The First Commandment

One

God first gave the ten commandments to Moses on Mount Sinai.

Every family needs some rules, or else home life just descends into chaos. God gave His family, the Israelites, the rules – the instructions – for happiness and peace as a community and as individual children of God.

Then, when God came to earth Himself in the Person of Jesus Christ, He reaffirmed that these same Ten Commandments still applied to the new community of the Church. When the rich young man asked Jesus what he needed to do to gain eternal life, Jesus told him simply to keep the commandments.

And the first of the commandments is this: “I am the Lord your God… You shall have no other gods before Me.”

Two

The Most Important Thing There Is

What does the word “God” mean? 

Very simply, it means the Supreme, most important thing there is.

Now if there is a God, and there is, then that means we know what the most important thing is.

So the first commandment tells us to recognize God as God and act like God is God and NOT act like anything else is God.

In other words, the first commandment just wants us to act rationally. It just instructs us to align our thinking and feeling, words and actions with reality. Because if God is the most important thing there is but you don’t talk that way or act that way, then your words and actions are dis-aligned with reality. Your whole life is off-kilter. You’re disconnected from the way things are.

So the first commandment just wants us to be integrated. To make sure our thinking and our actions and our words all match.

We believe in God, so we should worship Him, acknowledge His magnificence and His infinite goodness. We believe in God, so we should put Him first in everything and love Him with our whole heart and mind and strength.

That’s just being consistent. Anything less than that means we don’t really take the first commandment seriously.

Three

The Logical Implication of Saying “The Lord is God.”

St. Charles de Foucauld, who died in 1916 and was canonized in 2022, was a man who started out a life that mixed hedonistic pleasure, adventure, and cultural achievement. But all that changed when he realized that the Catholic faith was true.

The way he put it was this: “The moment I realized God existed, I knew I could not do otherwise than to live for Him alone.”

There is a logical man! There is a man who thinks through, and lives out, the implications of saying, “The Lord is God.”

Once you realize that the most important thing in chess is to checkmate your enemy’s king before he checkmates yours, you organize all your moves with that goal in mind. If someone were to prioritize something else ahead of that goal, it would mean he was playing the game irrationally.

And once you realize that the most important thing in reality is the Lord, the only God of heaven and earth, you organize your whole life with that goal in mind. 

If someone were to prioritize something else ahead of that goal, it would mean he was living life irrationally.

Again, all the first commandment asks us to do is to behave rationally. If God is God, if God is the most important thing there is, then act like it.

Four

Prayer is the primary way we keep God primary.

We’ve said that the first commandment requires that we acknowledge God’s primacy in our speech and that we treat God as the most important thing there is in our actions. But we can’t keep God first in our words and our actions unless we keep Him first in our thoughts.

We won’t remember to make Him a priority in speech or behavior unless we actually set aside time to remember Him. Setting aside time to raise our thoughts to God is what we mean by prayer.

Unless we dedicate time to friendship and conversation with God every day, time talking from the heart, listening to His Word and reflecting on it with our mind, drawing practical concrete resolutions, then He will never be the most important thing in our lives.

You will not be able to follow the first commandment, let alone the other nine, unless you are willing to dedicate time every day simply to focusing your mind and will on the Lord our God.

Five

The peace of knowing that God is God and you are not.

Jesus said to Catherine of Siena, “If you know this one thing you will always stay on track – I am He who is and you are she who is not.”

The first commandment reminds us that God is God, that He is the most important thing, He is the one it all depends on, He is in control.

We forget that God is God, that He is supreme because we forget to pray. And we forget to pray because we’re so busy. And we’re so busy because we take ourselves too seriously. We think our to-do list is so important, we just don’t have time to pray. We think what we have to get done is so urgent, that the Creator of the Universe Himself can’t get an appointment. 

That means we have forgotten the relative importance of things. It means we have blown ourselves and our little projects way out of all proportion.

And when we pray, the relative importance of things comes back into focus.

We come before the supreme, infinite being, and we say, “That’s right! I forgot! You are the Lord God – there is no other! It all depends on You, not me! You can take care of everything! You are in charge! You have it under control! And you are infinitely good and powerful, so You can handle whatever I don’t get done, or whatever I mess up. What a relief!”

All the commandments exist for our happiness. And the first commandment, where we recognize that God is God – if we put that commandment into practice through prayer, it will be the most foundational source of peace, tranquility, and the ability to delight in the gifts of the One, all-Majestic God, who is Lord over all.