Idolatry

What’s the second commandment all about?

We don’t really know what ideas the Israelites had about God and worship when they first came out of Egypt. After all, they had been slaves in a pagan culture for hundreds of years. We do know, however, that God took great care instructing these freshly liberated slaves in basically every area of life: family, agriculture, relationships and religion.

Among all these guidelines, God gave Moses the well-known 10 Commandments, which are widely regarded as particularly important.
We can easily identify with most of them: respecting parents, not murdering, being faithful in marriage, respecting the property of other people, telling the truth and being content with what we have.
Perhaps it is the first two of the 10 Commandments that seem most irrelevant to us today. In them, God tells His people not to worship any other gods and, secondly, not to worship using idols.

For the Israelites, who had just come out of a culture where worship was centred around images and statues, such commands would have made sense. The use of idols was also an issue for early Christians. In the letters of Paul, we find repeated instructions to stay away from the use of idols and even discussions about whether it was OK to eat food which may have been sacrificed to idols.

We don’t really have to worry about things like this today. How do all the parts of the Bible that talk about idolatry and idols apply to us in the 21st century? Let’s look again at the beginning of the 10 Commandments. In Exodus 20:1-5, God reminds the Israelites of who He is, then says to them “You shall have no other gods before me. You shall not make for yourself an idol in the form of anything in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the waters below. You shall not bow down to them or worship them” (NIV).

God is saying that He wants His people to make Him the most important thing in their lives—the only thing they worship. For us today, as followers of God, it is a challenge to make sure God comes before anything else. We may not struggle with worshipping statues and paintings instead of God but there are still plenty of things that can get in the way of our relationship with Him.

God values our relationship with Him so much that He doesn’t want anything to get in the way.