Amen. If you’ll turn with me to your our first scripture reading in Exodus chapter 20, beginning at the first verse.
And God spoke all these words saying: ‘I am the Lord your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery. You shall have no other gods before me. You shall not make for yourself a carved image or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. You shall not bow down to them or serve them, for I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children to the third and the fourth generation of those who hate me, but showing steadfast love to thousands of those who love me and keep my commandments. You shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain, for the Lord will not hold him guiltless who takes his name in vain.
Remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy. Six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord your God. On it, you shall not do any work, you or your son or your daughter, your male servant or your female servant, or your livestock or the sojourner who is within your gates. For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea and all that is in them, and rested on the seventh day. Therefore, the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy.
Honor your father and mother, that your days may be long in the land that the Lord your God is giving you. You shall not murder. You shall not commit adultery. You shall not steal. You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor. You shall not covet your neighbor’s house. You shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, or his male servant, or his female servant, or his ox or his donkey, or anything that is your neighbor’s.
Now when all the people saw the thunder and the flashes of lightning, and the sound of the trumpet and the mountains smoking, the people were afraid and trembled, and they stood far off and said to Moses, ‘You speak to us, and we will listen, but do not let God speak to us, lest we die.’
From there, we turn back again to First John chapter 5, verse 21, the final verse that John gives to us here: ‘Little children, keep yourselves from idols.’
This is the word of the Lord. Thanks be to God. Let us pray.
Lord, your word is holy and true. You have given it for our good. Help us to understand it, fill it, write it upon our hearts so that we may know it, that we may love it, and give us the strength to keep it, to keep our hearts focused upon you above all else. We pray this in Jesus’ name. Amen.
So we return now to the first letter of John, where there is something of great import that was passed over the first time: ‘Little children, keep yourselves from idols.’ This verse is so important for us that it does require special emphasis. It is so important, yet within its context, it almost seems to be out of place, incomplete, or perhaps even unnecessary. But remember, no word of scripture inspired by the Holy Spirit is ever unimportant or unnecessary, and so this verse is no exception.
Please recall that First John lacks the common forms of a first-century letter and was composed more as a sermon or a theological tract than an ordinary letter. Throughout it, the Apostle writes concerning who Jesus is, what Jesus did, who Christians are, and how we may recognize one another. Then, finally, he encourages us in our lives of faith, telling us to test the spirits in order to know what is true, to do what we ought, and therefore to love one another and to keep ourselves away from the world’s sin, so as to be pure and holy in our communion with Jesus Christ.
John plainly told us the purpose for which he wrote at the beginning, so that our joy may be complete. He wrote this document so that we would know that everyone who has been born of God does not keep on sinning, but he who was born of God protects him, and that the evil one does not touch him. We know that we’re from God, and the whole world lies in the power of the evil one, and we know that the Son of God has come and has given us understanding so that we may know him who is true, and that we are in him who is true, in his son Jesus Christ, who is the true God and eternal life.
Therefore, we know that we belong to God. Even the whole world’s under the power of Satan. We know that God the Son, Jesus, protects everyone else who is born of God and keeps us out of the evil one’s clutches. We know, understand, and believe that God the Son, Jesus Christ, is both true and the truth that we’re united with and into him, and that therefore we possess eternal life in him.
Merely knowing and believing all of that is surely sufficient to make our joy complete. If that was where John had concluded this document, then it would have been a sufficient exhortation. However, John did not end it there.
John wrote one more verse, a very important verse, which has a silent implied therefore. John concludes this missive by saying, ‘Therefore, on account of all of this that you now know, on account of all that you understand and on account of all that you believe concerning Jesus Christ and your relationship with him, in order that your joy would be well and truly complete, little children, keep yourselves from idols.’
So yes, this verse is not out of place because this command leads to the whole point and purpose of John’s writing. This command leads to our joy. It is a command and a word of encouragement for us, and it is John’s simple summation of God’s law—the simplest, clearest statement concerning what and who we are not.
You would expect that for John, based on all that we think we know about him, his short summary of God’s law would be love, agape. But remember, love is not itself God’s law; it’s the practical effect of obedience to God’s law. Love is the fulfillment of the law, and so to understand how this can be John’s simple summary, we need to turn back to the Gospel of Matthew, where the other evangelist records for us an occasion when Jesus was asked, ‘Teacher, what is the great commandment in the law?’
