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