Dennis Tuuri

# Sermon Transcript: The First Word
## Reformation Covenant Church
### Pastor Dennis Tuuri

Sermon text for today is Deuteronomy 5:1-7. Please stand for the reading of God’s word.

**Deuteronomy 5:1-7**

And Moses called all Israel and said to them, “Hear, O Israel, the statutes and judgments which I speak in your hearing today, that you may learn them, and be careful to observe them. The Lord our God made a covenant with us in Horeb. The Lord did not make this covenant with our fathers, but with us, even those who are here today, all of us who are alive. The Lord talked with you face to face on the mountain from the midst of the fire. I stood between the Lord and you at that time to declare to you the word of the Lord, for you were afraid because of the fire, and you did not go up the mountain. He said, I am the Lord your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage. You shall have no other gods before me.

Let’s pray. Father, we thank you for your word. We thank you for your indwelling Spirit given to us on the basis of our Savior, his death and resurrection and ascension. Help us, Lord God, to understand his word today from that heavenly perspective. Transform our lives. In Christ’s name we ask it. Amen.

Please be seated.

This is my first sermon on the first word. Last week we gave an introduction to the series of sermons on those ten words. Next week we’ll have a brief interruption in the series as Chris W. in the providence of God—or Lord willing rather—will be bringing the sermon. Chris is coming down for Jubilee and will stay with us through the weekend and preach here.

The reason why Chris will be here is because at one time he was one of Mark Driscoll’s trainees, became reformed, went to Greyfriars, and is now a member of Dean Helix’s church up in Lynwood, Washington—a CRC church. Chris has interest in reaching cities, similar to what Mark Driscoll is doing. He’s heard about our possible vision for a plant in Portland that would work in connection with other churches as we try to transform the culture of Portland and thus the culture of our region.

And so he is coming down for that purpose. It’s a reminder to us—him being here as well as the Jubilee being overseen and planned for by our younger people, young folks in our church who are interested in a Portland plant. It’s a way to put it in front of us again and to remind ourselves about it.

This week, in a blurb for Andy Wilson’s new book, *Notes from the Tiltha World*, which I strongly recommend, there was a reference to the New Calvinism. There was an article in Time magazine in March of this year where the New Calvinism was listed in the category of ten ideas changing the world right now. So according to Time magazine, the New Calvinism is one of the top ten ideas changing the world right now. This has to do with young people who in their Christianity are becoming Calvinistic but in a way that’s somewhat different from old Calvinism.

Mark Driscoll is one of the leaders identified by Time magazine with the New Calvinism, as is John Piper. He’s a man in the context of the Southern Baptist movement. It’s really quite a movement. It’s interesting to me as I read Mark Driscoll’s characterization of what the New Calvinism is. He says there are four distinguishing features, and I want to read a couple of them.

One: Old Calvinism was fundamentalist or liberal and separated from or syncretized with culture. New Calvinism is missional and seeks to create and redeem culture. Well, that’s great. That’s what we believe as well. And that’s been the message here—redeeming and creating godly culture rather than just abandoning it. That’s what I would call a postmillennial kind of vision for the future.

Two: Old Calvinism fled from the cities. New Calvinism is flooding into cities. Okay, so this is the new Christian urbanization that we’ve been talking about. It is really what’s behind this vision for at least supporting or perhaps doing our own church plant in Portland. You have to understand that the young people in our church who are interested in doing this—they’re part of a movement. Now, they probably didn’t know that, and I didn’t know what we were doing here was part of a movement, but it is. And it’s a movement, I believe, of the Holy Spirit.

We’ve been doing things here for a decade or two along these same lines. And lo and behold, if you look up from your work and look across the landscape across the country, and apparently according to Time across the world, people are doing similar works. What caused you all to do those works? Well, I’d say it’s the movement of the Holy Spirit.

So that’s why Chris W. is coming next week—because of that sort of thing. It’s interesting that the same opponents of New Calvinism were also the opponents of Federal Vision. And so that’s an interesting connection as well.

What’s it got to do with the ten words? Well, mostly it’s an explanation of the interruption in the series. But secondly, as we engage culture, as we try to transform the city of Portland, the city of Oregon City, or whatever it is where our churches are where plants will occur, the way we’re going to do that is by being faithful to the ten words. That’s the point of the ten words.

God’s going to create a new world. He’s brought them out of the old world, which is destroyed. And as he brings them out, they’re going into a new world. They’ll destroy who’s there now, but then they’ll start to build new cultures. And the way you create the kind of new covenant world that is given to us by the great fulfillment—the greater Passover in Exodus—is described for us in this way, in this teaching, in this Torah that includes mitzvot and commands and other things.

So I very much believe that a proper founding and understanding of the ten words will be critical for any kind of mission work that’s going to transform a culture. This is the leaven of the kingdom that we seek to insert into Portland, Oregon City, wherever that will grow and fill that area for the Lord Jesus Christ. So these sermons I think are absolutely critical for understanding it.

Now I keep saying “the ten words,” and I know that some people are concerned about that. Let me just say again that the only places where the term “ten commandments” is used—and on the outline today I gave you all three references—the Hebrew word is *dabar*, word. Word is comprehensive. Commandment is a subset of word. The word involves commandments. It involves instruction. It involves historical allusions. It involves theology: “I am the Lord your God.” It involves various things including commands, but it is a word.

