Tonight, I am attempting to weave together the main themes of the previous sermons on the first and second commandments, and expand upon them primarily in showing how they relate to the gospel of Jesus Christ. It is very important for us, as Christians, to understand that God’s moral Law in the Ten Commandments is a gift of His grace, an expression of His love and goodness and care for us.

At the same time, of course, the Law reveals our sin, and shows us that we cannot live up to the righteous requirements of God’s Law. Even if we could obey all of the Ten Commandments in an external obedience, we know that we have violated the commandments spiritually — with lust and greed and hatred and self-worship — and we know that God looks upon the heart, and so we must acknowledge that we have transgressed the Law of God in spirit, in thought, in our hearts and are guilty before God. And so, the Law shows us our sin and shows us our need of a Savior, and leads us to Jesus Christ, leads us to the gospel of salvation by grace alone through faith alone in Christ alone by virtue of His perfectly righteous life and His substitutionary death. Then, as Christ’s redeemed people, born anew by the Holy Spirit, and filled with the Holy Spirit, and adopted as the children of God, set free from the guilt of our sins under the Law, we are called to grow in the grace of Christ our Savior, growing in our love for God, and showing forth our love for God by obedience to His commandments.

Jesus Himself called us to this loving-obedience. He said, "If you love me, you will keep my commandments" (John 14:15), and, "If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commandments and abide in His love. These things I have spoken to you, that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be full" (John 15:10-11). Notice how Jesus spoke of the connection between love, obedience, and joy — His joy, the fullness of joy in His disciples who love Him and keep His commandments. And this commandment-keeping to which He calls us is to be an imitation of His own commandment-keeping. He kept His Father’s commands because He loved the Father and abides in His Father’s love. So, we too, out of love for Jesus, we are to follow Him in obedience; and, out of love for God the Father, who gave us His only Son, we are to keep His commandments. And in the keeping of His commandments, there is fullness of joy, indeed the joy of Jesus within us.

This same theme of obedience to God out of love for God is found also in the First Letter of John. First John 5:2 says, "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." The commandments of God are not burdensome to those who love God, who know that they have been redeemed by the blood of Christ, whose hearts have been regenerated by the Spirit of God, and who want to please God and honor Him by living in accord with His revealed will. The truly regenerate, truly converted Christian knows in his or heart that, in the words of Psalm 19, "...the precepts of the LORD are right, giving joy to the heart; the commands of the LORD are radiant, giving light to the eyes" (Ps.19:8). But this love for God which inspires obedience to God, is a love which flows in response to the love of God which we have received in Christ. As First John 5:19 says, "We love, because He first loved us." This is true obedience: obedience which is inspired and motivated by a loving response to the God who first loved us and sent His Son to be the propitiation (the substitutionary, atoning sacrifice) for our sins" (First John 4:10).

So, I hope we are seeing the close connection between our faith in Christ and our obedience to the moral law of God in the Ten Commandments. We must see a close, inseparable connection, between our faith in Christ and our obedience to the Commandments. And along these lines, I want us to consider the remarkable and radical claims of Christ upon our lives. In light of the First Commandment, "You shall have no other gods before me," which demands our absolute allegiance, our undivided loyalty, and our uncompromising commitment of love and devotion to the true and living God, in light of this First Commandment, consider Jesus’ call to discipleship:

Do not think that I have come to bring peace on earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law; and a man’s foes will be those of his own household. He who loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me; and he who loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me; and he who does not take his cross and follow me is not worthy of me. He who finds his life will lose it, and he who loses his life for my sake will find it (Matthew 10:34-49).

Now this is a remarkably radical statement from the lips of our Lord Jesus Christ. Listen to what He is saying. He is demanding an absolute allegiance, and undivided loyalty. He is going so far as to place Himself in-between a man and his father, a mother and her daughter, and a parent and his or her child, and to demand that His disciples be willing to break the blood-bond of family kinship, even to the forsaking of their own flesh and blood, in order to follow Him. Indeed, Jesus is demanding that His disciples be willing even to die for Him, and He presses home the point by saying that if a person is not willing to forsake family and to lose his or her own life for Him, then that person is not worthy to be considered His disciple.

Now, here’s the point: who can make such a demand? Only He who can also command: "You shall have no other gods before me." You see, Jesus’ call to discipleship, which is repeated elsewhere in the gospels, is either a re-statement of the First Commandment, a specific application of the First Commandment, or it is an arrogant, blatant violation of it. Do you see that? Jesus’ call to discipleship, the claim that He lays upon us, is either the command of God or it is utter blasphemy. But it is not blasphemy, because Jesus Christ is in fact who He claimed to be, the Son of God. And therefore, we have not truly and fully kept the First Commandment until we have truly and fully responded in faithful obedience to Christ’s call to discipleship.