And Jesus said to him, ‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and all your soul and all your mind. This is the great and first commandment, and a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments depend all the law and prophets.’
Yet before we consider what Jesus meant by his answer, we must first remind ourselves of an earlier definitive related declaration by Christ concerning the law, found in Matthew: ‘Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets. I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them. For truly I say to you, until heaven and earth pass away, not an iota, not a dot, will pass from the law until all is accomplished.”
Jesus did not rank or hierarchically prioritize the commandments and decrees of God here, nor did Jesus elevate to obscure and disconnected commands above the Ten Commandments when he quoted from the Shema: ‘Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is one. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul, with all your might,’ something that is recited multiple times daily by every devout Jew.
And from the Levitical declaration condemning personal vengeance: ‘You shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against the sons of your own people, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself. I am the Lord.’
See, Jesus took these verses and he explained the correct intentions of God, the Holy Spirit, who had inspired Moses in writing them. Jesus demonstrated that they were given as practical applications and expressions of the law, not merely as part of a list of rules and regulations. He explained them—the effect by which the law is meant to have upon and within people’s lives.
Jesus answered the question of what is the greatest commandment by giving us two examples that separately and together both summarize God’s holy law, his moral law—the law that is written upon every human heart and is obeyed by every person who believes God. However, Christians, we commonly divide them and still consider them separately, to try and help us better understand them by saying that they summarize the two tables of the law.
Ordinarily, we understand Jesus’s answer of ‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and soul and all your might’ as describing the first table by defining who we are in relation to God. This defines the vertical dimension of human worship and divine authority. Jesus’s answer of ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself’ describes the second table and describes how humans are to relate to one another, defining the horizontal relationship of human love and interactions.
Of these vertical and horizontal understandings, our interpretations are correct, and this is a valid interpretation of Jesus’s answer. However, there’s one more step which we Christians ought to take to best understand this, but we often do not, through our forgetfulness or ignorance. What we often forget is how the horizontal dimension relates to the vertical.
Our obedience and faithfulness in keeping the divine horizontal commands are meant to be acts of worship to God. We best and most truly worship the Lord by keeping his commandments. True worship is not found through any ritual, rite, or spiritual practice but through faithful obedience to our King, the Sovereign Lord.
That is what John meant when he wrote earlier: ‘By this we know that we love the children of God, when we love God and obey his commandments. For this is the love of God, that we keep his commandments, and his commandments are not burdensome.’ Therefore, we worship God because we love him.
Our works of agape for our neighbors, our friends, strangers, and our enemies are all acts of worship to the Lord God Almighty. Yet still, even by knowing and believing that we have not taken or reached the final step of understanding, but we are getting closer to take that final step and understand what John understood and expressed in this final verse of First John.
We must reexamine our understanding of the Ten Commandments. We need to reexamine our understanding of the organization and the internal relationship of the commandments—not reexamine their meaning. We need to understand that the horizontal dimension is not merely one-dimensional but is two-dimensional, both vertical and horizontal.
See, when we act in our human relationships with our fellow image bearers of God, with his earthly representatives, regardless of their faith and independent of their acknowledgment of him, we must treat them as we would treat the Lord. Because as his image, they all deserve and are warranted the same respect, honor, and consideration as Jesus Christ. This is why we’re to consider all others as being greater than ourselves, because we should see them as representing God, our Sovereign King.
Commonly, a visual example of the Cross is used to describe these directional relationships within the Ten Commandments, where the vertical beam represents the first table and a two-way relationship between God and man, and the horizontal beam represents the second table and the two-way relationship between ourselves and others.
But I would say that a better representation would be a broad column—an arrow representing our human response to God’s mercy going up, with a narrower arrow representing God’s grace going down. Within that broad arrow, there are many small horizontal arrows going in and out, representing our relationships and interactions with other people. I say this because the relationships we have with others impact and are impacted by our and their relationship with God.
Therefore, whenever we are loving our neighbors as ourselves, we’re also loving God with all of our heart, soul, mind, and strength. And that is why I say that the horizontal dimension of our response to God’s grace really is vertical.
