Fire on the Mountain: The First Commandment and the God Who Loves Us First
Ten Commandments, Part Two
“You shall have no other gods before me.”
Exodus 20:3
Eight words. That’s all. No long explanation. No fine print. And yet if we take those eight words seriously, they do not merely adjust our religious life. They reorder everything.
The first commandment is deceptively simple. It sounds obvious, even tame. Of course, God should be first. Of course, we shouldn’t worship idols. Most of us hear it and nod along. But the truth is this commandment, rightly understood, confronts the deepest loyalties of our hearts. It exposes what we actually love. And if we allow it to do its work, it will change our lives from the inside out.
A brief review: Law, grace, and freedom
Before we can understand the first commandment, we need to be clear about what the law is and what it is not.
Scripture tells us plainly that we are not made right with God by keeping the law. “By works of the law no flesh will be justified” (Romans 3). Christ is the end, or goal, of the law for righteousness for all who believe. The law was never meant to be a ladder we climb to reach God.
The story of Sinai makes this clear. In Exodus 19-20, God does not give commandments to a free people so they can earn salvation. He saves them from slavery first. God’s grace liberated God’s people for holiness and joyful faithfulness.
So why the law?
Scripture gives us at least three answers.
First, the law reveals. Through the law comes the knowledge of sin. It shows us who God is and who we are. It exposes our need for a redeemer.
Second, the law restrains. Its warnings and threats curb evil in a fallen world.
Third, the law instructs. It teaches God’s people how to live wisely and well. The psalmist can say, without irony, “Oh how I love your law… sweeter than honey to the honeycomb.” Even the apostle Paul uses the commandments to instruct Christians in holy living, as we see in Colossians 3:1–10 and in Ephesians 4-6.
And let’s remember, this is the moral law, not the ceremonial or civil laws given to Israel for a specific time and place. And Jesus does not set it aside. He fulfills it. He keeps it perfectly. He bears its penalty on our behalf. Astonishingly, he also intensifies its holy demand by driving it into the heart in his sermon on the mount.
“I will write my law on your hearts,” God promises. That is not abolition. That is transformation.
Sinai as a wedding
To grasp the first commandment, we also need to understand its place in the story of the Bible.
The entire Bible is a love story. It begins with a man and a woman married in a garden. It ends with a bride and a bridegroom united in the city of God. Between those two moments, the Bridegroom enters history to die for the sake of his beloved.
God repeatedly describes himself as the husband of his people. “My covenant which they broke, though I was a husband to them,” he says through the prophet Jeremiah.
Seen in this light, Exodus 19–20 is not merely a legal moment. It is a covenant wedding ceremony. Sinai is a destination wedding, complete with thunder, fire, and the presence of God.
And like any wedding, there are vows.
“I take you, and only you. Forsaking all others, I will cling only unto you.”
That is the heart of the first commandment. “You shall have no other gods before me” is not a cold legal prohibition. It is a covenantal declaration of exclusive love. It is God saying, “I am yours, and you are mine.”
That’s why Idolatry is described as “adultery” in numerous texts of Scripture.
What the first commandment reveals
The first commandment reveals, first of all, the depth of God’s love.
This is a God who binds himself to his people. He promises to be present with them, to provide, protect, sustain, and guide them all the way to glory. We love because he first loved us. Every good gift we have is a gift bestowed by a faithful husband on his beloved bride.
And yet, this is where things go wrong.
We take God’s good gifts and turn them into ultimate things. Freedom, success, romance, security, identity. We begin to believe that the gift, rather than the Giver, is the source of life and meaning.
As Tim Keller famously put it, idols are not just bad things. They are good things that we turn into ultimate things. “If I have that,” we say, “then my life will have meaning. Then I will matter. Then I will be secure.”
That is not devotion. That is replacement.
“Before me”: the subtle danger of idols
The danger of idols is not always obvious rebellion. The commandment says, “You shall have no other gods before me.” The phrase literally means “in my presence.”
This is where many of us stumble.
Like Solomon, we do not usually reject God outright. We simply add other loves alongside him. We keep the temple open, but we fill our souls' landscape with rival gods. We assume everything is fine because God still has a place.
But covenant love does not work that way.
This form of idolatry occurs not because we repudiate the one who saved us, but because we add other savior-spouses to crowd him out. We surround him with idols fashioned by our passions until his voice is drowned out and his presence is remote. As Romans 1 puts it, we exchange the glory of the Creator for created things and end up worshiping and serving the creature rather than the Creator.
And our culture encourages this at every turn.
“The says the Lord,” as Peter Leithart has observed, has been replaced with “follow your heart.” And following our fallen heart has led to death and demolition. Power, sexuality, self-expression, money, violence, moral relativism - these are not fringe temptations but the polluted air we inhale in this toxic culture.
Psalm 115 exposes the cost. Idols have mouths but do not speak, eyes but do not see, ears but do not hear. And then comes the warning: “those who make them become like them. So do all who trust in them.” The idols are blind, deaf, paralyzed, and mute - lifeless projections of our imaginations rather than the life-giving Creator-Savior. They enslave, blind, paralyze, and deafen. A culture committed to radical desire and radical non-judgment does not become free. It becomes hollow. When openness replaces truth and desire replaces wisdom, we end up with what one writer called an empire of desire, a way of life organized around satisfying longing rather than seeking the good.
These gods promise life. They deliver captivity.
The mercy that delivers us
Here is the good news.
God does not leave his bride trapped in her unfaithfulness.
Jesus comes as God with us, the true Bridegroom. He comes not only to forgive, but to heal. Notice the people he heals in the Gospels: the blind, the deaf, the mute, the paralyzed.
Those are not random afflictions. They are living parables of idolatry - and salvation.
Idols blind us to God’s glory. They deafen us to his voice. They silence our praise. They paralyze our obedience. Israel had become like the gods she worshiped, and we are no different.
People, including people in the church, can be idol-obsessed and idol-possessed. We are often unaware of how deeply embedded these rival loves are. And they are not harmless. They are killing us, killing our families, and hollowing out our culture.
But Christ is the idol-destroyer.
He throws down every false god not by force, but by love. He reveals the true and living God. He calls us back, not to mere rule-keeping, but to renewed covenant faithfulness.
This work is not cosmetic. This calls for weeding, not mowing. God goes after the roots, not just the surface behavior. And that can be painful. Repentance usually is.
But it is also the path to freedom.
Worship and joy
In the end, the first commandment is not about limitation. It is about life.
There is only one who is worthy of worship. “Not to us, not to us, but to your name be the glory,” declares Psalm 115.
Every knee will bow to Christ the Bridegroom. The question is not whether we will worship, but whom we will worship.
And the promise held out to us is stunning: “Let us rejoice and be glad, for the marriage of the Lamb has come, and the bride has made herself ready.”
The fire on the mountain was never meant to drive us away. It was meant to seal a covenant of love.
No other gods. Not because God is fragile or insecure, but because he knows that only he can give us life.
And he has already given himself first.