A (45). The first commandment is, Thou shalt have no other gods before me.

A (46). The first commandment requireth us to know and acknowledge God to be the only true God, and our God, and to worship and glorify him accordingly.

One of the things we said by way of introduction to the whole doctrine of the law of God, was that in each commandment, there is always a “positive” and a “negative.” The ways that the Catechism will highlight that will be to ask each time: What is required by this commandment and what is forbidden by this commandment. So as we arrive at the First Commandment, the question is what is required. To say it another way: What is the essence of it? What of God’s glory is at stake? Or, what has God designed to say about Himself through human beings?

“You shall have no other gods before me” (Ex. 20:3).

The First Commandment is all about the object of worship. The Catechism breaks this first commandment down into four parts: what are the words of it (Q.45), what it positively demands (Q.46), what it negatively forbids (Q.47), and what is meant by the word “before me” (Q.48). Let’s revisit another passage we have looked at, to get a good outline. That is the Greatest Commandment. There is an obvious similarity between the first part of the Greatest Commandment and the First Commandment of the Decalogue:

“And he said to him, ‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind’” (Mat. 22:37).

So if we look at the parts of our answer here, we can divide this up at least into (1) “All Your Mind—that is, TO KNOW AND ACKNOWLEDGE” and then the other aspects of the soul that we will just designate as the heart and will to account for our emotional and volitional life, so: (2) “All Your Heart:—that is, TO WORSHIP AND GLORIFY., and then the same for (3) “All Your Will.”

All the Mind: To Know and Acknowledge

Here is a simple entry point to a truth that we often make way too difficult: You can’t love what you don’t know, as the LORD said to Solomon, “And you, Solomon my son, know the God of your father and serve him with a whole heart and with a willing mind” (1 Chr. 28:9). The knowing is the root of the rest, as the mind is the “intake” location of the soul. I will often get the very subjective question: “How can I get to know God more?” or even in some bit of frustration, “I just don’t feel very connected to God!” Of course the answer of more theology always seems very anticlimactic to them.  But what if a married couple came in for counseling, and said, “We just aren’t connecting.” And I replied, “Well, look at her. Let’s start with that.” If they were to reply with an eye roll, or, worse yet, “Which wife?”—well then, we may have some pretty deep issues! You can’t cheat the process of the soul. You cannot love with the heart what you will not open up with the mind.

The intellectual side of the commandments is what discovers what they’re all getting at. For instance, how can we tell whether someone is obeying this commandment? We might ask them what notions of God they have, whether they place their trust in his word, whether they have confessed him before their neighbors, and then there are those affections. Hodge saw four necessary components to this commandment: 1. Knowledge, 2. Faith, 3. Confession, and 4. Spiritual Affections.1 But how to define and understand each of these? The answer is with the mind. For example, how do we tell if our feelings toward God are right or whether our choices properly pay honor to him? It is the energy of the mind that must be expended to study what is right. Paul united will to heart, and then heart to mind, in an important text on why we are not slaves to sin:

“But thanks be to God, that you who were once slaves of sin have become obedient from the heart to the standard of teaching to which you were committed” (Rom. 6:17).

The “standard of teaching” here is the mind being committed to a certain view over competing views. Show me what you keeping looking at and looking into and I’ll show you what you love.

Question 95 of the Heidelberg Catechism uses this language for what is required: “that I rightly acknowledge the only true God, trust in Him alone, with all humility and patience expect all good from Him only, and love, fear and honor Him with my whole heart.” 

Think of what is required not only in excelling in theology, but in right religion:

“Ascribe to the LORD, O heavenly beings, ascribe to the LORD glory and strength. Ascribe to the LORD the glory due his name; worship the LORD in dthe splendor of holiness.  (Ps. 29:1-2).

This action—to ASCRIBE—what does it mean but to rightly reckon and confess? And what is primary in the order of action so that one can ascribe to the LORD increasingly more of what is due Him? The Psalmist elsewhere makes the duty of the mind in worship even plainer as if belonging to the chief end: “One thing have I asked of the LORD, that will I seek after: that I may dwell in the house of the LORD all the days of my life, to gaze upon the beauty of the LORD and to inquire in his temple” (Ps. 27:4).

All the Heart: To Worship and Glorify

Your life is a sign that points to your Object of worship. Your whole life is that sign. That means that the affections are not exempt from that. 

Even obedience is never separate from feeling: “This day the LORD your God commands you to do these statutes and rules. You shall therefore be careful to do them with all your heart and with all your soul” (Deut. 27:16). I have already mentioned the Greatest Commandment. But in another way, the first commandment is addressing man’s chief end from Question 1 of our Catechism. What is the chief end of man? Man’s chief end is to glorify God and enjoy him forever.