There are a number of other examples and illustrations which we could cite, but consider this one from the Gospel of John, chapter 20. It is Sunday, the Lord’s Day, one week after Jesus rose from the dead. The disciples are gathered together in the house, and Thomas, who had not seen Jesus on the day of resurrection, is there with them. Suddenly, Jesus appears to them, stands among them, and says, "Peace be with you." Then, He said to Thomas, who had doubted the resurrection, "Put your finger here, and see my hands; and put out your hand, and place it in my side; do not be faithless, but believing." Thomas answered Him, "My Lord and my God!" (John 20:26-29). Think of Thomas’ affirmation of faith: "My Lord and my God!" If that was not a true affirmation of true faith in the one and only living God, then it was abominable blasphemy — abominable blasphemy which Jesus accepted as praise and approved of, making Him as guilty as Thomas. But of course, it was not blasphemy, because Jesus is "the image of the invisible God" who commanded from Mt. Sinai, "You shall have no other gods before Me" (Colossians 1:15; Exodus 20:3).

Now, of course this is very basic to the Christian faith; but I do not want us to so easily overlook the basics. It is the basic points of our faith to which we need to give close attention and deep meditation. In Jesus’ call to discipleship, and in His acceptance of our worship and praise, He is revealed as the God who thundered from Sinai, the God who demands our absolute allegiance, our undivided loyalty, our uncompromising commitment of love and devotion; and, therefore, to turn away from Jesus Christ, to ignore His call, reject His claim upon our lives, and disobey His Word, is to turn away from and live in rebellion against the one and only true and living God. But to receive Jesus Christ, to worship Him as our Lord and our God, and to trust in Him as our only Savior, is to live in blessed fellowship with the eternal, immortal, invisible God who created us and all things for His own glory.

The Second Commandment also points us clearly to the divine nature, the God-hood of Jesus Christ. We read from Acts 17 of Paul’s encounter with the pagan philosophers of Athens. The Scripture says that Paul "was greatly distressed to see that the city was full of idols." In the midst of this idolatry, Paul began to preach the gospel of Jesus’ resurrection from the dead. The pagan philosophers wanted to know more about this strange teaching, but only because they loved to speculate and debate about all the latest philosophical fads. Paul then began to preach to them, at their own level, so-to-speak. He said,

Men of Athens! I see that in every way you are very religious. For as I walked around and looked carefully at your objects of worship, I even found an altar with this inscription: TO AN UNKNOWN GOD. Now what you worship as something unknown, I am going to proclaim to you" (Acts 17:22-23).

Paul then continues by declaring to them the most basic points of the true faith in the true God, how that "the God who made the world and everything in it is the Lord of heaven and earth and does not live in temples built by hands, and is not served by human hands, as if he needed anything, because he himself gives all men life and breath and everything else" (Acts 17:24-25). There is, of course, much more that could be said about Paul’s sermon, but the most basic point of all tonight is that, though the city of Athens was filled with idols representing a multitude of gods, their unknown god was, in fact, the true God. Now, think about that: a multitude of idols for a multitude of gods; but the unknown god, was, and is, the living and true God!

That is the way it is with fallen humanity. As we saw from Romans 1 this morning, we human beings are incurably religious. Even in our fallen nature, the divine imprint is upon us, and we, by instinct, will worship some god or gods in one way or another. But because, in our fallen, unregenerate state, our thinking has become futile and our foolish hearts are darkened, we exchange the truth of God for a lie, and worship and serve the creature instead of the Creator. And so, fallen humanity, though very religious, is spiritually blind and bound to worship false gods, while the living and true God is for them the "unknown god." Another way to say this is simply to say that fallen humanity will never truly worship the true and living God by way of religious experimentation. Fallen humanity cannot discover God, or, on its own, find its way to God, because fallen man suppresses the truth by wickedness. And, you know, the sad thing is that the religions of the world, including the neo-pagan religions of New Age spirituality, are all about finding God and finding the way to God. And so they have a multitude of idols for a multitude of gods, but the true and living God remains their "unknown god."

But the gospel of Jesus Christ is that God has made Himself known. Christianity is all about the God who has revealed Himself. He has revealed Himself in His work of creation and providence; more specifically He has revealed Himself in His Word through the prophets, and in His inspired Word of Scripture. And preeminently and supremely, the living and true God has revealed Himself in the person of His eternal Son, Jesus Christ, the Son of God incarnate, the invisible God united with human nature, the God-Man. He, Jesus Christ, is "the image of the invisible God" (Colossians 1:15), and "the radiance of God’s glory and the exact representation of His being" (Hebrews 1:3). He is the God who spoke through the prophet Isaiah, "I will not give my glory to another or my praise to idols" (Isaiah 42:8), and the very God who commanded from Sinai "You shall not make for yourself a carved image." And why? Because He, Jesus Christ is the image of the invisible God, who has revealed Himself and who makes Himself known by the preaching of the gospel in the power of His Spirit. Therefore, all false gods are under His judgment, and, as Paul declared to the pagans in Athens, He will judge the world in righteousness, and the proof of this is His resurrection from the dead. He is not a dead idol; He is the living God. Indeed, He is the God who became Man in order that He might experience human death, destroy death, and deliver from death all those who turn from dead idols to serve and worship Him, the living and true God (First Thessalonians 1:9).

The First and Second Commandments call us to worship, serve, honor, and obey the Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God incarnate, who has come to us full of grace and truth, that we might have life, and life abundant, and be filled with His joy, as we live in fellowship with Him and His eternal Father, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, now and for all eternity, to the glory of His name. Amen.