Now, back at Mount Sinai, the Lord gave the Ten Commandments as part of his gracious national covenant with Israel, his elect people. This covenant is also referred to as the covenant of works, and it’s the same covenant to which Adam was bound, but whose stipulations were expanded by this, here God’s further revelation to Moses. This was given to us as a good covenant, a beneficial covenant, but it was not a covenant that offered or promised eternal life; there is no hope for man found within it.
Yet still, this covenant did promise a good and pleasant and rewarding life upon the earth for those who kept it and remained faithful and obedient to God. Moses, under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, took what the Lord revealed to him up on Mount Sinai, and then he recorded it using a common human format which he would have known well and would be recognized and understood by other neighboring peoples: the covenant format of a suzerain-vassal treaty.
Now, the five distinct necessary elements of this treaty format are easily identifiable across Exodus chapters 20 through 24: a preamble identifying the parties involved, a historic prologue describing why the suzerain deserves allegiance, a list of witnesses to the treaty who are responsible for facilitating its enforcement, a list of stipulations imposed upon the vassal by the suzerain, and finally, a list of blessings and benefits that are promised to the vassal by the suzerain for their continued obedience and faithfulness along with a list of the curses and punishments that are promised to the vassal as judgment for disobedience, faithlessness, or violations of the covenant.
Three of these five elements are found here in chapter 20: The preamble, prologue, and the stipulations, while the fourth and fifth parts are found in all the rest. The witnesses are defined as the standing stones which were erected to represent the 12 tribes of Israel and the altar raised by Moses at the base of Mount Sinai in chapter 24, while the list of blessings are outlined at the end of chapter 23.
But meanwhile, the three elements found here are the most important for us in understanding the character of this relationship to God. The preamble and prologue are presented together in the first verse: ‘And God spoke all these words saying: I am the Lord your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery,’ defining the covenant parties as the Lord Yahweh and you, being the original hearers of these words and their heirs—the people of Israel who followed Moses out of Egypt.
Then, the cause of or justification for this suzerain-vassal relationship between the Lord and Israel is presented as because the Lord brought them, Israel, out of Egypt and out from their slavery to Pharaoh. Then Moses begins to record the Lord’s stipulations for his people to obey.
Here, this is where we take that final interpretive step, because truthfully, Moses records the Lord’s one single stipulation and obligation that he expects of his people: ‘You shall have no other gods before me.’
But wait! Are there not nine more stipulations and requirements in this list? Yes, there are actually a lot more than nine. However, although each commandment is itself important and each regulation requires our absolute obedience, all the other commandments of God are derivatives of this one first command.
But you might ask, what do adultery, coveting, murder have to do with the first commandment? Or what do the holiness code or dietary laws like eating bacon or circumcision have to do with the first commandment? Absolutely nothing and absolutely everything.
See, now we’re finally reaching the understanding of John—what he warns us about, commands us against, and teaches us throughout the whole of First John, but especially when he concludes with the command: ‘Little children, keep yourselves from idols.’
Every sin, every sin is a form of idolatry—each and every one. Every violation and transgression of God’s holy and perfect law is an idolatrous act of worship, just as obedience and faithfulness in keeping his commands are righteous acts of worship. The difference is, with our every sin, we worship ourselves instead of the Lord.
See, John spent this whole document trying to teach us to know who God is, who Jesus is, and who we are in relation to them. They are God and we are not, period. The Lord is God. Jesus is God. The Holy Spirit is God—three persons, one essence, one triune God, perfectly united in will, love, and activity—whereas mankind, people, the elect, the children of God, and all the church, we are not God.
Yet by our every sin and in every transgression, we act as if we are God while the Lord and Jesus and the Holy Spirit are not. Idolatry is the core of every sin. Idolatry is the root of every evil. And the reason why idolatry is such a recurring problem for all of humanity is because we were created for worship and created to worship. Worship is the point and purpose for our existence.
The Westminster Shorter Catechism asks us, ‘What is the chief end of man?’ And then it answers, ‘Man’s chief end is to glorify God and to enjoy him forever.’ This is what we believe as Reformed Christians—that we are created to glorify God, to worship him, and enjoy him forever. This is precisely what John has been trying to teach us—to rightly worship God through love so that our joy may be complete by our obedience to and worship of him alone.
Humanity was created to worship God, not because he needs our worship, but because he desired to have people in relationship with him. Worship is really the only proper response for creation to have towards their creator. We were created to worship the Sovereign of the universe through active obedience to him as his appointed regents within creation and for us to relate to him as sons and daughters, enjoying our relationship and enjoying the whole of creation over which he’s given us dominion.
