No other gods before Me
God introduces Himself before beginning to lay down the Law
And God spoke all these words: “I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery.” (Exodus 20:1-2) Even now, countless centuries later, He is still the Lord your God, who brought (the Israelites) out of Egypt. Times change, He doesn’t. History may have moved on and He may have acquired new labels, some more relevant to us, such as the poetic, “I am the LORD your God, who rescued you from the World, out of slavery to sin” or the historically accurate, “I am the LORD your God, who sent my Son, My only Son, to die for you so that you may live”.
These are His calling cards, they set the scene for what is to follow. We must not forget this. In my book Into the Lion’s Den, I recounted an unsettling but significant television event, an episode of ITV’s This Morning, when the broadcaster Philip Schofield was castigating Andrea Williams of Christian Concern, for her “out of date” and “noninclusive” views on the LGBT+ issue. The heart of the real issue was encapsulated in these words that he wielded like a weapon, “… because that is not the way now that we are led to believe …”
“… because that is not the way now that we are led to believe! …”
Who’s calling the shots?
This begs a question. Who is doing the leading here? Who is Schofield deferring to? Who makes the rules? This is a major question, one rarely asked, but perhaps the question we should all be asking? That’s the killer, the vast chasm that separates the rules that we currently live by from the Ten Commandments. It’s all about provenance, a term used in the art world to determine the authenticity of a piece. The Ten Commandments have a clear historical provenance, the Mind of God, communicated to Moses and the Hebrews through the Finger of God. And what about modern day laws and commandments? A clever forgery, if the truth be told. Trouble is that the truth has little to say about it. It is a moveable, fuzzy, amorphous mass of public opinion, spin doctoring, fake news, rumour and gossip that appears to have a life of its own but I think we’ll be surprised to know that there are master puppeteers at play here, spinning and delving.
We are led to believe. Those doing the leading are the self-named progressives, always taking us “upwards and onwards”, never staying still, otherwise we would catch our breathe and start wondering where this is all going. We are probably familiar with these people, they are the ones who insist they are progressing to some ideal liberated society. This is a giveaway of course to the Marxism that runs at the heart of these ideas, a political theory that promises nirvana but brings only misery, death and destruction, as witnessed in Soviet Russia, Communist China, North Korea and Venezuela. They promise “equality”, “equity”, “empowerment”, “diversity” and “entitlement” but have served only to lower moral standards in our language and behaviour and have redefined the word “tolerance” to mean believe what we tell you to believe in, or carry on in your intolerance. By their standards there is no-one more “intolerant” than a Biblical Christian, someone who doesn’t believe that all religions lead to God but believes that there are only two sexes because that is what God has created.
So Exodus 20:1-2 reminds us who is the Author of the Ten Commandments, Someone who we can trust, rather than some faceless influencer, operating from an unanchored soul. That is the Foundation that ensures that all that is built on it is true and eternal, rather than on shifting sands that can support nothing.
Many gods?
Now that we can see the contrast between the eternal Ten Commandments and the ever-morphing laws of today, we can begin to re-examine the First Commandment and decide what is relevant for Christians living in the 21st Century.
“You shall have no other gods before me.” (Exodus 20:3)
Has become …
“You can have as many gods you like, as long as you don’t force others to believe as you do”.
Can we live with this? Can we accept this?
If we believe that the Ten Commandments are still valid for Christians then we must accept that the rules haven’t changed. The commandment accepts that there are “other gods” but utterly prohibits us to consider them in any way.
How have Christians fared on this issue? Have we knowingly – or unknowingly – given credence to “other gods”? We can look at the major religions and see how they have subtly polluted the pure Christian faith. This may be surprising to you.
Meeting the ‘others’ …
Firstly, Allah of the Muslims is not the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. Judge yourself from the following quotations from the Quran. “For Christians, Jesus is certainly God and for Muslims Jesus is certainly not God” (5.72). “Rebuke Jews and Christians for calling God their loving father because humans are just things that God has created.”
This means that any acknowledgement of Allah as God in conversation or prayer is giving credence to “other gods”. One such initiative is Chrislam (a bit more catchy than Islach), which seeks to find communality between the two religions.
