You shall have no other gods before me. You shall not make for yourself an Idol, whether in the form of anything that is in heaven above, or that is on the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. You shall not bow down to them or worship them; for I the LORD your God am a jealous God, punishing children for the iniquity of parents, to the third and the fourth generation of those who reject me, but showing steadfast lave to the thousandth generation of those who love me and keep my commandments.

—Exodus 20:3-6

The First Commandment

Our story begins with the voice of God. God is the initiator of this "conversation." If God had not loved enough to speak, there would be no conversation, no Israel, no nation of priests, no story called "church," no us. Unlike the laws found in Deuteronomy or elsewhere in Exodus, the commandments are in the form of direct address from God, thus underscoring their force. God speaks to Israel the way parents sometimes speak to children—directly, pointedly, without equivocation or much qualification. Do not steal. Do not kill.

Furthermore, everything rests upon, "I am the LORD your God." Command arises from relationship. Israel is owned, called, and therefore accountable. Anything that is demanded of Israel rests upon God's election and gifts to Israel, one of those gifts being the Law.

In few places in Israel's testimony about God is it more evident that our assumed distinction between ethics and theology is simply unknown than in the light of this commandment. Freedom from slavery to the empire first requires an active, holy God, a God whose holiness stands against every rival claim to sanctity. So the first commands assert the uniqueness, the oddness of the God who has loved Israel. The true God, who stands at some distance from Israel, is to be obeyed and worshiped, not used or recruited in behalf of our purposes—even when those purposes are called "ethics."

Israel's God commands. Walter Brueggemann calls command the "defining and characteristic marking" of the true God. The most striking characteristic of communication between God and Israel is that of command-obedience. Because we live in a culture where submission to any authority other than our own egos is considered unduly authoritarian and unfair, command-obedience is difficult for us. We have freed ourselves from all external authority except servitude to the self. This we hail as freedom, though Israel testifies that slavery (particularly slavery as the necessity to do "what I want to do") comes in many guises.

Sometimes slavery comes from Pharaoh, who ordered, "Go and get straw yourselves, wherever you can find it; but your work will not be lessened in the least" (Exodus 5:11). Sometimes slavery comes from an economy that says, "Buy a lot of Pepsi, get a lot of stuff."

So the issue is not if we shall live under some external command, but rather which external command will have its way with us. Israel knew the burden of imperial, governmentally sanctioned command. The Exodus was not the achievement of unrestricted, boundless freedom, for such freedom, as we have said, is a modern fiction. The Exodus was not liberation. It was about an exchange of masters, the false for the true.

We were created to be God's good lovers, but everywhere we find we have been enslaved by our choices. That we are so enslaved has everything to do, as we will see in our discussion of the last commandments, with desiring rightly. Part of the problem is our current presumption that freedom is choice rather than desire. God created us as passionate beings. We rightly desire. The problem is when our desire becomes disordered by desiring what is desirable as if God does not exist. The result is slavery.

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For they are my servants, whom I brought out of the land of Egypt; they shall not he soId ad slaves are sold.

— Leviticus 25:42

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Just to the degree Israel is closely tied and utterly obedient to the commandments of the true God, and therefore animated by well-ordered desire, Israel is truly free. God knows that Israel, left to its own devices in the wilderness, is prone to reestablish Pharaoh's rule in different forms. So the commandments are given as a basis for a radically alternative society that is counter to all that the empire demands. There can be no resistance to the empire, no ongoing alternative without a counter institution. The commandments are the basis for this alternative way of life for Israel.

The first commandment is odd to lay upon modern people. It is irrelevant, some say, because modern people have outgrown the propensity to worship a plethora of gods— polytheism— rather than one God. Our modern problem is, they say, whether or not we should have any God at all—atheism. The trouble is, atheism is not a biblical issue. The Bible never asks, "Is there a God?" Rather, the Bible question is, "Who is the God who is there?"

Even atheism is parasitic upon a notion of God. We believe that the great problem of the modern age is not atheism. Our problem is the kind of limp, flaccid rejection of God so characteristic of late-twentieth century Europeans and their colonies. Seldom these days is atheism the angry shaking of the fist against some alleged injustice of God. More than likely, atheism is little more than the shrug of the shoulders that says something like, "I don't care what someone believes about God as long as he is sincere," or "It doesn't matter so much what someone believes as long as that person lives a good life."

That shrug of the shoulders, that simpleminded agnosticism is the result of Christians disobeying the first commandment, attempting to reduce God to a problem of belief rather than a call to worship. We are those who are not to have any other gods (and the commandment appears to assume that there are indeed many). Listen to us pray and one might get the impression that we think we are doing God a favor by believing in God. The commandment is clear: God does not want our "belief." God wants all of us, heart, soul, pots and pans, the whole ball, of wax:

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Hear, 0 Israel The LORD is our God, the LORD alone. You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might.

— Deuteronomy 6:4-5

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Luther put the matter this way:

What is it to have a God? What is God? The answer: a God is that to which we look for all good and in which we find refuge in every time of need. To have a God is nothing else than to trust and believe him with our whole heart. As I have often said, the trust and faith of the heart alone make both God and an idol. If your faith and trust are right, then your God is the true God. On the other hand, if your trust is false and wrong, then you have not the true God. For these two belong...