No Other Gods Before Me (Part 2)

I, the Lord, am your God,
who brought you from the land of Egypt,
from the house of bondage.

You shall have no other gods before me.

The first commandment is a command to worship the one true God and only the one true God. It’s obvious (isn’t it?) that we’re not permitted to remake him, even in our minds, into something different than what he is, because having a remade god is nothing less than having another god before him. Redefining God is a great big no-no and most of us are not quite so brazen in our disobedience. 

On Knowing God
But there’s more to worshiping the one true God than keeping ourselves from shamelessly reworking him into something more like what we want him to be. In order to worship him and only him, we must also know him as he has revealed himself. In its list of things forbidden by the first commandment, the Westminster Larger Catechism lists ignorance and misapprehensions of God right beside unbelief and misbelief.

I’ve known people who get hung up on the idea that God is incomprehensible to us and give up trying to  understand him because it’s too difficult a task for them. They’re right about one thing: God is incomprehensible. He’s infinite and we have finite minds. R. C. Sproul says we are like infants struggling to understand a genius.1 We will never, ever, not in a million years or eternity, understand the whole of who and what God is. 

But God’s incomprehensibility is no excuse for breaking commandment number one by lacking knowledge of God. When God gives this commandment to Moses he identifies himself to them: “I … brought you from the land of Egypt, from the house of bondage.” He tells them something about himself, something he has done for his people that they can hold onto when they worship him. They could know him by knowing what he had done for them. We have even less excuse for ignorance than the Israelites did, because in all of scripture, God is defining himself for us. The genius, says Sproul, is speaking to the infant in tbe infant’s own terms.1 God condescends, we might say, to speak to us in baby-talk. That doesn’t make it easy for us but it does mean that can know him—never fully, but truly—because he tells us about himself.

And it’s always worth the effort it takes to understand God’s revelation of himself to us because the more true things we know about our God, the more we learn of his perfections and his actions from his revelation of himself in scripture, the more we are able to see him as he really is. The more we know of him, the more we can hold the one true God in our minds when we worship.

Given this commandment, it’s downright silly to think that we can give up on learning theology, or learning about God, because it’s all too difficult. Likewise, it silly to say that theology matters less than our obedient actions, for this commandment makes knowledge about God fundamental to our obedience. To the extent that we do not think of God in the way he has explained and defined himself, we are idolators. Redefining God is one way, and a flagrant way, to be an idolator; being ignorant of the things God reveals of himself to us is another.

1R. C. Sproul, Truths We Confess

And Shooting Himself in the Foot

In chapter 29 of Greg Bahnsen’s Always Ready, he puts his apologetic approach to practice against Bertrand Russell using Russell’s famous essay Why I Am Not a Christian. Yesterday I quoted two paragraphs from this chapter in a post titled Firing an Unloaded Gun. Here’s how the chapter continues:

Bertrand Russell made no secret of the fact that he intellectually and personally disdained religion in general, and Christianity in particular. In the preface to the book of his critical essays on the subject of religion he wrote: “I am as firmly convinced that religions do harm as I am that they are untrue.” He repeatedly charges in one way or another that a free man who exercises his reasoning ability  cannot submit to religious dogma. He argued that religion was a hindrance to the advance of civilization, that it cannot cure our troubles, and that we do not survive death.

We are treated to a defiant expression of metaphysical materialism—perhaps Russell’s most notorious essay for a popular reading audience—in the article (first published in 1903) entitled “A Free Man’s Worship.” He there concluded: “Brief and powerless is man’s life; on him and all his race the slow, sure doom falls pitiless and dark. Blind to good and evil, reckless of destruction, omnipotent matter rolls on its relentless way.” In the face of this nihilism and ethical subjectivism, Russell nevertheless called men to the invigoration of the free man’s worship: “to worship at the shrine that his own hands have built; undismayed by the empire of chance….”

Hopefully the brazen contradiction in Russell’s philosophy of life is already apparent to the reader. He asserts that our ideals and values are not objective and supported by the nature of reality, indeed that they are fleeting and doomed to destruction. On the other hand, quite contrary to this, Russell encourages us to assert our autonomous values in the face of a valueless universe—to act as though they really amounted to something worthwhile, were rational, and not merely the result of chance. But, after all, what sense could Russell hope to make of an immaterial value (an ideal) in the face of an “omnipotent matter” which is blind to values? Russell only succeeded in shooting himself in the foot.

Thankful Thursday

I’m thankful that my sons are busy at work. When you run your own business, lots of work = good gift from God.

I’m thankful that the carrots seeds have sprouted into little tiny grasslike carrot plants. I’m also thankful for long daylight hours to grow the garden quickly during our short summer.

I’m thankful for eyeglasses. My own pair of glasses—without them I’d be seriously handicapped—and glasses in general.

I’m thankful for the past providences—past mercies—that I’ve been remembering lately. I’m thankful that God can make very difficult circumstances into ultimately good things. I’m thankful that I’ve had God’s help in past trials to give me assurance of his help in future ones.

On Thursdays throughout this year, I plan to post a few thoughts of thanksgiving along with Kim at the Upward Call and others. Why don’t you participate by posting your thanksgiving each week, too? It’ll be an encouragement to you and to others, I promise.