

So the question now is, ‘why should I have only one God?’ This is the beauty and the genius of God; the answer remains the same: He is the God that has brought us out of bondage. To this you may ask ‘when was I in bondage? I’ve never been a slave to anyone’. Some of your ancestors may have been, but short of being a victim of modern day slavery (human trafficking) not many of us know what it is to physically be in bondage. However, God transcends the physical into the spiritual and the fact is we are all in spiritual bondage (Romans 6:20). After the fall of our first parents, every human being is under the chains of sin. We know that sin is the breaking of the Law (1 John 3:4) and the consequences for breaking the law is death (Genesis 2:17; Romans 6:23). We are, in ourselves, incapable of doing what is right (Psalms 51:5; Lamentations 5:7). If we of our own strength do something considered right, it remains inadequate (Isaiah 64:6).

But hope came in the form of Jesus Christ (Luke 2:10). God came to earth in human form and lived the perfect life as an example for us (John 15:10), then sacrificed Himself in our behalf (John 10:15-18) to free us from the desire to (Romans 6:18) and the condemnation of (Romans 6:23) sin. Thus, we can now live lives of joy, free from the bondage of being chained to sins that hurt and destroy and with the faith that our debts have been paid (Romans 8:1).

As a result, we can personalize the first commandment to say ‘He is the Lord my God, who freed me from sin and saved me from eternal death, I will have no other gods before Him.’

With Love