And what we have in Deuteronomy particularly is a long sermon by Moses, or a series of sermons, on those ten words. So it’s a sermonic analysis that will go a long way toward helping us remember this is not some narrowly confined little thing. It has comprehensive understanding for our lives.

In fact, I think I could say that the binding authority of the ten words is only found when we see them as words and not only commandments. That sounds weird, but here’s why I think that. Because these commandments were given at a particular place in time, to a particular people, in a particular moment of history, and some of those commandments have to do with the way they were going to dress, for instance. Does that have direct application to us? It has application. Is it a command for us? No.

So as the Westminster Standards say, the Mosaic judicials have expired. Those commandments were given for a particular period in time, but the reason why they’re binding upon us—the truths and the commandments, some of the commandments contained in the ten words—is because they’re words and not a law code delivered at one point in time for one culture in one particular period and setting. The fact that they are words carries them forward to us with command properties to us. They’re commands to us and they remain commands because they’re not structured in a way that’s only a command for these particular people. It’s a word that contains commands.

In the Middle Ages, the word “repentance”—you get the Bible, you got repentance—and their theology drove them to focus on the penance aspect of repentance. So repentance is a turning away from one thing and a turning toward God. It’s a seeking of forgiveness. It involves a lot of things, and it can involve restitution. If somebody steals from me, they’re supposed to pay back double.

The application of the ten words and the sermon on the ten words I think is pretty directly applicable to us. So that’s part of it if you want to think of that as doing penance. The problem was in the medieval period they translated that as a code word basically. So repentance equals penance rather than penance or doing works as a subset of restitution of repentance. And as a result they ended up all messed up.

So command is there, but it’s a subset of word, and God gives us specifically the Hebrew word *dabar* for word to remind us of all of that. Okay.

Remember that what we said last week is that we’ll talk more about motivation at the end of today’s sermon, but throughout the first word there are repeated references in the Moses sermon on it in chapters 6 to 11 to fear God. Fear is vitally important.

You know, we had a teaching moment at the White House, so-called, as they brought together the people that we talked about in the controversy from last Sunday—the policeman and the professor. And it was a teaching moment. The question is great, but the question is what does it teach us? And I would say that one of the vital aspects of how it instructs us or teaches us is hopefully everybody understood a little bit better by the end of the story what police do, why they go into your house, why they want to search your house.

You know, something happens—accidental triggering, false report, whatever it is—and the police show up at your house and they want to search it. And you say, “Well, a man’s home is his castle. I’ve got inalienable rights. Get out of here.” They’re not searching it because they’re looking for evidence against you. They’re searching it to rescue your wife if she’s being held in the back bedroom at gunpoint. So they have reasons for doing what they do.

And it was a teachable moment for a lot of people to realize, “Oh, that’s what it is. It was a teachable moment to remind us of why we’re not supposed to get ticked off at authorities. They’ve got power. Real power. They can put the cuffs on you. Teachable moment for our kids. Look what happened here. Smart guy, professor owns—well, he doesn’t own it. He rents it. He gets hauled off to jail and has a mug shot. You know why? Because he was disrespectful to God’s authorities that he’s placed in the context of our lives. Right?

We have to properly fear God. And that means fearing the authorities that he’s placed in our lives. We should fear God, as we said last week, as our loving master. And this means a good attitude, a proper fearful attitude toward rulers or toward police. A good attitude toward police. We assume the best about them. They probably have a good reason for doing stuff that we don’t understand. A lot of things in life are that way.

Rulers have power. And if you resist the ruler, Paul makes it quite clear in Romans 13, it’s not going to be for your good. He bears the sword. So don’t do that. Don’t get angry. Don’t start cussing the cop out or his mother because he’s a representation of God’s authority. Those are some of the teachable moments that happen that relate to the motivation for God giving us the instructions to obey the commands found in these ten words. Okay.

Now let’s talk specifically about this first word. I’ve included on your outline the actual text that I just read: the first commandment. And you know, good people disagree about this, but some people believe that because the first commandment, “You shall have no other gods before me,” comes after “I am the Lord your God,” they really see those two sentences as one command. And I’m not going to get hung up on it, but that’s why I’ve got it here this way. Is it a prologue, the first sentence, or part of the first command? Well, maybe a little bit of both, and we can look at it from that perspective.

So there’s a bit of a prologue, but it helps us to understand the first command, and we’ll use it that way.

What’s the basic meaning of this first word? As I’ve tried to point out in the outline at the top, I don’t think the basic meaning is “you can’t have any other gods.” And I want to talk about why that is. In the case laws—the case sermons, the case words—in Exodus 21:6, Exodus 22:8, and in Exodus 22:28, the translation you’ll see in your Bible is “judges,” right? “His master shall bring him to the judges. The master of the house shall be brought to the judges.” Judges plural.

But the Hebrew word that’s being translated there is *Elohim*. It’s the same Hebrew word as “having no other gods before me.” No other *Elohim* before me. “I am the Lord your *Elohim*. Have no other *Elohim* before me.” But he actually tells us that our judges are *Elohim*. They are authorities or powers.

Now, you know, we don’t like to think about this. You get a little worried about the creator-creature distinction and all that sort of stuff. And that’s fine. We’re not saying that they’re little pieces of deity, but we are saying they are powers or forces. And that’s what *Elohim* has reference to: power, strength, authority. And God actually calls civil authorities, judges, as little gods. The word “God”—when it’s translated in the Hebrew, when you see “Lord your God”—God is *Elohim*. *Elohim* means authorities. And there are smaller gods—called judges here—who are given the same name because they’re supposed to represent God and they have authority and power.

