Worthy of Worship: Everyone worships something. Whether that be wealth, success, people, or other created things. In the second of the Ten Commandments, we discover that Yahweh God, the Creator of heaven and earth, is the only One worthy of our worship. Recorded on Feb 5, 2023, on Exodus 20:4-6 by Pastor David Parks.
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Ten Commandments: Learning the Law of Love is a sermon series on the most influential legal code in human history. Why should we learn about the Ten Commandments today? Because they reveal God’s will for how human beings ought to live: to love God with all our heart and love our neighbor as ourselves. Ultimately, the law of love points us directly to Jesus.
Sermon Transcript
All year, we’re focusing on Learning the way of Jesus. And today, we’re continuing a sermon series we started last week on the Ten Commandments. [Ten Commandments slide] The way of Jesus, as described in the Bible, includes a unique message of what is wrong with the world, of who God is, and what he has done and is doing today to address the problems of the world. Christians call this message the gospel or the good news of Jesus. But also, the way of Jesus includes a whole new way of life including a new set of morals/ethics/understanding of what is right and wrong according to God. Now, before we jump into the second command this morning, I’d like to address a common question or objection that modern people have about the commands of the Bible. The objection is something like, “You Christians don’t obey every command in the Bible. There are commands against eating pork/shellfish or getting tattoos that you seem fine ignoring today. So aren’t you simply picking and choosing which commands you prefer to follow? For example, isn’t your belief in the sexual ethic of the Bible which prohibits any sexual relationship outside of a marriage covenant between one man and one women, based not so much on the command of God but more on your own preferences or biases? How can you accept that one but reject others?” And that’s a fair question. Have you ever wondered about that or heard that question before? If that’s what you think is going on with Christians and Biblical commands, I certainly understand why some people think Christians are bigots. So why do Christians believe that the Ten Commandments are still valid while other commandments in the OT law are no longer valid, such as the dietary laws or the law against tattoos? And the answer is that the 600+ laws of the Mosaic Law in the OT contain three categories of laws: civil law, ceremonial law, and moral law. Civil laws governed the nation of ancient Israel in the Promised Land, including certain crimes and punishments, the allotment of land, how the poor were to be treated, how debt worked, and much more. Ceremonial laws governed worship in ancient Israel, including the sacrificial system, priesthood, tabernacle/temple, dietary laws, annual festivals, and so on. Now, the civil laws ceased to operate many years later, during the time of the exile, when the nation of Israel was basically destroyed because of their covenant unfaithfulness. The ceremonial laws were in place until the new covenant established by Jesus because the whole sacrificial system, temple, priesthood, and more were fulfilled by Jesus. However, the moral laws are still valid because they deal with morality, or what is right and wrong for all people according to God. Of course, there is much more we could say about the purpose of the various laws of the OT, and many of the civil and ceremonial laws have an underlying moral principle which is helpful to understand — but the big idea is that Christians today are fine having a pulled pork sandwich, but it’s still wrong to murder people or lie or steal. We’re not picking and choosing what we like or don’t like. We believe we’re still responsible for the moral law because it relates to how we are to love the Lord our God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength and how we are to love our neighbor as ourself. And those principles don’t change regardless of what the broader culture thinks/believes is right or wrong. So with all that, if you have a Bible/app, please open to Exodus 20:1. We’ll read through the first and second commands and then unpack the second of the Ten together.
Exodus 20:1-6 (NIV), “And God spoke all these words: 2 “I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery. 3 “You shall have no other gods before me. 4 “You shall not make for yourself an image in the form of anything in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the waters below. 5 You shall not bow down to them or worship them; for I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God, punishing the children for the sin of the parents to the third and fourth generation of those who hate me, 6 but showing love to a thousand generations of those who love me and keep my commandments.”
