July / August 2009 Pastor's Highlander Column

JULY / AUGUST 2009 / PASTOR'S COLUMN

Brothers and sisters,

As I write this, we have just celebrated Father’s Day, and I want to share again with you some eulogistic words penned in March 1942 by then Maj. Gen. Dwight David Eisenhower upon the death of his father, David J. Eisenhower: “. . . His finest monument is his reputation in Abilene and Dickinson County... His word has been his bond and accepted as such.... Because of it, all central Kansas helped me to secure an appointment to West Point in 1911, and 30 years later, it did the same for my son John. I'm proud he was my father.”

These simple words clearly and movingly describe the value of honesty and integrity. So, as we begin our study of the First Commandment, let’s all consider the following questions:

• How solemn, serious and secure are the vows that I have sworn and undertaken.

• How frequently do I forswear or break my oaths?

• What is the nature of those vows — are they vows of friendship and service? Are they made to man or to God?

These may seem odd questions with which to begin a study of the First Commandment, yet they are really some of the most crucial and probing questions that can be asked of anyone. Further, they are questions that demand not only answers, but correct answers because they are questions of the “first order” or first premise. This means that their answers define all subsequent understandings, relationships and principles that follow them. If these answers are wrong, then so, too, will be everything else coming from them.

This necessarily follows just as certainly as night follows day. It’s an immutable, or unchangeable law of existence. In the same way, one cannot correctly solve a long-column addition sum, if the first sum in the column is wrong. So, too, our lives are relational and demand that proper relationships and principles be established and maintained in order for them to be lived out in proper fashion.

It is a readily observable fact that this is not the way many, or even most, people's lives are lived. We are fallen, broken and sinful, and unable to fully (or even properly) understand the nature of our pledges, promises and vows. At best, we inadequately perceive their nature, permanence and importance, and then we fail to treat them with proper gravity and seriousness. In doing so we unleash destructive and tragic consequences that steamroller over every kind of relationship we have.

Billions of people fail to appreciate that a vow is a solemn declaration of future action or non- action. To make or take a vow means we are making a binding guarantee, by a solemn pledge or promise, to fulfill our declarations. And, because we, or they, misunderstand, misinterpret or ignore the proper nature of vows, we are plunged into the nightmare scenario of broken trusts, hearts, lives, homes, families, and nations.

All of us, men and women, even rulers and nations are torn asunder and dashed upon the rocks of convenience and self-interest because we have been infected by the misunderstanding of promissory obligation. In all kinds of ways and at every level, we abuse each others' trust, shattering our relationships because we have made promises with crossed fingers and hardened hearts.

If this sounds like a “litany of ills” in American culture in the first decade of the 21st Century, it’s because it is. But it is also the portrait of the entire human race since the Fall. Since then (all human history) people have failed to understand the sacred and solemn nature of vow and obligation. All of us are thus morally handicapped.

That “covenantal disabilty” results from our ignorance of the One to and in whom all vows are made and from whom they are derived.

The problem thus stated, we enter our the specific discussion of the First Commandment. Lets begin by looking at Exodus 20:1-3:

• 1 And God spoke all these words, saying: 2 I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage. 3 You shall have no other gods before Me.

It is not some cosmic accident or coincidence that God gives this commandment first. He didn’t just happen to think it up during some cosmic brainstorming session. It is the First Commandment because it has an order of logical and essential precedence that makes it the cornerstone of our existence. All other things derive from this first premise, and it is the most important principle in the existence of the universe. Without God's authorship nothing else would exist.

God spoke creation into existence from nothing, creating all things according to His perfect will. He sustains them by His own authority, majesty and power. Beyond that, He extends His own grace to us for reasons sufficient unto Himself.

It is, then, wholly reasonable that He presents and declares this First Commandment to us as the foundation of all other things. As we noted previously in our study on the nature of God's Moral Law, God is the creator who has fashioned each individual in His own image. Therefore, we owe Him a debt of love and obedience that is both non-negotiable and non-transferable. We may either take up the obligation or rebel against and reject it.

Instead of the more familiar “thou shalt not!” commands, this is the ultimate “thou shalt!” Everything else springs from it. We are informed by the God of heaven that He and He alone is supreme — His word authoritative. We cannot allow anyone or anything to stand in the way of His total Lordship or His commandments. In other words, slightly “tweaking” the recent spate of roadside billboards: “What part of THOU SHALT didn't you understand?”

Theologically and practically, this means that all of relationships to anyone or anything else are mediated by our relationship to Yahweh, the Great I AM. This is the same God and Father who declared and revealed Himself to Moses by saying "I am that I am." The name, Yahweh, shows that because “He is what He is,” we are what we are. If we ignore God's existence and authority, then we become functional atheists, debasing our own existence and all our relationships to everything else. We become lower than even the rocks and the dirt which yield testimony to their Creator and their own createdness.

Such an attitude not only diminishes us, it also warps and destroys all our relationships to everyone and everything else. Again, we are in serious error if we say, “because 1+1=3, then 1+1+2=5.” The conclusion is flawed because the first sum was wrong. Similarly, none of us would attempt to cross a river bridge if we knew that the bridge was 40 yards short of the far river bank. Only a fool would try it!

And John tells us much the same thing in John 1:1-4 and 10-13:

• 1 In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. 2 He was in the beginning with God. 3 All things were made through Him, and without Him nothing was made that was made. . . . .
• 10 He was in the world, and the world was made through Him, and the world did not know Him. 11 He came to His own, and His own did not receive Him. 12 But as many as received Him, to them He gave the right to become the children of God, to those who believe in His name: 13 who were born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God.

John tells us that Jesus is the eternal Word and Son of God — distinct from the Father and yet also one and the same with Him. He is one with the God the Father and God the Spirit who made the entire universe from nothing. This same God showed His voice and presence to the Israelites at Sinai with lightening, thunder and incalculable majesty and glory. He also, in His great love, came once-for-all to take on humanity's nature and share its burdens. Our God lives among us. He is not only our God and our Father, but also our companion and guide, friend and savior.

This is why anything but total fidelity to our vows of love and obedience to our God yields only broken or incomplete results. Without that love for God, we cannot love brother or sister, wife or husband, neighbor or stranger, countryman or foreigner. With that love we cannot do anything but love them and seek after their best interest.

Next month we’ll look more fully at how and why our faith in Christ and His grace actually both strengthen the requirements of the First Commandment and enable us to live into it in a way we never could before. Let us renew our vows to God and to Him alone as we strive to fulfill the first commandment to have no other gods but the one true God.

Grace & Peace,
Pastor Rusty+