Adam, after he sins, God says he’s become like us. How has he become like God? How does he have godlike something? And what it is: he’s eaten of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. He’s eaten of the tree of rule and authority. He’s grasped at rule and authority. He’s grasped at being a judge, too quickly. He’s immature. But because of that, now he’s become like God because now he’s going to rule, and he’s not going to do it right. So he’s a ruler. He’s an *Elohim*, we could say, right?

And so the text can’t mean “you can’t have any other gods.” If the text stopped there—well, okay, it says that—but clearly we have to put that together with other pieces of Scripture and understand it in context. And in context, it would be saying the same thing: no other gods more powerful than me or equal to me in your mind. And so he does that here by saying “you have no other gods before me.” And so it doesn’t say—it doesn’t imply an absolute prohibition on gods.

In fact, it seems to have within it the first word an acknowledgement that there are gods. He says, “You shall have no other gods before me,” meaning the gods you have can’t be placed in preeminence in reference to me or equality to me. And the implication is that you’re going to have gods, and that isn’t bad. And he sets up judges, and he actually calls them gods.

In Psalm 58:1, he says, “Do you indeed decree what is right, you gods?” And he’s criticizing judges or people with rule and authority. And he’s referring to them again as *Elohim*. The same truth is in Psalm 82.

Psalm 82: God stands in the congregation of the mighty. He judges among the gods. Well, what is that? He’s in the pantheon with all the… No, what he’s going to talk about here are judges. “How long will you judge unjustly and show partiality to the wicked?”

Remember the nice Presbyterian word for elders is session, corporately. And it represents the session of God’s rule. Jesus is at the session. It’s begun his session, and his session rules through courts. And so ecclesiastical judges, civil judges, are sessions. They’re representing the rule of Christ. And here God is calling them into account for not being good gods. You’re being crummy gods because you’re not judging correctly.

“How long will you judge unjustly and show partiality to the wicked? Good *Elohim*, good powers, good gods are supposed to defend the poor and fatherless, do justice to the afflicted and needy, deliver the poor and needy, free them from the hand of the wicked.”

“They do not know, nor do they understand. They walk about in darkness. All the foundations of the earth are unstable.” They’re talking about the judges, I think, here—the wrong judges who don’t rule correctly.

“I said you are gods. All of you are children of the Most High. But you’ll die like men.” So he’s not saying he’s deified civil rulers or church rulers. He’s saying your gods—your *Elohim*, your smaller gods, your authorities and powers that are supposed to represent me. And if you don’t, you’ll realize you’ll die like a disempowered, an unempowered man, as opposed to an empowered ruler for me.

So you know, there are two names for God put forward in this first commandment—two names. And the first name, “God,” that we’re talking about here means something or someone with power. Now I say “something” because the idea is an allusion to power and authority. And as we walk around the world, things have power over us. God, Paul says, you know, your belly can become your god. Well, it is a god. It is a power in your life, right? Your belly says it’s time to eat, and you listen to it, and that’s not wrong. God intends you to have hunger.

The small power or authority of one’s belly is supposed to drive you to work. Hunger is supposed to be a motivation for work. So you know, it isn’t just people. There are kind of what we think of as forces. We’ll talk about that in a little bit. They are personal. They come from God. Your stomach is made by God. There’s personal stuff going on. But anything or any person with power can be described as a god—*Elohim*—strength, authority.

Human judges are actually explicitly called gods in the Bible. You don’t like this part of the sermon? It’s like the ten words thing. I can’t help it. That’s what it says in Exodus. That’s what it says in Psalm 58 and Psalm 82. That’s not my deal. That’s the way God wrote the book. There are many gods, then, or powers.

So another synonym for God, in this sense of the term, is power. So when we sang last week our version of the ten commandments—which is a great song, I love it just fine—but when verse two ends with “Have then no other gods but me,” that’s not quite the sense in the absolute sense. Yeah, we can sing it. We can put an interpretation to it. Yeah, no god in the absolute sense. But that’s not really quite what this commandment says.

This commandment says: those powers and authorities that I give to you, those people—they all have to be subjugated in terms of your obedience to me. You have to have no idols in reference to me.

Now, the second commandment is specifically talking about idols. But there’s a sense in which all of the first three commandments in reference to God are against idolatry, right? So if our gods become our belly, become our god, if the judges in the earth become our ultimate god, then they’re an idol for destruction, as Herbert Schaeffer called it in his book.

And so they’re an idol. So one way to think of the first three words is: the first word prohibits covenantal idolatry. We’re going to talk about this, but the second name for God—Yahweh—means covenant faithfulness, to complete the covenant. So the covenant is in view specifically in verse one or word one. So, covenantal idolatry.

The second word, which is mediation—we really got, you know, again our responsive reading will have to be adjusted because we’ve got the idea of mediation as a New Testament response to the first word. There’s no mediator between God and man except the man Christ Jesus. Well, mediation is what the second word is about. And it has to do with liturgy and what you do in worship. And so it talks about liturgical idolatry.

And then the third word—not having an empty witness in the life—is talking about practical idolatry. So they’re all about idols, but this one particularly has reference to the covenant, and the name of God helps us to remember that we are to have loyalty. So we’re not supposed to not have any other gods, but our primary loyalty, our first loyalty—everything has to be subjugated to the God of gods, the King of Kings.

