Sermon: The First Commandment

Preached by Dr. Peter Brunner on July 15, 1945, the Seventh Sunday after Trinity

Dear Congregation!

It’s necessary that we once again, as members of the Church, reflect on the Commandments of our God. The collapse that we’ve experienced is primarily a collapse inwardly and ideologically. Since the collapse of the Third Reich, there have been countless people who have held everything in about it and collapsed themselves. That’s true especially for many young people. A spiritual void has emerged in our people that is as dangerous as our lack of food supplies. The false faith of false ideology has not only devastated the external form and external order of our land, but above all it has dissolved our communal life’s inner moral orders [Lebensordnungen and Gemeinschaftsleben]on such a large scale that even the Christian congregation and the Christian family are frequently being infected from this dissolution.

But if only the wreckage of our cities, the wreckage of our economy, and the wreckage of our schools and our education are rebuild, then the reconstruction, of which so much is said today, will never be a true construction. That is unless, before anything else, the core [Innern], namely, the collapsed faith in the one true God and the crushed obedience against His Commandment is rebuilt through God’s grace. Here arises a great responsibility for the church and her members. If it’s not given to us to lead our people back under God and His Commandment, then all reconstruction will be like a house of cards that the slightest breath of wind will blow over. The restoration of our people under God and His Commandment will be, simply put, the decisive contribution towards reconstruction. And we Christians, we the church, have this contribution to make. How then should our people learn again what it means to have one God and to hold on to God’s Commandments if you, my beloved, do not set an example for them and show them with word and deed? You, my beloved, are now the salt on which it all depends, so that the whole might not decay and decompose. You are the light that must shine out clear and without refraction, so that the darkness might not prevail. By your attitude [Haltung] and your witness the others have to be able to gauge what it means to stand under God and to hold on to His Commandments. Therefore, the inner reconstruction must begin with us, with the members of [this] congregation [Gemeinde]. We ourselves must live with new zeal according to the will of God and must with new strength set an example of obedience to God’s will for the others, so that the tremendous amount of suffering that has come upon us wasn’t for nothing. Therefore, today, we are going to begin with an explanation of the Ten Commandments. May God lay His blessing on our trouble and show us through His Holy Spirit what He, in His Commandments, wants of us today.

At the pinnacle of all commandments stands the mighty word: “I am the LORD, your God.” Before God comes to us with His “You shall,” He comes to us with His “I AM.” Before God wants something from us, He introduces Himself to us; He reveals His reality to us, and in His holy name He gives Himself to us. First God gives, then He demands. Out of pure grace, He puts us into His domain, then He announces to us what the laws of His kingdom are. So what God wants from us is really only a result of that which He has given us in His Son Jesus Christ. In Jesus Christ, God has caught us poor, sinful, lost men and taken us home as His own possession. In Jesus Christ God has made us His people, a people for His own possession. In Him, He delivered us out of all the dark, demonic fetters. In Him, He has set us free into the freedom of the children of God. That’s where we’re coming from when we hear God’s Commandments. When God gives us His Commandment, we’re coming from the Gospel we’ve received. The Ten Commandments are therefore not the sum of some kind of moral teaching. Rather they are a consequence of the miracle that God has done on us in His Son. We wouldn’t be able to take even a step on the path of the Commandments of our God, if God had not first taken us along the path of salvation [Heilsweg], on the path that He has gone with us, in the birth, passion, death and resurrection of our Savior. But since He has lead us out of the slave house [Diensthause] of sin, death and the devil, since He has bought us to be His own possession, since He has purely out of grace and mercy taken us completely in His hand, therefore He can and may also tell us now what is fitting for such people, for those who have become His citizens and members of His household. Therefore, He can and may also expect from us that we, out of the power of His saving work, will praise and thank Him. And He may expect that we will now behave sensibly, as is fitting for such people, for those who belong to His family, since they have indeed become His children.

But who does God address in His Ten Commandments? Who is meant by “You,” when it says: “You shall have no other gods before Me?” In the Ten Commandments God addresses His people, His church as a whole. It ought not happen in Christendom that before God there are still other gods who are being served. In its conduct, the Christian church, Christendom as a whole, should make it plain every day that it fears God alone, above all things, and that it loves and trusts Him above all things. Therefore, Luther, in his explanation of the Commandments, also had it right, when he said that the “You” of the Commandments is explained by the “We.” You shall have no other gods before Me. That means: We Christians, we the holy, universal, Christian church…we shall fear, love, and trust God above all things. In the Ten Commandments, the individual is addressed as a member of the whole [Gesamtheit], as a component of the We. It’s important that we make ourselves clear from the start. The Ten Commandments do not primarily have in view the individual who they are to bring under God’s will. Rather, they primarily have in view a sum, or more precisely, the sum of God’s people and the Christian church. The sanctification of God’s people is, therefore, the goal of the Ten Commandments.

