Commandment One Series

10 Commandments-

No Other God’s

CCCAG (May 21st, 2017)

Scripture- Exodus 20:1-3

About 20 years ago I was working a paramedic shift when we got called for a 14-year-old girl having an unknown medical problem in a local gas station. We responded over there and found that the medical problem was the fact that she was pregnant and her water had broken. We got her to the local community hospital, who then called us back an hour later to transfer her to a Milwaukee area hospital that specialized in high risk obstetrics.

It’s about an hour drive so I got to have a conversation with her, (we’ll call her Jane Doe). Jane was a ward of the state living in one of the local shelters for troubled kids. Jane was very open about her past- mom was into drugs and partying, dad was unknown and never in her life. Jane had been taken away from her mom at an early age and like many kids thrown in the foster system, ended up following in the footsteps of the parents that they got taken from. She had been in and out of foster care since she was 5 years old, and she suspected that the father of her child was a guy in his 20’s she met at a party.

When I was preparing for this message, and I remembered Jane, I realized she was an example of what people who have never known a father’s love, or even had a stable household to grow up in.

In Exodus Chapter 20, Israel is in a similar situation at the foot of Mt Sinai. A few weeks ago, they were slaves. In fact, for 400 years they have known nothing but slavery, and like Jane had no idea who their Father God really was.

They only knew God as Elohim- creator and the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. They had no personal relationship with God and knew very little about HIM.

They didn’t have the complete Word of God like we do, but only a mostly oral history that spanned Genesis 1:1 to now Exodus 20.

(Demonstrate using bible)

So God brings His children, who really do not know their father, to the mountain for the first family meeting ever between God and His chosen people.

Moses tells them to get ready, wash their clothes, abstain from intimacy with your spouse. Make sure your hearts are ready, pure and right because Father is coming home, and HE wants to talk to all of us.

And this is what God had to say

Exodus 20:1-3

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.

Prayer

Last week we talked about the law and specifically the moral law which is grounded in the 10 Commandments as being the white picket fence around God’s yard that protects His children from the danger that exists outside of His will for humanity.

Today we will be examining the first plank in the protective fence that God has around His yard to protect His children.

We begin by noting that the scriptures very clearly say that-

I. God Gave the Commandments

A. God gave them verbally and directly to the people, not through Moses.

One of the arguments in secular academia is that Moses simply took what he learned growing up in Pharaoh’s household and tweaked it a little bit for the Hebrew people.

The accusation says that Moses hijacked and plagiarized the Egyptian code of morality, repackaged it, and handed it to Israel.

Egypt indeed had a moral code, but it was substantially different than what God gave Israel and though Israel, us. The 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th, and 10th commandments were nowhere found in any version of Egyptian law, nor were they part of the worship of the Egyptian goddess Ma’at who was their personification of Ethics and morality.

So the Ten Commandments are unique as they were given directly to millions of people from God’s own mouth. That’s right- Millions of witnesses to this event.

If they had come directly through Moses, the people who later copied and transcribed this narrative would have said, “Hey Moses, you got this wrong….”. Not only that, but when Moses read Deuteronomy to the people before he died, there would have been 6 million people questioning that narrative- “Hey, that isn’t how it happened! I saw the movie! Charleston Heston (I mean Moses) You came down from the mountain holding a couple of carved stones and said God gave them!”

Hollywood not withstanding, it’s very important for us to see the personal nature of God here.

God didn’t work through an intermediary in this case.