Turn to Exodus 6, and we’re going to look at verses 2 to 8 as a little text that explains these two names that are used for God in the first word—Yahweh and God. Yahweh is the name that God gives to Moses at the burning bush. God is the name that’s *Elohim*, strong one. Elijah is a contraction between a shortened form of *Elohim* and Yahweh.

In Exodus chapter 6, verse 2: “God the all-powerful one spoke to Moses and said to him, ‘I am the Lord.’”

You know, names are significant, right? You know, it’s interesting if you think of the Sabbath—my wife has pointed this out to me, and we’ll talk about this a little later—but if you think of the Sabbath, on one side of the Sabbath is not taking God’s name in vain, and on the other side of the Sabbath are obligations relative to your parents.

Your parents have given you a family name, and that family name is significant in terms of what you do. It’s a reflection of being careful to carry God’s name not with emptiness. I think we can see by implication: don’t carry your family’s name in emptiness. If you’re going to be a member of that family, carry that name well.

Secondly, your parents have named you. And we all know, as Paul says in *Dune*, to name a thing is to control a thing. So in a sense, your parents are exhibiting godlike power over you. This is true. Can’t be ultimate, but it is a power over you. And that power is demonstrated in their naming of you. Okay?

Now God won’t be named by man. He won’t let Moses name him. He will reveal himself to Moses and he’ll say, “This is my name. This is my other name.” God will not be ruled or controlled. He is the ultimate namer. And now Adam has nearly godlike powers. He has power because he’s given the power to do what in the garden? To name things, right? To take God. So again, he’s like an *Elohim*. He’s a strong one by giving names.

Well, here God says, “No, I’ll tell you who I am. I am the Lord.”

And in a way, it’s a name and in a way it’s not a name. What does it mean? Well, he goes on to tell us what it means. “I appeared to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob as God Almighty, the powerful God.” *El Shaddai* in some of your Bibles—that don’t translate it. *El* is shortened for *Elohim*, strong one, God. *Shaddai*, mighty, Almighty, God Almighty.

“But by my name, Lord”—Yahweh is what the Hebrew is here—”I was not known to them. I have also established my covenant with them to give them the land of Canaan.”

He said, “I’m going to give you the land of Canaan, but I’m not Yahweh.” He doesn’t reveal himself as Yahweh to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. No, he reveals himself as God Almighty. He is the one who is powerful, and he’s going to give him a promise that he’s not going to bring to pass. Okay? And they’re to trust him because he’s the most powerful God of all gods. He is God Almighty. He is the big, powerful, most omnipotent God.

So He promises them and wants them to trust him even though he doesn’t bring it to pass because of his strength. Now he goes on and says, “I have remembered my covenant. They’re now in bondage. He says in verse 5, ‘In Egypt, but I remembered my covenant. Therefore say to the children of Israel, I am Yahweh. I will bring you out from under the burdens of the Egyptians. I’ll redeem you. I’ll take you as my people. I’ll be your God.’”

He says that his name Yahweh is connected to the performance of the promises. He’s promised certain things to them, and he’s going to trust his promises because he’s all powerful. And now as he’s bringing about his promises, as he’s bringing them into the land, as he’s delivering them and redeeming them, Yahweh is the name that focuses on his performance as their covenant God—ability and performance.

Now, the performance is in godlike power of course, but that’s the differentiation between the names. It has to do with the promise of the covenant and then the fulfilling of that covenant in what he does.

So he says, “I am the Lord your God.” Okay? You’re my people. I’ll be your God. So Yahweh is “you’re my people, I’m doing things for you.” And Yahweh is “your *Elohim* who brings you out from under the burden of the Egyptians. I told you I was powerful enough to do it. I’m going to demonstrate the power. And as I demonstrate it, I’m going to call myself now Yahweh, who is the faithful one to the covenant.”

It’s his faithfulness to the covenant that’s what he’s doing. “I’ll bring you into that land that I swore to give to the fathers, and I will give it to you as a heritage. I’m Yahweh. I’m fulfilling now the covenant.”

So that’s a little of the distinction between these two names. God is the God of gods, King of Kings, Lord of Lords. This power, God, always—as this word teaches us—is that God gets first place before us. God gets first place. So the basic meaning of this word, God, is that he gets first place over every other power and authority in the context of who we are.

So God, the Daniel—well, in the very first chapter of Daniel we read: “In the third year of the reign of Jehoakim, king of Judah, Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon, came to Jerusalem and besieged it. And the Lord gave Jehoakim, king of Judah, into the hands of Nebuchadnezzar with some of the articles of the house of God, which he carried into the land of Shinar, to the house of his God, his *Elohim*, his power, his authority.”

And what happens in chapter one is, so the setting is: who’s God? We’ve got the God here, the Lord and his house. And Nebuchadnezzar takes stuff from his house and puts it in his house of his lord. So it sets up the whole thing—the beginning of Daniel—in terms of the first word. Who’s the power? Who has ultimate power? And we’re reminded back—you know, God warred against Dagon, and that one who is more powerful, God, he can knock Dagon down, knock his head off at the doorway, knock his hands off, his power off. So that’s what we’ve got set up for us here.

And as people heard this coming back from Daniel, they would have thought about that first word of the powerful God. “I am your God. Don’t have any other gods take preeminence over me. Right?”