The first time this was tried was when the Church Fathers, in the 2nd Century, merged the pagan philosophy of Platonism with the Biblical gospel, in order to make Christianity “more favourable” to the pagans living in the Greek world of the day. This was an utter disaster and the end result was Christendom – State Christianity, that gave us the Crusades, Inquisition, persecution of the Jews and other Christians, doctrine wars, ecclesiastical power structures, corrupt Popes, idolatry and superstition. Two thousand years of “what could have been” as a result of bad decisions made by those early Gentile believers. Of course God still preserved the True Church during that time, through such people as the Waldenses, Hussites, Moravians and Methodists, otherwise you wouldn’t be reading this and I wouldn’t be writing this!
In 2015, in the evangelical Wheaton College in the USA, Larycia Hawkins, one of its professors donned a hijab and wrote this on her Facebook page, “I stand in religious solidarity with Muslims because they, like me, a Christian, are people of the book. And as Pope Francis stated last week, we worship the same god.” High intelligence, but little wisdom. Sonya Jay Walker made this observation in a recent web article for independencedaily.co.uk:
“An Anglican church in southern England held a joint birthday celebration for Jesus and Mohammad which ended with an Islamic prayer. In Southern Italy, a parish priest actually produced a Muslim crèche, starring Mary in a burka and Joseph as a North African Muslim while another Italian priest eliminated the Christmas nativity scene outside his church ‘because it could offend Muslims’, and Islamic songs accompanied Christian ones in Florence’s Cathedral. But possibly the most worrying of the Christmas services was that held in an Episcopal Church in Scotland because this included a reciting in Arabic of verses from the Koran which denied the deity of Christ which is of course, the whole point of the New Testament of the Bible.”
It’s not that Chrislam, or any related initiative, is doomed to failure, rather than those who are sucked into it are ensuring their own failure, on the basis of the First Commandment, so stay away because God, our Creator and Redeemer, deserves a lot better!
The progress of Hinduism into Church activities have been more subtle. The Yoga asanas, or body positions, retain elements of their earlier spiritual meanings. For instance, the Surya namaskar is a series of positions designed to greet Surya, the Hindu Sun God. They are positions of worship to a Hindu god. Some may argue that is it true worship if you are unaware you are doing so? Best not to put this to the test and surely it is best to err on the side of caution and holiness.
It’s the covert side of it that we need to be most wary of, the spiritual undercurrents that sway the undiscerning mind and drag it into bad places. For instance, is yoga harmless? How many church halls host yoga classes or martial arts classes or “Christian” mindfulness sessions? Does this make it OK, just because the local vicar has been swayed by these unseen forces and condoned these practices (usually for financial reasons).
So what should we do? First let’s gird up our loins with Scripture, our anchor when the madness of our World encroaches: “The Spirit clearly says that in later times some will abandon the faith and follow deceiving spirits and things taught by demons. Such teachings come through hypocritical liars, whose consciences have been seared as with a hot iron”. (1 Timothy 4:1-2)
Some may argue that, as long as we are vigilant and alert, it is possible to indulge in some of these practices without being corrupted by them. A warning should come from the fundamental principal of one of these practices itself, homeopathy. In this technique, a medicine is administered after the core ingredients are diluted so many times that there surely can’t be more than a small clutch of molecules actually left in the mix when it is administered. This, apparently is not the point. The point is not the chemicals or molecules themselves, but the spiritual forces attached to them. And so it is with all of these “New Age” practices, one must look at origins and purposes and realise that there is always more going on than meets the eye. Don’t let a pagan Trojan horse into your spirit. Be warned!
“You shall have no other gods before me”. (Exodus 20:3)
We therefore need to be on our guard. Things may not always be what they seem. We need to hold onto the one truth that is going to get us into more and more trouble as the World “progresses” towards what could be a “one religion fits all” scenario. The truth is, that, as we have just read, there will be no gods before the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob but also that Jesus is the only way to God (John 14:6), a truth that is even more antiprogressive and counter-cultural … and hence dangerous!
This is an extract from Steve’s new book, The Sinner’s Charter, available in April 2020.