But when Adam chose disobedience over faithfulness to God’s commanded will, he stopped worshiping the Lord and began to worship himself. Adam elevated himself, his desires, his wants, his priorities and his preferences over and above the simple, clear, solitary command of the Sovereign Lord.
So ever since, every child of Adam has followed in our not-so-great grandfather’s footsteps, because we’ve inherited a corrupted and flawed nature from him—a nature that is inclined towards sin and wickedness instead of righteousness and obedience. Our whole selves are corrupted and tainted; therefore, no part of us is untouched by sin. And so we require rescue, cleansing, redemption, regeneration, and the transformation which is found only in the Holy Spirit’s work of sanctification.
Humanity’s problem is sin, and the problem of sin is idolatry. Idolatry is the sin that Jesus came to end so that we would have no excuse, because through him, we would know the Father. Idolatry and our spiritual adultery is why Jesus was born, lived, died, was raised, and ascended into heaven to now sit enthroned as our Redeemer and justifier, as our Savior. He has redeemed us from our chosen bondage to idols, from the sinful slavery of Satan into which Adam sold our whole race.
Sin is humanity’s problem, and idolatry is the one sin which is the heart of every other. Our idolatry of self—that was Adam’s fault, and it remains the fault within each and every one of us. This is why John Calvin famously wrote: ‘From this we gathered that man’s nature, so to speak, is a perpetual factory of idols. Man’s mind, full as it is of pride and holiness, dares to imagine a god according to its own capacity. As it sluggishly paws, indeed, it is overwhelmed with the crassest ignorance, and it conceives an unreality and an empty appearance as God.’
See, people, we are made to worship, and if we do not desire to worship the true God, then we will find or create a god to worship, and that’s akin to our sin of idolatry. We take the natural, divinely ordered arrangement of God making man in his holy image and we twist it, corrupting it into the arrangement of man making God in his image.
See, the Greeks and Romans demonstrated this principle best and most honestly because their gods, Zeus, Apollo, Athena, and all the rest, were imagined to be more human than human. They were not inspirational; they were not intended to be examples for humanity to echo or aspire to, but each one of them exemplified a human ideal taken to such an extreme that every portrayed human good became a fault or a flaw.
These fantasies offered no possibility or encouragement of hope being found within humanity. Even the more obvious demons which were worshiped—and which are worshiped as gods—take on forms that resemble humanity, sometimes by shape, but always by our character. They are never consulted or worshiped as paragons of righteousness, but they are as the justifiers of and encouragers in human sinfulness and depravity. Since they look like us, we will more gladly listen when they tell us precisely what we want to hear.
I mean, sometimes I wonder if humanity could put Satan out of a job, because we do such an exceptional job of creating new perversities and sinful practices that I do not know if it is possible to plumb the depths of human depravity. We don’t even really need for Satan to tempt us into sin because our own nature tempts us and leads us into damnation that is far worse and does it far faster than even the prince of this world could imagine.
That is why John makes his ultimate point: ‘Keep yourselves from idols,’ because idolatry is the root of all our sin. That is why the principal stipulation in the Lord’s covenant is ‘You shall have no other gods before me,’ and why every other commandment derives itself from that one. Everything boils down to the simple fact that the Lord alone should be the object of our worship, devotion, obedience, and faithfulness.
So this is how John and Jesus and we should understand God’s whole law in relation to honoring and obeying God.
‘You shall not make for yourself a carved image,’ meaning that nothing in creation is to be worshiped in place of the Lord. Do not worship stuff as if it were God.
‘You shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain,’ meaning that God’s name is not to be invoked for sinful purposes and that our oaths, when they must be made, when fulfilled, bring ourselves and him honor and glory instead of shame and disgrace.
‘Remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy. Six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord your God,’ meaning that we must trust that God always has our best interests as his intention; that his commands are for our continued good.
That if the practice of rest is good enough for God, then the practice of rest is good enough for us. That by refusing to rest, we declare that we know what is good for ourselves better than the God who created us.
‘Honor your father and mother,’ meaning that we must honor and respect those with authority over us—trust that they have our best interest at heart; to view our parents as authoritative representatives of God given to us to lead us in worship to teach and train us, equipping us for righteous obedience.
