There has only ever been one God. And He has loved you with an everlasting love, and given Himself to you as your cheleq [portion], the slice of the field that is yours forever, and that no thief can carry off, and no market can devalue, and no fire can burn, and no grave can hold.

There is a curious thing about the first commandment, which is that almost no one believes they have broken it. Murder, yes. Theft, perhaps. Adultery, well, of the eyes if not of the body. But idols? Idols are wooden men in jungles and golden calves in deserts and fat little statues in temples on the other side of the world. The modern man hears Thou shalt have no other gods before me and feels a faint, rather pleasant solidarity with Moses, the way one feels solidarity with a man condemning a crime one has not yet thought of committing.

The truth is that we break this commandment before breakfast.

We break it in the silent thirty seconds before our feet hit the floor, when the soul, still warm and unguarded, leans toward whatever it has decided is the meaning of its life and whispers good morning. We break it in the soft glow of the phone we keep face down on the nightstand like a small dark altar. By nine in the morning most of us have committed more idolatry than the high priests of Baal managed in a season, and we have done it while believing ourselves to be reasonable, civilized, modern people who would never bow to a calf.

The Lord knew. That is why He spoke this commandment first.

Hear the order at Sinai. Before God told them not to kill, He told them where to put their hope. Before He forbade theft, He forbade misplaced worship. I am the LORD thy God, which have brought thee out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage. Thou shalt have no other gods before me. The grace comes first. The God who breaks the chains tells the freed slaves, with the iron dust still gritting their wrists, where to set their hearts now that the chains are off.

What He says, before all else, is do not love anything more than Me, because nothing else can love you back.

A father tells his children, do not eat the berries from that bush. He is not a tyrant. He is a botanist. He has seen what the berries do. The first commandment is not a fence God built to keep us out of joy. It is a fence God built around joy itself, to keep us from wandering into a meadow full of beautiful poisons.

It is not first by accident, either. It is first because every other commandment grows from its root the way every branch in the vineyard grows from the trunk. The husband who lied to his wife lied because his reputation was his god. The boy who went to the bottle went because oblivion was his god. The merchant who short weighted his customers short weighted them because Mammon was his god, and Mammon is a hard master who counts. We do not break the first commandment when we break the others. We break the others because we have already broken the first. Pull up the root, and the rest of the weeds come with it.

Now hear me on a thing that may sting before it heals.

The strange thing about idolatry is that it is not chiefly wicked. It is chiefly silly. Picture the spectacle. A man made in the image of God, with a soul the size of a cathedral, kneeling before a screen the size of a candy bar to ask whether the world likes him today. A woman who could have moved mountains by faith, lying awake at three in the morning rehearsing what her mother-in-law said at Easter dinner. A pastor who could have wrestled angels at dawn, scrolling his rivals’ sermon downloads with the small bitter pleasure of a man counting another man’s sheep. The God who hung the Pleiades and stitched the platypus together for the fun of it is on offer, and we keep choosing the slot machine. We are not so much wicked as we are bored, and we have managed to be bored in front of an open heaven. The first sin in Eden was not chiefly cruel. It was unimaginative. It traded a garden for a piece of fruit, and we have not even improved the menu.

So the question is not whether you have idols. You have many. The question is which one you would sell the others to keep.

Brothers and sisters, we were made to hope. The human soul is an anchor in search of a rock. The writer of Hebrews calls hope the anchor of the soul, both sure and steadfast, and he treats it not as one virtue among many but as the rope without which the ship of you drifts onto the rocks before nightfall. The man who claims to have lost all hope has merely transferred his hope to despair, which is its own little god, with its own dark liturgy. The cynic hopes the world will disappoint him so he can be proven right, which is itself a hope, and a sad one. There is no neutral. There is no pause button on the worshipping heart.

So you do hope. The only question Scripture is interested in is where you have driven the anchor down.

Hear Jeremiah in the ruins of Jerusalem. The temple is rubble. The walls are smoke. Children lie dead in the streets where, a year ago, they had played at marbles. The prophet’s eyes are caverns of weeping, and in the third chapter of Lamentations he says his strength is perished, and his hope is perished from the LORD. He has hit the floor of the floor and found, to his astonishment, that the floor has a basement. And then, in the middle of that black abyss, the gospel breaks like a dawn no one was expecting and no one had earned.

“This I recall to my mind, therefore have I hope. It is of the LORD’s mercies that we are not consumed, because his compassions fail not. They are new every morning: great is thy faithfulness. The LORD is my portion, saith my soul; therefore will I hope in him.”
—Lamentations 3:22-23

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