Having One God

“Thou shalt have no other gods before me.”
- Exodus 20:3

If God were any less than All, this might be a problem. If there were God, and then some other things, not necessarily God but possibly good, the command would be asking us to choose. Asking us to give up some good things for what we might presume to be better things. Asking us, perhaps, to gamble, not knowing for sure if what we are giving up is worth what we’re giving it up for.

But if God is All, and God is good, then anywhere anything good is, it’s of God. There is no good anywhere that isn’t a result of God’s presence. In other words, and very basically, good is good. There is no bad good, no evil or forbidden good.

When God says, “Thou shalt have no other gods before me,” it is a statement of utmost tenderness and conscientious care for us. It means, don’t go buying into the lie that there is ever a price in evil to pay for good - that in order to have good, you must suffer, or you must hurt someone, or you must sacrifice something that you love. Don’t believe that it is part of life to be sick, disappointed, miserable. False gods require human sacrifice. God is Love. Love always delivers good and not suffering.

So what of all the suffering in the world? It is from the tyranny of false gods. You can tell they are false because they speak with contempt in their voices. Moses told the Children of Israel to choose: “I call heaven and earth to record this day against you, that I have set before you life and death, blessing and cursing: therefore choose life, that both thou and thy seed may live.” He exhorted them to choose to know they were under the control of the God who is good, and that they never should settle for any other cause to control them.

Every one of us has the right to obey the first commandment, to have good be the only thing in our lives. The snapping jaws will respond with scorn that there is no way we can have that, that we have no right to ask for it, that we can’t have it because other people don’t have it. But the all-loving God is everpresent, and tells us that we, along with everyone else, can have all good.

Discussing Scriptures (thoughts on Isaac)

My friend Audrey was over the other day, telling me about her experience reading Torah at her little group’s Rosh Hashanah service. And how the tradition afterwards is to sit together and discuss, what does this mean? How does it apply to our lives now? She said often at Yom Kippur, which was coming up, the section read was the story of Abraham’s near-sacrifice of his son Isaac. She said in one discussion group, someone had said, “Well, I think God was just wrong on this one.”

I’ve heard this before, in the context of, how could you worship a god who asked for human sacrifice, and especially of your own child. I said, check out what I’ve learned about this through my study of Christian Science. In the book of Genesis, the deity in the first chapter is called God, or Elohim. In the second chapter, it’s the Lord God, or Jehovah. (At this point we looked it up in the Hebrew, Audrey reminding me that they never spoke the name of Jehovah. We found it there, as I had said, starting with the 4th verse of Chapter 2. We found that Lord God in the Hebrew was actually Elohim Jehovah.)

Anyway, I said afterwards in Genesis the usage is mixed, but if you translate Lord God as the people’s idea of God, or their best understanding at the time of what God is, then a lot of things make more sense. If you know that God is Love, you would know that if Love said, “sacrifice your son to me,” it wouldn’t mean kill him. It would mean give up everything in your conception of him not based on love. Give up your ego, your human expectations, your material sense of paternity. Give this relationship to Love, and let love inform your entire understanding of your son and your relationship with him. But Abraham didn’t get it, because he didn’t fully understand the nature of God. So he thought God was telling him to kill his son.

I think the great hope in this story is that, because Abraham was willing to walk with God step by step, continually listening, he was able to understand enough about God in time to not do a terrible thing. I think if he had made an interpretation of what God meant and stopped listening at that time, it would not have gone well. But the nature of Abraham’s relationship with God was to do as God had said: “walk before me, and be thou perfect.” So this experience became for Abraham what it was intended to be, an occasion for him to learn more about the nature of God.