No Mental Gods
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.
You shall have no other gods before Me. - Exodus 20:3
As a way of background, the Ten Commandments function as the bedrock for every Biblical command. Like ten huge buckets, every law, precept, and imperative within the Bible will fit neatly into one of these ten categorical words. This means that every law in Leviticus and Deuteronomy is, first and foremost, a commentary on one of the ten commands found within the Decalog. And in that sense, these wonderfully concise statements are a summary of the entire law. All Biblical casuistry, all ceremonial and civil commands, and all ethical maxims contained in Holy Writ are a commentary on the first ten. This, among many other reasons, shows us why these ten commands are so important and why we must understand them and dive deeply into every implication that can be extracted from them. Let me say it this way, if the Ten Commandments are a ripened orange, we should want to squeeze as much out of them as possible since every ethical standard God has given us rests on them.
If you are familiar with the Westminster Larger Catechism, you will know that this work has already been done. In that catechism, the Westminster Divines have faithfully divided each command into two sections, containing all the duties required in each commandment and all of the sins forbidden by that commandment *This begins in question 104 of that catechism). And since this is such an excellent treatment, the session thought we could use this as a template to dive deeply into the Ten Commandments and explore all facets of obeying God’s law so that you and I will become increasingly obedient people.
Thus, we begin with commandment 1, “You shall have no other gods before me,” and we start off with the first duty required in that commandment, which is to have no mental idolatry.
The Westminster Larger Catechism says this:
“ The duties required in the first commandment are the knowing and acknowledging of God to be the only true God, and our God; and to worship and glorify him accordingly, by thinking…etc.) “ WLC A104
Of course, we know that this command to have no other gods before Yahweh is not limited to all of the earthenware statues, the wood, stone, clay, or metal figurines that human hands artfully produce. If that were the case, we could rightly say that the church and the culture we live in are not, on the whole, an idolatrous people, which is undoubtedly not the case.
Instead, we are morbidly aware of the fact that idolatry grips all of the senses. And let us not be mistaken about how it affects and infects the mind. It latches onto our heads and wreaks havoc with our thinking like full-blown mental syphilis. The Scriptures employ us to have the mind of Christ, to think about those things which are excellent and lovely, true and trustworthy, and yet our brains return like dogs to the vomit. We return again and again to all kinds of reprehensible thoughts that drown us in a mental and cognitive manure.
Whether we know it or not, in this society, we have become infatuated with Materialism, which is the idol of possessions, wealth, status, and believing that our happiness comes from physical objects rather than God. How often do we obsess over the next iPhone, the new vehicle, outfit, or whatever idol occupies our conscious thoughts.
We bow down in our minds to the idol of individualism, orienting our opinions, our self-understanding, and even the silent statements we do not let escape our lips around the hypothesis that I am enough, I can do this myself, I do not need any help, I will myself to do it.
We let our brains go to bed with the idol called humanism, going through entire days elevating our human ability, reason, achievements, and capabilities at our feet instead of humbly acknowledging that everything in our hands belongs to God.
We ache in bitter sorrow over the state of our nation. We fantasize with deep nostalgia about the good old days. And we seethe with putrid fury over the way our leaders lie to us, mislead us, and are burning the country we love into the ground. Why? Because the idol of nationalism has taken root inside our minds.
We daydream about the corner office, the raise, the promotion, and other people acknowledging our success because we are secretly more invested in building up our castle than we are in building up His Kingdom. The idol of success has captivated many minds.
We turn off our minds to sit and gorge on entertainment… Wasting hours of our lives that could be given to God, instead remotely controlled by programming, which is programming more infectious and insidious idolatries within your mind. We laugh at the things God hates, we watch on as adulteries and fornications happen right before our eyes, we endure gratuitous violence, crave secular worldviews, and lap up every godless abasement between our ears because our minds have become debased with the idol of entertainment.
We indulge our brains with untold hours of social media, bowing at the altar of comparison, the altar of contentiousness, the altar of consumption, and filling our lives with moments we cannot get back that could have been used for the Kingdom of God.
Our minds are consumed with people pleasing, pride, immorality, lusts, and all manner of perversions, and yet we come to this time of our service, wondering what, if anything, exists that we could repent of.
Dear ones, as we have opened up the law of God and asked the Lord to use it to examine our hearts, this is now the time of our service when the scalpel of God’s Word is available to cut out your tumors. Do not flee from the discomfort. Do not suppress the movement of the Spirit to preserve your fragile ego. Do not skip this most vital step in our service and flee straightway to the table of our Lord too quickly. Allow the Word of God to cut you open, divide the marrow from the bone, and through repentance, which is by the Spirit, eject from your heart whatever toxins remain. Then, as you are built back up in the sermon, you will be ready to engage the Lord Himself at His table.
Thus, for the next couple of moments, let us be repentant people. Whatever spiritual toxic waste has crept into your thinking, whatever mental gods that you have brought into the presence of God, now is your time to repent so that you may be reoriented to your savior. So, dear saint, repent of the idolatry of your mind. Repent of what you remember. Repent of what you have forgotten. And as the Lord, increase your capacity and desire for repentance.
Let us pray.
