God Alone

Thou shalt have no other gods before me.
(Exodus 20:3)

What God was saying then and is still saying now is that we should not have any gods before Him, but that doesn’t mean He wants first place it means He wants the entire place. No other gods beside, behind or in front of Him at all. The word in this passage for before in Hebrew is paniym (paw-neem), which means in front of, in the presence of, in the face of.

No other gods before Him needs to be realized for what it means, because so many today think that it has no context, no relevance for today, being that no one is making idols out of wood, etc., at least in the West. However, an idol is anything that takes precedence over God, and most often it is self, and the self-ish, self-indulgent, fleshly desire of our nature to want to be able to hang on to our old life while claiming to be regenerated to new life.

Idolatry takes so many forms and is as prevalent today as it was back then. Remember the Israelites in the wilderness – they weren’t calling the golden calves Baal. Our flesh is the image-maker, and the world and the devil provide plenty of carnal clay with which to make our idols. We must be allowing the Spirit of God to be the spiritual iconoclast, the image breaker in our life. We are either knocking them down or building them up.

God is omnipresent, and so everything is in His presence, or before Him, and so we may have no other gods, period. It is not that God is to be placed first, He is to be the ONLY God we serve, and that includes self. If you don’t want to end up alone with your self, and alone without God forever, you had better get alone with God now, and make sure your serving serve God alone.

“Living For Today With An Eye For Tomorrow”©