Of all the commands, the one that is far and away the most important and the most difficult and the most foundational is the first commandment. It states, “You shall have no other gods before me.” You can look at the first commandment negatively, this means you can’t spend all your time daydreaming about money or sex. It means you can’t look to yourself to solve your problems and think that politics is the answer to everything. Or you can look at it from the positive side. We can’t have these other things in first place because we get to have God in first place. We get to have the God of all compassion, the God of all grace, who will never leave us or forsake us. If you want to have money as god, take it. If you want to have power or fame as God, it’s all yours. The first commandment means that we get to have Yahweh as God and at the end of the day that’s a much better offer.
