"YOU SHALL HAVE NO OTHER GODS BEFORE ME." (Exodus 20:3)
Most of us are familiar with the first commandment. "Before" is literally "beyond" in the Hebrew and means "other than." Israel was to have but one God and no others; and the one God was to be the God of revelation, the One Who spoke to Israel from the flames and smoke of Mt. Sinai.

This God, the only real God, the only God with credentials, had just delivered Israel from Egyptian bondage. For four hundred years the children of Israel had lived in the most advanced nation on the planet. The Egyptians practiced brain surgery, plotted the movement of heavenly bodies, wrestled with problems in trigonometry that challenge us today, and employed engineering principles that are still unknown to twentieth century man. Israel had left Egypt’s affluence to drive her flocks through the barrenness of the Sinai desert toward a hostile country most of her people had never seen. Israel had left a highly cultured land of many "gods" for a wilderness with only one God.

Does it amaze us that sophisticated man cannot escape his natural tendency to polytheism and idolatry? Pascal, the French physicist and philosopher, said, "There is a god-shaped vacuum in every human heart, and only God can fill it." Paul said that men did not desire to retain the true God in their knowledge system and so God gave them over to their own debased minds (Romans 1:28); that men exchanged the truth of God for the Lie and, as a consequence, worshipped and served the creature rather than the Creator (Romans 1:25). When man exiles the Creator from his thinking, he creates the "god-shaped vacuum" into which something must rush.

Knowledge of the true God makes unsaved people uncomfortable. What is worse, sometimes it makes saved people uncomfortable also. The carnal mind (literally, "mind of the flesh") is at enmity with God whether it resides in the believer or the unbeliever (Romans 8:7). The unbeliever, of course, has only a carnal mind...a fleshly capacity, and thinks, always and only, as a worldling. The believer has two capacities; one belonging to his Adamic makeup and the other owing to his having been born from above (Galatians 5:17).

The unsaved world rejects God the Creator in favor of "gods" of its own creation. The "worldly" Christian changes the one God of Scripture into a more acceptable form, producing an inaccurate caricature of God with which he can be comfortable. The liberal, while rejecting the God revealed in Scripture, applies names and characteristics belonging to the Bible’s God to the phantom of his own creation. Liberals are fond of quoting the Twenty-third Psalm, for instance, as though it were written of their own unscriptural deity, when, in fact, it describes the very God Whom they reject.

It is impossible to relate intimately to a stranger. To have any meaningful depth, a relationship must involve people who know something about each other. To know God in a realistic manner, one must be acquainted with a characteristic of His that is both essential and unique, and this facet of His Being is only spiritually discerned (1 Corinthians 2:6-16). God is gracious...infinitely generous. This is demonstrated by the indisputable fact that at Calvary, He provided Heaven for people who deserve Hell! (Romans 5:10). God is a Giver Whose giving knows no limits. His measureless Grace is given, not to His friends, but to His enemies. The Adamic, natural (Greek, "soulish") mind cannot and will not fathom this. Grace is a foreign language to the unregenerate. Tragically, in this prophesied era of apostasy, the "church" knows little more of God’s Grace than the world does.

In the little church where I was once associate pastor, the people loved to sing about "grace of God beyond degree;" but you had better not preach measureless grace there or you’d be tarred and feathered. Limitless Grace was alright coming from the choir loft, but never from the pulpit! Even the hymnal was full of contradiction; boundless grace on one page with legalism on the next. The pastor could make a great Pauline statement followed by an extremely legalistic one with neither he nor the congregation spotting the self-evident antithesis. The pulpit spun like a weathercock in a windstorm, and confusion reigned in the pew.

God’s holiness is clearly revealed in His perfect Law, where what His righteousness requires of responsible man in the flesh is made conspicuous. God’s Grace is as clearly revealed in Salvation, where God Himself endures the penalty of a broken Law in the place of sinners. To know only God’s holiness without knowing His Grace is not to know God accurately. Our failure to grasp Grace leaves us in total ignorance of what God is really like. God created the Universe in order to demonstrate His Grace (Ephesians 2:7).

To miss the message of the great drama being played out on this incredible stage is to end up with an inaccurate picture of Who and What God is! We do not know God intimately if our image of Him is flawed. To make Him less than He is, is to make Him other than He is. To make Him other than He is, is to create another god, a false god, in defiance of His warning in the First Commandment.

All people must choose between the one God Who has revealed Himself in Scripture and the many "gods" of man’s invention. We who have chosen the only real God, the Bible’s God, must resist the temptation to conform Him to our image. We must know Him in the terms in which He has made Himself known. The only real God is the "God of all Grace." To reject the Grace of God is to reject the God of Grace and to create a vacuum into which another, lesser, and so false "god" will most assuredly rush, perhaps even wearing the names and claiming characteristics of the True.

For us as believers, it is back, back, back to the message of the risen, glorified Christ speaking from Heaven through the Apostle Paul...back to the Bible’s one true God with His infinite generosity, His boundless and fathomless Grace, or on, on, on to ruin.

"Dear Lord, let us have no other God than You!"