So as we said last week, the book of Exodus, written by Moses, the prophet and leader of ancient Israel around 1300 BC, describes a key turning point of history when God rescued the people of Israel from captivity in Egypt, entered into a covenant relationship with them, which included giving them the Law. Eventually, God would bring them into the land he had promised their ancestors, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. The first half of Exodus describes the wild events when God rescued his people by grace from Egypt, and met with them here at Mount Sinai [Mount Sinai slide] to give them the details of this new covenant. A key takeaway from last week is that the pattern of God in the OT is the same as the NT: first God rescues people by his power/grace, and then he gives them a law to govern their way of life. Obedience to the law does not lead to salvation, salvation leads us to want to obey. Second, we saw last week that this covenant with God was not with God in general. At this time in history, as in many places today, almost everyone everywhere believed there were many gods and goddesses. If you said you were worshiping or serving God, people would’ve asked, “Which one?” It’s only at this moment in history at Mount Sinai, in the first of the Ten Commandments, where the concept of monotheism came into history. Yahweh God, the Creator of heaven and earth, claimed that he was the only living God, the only truly divine being. But he had just proved his power over all the many gods/goddesses of the Egyptians in the dramatic rescue of Israel. Now, some of the laws of the Ten Commandments are similar to other law codes of ancient Mesopotamia, but the first command is radically different. Yahweh wasn’t just another god among many or even the most powerful god in the pantheon of gods. He was the only one. There is only one God. This is the foundation of the Ten Commandments. Of course, this first command leads naturally to the second. If there is only one God, then there is only one God who is worthy of worship. Let’s look again at the second command starting with v. 4.
Exodus 20:4-5a (NIV), “You shall not make for yourself an image in the form of anything in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the waters below. You shall not bow down to them or worship them;” Ok, let’s pause here. So Yahweh God had already said there were no other gods/goddesses. So the second command isn’t so much a prohibition against worshiping other gods/goddesses (of course, that was a perennial problem for Israel), but rather, it’s about how God wants people to worship him. And he says Israel should not make images or objects for use in worship. Remember, as we said last week, the Israelites were for all practical purposes, Egyptian at this point. They were liberated from Egypt only a few months ago, a place where they and their ancestors had lived for over 400 years. So they would’ve looked and thought and spoken a lot like Egyptians. And think of the hieroglyphics you saw in school. They are full of images of gods and goddesses in the form of created things. Most Egyptian gods (and other gods at this time) were associated with something in creation: animal or sun/moon/stars or the emperor or whatever. Temples were full of these images. And even though people had made them, the people bowed down in worship of them. Just as it would’ve been incredibly weird to claim that there was only one God, the Creator of the heavens and the earth, it would’ve been unthinkable to not have some visible representation of your god, some sort of image in the form of anything in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the waters below, to worship. So far, the first two of the Ten Commandments would make the people of Israel very different from their neighbors, in fact, different from all the other peoples of the world. But why would God not want his people to use some sort of image in their worship of him? What difference would it make? The people would know the image is merely a representation of God, right? What’s wrong with that? The answer lies in who God is. As we saw last week, Yahweh God is not just the God of Israel, he is the one true and living God; the whole earth is his. And he is not some divine spark; he is personal and near, he speaks and has a name. And he is not limited to one nation or location; he is universal and infinite, he is just as much the God over Egypt as he is over Israel. He isn’t just very powerful or wise, he is infinitely powerful and wise. And Yahweh God is not part of his creation; he is the Creator, who is transcendent over all. So do you see that representing this God with an image of a created thing, even a created thing representing power/wisdom/life, would shrink God down to something that can fit within creation? This would distort people’s understanding of who God is. And a distortion in your understanding of God’s character/nature results not in true worship, but in worshiping a god of your own making, an idol. This would be the absolute opposite of what God wanted for his people. God doesn’t want people to worship because he really likes worship. God wants an exclusive relationship with people who actually know him. And when you truly understand who God is, worship is the only appropriate response to him. Then, in vv. 5-6 God gives an indication of both the blessings and the curses of obedience to this command. There are real consequences of both our understanding of who God is and our worship of him. Let’s look at that.
