Mackintosh Mackay
Exodus 20:3. Thou shalt have no other gods before Me.
Surely the heart of man is indeed a heart of stone, unfeeling, impenetrable, senseless, hard and resistant in relation to God, in receiving knowledge of Him, and acknowledging His being and His dominion. How great and marvellous were the works of God to the people here addressed! How wonderful the ways in which He manifested His being and supremacy to them!
Was it possible that any of the hundreds of thousands of Israelites who came out of Egypt could ever cease to remember that verily He is God, and
1Taken, with editing, from The Christian’s Daily Companion. Mackay (1793-1873) was at this time a minister in Dunoon.
that there is none besides Him? When He condescends to say to them, “I am the Lord thy God, which have brought thee out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage”; we would suppose that God was uttering a truth which they must already have known most thoroughly, in their inmost souls. They had seen much idolatry in Egypt – a whole nation esteeming themselves learned, wise, civilized and powerful, beyond all the other nations of earth. They were bowing down to idols and serving them – changing “the glory of the uncorruptible God into an image made like to corruptible man, and to birds, and four-footed beasts, and creeping things” (Rom 1:23).
But they had seen how God, the true God, had mocked all these things, when His mighty arm was revealed to deliver His people from bondage. They had beheld the mighty doings of the Lord, the stupendous miracles He had wrought, and the inability of all other wisdom and power to withstand His working. And while all this was revealed, in terror and destruction to the enemies and oppressors of the children of Israel, they particularly experienced Almighty God’s wonderful mercy to themselves.
It was on their behalf that God’s almighty arm was revealed, His divine faithfulness in His promises to their fathers confirmed, established and ratified in His works of wonder. And would they not now trust Him? Was it likely that any of them would ever think that there was any other God but this one true, almighty and merciful God, who had so revealed Himself to them and had delivered them out of the hands of those who had hated and oppressed them?
How foolish to think well of our own hearts! Lord, what is man? What a monster of vile ingratitude, what a rebel against Thee! Could any commandment be more reasonable than this? Did they not already feel its authority in their very souls? “The Lord knoweth the thoughts of man, that they are vanity” (Ps 94:11). They had already forgotten God; they had murmured against Him; and they soon showed – even before this commandment had issued from the glories of His presence that rested on the mount of Sinai – that idolatry was in their hearts and that they did not regard the true God. Not even all His works toward them had reclaimed them.
There is much that is penetratingly instructive in the very form of the precept: “Thou shalt have no other gods before Me”; or, “Thou shalt not have any other gods before Me”. This looks to the heart within, beholding how prone the evil heart of unbelief is to depart from the living God. It speaks to a rebellious heart, while it speaks in mercy and love. The heart is prone to forget and to deny God; indeed, there is enmity against Him, which rebels against His holy authority and tramples His benefits and His mercies under foot. It is a wonder to see God remonstrating with the sinner, and by
His mercies, His manifested kindnesses, and the evidences of His wonderful, sovereign love, proclaiming His mercy to be over all His works; but proclaiming also that there is, in the fallen, debased, guilty soul of man, the deep principle of rebellion against Him.
And here, God speaks to them personally: thou. He takes them one by one, letting none escape. “Thou shalt have no other gods before Me.” The evil is in the individual heart: the root of bitterness, the poison of sin, the disease of unbelief, the source of all practical ungodliness and actual sin. To the individual heart the commandment of God is addressed.
But taking this commandment in its most literal sense, if we consider the state and the history of the whole world ever since sin entered, do we not see why this commandment should take precedence of all others in God’s holy law? Idolatry is the reigning outward sin, the universal and prevailing evil; the open and bare-faced denial of the true God which He beholds rising from His own fallen rational creatures, insulting His majesty and destroying the souls of His intelligent and moral subjects. And, when we trace the progress of all this to its source, we trace it to the individual evil heart, that does not like to retain God in its knowledge (Rom 1:28). This is the evil tendency of sin and proofs of it are sadly many.
Think, my soul, does not this commandment speak to you the words of divine, almighty and eternal authority? Is not this the evil disease of my heart – denying God, putting the remembrance of Him away from me and rebelling against His authority and His will? If there is in me what resents the strictness of His requirements, is this not to wish that God is other than He actually is – a God more accommodating to the sin that is in my nature? Behold then the source of all error, the source of all idolatry, in the individual soul polluted by sin, that has become the enemy of the one living and true God.
Surely the first and most important of all truths is that there is a God, and that I, as an individual, have to do with that God. This commandment therefore stands at the head of God’s unchangeable moral law; it is its true place. The eternal importance of the subject itself demands it. The cause of God’s glory requires it. The sin that has the mastery over the soul also demands to be met by this most solemn requirement. And transgression of this precept in the heart produces, as its bitter and evil fruit, the habitual, practical violation of every other commandment of God. Here, then, let the sinner and God meet: God challenging this as His eternal, rightful claim of supremacy; the sinner denying it to Him, not acknowledging God in his heart, not liking to retain God in his knowledge.
And are you, my soul, guilty of breaking this commandment? Guilty! The word is but faint and feeble to express the amount of my guilt. Let God write
it in the face of heaven against me, in flames of fire more awful than blazed on Sinai’s summit, and let Him say to me from heaven, in a voice of louder thunders than made Sinai quake: Thou art the man. Then all would set forth the awful fact of my individual guilt.
Let my soul ponder this; let my stony heart be broken and melted to feel it. What have I ever been doing but breaking this commandment? What was all the idolatry of Egypt, or of the nations of Canaan, compared to that of the natural heart, from which those outward abominations resulted – that guilty preference given to every other object above God, by which He is denied, by which His holy name and being are treated by the soul even as if there is no God?
But here, blessed be His own gracious name, He offers Himself to the soul as God in covenant, through Jesus Christ, to be my God. He has wrought – and He has put on record – greater wonders than those done in Egypt. A greater than Moses is here: the Lord Jesus Christ, having overcome the enemies of the soul, having made atonement for guilt. And God is in Him reconciling the guilty to Himself, not imputing their trespasses unto them. Let my soul know Thee, O Lord, as Thou art revealed in the Son. And embracing Him as the way to the Father, may Thy Holy Spirit, baptizing my soul as with fire, melt the heart of stone and make it a heart of flesh on which Thy laws shall be written. Let me not be satisfied without that experience of Thy saving grace which enabled thy servant to say, “I delight in the law of God after the inward man” (Rom 7:22.)