And what happens? Daniel says, you know, “I’m going to establish something to tell you, Nebuchadnezzar, that I have a higher loyalty than you, my loyal. I’m going to be a good servant. I’m going to go to your school. I’m going to use your tax-funded educational system and housing. I’m going to eat your food. I’m going to do all that stuff for you. I’m going to be a good servant of the European Union or whatever it is or the United States of Europe and Canada, whatever it turns out to be. I’m going to be a servant. I’m not like those rebels in Jerusalem who just want to spit on the authorities that God has brought to bring chastisement to his people.

No, I’m going to be a good servant. But from the get-go, I’m going to establish that I have a higher loyalty than you. My higher loyalty is Yahweh.”

And now Daniel chose a test for doing this that I don’t understand except that food is about all there is in life. You know, Adam is created and he’s given a world to eat. That’s about all there is. You know, when God’s people are called out of Egypt, they’re called to have a feast. Everything’s about being called to dinner in the Scriptures. So I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that he starts with food. And I don’t know why beyond that. I’ve heard lots of explanations, and they’re all interesting. But I think in a way it doesn’t make a whole lot of difference.

I think Daniel in his wisdom, even as a very young man—18 years old or something—Daniel in his wisdom chose something, and he chose it just to demonstrate his higher loyalty to Yahweh.

And so the first chapter of Daniel is about covenant loyalty and getting rid of covenant idolatry—not being part of it. The second chapter is going to be about worship, just like the second word is about liturgical idolatry, and he’s not going to do that either. The first chapter is about who’s God? Who’s the god? The god of gods. Don’t deny that Nebuchadnezzar is a power. No, he’s a power. But who’s greater? God.

Now as we look at that, that means that in our lives, if we’re going to be like Daniel, applying the truths of the first word, we’re going to have to have some wisdom. It doesn’t mean you have to use food, but it does mean when you think that your loyalties are being called into question and people could perceive that your ultimate loyalty is to the God of Obama or whatever it is, or Bush, you have to do something.

If you’re called to serve in the Bush administration or now the Obama administration, you want to be a good Daniel. You want to try to win the king’s heart. You want to bring him to conversion. But you also will have to in wisdom think through: how am I going to establish to him that my primary loyalty is to Yahweh? That’s what the first word calls us to do. And it calls us to do it today. It says that in all of our relationships—in our work, our entertainment, our recreation.

Now, one way to do that is the Lord’s day, right? You know, we have freedom. Daniel didn’t have this freedom. We have freedom and we can say, “Well, we’re not going to work on Sunday, or we’re not going to play ball on Sunday. If that’s what the league’s about, we’re not doing it because our ultimate loyalty is to God and his worship.” So practical application: real easy to see in the life of Daniel and easy to see how it relates to us.

Now, what are some typical opponents to the God of gods and King of Kings and Lord of Lords? What stuff are we tempted to have become more important to us than Yahweh? This is point three of your outline: Typical idols and their present-day manifestations.

And this term I use: idols of nature and idols of history. These are terms that I mentioned from Schaeffer, *Idols for Destruction*, a book that’s in our library. He says there’s basically two kinds of idols: idols of nature and idols of history, which have to do with humanity.

So there’s idols of nature. And you can see this in the Old Testament. Flynn A. talked a little bit about this a couple weeks ago. Baal is the great god of forces and nature and all that stuff. And so people can be tempted to worship force or creation. We’re tempted to worship the forces in nature or the forces of creation.

You know, the ultimate thing is fire, and it’s more ultimate than the God who created everything, and that’s what we’re going to serve. And it sounds ridiculous, and it’s hard to see it being done in the same ways as Baal worship was being done. But on the other hand, I think it is being done. Some I say angels on your outline because, you know, the word of God first of all refers to angels as sons of God—or sons of *Elohim*—which makes them little *Elohim* in Job. The text I’ve spelled out for on the outline. They’re little powers. The angels had power. They had a great deal of power in the Old Testament, particularly before man matriculated, graduated. They kind of ran everything, and now we’re running everything. But they ran everything. And they still run a lot of nature.

There are no impersonal forces in the world. God speaks the world into existence, and as he continues to speak it, he uses angels, the Psalms tells us, as his ministers. So angels, you know, some people have said that gravity is either angels pushing down or pulling down, and which may be a little bit too—you know, the illustration probably doesn’t work very well—but the point is the forces of nature are not impersonal. They really are kind of angelic ministrations of God, and angels. You know, we can be tempted to worship these things. They’re pretty cool deals when you see them.

John the Revelator saw one and wanted to worship the thing. He fell down to worship. “No, no, don’t worship me.” So when we talk about creation worship, really, kind of behind it is angel worship.

And what do we have in our day and age? We have kind of a resurgence and a new form of Baalism in creation worship—Save the Earth, Earth Day. And we’ve got also a whole bunch of talk about angels being so important in the context of who we are.

Now these idols are perversions of real deals. There is a sense in which the sliver of truth of animism is that things are not isolated from a personal God. You know, God controls everything personally, and a lot of that control seems to be exercised through angels. The problem—so we don’t want to deny forces of nature, but we don’t want to see them as more ultimate than God.

You know, St. Patrick’s Breastplate talks about all the forces of nature being overseen by God. He knew they were forces, but he knew that they were forces and powers that were overseen by the great power, *Elohim*, the Yahweh, the covenant-keeping God.