Exodus 20:5-6 (NIV), “You shall not bow down to them or worship them; for I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God, punishing the children for the sin of the parents to the third and fourth generation of those who hate me, but showing love to a thousand generations of those who love me and keep my commandments.” Now, this might be confusing for some because it seems to conflict with other passages describing the personal accountability for sin which is just For example, Dt 24:16 says, “Parents are not to be put to death for their children, nor children put to death for their parents; each will die for their own sin.” It wouldn’t be just to put a whole family in prison for the crime of one family member, right? But what about idolatrous patterns of life that are taught from one generation to another? Are there not real consequences in life for how parents raise their kids? Of course there are. Some of us spend our whole adults lives trying to recover from how we were raised. And some sins seem to carry on from one generation to the next just as trauma is passed down as well. The context here is not so much crime and punishment but of having or not having a covenant relationship with the one true and living God, and the results of that relationship (or lack of relationship) over time within a family. Idolatry isn’t excused because you learned it from your parents. We are all individually responsible for how we deal with God. But there are destructive patterns which can easily prove harmful to the third and fourth generation. And God is a jealous God. This is good to know. Isaiah 42:8 says, “I am the Lord; that is my name! I will not yield my glory to another or my praise to idols.” But look at the comparison here to what happens when you have a family that is committed to worshiping the one true God: faithful love and a life-giving relationship with God for a thousand generations! Now this isn’t fair at all! But it shows that God desires far more to love than to punish. Later in Exodus, God reveals more about his character saying that he is a, “…compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness, maintaining love to thousands, and forgiving wickedness, rebellion and sin. Yet he does not leave the guilty unpunished; he punishes the children and their children for the sin of the parents to the third and fourth generation.” (Ex 34:6-7) Here, as everywhere in the Bible, God is both just and merciful. But lest we are tempted to cower in fear of the living God, let’s remember the context. He has already saved Israel by his power/grace. He later explicitly says that he did this because of his love for them and his desire that they would know him and find the freedom and joy and peace they were created to enjoy in him. God is great, but God is good, and his goodness is without measure.
So what does this teaching mean for us today? How might we apply this to our lives? I was especially struck this week that we can never say everything you could say about any topic, much less a topic so great as our understanding/worship of God. I’ll just leave you with two thoughts today. The first is this: in a broken world, we are all tempted to replace the Creator God with created things as the true object of love in our hearts and the main thing we worship and serve in life. According to Jesus, the greatest commandment is to love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength. Fundamentally, love is what worship is. But our hearts are easily distracted and are far too easily satisfied. We find some created thing or person and our hearts are drawn in love to it or to them. Because we think that if we give our lives for that thing or that person, it will bring us the freedom, joy, and peace that we long for, but it won’t. It will only lead back to slavery in Egypt. For some, their hearts are drawn to financial independence, for others it’s kids or grandkids, for others it’s the accomplishments or recognition of career or education, but there are many created things that consume our hearts, minds, and imaginations. We think, “If I could just have that, then my life would be complete, then I would be safe, then I would be somebody.” The old images of animals and the sun/moon/stars no longer seem so weird when we realize that they represented the same desire for power, approval, comfort, and control that we have. So let me ask you this: what is the main object of love in your heart? Who or what drives your service and sacrifice in life? Whatever the answer is is the true object of your worship. That is your god, that is your master/lord. Everybody worships something. The Bible is one long case to reorder the love of your heart to be fixed on the one true and living God. A God who is as good as he is great. A God who saves by grace and mercifully helps us grow in our understanding of who he is and who we are in him. I’d like to close with this final thought: the second commandment points us directly to Jesus. Without him, we would be hopelessly lost in our frantically distracted and destructive love of created things in the place of our Creator. Jesus not only modeled this type of singular love of his Father in heaven, refusing to worship anyone or anything else, but also perfectly reveals to us who God is. When you look at Jesus, you see God; when you listen to Jesus, you hear God. The Son is the image of the invisible God. But finally, because of his life, death, and resurrection from the dead, we can be forgiven for our idolatry and freed from their enslaving power. In other words, we too can be freed from captivity in Egypt and find our way into the Promised Land, finding the freedom, joy, and peace we were created to enjoy. So today, do not delay, turn from the created things you have been loving with your heart and worshiping/serving with your life, and come to Jesus. He is the only master, he is the only lord whose love frees us and gives life. He is the Creator and the Savior. He is the only one who is worthy of worship, both now and forevermore. Let us pray.