Now whatever other criticisms someone wants to level at John Piper, he has at least persuasively argued that these are not two ends in Question 1—God’s glory and our joy—these are not ultimately two incompatible ends, but one harmonious end — hence the words “chief end” in the singular. And therefore Piper’s maxim that, “God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in him,” is actually quite profound, and you don’t want to throw it away. Some people are uncomfortable with putting things this way. They hear the word “happiness” and assume that it means whatever the culture wants it to mean. They fear that what is meant is “The way that sinful human beings define pleasure.” This really would be alarming!

But consider the following line of reasoning, in the form of a syllogism. It contains two premises and a conclusion. If our two premises are true, then our conclusion should follow. 

1. If our satisfaction is in God, then God is most glorified.

2. We are happiest when our satisfaction is in God.   

∴ When we are happiest, God is most glorified.

Think of the things that bring us the most joy. We would put nothing before such things. I mean that we would set up no obstacle; we would settle for no alternative; we would be fooled by no cheap imitation, because nothing else would do. We would jealously guard this first love. We would be greatly annoyed at the danger of it being stripped away from us. Jesus compared the gaining of the kingdom of heaven to this kind of jealous joy in Matthew 13:44. 

It is when we get this insight that we are ready to get at the spirit of the first commandment. How is God most honored in the life of someone obeying the first commandment? God is worshiped in an exclusive way by maximizing one’s enjoyment of God. This is really the same as to be as happy as one could possibly ever be. This is also true about FEAR. What we fear the most is what we worship (cf. Is. 8:12-13). So whether in our enjoyment, or in our dred, the glory of God is at stake; and he says, “My glory I will not give to another” (Is. 48:11). So to fear something greater than God or to enjoy something greater than God are both alike a failure to do what the First Commandment requires. Glory is in fear, just as glory is in enjoyment. That is because the object is magnified in proportion to what we say is either most satisfying or most threatening. The ultimate Object of satisfaction just is the ultimate Being, and likewise with the Object of ultimate dread.

Anyone who downplays the role of affections in worship ought to spend some free time reading Jonathan Edwards’ classic The Religious Affections, where he argued that, “True religion, in great part, consists in the affections.”2 He then brings forth scripture after scripture to show it. The disciples whose “hearts burned within them” (Lk. 24:32), for example. The Psalms are nothing but the whole range and depths of affections. Paul appears to be a person full of affection. He not only commands them everywhere, but exemplifies them himself. The ultimate example is Jesus Christ himself. We read much of his zeal, grief, desire, compassion, etc. And according to Edwards, John 13 through 17, taken as a unit, is: “Of all the discourses ever penned or uttered by the mouth of any man, this seems to be the most affectionate and affecting.”3

All the Will: To Worship and Glorify

The “will is the mind choosing.”4 That is the definition that Edwards gave, and I happen to think it is right and helpful. Worship is a doing. Worship is active. To revisit a place we just saw last time, Paul said, “I appeal to you therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship” (Rom. 12:1). The imagery is purposefully hyperbolic, as if the Christian were to throw our whole beings up on the altar as an offering to God! The point of this is not to dictate a certain kind of outward expression. The point is that right worship in the assembly and a God-glorifying life the rest of the week takes a most active will, with all of the intentions and zeal in it.

Calvin says that what is positively commanded is “to worship and adore him with truly pious zeal” and “to make him, as it were, the sole aim of our actions.”5 Dabney adds to this the idea that, “The duty of ‘having Him for our God’ may be said to be the summary of almost all the commands of love, reverence and obedience, which so abound in the Scriptures.”6

But how can this be the “sum” of them all if this is not an active, all-of-life, doing? So obedience to the First Commandment is a changing of things around the worshiper. It’s not simply private. 

Doing all for God: not a contribution to God, “as though he needed anything” (Acts 17:25), but for God’s glory, as in a contribution to us, or a “much needed increased sight of him” in that glory gained in your actions and my actions.

Remember our fundamental maxim of Christian ethics: We do what we do because of what it says about God, not because of what it says about us (or any lesser thing). This practical application — the “doing” part — of the first commandment can be supported by Paul’s instruction: “So, whether you eat or drink, or whatever you do, do all to the glory of God” (1 Cor. 10:31). Worship is happening in all of our doing. Our whole lives testify to what, or who, we really think is the ultimate Being.

