November 1: Exodus 20 3

Key Verse: Exodus 20 3
You shall have no other gods before me.

Devotion:
This is the first of the Ten Commandments. It is listed in first place because of the environment the Israelites came from and the peoples they were going to be surrounded by later on. God wants us to focus on Him as the only God and not to be persuaded by the polytheism of many cultures today – just as it was back then. They had been under Egyptian rule for a long time; a society which promoted multiple gods just as the Gentiles would do so!

In life we are surrounded by leaders who have different agendas and different priorities of their own. If we try to please all of them all of the time, we are going to get lost and lose focus on those priorities as we spread our allegiance through each of those leaders. In our spiritual lives we cannot hope to try and appease multiple gods because we will lose focus just as we do in life. This commandment was listed first to show us just how important it is to stay focused on God.

We have seen how Jesus upheld God the Father above all else and did everything to obey His Father. If He had given in to the people around Him and tried to please them all, they would have been confused as to which God they should follow. If we run off and worship other gods the people around us will be confused as to who we do worship and will find it harder to understand what we stand for!

God has done so much to show us, through all our generations, that He alone is God and nothing and nobody else can hope to fulfil that role! And yet, no matter how far we go, He is willing and able to show us mercy if we are willing to come back to lift Him up as our one true God. Try to look at it from His point of view – He sees what is in our hearts and sees everything we get up to, because we are doing this all in front of Him. So how can we think about worshipping anyone else or hoping any other god will do anything in front of God for us – they know they are not God and still they try to persuade us to do things we aught not to!

Points to Ponder:
Do you spread your hope and faith thinly around every god you come across?

Are you willing to put all your faith and hope in God alone?