So, you know, abortion—people are willing. The test of an idol is everything else has to go instead of the idol. And people are willing (some people in the world, some people in our country, some people in our government) to try to encourage abortion, the death of humanity, for the sake of saving the earth. We’re polluters, of course. We breathe out that horrible carbon dioxide stuff. Trees ought to be here, not us. That’s the way people think.

And without a theistic perspective, without a biblical perspective, you can see why they do. So they’re willing to kill their own children, or your children, for the sake of the idol Baal, the created order, the earth, whom they’re going to save through sacrificing people. Now, that’s what’s going on. Now, it’s not self-conscious usually, but it is in some people. But it’s a practical idolatry that we want to avoid.

We shouldn’t fall into creature worship. Jesus is over the angels. It’s a big deal in Hebrews. Jesus is better than the angels. And he brings humanity into rule and power over the angels. Many people today serve the earth, not God. The earth is ultimate—Gaia, whatever it is. We are to serve the Creator.

So we can engage in environmental stuff, but we have to make clear again—if we’re engaged in that kind of thing—that our ultimate loyalty is to Yahweh. Yahweh has not given the earth, which then men are a problem to. Yahweh has given the earth that men are to exercise proper dominion over, but the earth is not preeminent. Okay? Man is the crown of God’s creation. And to sacrifice the primary image-bearer of God—man—for the sake of saving the earth shows the religious idolatry that’s going on.

The covenantal idolatry: we’re supposed to serve the Creator. One space is missing from number 12—an R. I left out one blank. So “Creator” is the answer to number 12. People are the crown of God’s creation. All right.

Then there are idols of history or humanity. Sex worship. Astarte, you know, and again I think Flynn A. talked about this a little bit. What do you see? So I’m looking at the Old Testament names of the preeminent gods and saying: how are they reflected to us today? How are the gods—who are powers or authorities—improperly placed into primary godlike nature?

People worship sex. And I mean, this is still very much with us. And now, in the past, it was more involved with the generative powers—the ability to bring forth offspring. And in our day and age, it’s—and this frequently happens in cultures as well—degenerated into just pure sexuality that, you know, has no generative capability involved in it because nothing is generated. It’s just fornication.

And so in our day and age, this is an idol that some of you—half of you probably—have to struggle with. The first commandment tells you first of all: don’t deny the power of sexuality. It is a power. It’s a force in your life. It’s a tremendous force that God uses to create families. That’s why guys and girls get married—at least from one perspective. They’re being driven to it by a force and a power that comes from God. It’s a good thing. It’s a lot of fun because God wants you to have godly children in the context of marriage.

So it’s a power. The problem is when that power becomes higher than bringing it under the authority of God. And when you engage in pornography or when you engage in illicit sexuality, what you’re doing is you’re violating the first word. You’re putting a power—which is a good power—so you’re not having it in submission now to Yahweh.

And some of you young men, some of you older men, your lives are much less effective. And some men, their lives are totally blown up because they won’t deal with the first word implications of their sexual sin. You cannot mess around with a little bit of idolatry. God doesn’t like it. It has natural consequences. It’s going to hurt you.

I’ve said this before. I say it again. I tell people this all the time, and virtually nobody listens to me. Nobody does it. Men think, you know, they hit a crisis point with pornography and then they cry out, and okay, yeah, and then they go back and they don’t do anything about it. They don’t try to fix the basic problem. You have to put a stake through the heart of that particular sin.

It’s one of the most powerful forces that God has created—for his good, for our good rather, in his glory. And so it’s a powerful thing. And when we allow it to have preeminence over God’s control of it, then we’re violating the first commandment. You know, all other powers have to be subjugated to him.

So, you know, immediate application of the first word to some of you is to get software for your computer. Get another guy. I don’t recommend your wife if you’re married. Get somebody. Get accountability structures in place. That’s the way it works. You can’t do it with—I’ve never known anybody that I can think of that was able to handle this kind of problem on their own. Get structures. Make the structures work. Do it the rest of your life if you have to. So what? Humbling? You bet it is. And that’s what we need: humility before God and each other.

Ancestor worship. We talked about Westminster Confession of Faith as a totem pole in our Sunday school class today. You know, one of the biggest forces in tribal culture is ancestor worship. The ancestors have set things up. And the way they set them up is what’s supposed to govern the culture forever. And the way they’re going to enforce that is—they’ll do it one way through ritual: a totem pole with a face with really big eyes representing your ancestors who are now in the spirit world. And in the spirit world, the ancestors are looking at you. Or they’ll make faces in the ritual performances. These faces will have big eyes. The ancestors are watching. Don’t break the taboo. Don’t have sex outside of your wife. Don’t go, you know, kill your other members of the tribe.

See, they set stuff up—taboos—and they enforce them through the looking on of ancestors. Now, ancestors are a power. Parents are a power. Families have power. That’s okay. God wants it that way. And in a way, some of that’s good because people do keep away from taboos because of the fear of the ancestors. And they tend not to devolve any further. But they also don’t evolve further. They don’t culturally progress and mature. It freezes development at a particular point in time.

Some men are using the Westminster Standards, I think, as a totem pole. They’re using a perversion of it—their modern idea of what they think about what it says—and they’re looking everywhere to see if anybody’s breaking the taboo of the Westminster Standards as they understand them. And when you are, they cast you out of the tribe, right? Keeps the tribe stable, but it doesn’t produce growth and maturation. Growth and maturation happens by following the first word. It’s to our good not to let ancestral power—parents—have ultimate authorities over who we are.