This means that in all conceivable actions, the First Commandment is being either obeyed or disobeyed. Hopefully we can get a sense that everywhere else we move the heart of worship moves with us. In all of the other commandments, the First Commandment is at stake. If we carve an image to worship, or take his Name lightly, or spend alternatives to his Sabbath rest, then we did so because of some other god before him. Our motive that prevents us from honoring parents, defending life, staying faithful to spouse, respecting property, upholding our neighbor’s good name, or being happy for our neighbor in his portion—each of these voids are created by finding some other god before him.

Application of the Law

Use 1. EVANGELICAL USE. How can we say that we have “no other gods” if other things (besides God) are where we derive our ultimate joy or our ultimate sense of identity or our ultimate fears? So what the Catechism said about the sum of the Ten Commandments (Q.42) is especially true about the First Commandment. It echoes what Jesus said about the Greatest Commandment—ALL of every one of those faculties of the soul, and every part of life. Have we loved God in every thought, and in every feeling, and in every choice? Have we loved him to the depths of our beings in any thought or any feeling or any choice? Forget about “every.” How about “any”? I think we know the answer.

But Jesus obeyed the First Commandment for us. He said, “My food is to do the will of him who sent me and to accomplish his work” (Jn. 4:34). Later in that same Gospel, he says, “I do as the Father has commanded me, so that the world may know that I love the Father” (Jn. 14:31). So in the place of all of our failures to keep this greatest commandment, Christ has loved God in our place. And his love of God counts in the courtroom of God. Because his love stood in the place of ours, God considers us to have the righteousness that should have done so in us. This frees us to love him now.

Use 2. CIVIL USE. How can the First Table of the Law apply to the civil sphere? Think of it this way. If what we just said about the will is true—that in all decisions and actions, God is either honored or dishonored—then it follows that civil decisions and actions are no different. In speaking of our whole wills for God, we are reminded that the word for the will of free choice, in the Latin is the word liber, from which we derive the English word liberty. And that liberty which God gives, in the nature of man, which civil governments exist to defend, is a pivot point of true worship. How so? Remember the question: Where is liberty in the law? We can actually show the very fountain of it. Think first back to Exodus, in the archetypal instance of slavery in the Bible, where the Liberator was sent to declare:

Let my people go, that they may hold a feast to me in the wilderness …. That they may serve me in the wilderness (Ex. 5:1; cf. 7:16; 8:1, 20; 9:1; 10:3).

Moses was really only the messenger and type of The Liberator—the Maker of your will and One to whom liberty is owed. So the disciples knew that worship was at stake in their example of civil disobedience before the Council:

“Whether it is right in the sight of God to listen to you rather than to God, you must judge, for we cannot but speak of what we have seen and heard” (Acts 4:19-20).

So it’s not that the civil use of the First Commandment is the State enforcing religious conviction, but rather the State protecting that very religious conviction. Liberty is a First Commandment issue. More chains equals less one can do in true worship. It is precisely because that worship is not to be politicized that the right structures will not dictate it, nor constrain it. Liberty is a worship issue because only wills worship. Not that you cannot worship God in chains (Paul did), but that if you can avail yourself your freedom (1 Cor. 6:23) and you choose not to, then your choice is a choice for less “living sacrifice” (Rom. 12:1) to God and more to the whims of the Master whose chains those are.

Use 3. DIRECTIVE USE. If that is all true about our thoughts, feelings, and actions about God out in the civil sphere, then much more refined and heavenly must it be true about our specific actions of gathered worship. The Reformed tradition has made much of “worshiping by the book,” and yet how few consult God’s book to direct their worship!  Even leaving aside the deception of our sin: Is it so obvious to finite creatures how to pay honor to an infinite God? Let me take one example from the ceremonial law to show how its spirit still instructs us. In Leviticus 10, there was the story of Nadab and Abihu. God struck them dead because they offered that strange fire before the LORD. Immediately we may rush to conclude that there is nothing to see here. We are not priests and this is the ceremonial law. However, the text flatly gives us a takeaway that never changes:

“This is what the Lord has said: ‘Among those who are near me I will be sanctified, and before all the people I will be glorified’” (Lev. 10:3).

It is true that God’s people no longer have a separated priesthood anticipating the Great High Priest to come, still performing sacrifices, and so forth. But as there is a priesthood of all believers, it is not true that we are not to conduct our public worship with “reverence and awe” (Heb. 12:28).

______________________________

1. Hodge, Systematic Theology, III.19.4.

2. Edwards, Religious Affections in Works, I:237.

3. Edwards, Religious Affections in Works, I:241.

4. Edwards, The Freedom of the Will, 1.

5. Calvin, Institutes, II.8.16

6. Dabney, Systematic Theology, 358