Directing our Worship Back to God: the First Commandment
Lenten Devotional Series Day 4. Today’s meditation comes from Exodus 20:1-3.
What will you worship today? Consider this excerpt from the late David Foster Wallace’s address to the graduating class of Kenyon College in 2005:
[I]n the day-to day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship—be it J[esus] C[hrist] or Allah, be it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles—is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive.
Wallace was half right. We do get to choose what we worship—God grants us that freedom, and we should respectfully extend it to others. But our choices aren’t as neutral as he implies. It’s true that worshipping ourselves, or our careers, or our families will eat us alive. But, ultimately, so will worship of Allah or the Wiccan Mother Goddess. In other words, the only God who will set us free rather than destroy us is the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. He alone is worthy of our worship.
The First Commandment reminds us our enslavement apart from the Lord. All other gods are false gods who ultimately enslave and destroy. God therefore lovingly calls us to refrain from other religions, other gods, and to respectfully point out that they are false. Jesus Christ is the only Way, Truth, and Life.
But the commandment doesn’t only speak to what we think of as “gods” in a religious sense. It speaks to all the idols of our hearts. It warns us against seeking stability, pleasure, hope, security, identity, in our career, our family, our education, our pleasure, our control of life, our growth as human beings. It warns us against allowing good things to become the ultimate thing in our lives, and thereby displace the only one worthy of our worship.
John Calvin famously wrote that the human heart is a perpetual factory of idols. We are, by God’s design, worshipping creatures. But our desires are often misdirected, granting ultimate significance to things in the creation rather than the Creator. Lent affords a wonderful opportunity to examine ourselves for traces of falsely directed worship, and to put these desires to death, before the false objects of our trust, love, and worship, eat us alive.
Today in prayer, ask the Lord to give you eyes to see your own idols. Confess to him all those things which you have come to worship above him. Reaffirm your love for him, and your desire to worship him above all others. Then conclude with the Collect of the Day.
The Collect of the Day. Almighty and everlasting God, you hate nothing that you have made and forgive the sins of all those who are penitent: create and make in us new and contrite hearts, so that worthily lamenting our sins and acknowledging our wretchedness, we may obtain from you, the God of all mercy, perfect remission and forgiveness; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
To read more about our tendency to turn good things into ultimate things, read Idols of the Heart and “Vanity Fair” by David Powlison.