Entry 43

This is the first commandment, and it was of the first necessity at the time it was published. For the whole human family having fallen from the knowledge of God and from all communion with Him, and a God being indispensable to every conscience and heart, men had conceived and manufactured all manner of gods for themselves. Each separate tribe and nation had created its own divinity according to its own character. And accordingly the first thing to be done in beginning to establish the true religion in Israel, and through Israel in the whole earth, was to sweep all superstitious and mischievous notions about local and contending deities clean out of the mind. Israel must learn and hold and teach that there is no God but Jehovah only. And He was not a new or unknown God who gave to Israel this comprehensive and exclusive law. He was the God of Adam and Abel, of Enoch and Noah, of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob. He was the God of Moses and Aaron; it was He who by the hand of Moses had just delivered them out of the land of Egypt. It was He who said to the whole house of Israel, and to every individual Israelite, Thou shalt have no other gods before me. In Calvin’s Institutes there is an admirable analysis which gathers out all those things in this commandment that make it common to Israel and to us. The commandment came to them, and it still comes to us, carrying the divine demand on all our adoration, trust, invocation, and thanksgiving. And these affections, attitudes, aud acts, rightly understood and spiritually performed, fulfil and satisfy this first and fundamental commandment.

The first commandment—“In duties themselves there is an order, which it is of much importance to observe. There is scarcely a greater or more mischievous error than one which has found advocates, even among some who profess a regard to revealed truth; namely, that the principal service which God requires of us, and which of course we need to be much concerned about, is the performance of social duties—the duties of justice and benevolence to our fellow-men. Now, that social duties constitute an indispensable part of all true religion, we both admit and inculcate. But we maintain that the duties first in rank and importance are those we owe immediately to God, our Creator and Redeemer; that He is infinitely the greatest and best of all beings, and that if reverence, love, service, and worship be due to Him at all, our obligations to these must of necessity be higher and more sacred than any other” (Green).

requireth—Conformity to. (See Answer 14.)

to know and acknowledge—“This is life eternal, that they might krow Thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom Thou hast sent” (John xvii. 3). “In all thy ways acknowledge Him, and He shall direct thy steps” (Prov. iii. 6). “The true knowledge of God includes the love of God. ‘To love man, we must know him: to know God, we must love Him.’ They who will not love God, cannot even aright know of God. To know God is to know by experience that God is good, and this God makes known to the soul He loves, while it meditates on Him, reads of Him, speaks to Him, adores Him, obeys Him” (Pusey).

only true God—See Answer 5. The epithet only, as Meyer says, bears upon the whole phrase true God. The term true shows that this God alone perfectly answers to the great idea expressed by the word God.

worship and glorify him accordingly. Short for worthship: to put proper worth upon: to value supremely: to adore, love, and serve. “The God of glory is the sum of the divine praise” (Bengel).

In her beautiful book on the Commandments, Miss Rossetti calls this commandment the Catholic basis on which the Christian structure can alone be raised. What is Catholic underlies what is Christian. And to that fundamental doctrine of the divine unity from which the Christian doctrine is developed there has been granted a freer currency: so that while the Jewish Church knew it by revelation, multitudes of the Gentile world knew it, or at least surmised it, by intellectual or spiritual enlightenment.

forbiddeth—Want of conformity to or transgression of. (See Answer 14.)

the denying—This commandment forbiddeth atheism, speculative and practical. For speculative atheism is the looking upon nature and man as coming into existence and being sustained without God; while practical atheism is just vulgar irreligion: living “without God in the world.” Many who would shudder at the name of atheist are yet to all intents and purposes living an atheist’s life. How many atheistic hours we all spend, and how many atheistic acts we all perform, let each man say for himself.

giving that worship to any other—This is directed against all idolatry, and this sin is treated more fully in and under the second commandment. Milton makes idolatry the first result of Eve’s eating the forbidden fruit:—

“So saying, from the tree her steps she turned,
But first low reverence done, as to the Power
That dwelt within, whose presence had infus’d
Into the plant sciential sap.”

before me—In my presence, which is omnipresence. There is no place where man may set up or worship another God. (See Ps. cxxxix. 1–12.)

seeth, taketh notice of, and is much displeased with—Note the progress in these clauses. “How doth the idolatry forbidden in the first, differ from that forbidden in the second commandment? The idolatry forbidden in the first commandment is a sin respecting the Object of worship, when we set up anything in the place of God, which by nature is not God. But that against the second commandment is, when we pretend to worship the true God, but do it by such means, and in such a manner as He hath not required, or hath forbidden” (Flavel).