‘You shall not murder,’ meaning that we must value the lives of other people as being greater than our own, to protect the lives of others and defend them as if they were God, because they bear his image—just as God protects your own life.
‘You shall not commit adultery,’ meaning that we must not break God’s covenant; that we must remain faithful to him and not worship anyone or anything else; that we must be faithful within our own human covenant relationships like marriage, just as we are faithful to God’s covenant.
‘You shall not steal,’ meaning that we should accept God’s good provision; that we first must be content with what he has given to us, and secondly that we must not deprive other image bearers of what God has given to them.
‘You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor,’ meaning that God is true and speaks truly; that any falsehoods we might speak cannot replace or supplant God’s truth, that we must speak truly to others because God speaks truly to us.
‘You shall not covet,’ meaning that because the whole earth belongs to the Lord and we are only his regents and stewards in creation, we are charged to wisely use what he has given us and be content with his provision, refraining from being envious of other image bearers and their provisions and gifting, trusting in God’s wisdom rather than our own understanding.
Can you now see how these and all the many other divine commandments written in sacred scripture all boil down to this one: ‘You shall have no other gods before me’?
Making statues or images and worshiping anything that’s created as if it were the Lord is idolatry. Misusing God’s name or suggesting that your own word and that you are more dependable and reliable than the Almighty is idolatry. Choosing to work seven days a week—not from need, but from pure voluntary choice instead of only six—and thereby not worshiping God as he commands is idolatry.
Worshiping work and preferring your own goals, preferences, and desires over those of the Lord is idolatry. Despising the authority of your parents is despising the authority of God—believing that your authority trumps God’s sovereignty—that’s idolatry.
Despising the life of another person and killing them proves that you value their life and personhood—and the personhood of the Lord whose image they are—as being less than your own.
Breaking covenant, being unfaithful to others and to the Lord by prioritizing your own selfishness over the needs of others, over your relationships with others—is idolatry. Theft declares your belief that God has not given you enough; it proves that you’re dissatisfied with what you have, and shows that your desire for someone else’s stuff is greater than your desire for God or your love for him, and is therefore idolatry.
Lying creates and propagates false understandings about reality so that when your lies are believed as truth you call God a liar, and every absolute and all pretense of objectivity becomes subject to the human mind and understanding rather than the Sovereign will and decree of God, and thus becomes idolatry.
All coveting is like theft. Covetousness is constrained within the heart as an active sinful desire rather than a sinful action, but nonetheless, it is still idolatry.
So once you see the law in this light, it becomes easy to see how every sin committed by man may be reduced to the lowest common denominator of idolatry.
However, there is good news for us. Ever since God entered into covenant with his chosen people, ever since Jesus Christ came into the world and lived a sinless life and died as an atoning sacrifice for us, we now may turn away from our idols in repentance and turn to the Lord in faith to be forgiven and therefore saved.
Whereas before the Holy Spirit’s regeneration, we did not love the Lord, much less with our heart, soul, mind, or strength, and we never truly loved our neighbors—but now we can. Now we do love God as well as our neighbors, and with the Spirit’s help, we will do it more every day. We will do it better daily.
And although our hearts will still fashion idols to tempt us, we now have a great high priest who is able to sympathize with us, who has been tempted just as we are, yet who himself refrained from sinning.
Jesus Christ—he who saved us—is also our advocate before God, and he is our help. He is the help of our strength to persevere to the end. He is the Lord; therefore, he is the object of our worship, and he will preserve us and keep us from our idols.
And although we are still tempted by the many idols of this world—fame, fortune, sex, drugs, power, and influence—ourselves, or even our families—we’re no longer subject to them. They no longer rule over us or our lives because we know that God, the Lord, that Jesus Christ is the Sovereign Lord, and we know that he is over all things, that he alone is worthy of praise and worship because he alone is the source of our joy.
So finally, humble yourselves before God. Keep yourselves from idols and have no other gods before the Lord. Believe that the Son of God, Jesus Christ, has come and will come again. Believe that and that he and his words are true.
Believe that he is the true God and the fountainhead of eternal life for his elect people. If we keep ourselves from sin by loving God through obeying his commandments and his alone, believe this and know this so that our joy may be complete.
So that our joy and the Lord’s joy—the joy of God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—would be made complete through our union in Christ and the koinonia that we all now share forever and ever. Amen.