Now, as I said, you know, parents are good. Maintaining their name is a good thing. That’s what the Scriptures kind of lay out for us. These are all—these things are sex is good. Parents are good. Forces of nature are good. Angels are good. They’re all good in their place. But when our families become more preeminent to us than our loyalty to God, then we have to say, “No, this is not the way it’s supposed to be.”

And there is a movement, you know, in the context of conservative Christianity that is in danger of that and in danger of that. You don’t want to set up all the rules for your children for the rest of their lives and for their grandchildren. That stymies biblical maturation and development. You want to keep pointing them back not to family rules ultimately, but to God’s rules. Our family has family rules, but those family rules are for that particular family. You may adopt them in your family, but if you intend to produce a generation of people that have your family rules as opposed to God’s rules, man, you’re in danger of violation of the first word, and it’s not going to be good.

Jesus is more important than parents. He is God—is the God of the fathers, right? “I’m the God of the fathers.” And I used to think of that while continuity. No, one way to think of that is anti-ancestor worship. You’ve got some ancestors, and these were really cool guys: Abraham, and Jacob, Joseph. Now, these were some ancestors that, you know, we would be tempted to worship because they were great guides. And God says, “I was the God of your ancestors. I am the God of your ancestors. Your fathers and your adherence to them must be subjugated to me. I’m God of gods, King of Kings, Lord of Lords.”

These totem poles with their faces are representations of familism.

Three: state worship. Moloch. And this is the worst. Well, not the worst, but this seems dominant to me. Moloch or Milcom in the Old Testament—it seems like this is a word that means state. And so when people worship humanity, when we worship ourselves, what we end up worshiping is the corporate humanity because it’s more big and powerful than little old me. And so people tend to worship the state.

Humanism, in some ways, is good. It does away with a lot of the weird, odd manifestations of idolatry that preceded the coming of the human Jesus Christ, who brings humanity into maturation. But when we use humanism—sometimes we mean by it negatively—that people themselves are the ultimate good, and the end result of that is the exertion, the exultation rather, of the civil state as the ultimate good.

A monopolistic state is a result of people’s ultimately putting covenant loyalties to something that is good and proper—the state. It’s a good institution, but it’s a violation of the first word. And it becomes more important than your adherence to God. When you start doing things in your civil government that ends up with violations of God’s way he says civil governments and cultures are supposed to work, then you violated the first word in reference to civil states.

Many people today serve the state rather than their Creator. This state.

Now, I’ve got a couple of quick comments about Cash for Clunkers and the healthcare program. I put out an email. I think this is the time. This is the time, August—one of maybe one of the most important months in our country’s history. Statism is on the move, and the progressives are trying to get obedience, covenantal obedience, to the state in a way that we’ve never seen before in this country. And the mechanism, one of the primary mechanisms, is healthcare.

If you control—if the state ends up paying for everybody’s healthcare and the state can also then tell you, “Well, we’re going to cut costs, so we don’t want you doing this, that, or the other thing”—and the state, everything you eat, everything you do, everything you breathe has an impact on your body, right, on your health. So if I’m in control of your health, you know, me only, no competition to me—I’ve got a monopoly over 300 million people about their health, their individual health. I now can control every aspect of your life.

Now, this is bad. This is statism gone wild. And that’s what we’re on the verge of. For the next 30 days, Congress are going to be in their districts having town hall meetings. We should write to them, email them, go in person, tell them we don’t like what you guys are doing. And God has given us an interesting gift in the last couple of days. He gave us Cash for Clunkers. He gave us a government program that was intended to last until November, and already has become out of money, and now they’re going to triple the size of it.

Cash for Clunkers: $4,500 bucks for a car—$3,500 to $4,500 bucks. Trade in your old car, which may be a perfectly good car if it gets, if you trade it in, certain ones for 2 miles per gallon more better efficiency—then they’ll give you between $3,500 and $4,500 bucks for your car. Now, they’re going to crush it.

Let me give you some things of the problem.

Cash for Clunkers highlights the state’s inability to plan accurately. The state can’t plan. They thought, “Oh, this program will last till November 1st.” It’s already out of money after 4 days of actual implementation.

Two, it highlights the inefficiency of government programs. It’s caused chaos through shifting rules. The rules changed this week in terms of which cars are eligible and which weren’t. And now dealerships are already doing this program. Dealerships are using the opportunity to sell a bunch of new cars, but now they can’t get their money back from the federal government. There’s chaos. The forms to fill out are lengthy. The manual is lengthy. It’s a bureaucratic system, and it just produces a problem. It, you know, mandates, for instance, that the used car once it’s been traded in has to be crushed within 2 days.

So the dealer in good faith does the program, crushes the car, says, “Give me my $4,000 bucks now from the government.” Government says, “No.”

Why not? Well, there’s nobody to ask why not. It’s a government bureaucracy, and dealers have been turned down multiple times, and they completely meet the qualifications. It highlights the inefficiency of government programs. You can’t have a 1983 car to turn in because the government has decided ’84 and up. You got an ’83 car without a catalytic converter. If the whole point is the environment, what’s wrong with the ’83 car?

Well, you know, the government has created an inefficient program, and that was shown in spades in the last few days and all the rush. What are we going to do? We all owe these people money, and cars are being sold. Oh, we’ll give you the money, they say, but we don’t know if they’re going to give us the money or not. Only the House passed an extra two billion bucks. The Senate hasn’t. McCain may boycott it.

