I suspect that most of my readers are very familiar with the Ten Commandments. Perhaps as a child you had to memorize them, as I did. They are very important for our understanding of biblical morality. They express morality both in terms of our relationship with God (Commandments 1-4), and our relationships with each other, in the home and in the community (commandments 5-10). If you want to know what it means to be good; if you want to know what it means to be godly, start here.
But the Ten Commandments are sometimes criticized for being too negative: lots of “Thou shalt not’s”—Don’t do this or that; but, as we shall see, each “Thou shalt not…” implies a positive principle that tells us what we ought to do in order to please God. And each commandment also tells us how to be happy as we live our lives. We have not fully understood the Ten Commandments until we have understood the Ten Positive Principles that reveal the keys to morality and happiness!
The historical background of the Ten Commandments was at the time when God made a covenant with the nation of Israel. A covenant is a formal agreement between two parties, each of which has obligations. For his part, God agreed that he would be Israel’s God, protecting and prospering them. And their part of the covenant was to love God and to follow his laws. In the Old Testament God gave Israel 613 laws, but the most important were the Ten Commandments (Exodus 20:1-17; Deuteronomy 5:6-21).
Different religious groups divide these passages into ten commandments in slightly different ways. In this column I will use the normal protestant way of numbering them.
Today’s column begins an eleven- part series studying the Ten Commandments. We will look at the surface meaning of each commandment, the “Thou shalt not” level, but we won’t stop there; we will look deeper at the principles that can make our lives better.
COMMANDMENT #1: “You shall have no other gods before me.” (Exodus 20:3) This first one is the most important one of the Ten Commandments!
The main reason we should have no other gods is that there are no other gods. The Bible teaches a worldview called “monotheism.” Mono means “one,” theism means “god”: one God. My definition of monotheism is “There is one and only one God who is the source of everything else.”
This God has a name: YHWH (pronounced Yahweh). The Hebrew word YHWH is derived from the title “I am who I am”— or the shortened version “I am,” the name which God used when he first revealed himself to Moses (Exodus 3:14). In other words, Yahweh simply means “I am” or “God is”—and all attempts to define or explain him are therefore inadequate: he just is. (In many of our English Bibles, the name Yahweh has been replaced with the English title “LORD.”) Here is how God has described himself, “Thus says the Lord, the King of Israel and his Redeemer, the Lord of hosts: ‘I am the First and I am the Last; besides me there is no god’” (Isaiah 44:6). In this single verse God identified himself as Lord (Yahweh), as King, as Redeemer, and as Lord of hosts (supreme over the angels). He is also the first and last, meaning the eternal One who has always existed and will always exist. As such he created everything else. He is supreme. And there are no other gods.
Why did God start the Ten Commandments with this one? Humans have always created other gods, and new religions, but those other so-called gods are not real. Biblical faith begins with this simple truth: one and only one God.
As said above, though the words of each of the Ten Commandments is a negative, “Thou shalt not,” each implies a truth and a positive principle which we are to follow. The principle which underlies the first commandment is to worship Yahweh—and only Yahweh.
Jesus summarized the Old Testament law as two great commandments. The commandment which he called the greatest and most important is, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind,” a quotation of Deuteronomy 6:5. This was part of the prayer called the shema which Jews recite every morning: “Hear, O Israel: The Lord is our God, the Lord is One.” Jesus’ use of this verse as the first great commandment turns the negative form of the First Commandment into a positive: We are to love God wholeheartedly, with all of our emotions and all of our thoughts (Matthew 22:37-38).
An application of the First Commandment is that for us to be moral we should be like God, that is, to be godly. Because God is good, we are to be good. The Apostle John wrote, “God is love, and the one who remains in love remains in God, and God remains in him.” … “We love because he first loved us” (1 John 4:16,19). John concluded this lesson about love with an important application: “the one who loves God must also love his brother.” The mark of a follower of God is love, love for God, love for one another.
Here is a test to see if the God we follow is Yahweh, the God whom Jesus told us to follow: Does our God tell us to love others as ourself? That is the true God.
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Greg Giles is a published author, who, along with his wife Jean, has embraced the call to serve and teach around the globe. Their life together has included missionary work in Liberia, Bangladesh, teaching in China, and raising a family in Bemidji, Minnesota. Between global travels and local commitments, including serving as superintendent of Corn Bible Academy and their current part-time roles at Corn Heritage Village, the Gileses have found “home” in many places; yet, they now happily reside in retirement in Cordell.