no other gods

The past few weeks for me has all been about looking ahead to the Good Friday and Easter weekend and all the extra things that go on; an extra worship service tonight, church pot-luck breakfast on Sunday (it's at 9 if you want to come!), and the whole focus on Jesus, death and resurrection and new life. Even those who seldom set foot in a church, or think about God, find it hard to not notice all this focus on Jesus. Some may even find their way into a church on Sunday because it seems the thing to do, but they come to worship God as only one of the many other gods they are following.

I wonder if on Easter, rather than focusing on the stone rolled away, we should be focusing on having no other gods before Yahweh. We have a big tendency to create gods; we so often take God's blessings and turn them into Baals. The old gods such as Thor, Zeus, Aphrodite, Freya have faded away, or at least their names have faded away except in the Marvel comics and Agents of Shield, but the power they represent is still here. We tend to make gods out of everything; eros, money, pleasure, fun, food, beauty, and the list goes on. You might protest that there really aren't other gods and say it's unfair for me to accuse you of worshipping other gods, and yes, I'll agree that other gods don't exist, that the Thors and Baals don’t really exist, but our yearning for prosperity, passionate love, power and strife still do exist today and all too often these things grab our hearts and desires more than God.

The Bible calls for you to make a choice for only one God and to worship him alone. It has to be a radical choice; it’s not both-and, but either-or. You can't choose God and continue to worship whatever else you've been chasing after. As Jesus says, “You can't have two masters.”

One thing that strikes me in the Bible is how often the people of God renewed their covenant with God. It seems as if this needs to be done regularly for our sake so that we can make our choice over again, reinforcing it each time in our hearts and lives.

Choosing God means loving God. The Jews regularly recited the Shema, “Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one! You shall love the Lord your God will all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your might.” This love is emotional, something you experience in your heart for in our love we are responding to God’s love toward us. We understand more clearly what love toward God really is when we see love as a choice. To love God means you stick with your choice. This is about faithfulness to God where nothing is allowed to come between you and God. Jesus later on tells us that love means that we keep his commandments; that we live in the way he has told us to live.

Following Jesus, embracing the Christian faith comes down to worshipping God with an undivided heart; there is no “God and ...” in your hearts; you serve and follow God alone. 
So maybe this Easter we should be covenant renewing; challenging each other to have only one God, and not a god we make, but approaching the God who loved us so much he sent his Son to die and make our promises to love him alone again as God renewed his promises to us through Jesus. Just a thought.