Three: Cash for Clunkers is an intrusion in the marketplace, which causes disruptions—unplanned for disruptions. My son-in-law is immediately affected. He’s already had a couple of people tell him, “Well, we’re going to have you work on these cars, but we’ve decided to trade them in for Cash for Clunkers.”

So people that repair used cars all of a sudden have less business. People that buy used cars—which are poor people, right?—their cars are going up in price. You got thousands, tens of thousands, of used cars taken off the used car market and crushed. And that means your supply of used cars is smaller. That means the price for each used car goes up. And poor people are having to pay more and more money for used cars.

Used car parts—you can’t take parts off the cars before they’re crushed. And so used car parts are also rising in price. All these market disruptions because people are looking to the state to solve a problem that, really, in a lot of ways, the state created.

Scrap metal prices have become depressed, of course, since you’ve got all these cars being crushed and sold as scrap metal. So scrap metal producers are in trouble. It’ll probably cause an anomalous bust in new car sales as soon as the program’s over. That will create a clamor for increasing the program and extending it beyond November, right? Because if you’re going to buy a car now, you’re going to do it today before the program runs out. You’re going to do it this weekend because the program is already out of money, and you want to get it done quick. So that means you’re not going to do it 6 months later, right?

So it’s going to cause an anomalous surge in sales now and a depression in sales later, which will lead to increased political pressure to increase and lengthen a political program. It shows the cycle of government intervention and resulting cyclical spiral upward of government control. People have clamored and already demanded $2 billion more of this program. The government does it and increases its control over this particular area of the economy.

Five: It highlights the typical rise in costs of whatever the government budgets for. The program started at a billion. If the House has its way, it’s three billion now. They added an extra two billion. Now we’re looking at a healthcare program that’s supposed to cost 1 trillion. It may well cost us 3 trillion. They don’t know what it’s going to cost us. But what you subsidize, you get more of, as this program shows. And it shows us why government benefits increase in their costs beyond what we can control.

Six: The prescription is more booze for the drunkard. What do I mean? How did we get here? Too much debt. How are we getting out of it? We’re encouraging people, rather than to drive their thrifty used car, to trade it in for a car that’s going to put them in debt, usually for $20,000 to $40,000 bucks. We’re fixing the drunkard’s problem with the same booze we gave them to get him drunk to begin with.

This is what the state does when it is looked at as a power beyond the controls and limitations of what God asked us to bring to pass. Now, all of that is a gift of God. It’s a tiny little program. It’s a billion compared to a trillion. It’s only—you got to do if you get the car thing going on. The other program, a trillion plus, is going to give the government control over absolutely everything you do. Whether they exercise it or not, we’ll see. They probably will.

They are warring on private insurance companies. Nancy Pelosi has made that clear. She said, “The glory days of the health insurance companies are over.” What is wrong with the health insurance company? They’re already one of the most regulated industries in the country, but they want to put them out of business. They want them dead. They want their stockholders dead. They want, you know, their involvement in the health program dead.

Barney Frank explicitly said this week that, you know, the option of federal health care will certainly lead to the elimination of private insurance because they can compete unfairly, of course. And he said it’s just a transition step to single-payer where the government is in charge of the whole thing. We’re on the verge of this happening, being voted on. The only way it’s not going to get passed through a Democratic legislature is us. It’s the people of God. It’s the people of the country talking to the representatives and saying, “This is horrible. We want our children to have liberty, not tyranny. We want our children, you know, to live with the ability to make financial transactions about their health as they see fit, not as some member of, you know, Pharaoh’s household tells them it’s supposed to run.”

The next 30 days are a critical time for stopping this thing, or at least putting it into a better way of being.

That’s a preview. All of this flows from the first word. Government’s great, but when government is seen as the ultimate authority and is given monopolistic authority over, you know, healthcare, cars, whatever it is—as it’s looked to save us from an economic crisis that they in fact gave us—then God spans us real good because he doesn’t want us to engage in covenantal idolatry by taking forces and powers that he’s given us, subjugated to him, and exalting them over everything else.

May the Lord God grant us success this month, and may he grant us more importantly a meditation on this first word.

What’s the biggest god that we serve? Well, it’s me, right? I mean, if we have no other gods, you’re a powerful person. You’re made in the image of God. You’re an *Elohim*. You’re a power. And your problem is you are tempted, and probably usually do many times a week, to exalt yourself over everything else.

Yeah, you’re tempted to these other forms of idolatry. But you know, in the Bible in the Lord’s Prayer it says, you know, to keep us from evil. It really is personal. It’s the evil one. And good commentators think it’s really a prayer to keep us from the evil of idolatry of ourselves. You’re good. You’re important. You’re supposed to make decisions. You’ve got power. But when you don’t subjugate your life—what you do today, what you do tomorrow, what you do as you wake up, what you do as you go to bed—if you don’t see all of that in submission to the great God of gods, then you’re guilty of the violation of the first commandment, and everything else we’re going to talk about in the ten words flows out of that misplaced loyalty.

May the Lord God grant us loyalty to him today.

Let’s pray. Father, we do thank you for the powers that exist in the world, and we thank you that you have created them for your purposes and our well-being. Forgive us, Lord God, when we take those very powers and exalt them over you. Bless us this week as we attempt to subjugate all powers—ours, including our own—under your great headship. Bless us, Father, in Jesus’ name we ask it. Amen.