Belief and Covenant Loyalty
In this series, I take our law homily from our church gathering each week (The law homily is where we read from the law of God and let His law examine our hearts so that we can be a tender-hearted and repenting people), and I post them here for your edification. Here is this week’s law homily on the prohibition against mental idolatry.
Belief and Covenant Loyalty
At the very core of God's command to "have no other gods before Me" lies a profound call to wholehearted belief and covenantal loyalty. This is no mere external prohibition against participating in other religions – it is a charge to render the full potency of our hearts, minds, and bodies to our Lord in believing allegiance.
True belief, as God resoundingly requires, goes far beyond mental assent. It is covenantal loyalty lived out in every sphere of life. The Greek word "pisteuo," from which our word "belief" derives, captures this reality. It describes a continual, active loyalty and fidelity to God – a spiritual marriage of exclusive, all-encompassing devotion.
To believe God with this kind of faith is to order every aspect of our existence around Him as our supreme treasure and authority. It is to know that God is our master and Lord, and that we are His dutiful and joyful slaves. Believing in this way is to allow any and all other allegiances to bow the knee to Christ, so that all our loyalties are submitted first to Him.
Our Unbelieving Idolatry
Yet, how clearly we see that none of us have kept this first duty. At the core of every sin, idol, and unrighteous path is the traitorous unbelief of refusing to behold and delight in God alone as our all-satisfying portion.
Covenant disloyalty can abound in many ways. In romance, for instance, godly loyalty is first and foremost covenant loyalty unto God. When a man and woman place God as their highest treasure and pursue Him above all else, their marriage, dating, or courting will be thrilling, satisfying, and glorious. But when they fail to submit to God as their chief treasure and Lord, elevating one another to the status that only God can occupy, their relationship will devolve into argumentation, fornication, lust, pride, war, demonization, and likely divorce – for whatever you idolize, you will eventually end up demonizing.
If you make your bodily image the thing to which you are loyal, the thing you serve, spend money on, and obsess over, your end will be devastation as every wrinkle exposes your unholy fixation. If you make your children the chief affection you live for, they will disappoint you. If you become loyal to anything other than God, you invite misery and suffering into your life – for God will have no other gods before Him, which means He requires your total, unadulterated, and undivided loyalties on Him.
Yet, as you place your loyalties squarely on Him, all other things will flourish. Your secondary loyalties and appetites will flourish because they are now tethered to your love, belief, and loyalty to God.
The Call to Repentance and the Gospel
So, take a deep look at your life. Where is there chaos? Sin? Misplaced priorities? Anxiety, dread, worry, lust, misery, loss of meaning, hope, and direction? Wherever there is pain, wherever contentment is missing, there you have a loyalty problem. There you have traded pure loyalty to God and elevated something else upon the throne of your heart. Wherever you have sorrow and lack of joy, defeat, sadness, glum, and melancholy abound, there is your idol.
But you can repent of your idolatry! By the Spirit of Grace, you can identify the tares within your heart and ask the Lord to remove them by His kindness and mercy. And why would God remove these things? So that you can respond with gratitude, reorienting your heart, mind, and soul back to perfect allegiance in Him. For when your allegiances are settled on Him, you will have perfect peace, joy, and gladness all your days. God will be glorified in you, and you will be perfected in obedience to Him.
Repent this day of anywhere your loyalties have lapsed into idolatry. Ask the Lord to help you make Him your all-consuming treasure. And look to Christ, the one who displayed perfect loyalty to God in His death upon the cross, securing our redemption and enabling us to render wholehearted belief and covenant loyalty to our great God!