In his attitude the individual is again and again truly dependent on the whole and, as a rule, more dependent than he knows. What kind of a spirit blows in a congregation that is not also decisive for the attitude of the individual members of the congregation? The individual, in his spiritual insights, in his spiritual desires, also in the progress of his spiritual life [geistlichen Handelns] is carried and defined by the whole congregation in which he stands. What’s more is that in every part of his life until it ends, he is carried and defined by the spiritual condition of all Christendom. That’s why it’s absolutely crucial to know what attitude is reigning among Christians throughout the church at a certain time. That’s why God primarily takes aim with His Commandments at the sanctification of His people. That’s why we as individuals and as an individual congregation must also be responsible together to know the entire inward and spiritual situation of our church. The entire spiritual life of Christendom is precisely where God’s will should plainly be seen, that it serves Him alone and that He is feared and loved above all things. Each person is responsible for this entire spiritual life of the congregation, of the church, of Christendom, each in his own place, but together.

Since God addresses all of His people in His Commandments, the whole must also be responsible to know the Commandments for each individual member. We all know that a bad egg spoils the whole cake. A little leaven leavens the whole lump. That’s why the whole church, the whole congregation also has the right and the duty to watch over the individual members, so that the individuals don’t spoil the attitude of the whole. In a church and in a congregation, the congregation and its leaders have the holy duty of making sure that there are not individuals who are persistently breaking God’s Commandments. That’s why Paul warns the congregation in Corinth: “Sweep the old leaven out!” (I Corinthians 5:7). That’s why the Epistle to the Hebrews warns: “See to it that no bitter root springs up and that by it many become defiled” (Hebrews 12:5). Just as the dependence of the individual member is on the entire attitude of the whole, so also among us, the responsibility of the whole must clearly be for the individual member, that is, if we want to understand the consequences of the godly “You shall.”

What is then the first thing that God expects from His people, from His Christendom made holy by faith? God wants His people not to have any gods before Him. Thus, the first and greatest danger that God sees threatening us is perhaps not what we expect, which is to deny God, or what we usually call godlessness or atheism. Apparently, this kind of denial of God is never really meant to be serious at all, or, in any case, it’s not to be taken at all seriously. Honestly, there’s not a man alive who doesn’t have something that he bows down to as a final authority. This final authority that man bows down to can be, for example, money or his stomach or the state or even his own ego. So realistically, if he doesn’t pray to God, man is always going to have idols that he prays to.

But the people of God simply falling back into idol worship is apparently not the first and greatest danger. Where God once spoke His majestic “I AM,” there is no more paganism in the original sense of the word. We’ve just recently experienced that too. What one propagated among us as a new religion, that wasn’t paganism; since this new religion was far too wretched, an artificially webbed, literary product, far from the naïve consistency of true paganism. Where the holy name of our God has been called upon, there paganism is forever inconsistent and naïveté forever destroyed. For the people of God, for Christendom, for a man who is baptized in the Trinitarian name of God, there’s no more return to paganism. The danger that threatens God’s people and its members is actually much worse than paganism. It’s the mixture of Christian with pagan, the mixture of the worship [Dienst] of God with the worship of idols, the mixture of the one, true, living God with the dead idols of blind, human hearts. Or even worse, the camouflage of idol worship seen through what seems to be a Divine Service, the Christian dress rehearsal of what is in fact apostasy of the living God. That’s what the First Commandment opposes. It demands the uniqueness, worthiness, and indivisibility of the worship of God. The hesitancy of our worship, the indecision of our heart in our worship, that is the first and greatest danger that God through His First Commandment wants to spare us from.

If we want to understand it rightly, we have to ask ourselves: What then does it mean to have God, this one God? Luther in his Large Catechism answered this question with rare clarity when he said: “To have a god means to have something we are supposed to look to for all good and in which we are supposed to find refuge in all need. Therefore, to have a god is nothing else than to trust and believe in that one with your whole heart…Anything that your heart now relies and depends on, that is really your God.” Therefore, in the First Commandment the point is that the faith and trust of our heart is always to be right. The faith and trust of our heart is then right, when in every situation, in joy and sorrow, in fortune and poverty, in life and in death it is always and exclusively directed to the one, true God, who has spoken to us in His Word, in His commanding “I am the LORD, your God.” The undivided trust, the undivided adoration, the undivided heart, that’s what God wants from us in His First Commandment. He wants us totally for Himself as His chosen possession.

The danger that God sees in us is not that we don’t call on Him anymore, or that no longer speak His name, or that we no longer want to know anything of Him, or that we have completely forgotten him. Rather, the danger that He sees in us is that when we call on Him our heart is ultimately still bound by other things, powers, and authorities. The danger is when we carry His holy name in our mouth, but we’re actually expecting help for our despair from somewhere else. In a word: the danger that God sees in the First Commandment for us is that His people don’t take Him seriously, or take Him seriously as God, or take Him seriously as their God, or take Him seriously as the Lord of lords. That’s the apostasy of God, that we divide our heart between Him and other things, powers, and gods. The divided heart, the heart that half trusts in God and half trusts in money is, in fact, completely trusting in money; the heart that depends a third on God and two thirds on its own work, is, in fact, ultimately and exclusively depending on our own work; the heart that believes that it has to serve God on Sundays, but on workdays forgets God and becomes completely consumed with business or other earthly influences, and then also on Sundays it doesn’t truly serve God – this divided heart, this heart that is Christian in appearance, but godless in faith. That is the original sin [Ursünde] against which God speaks in the First Commandment. Out of this original sin flows all other sins. If this defect that ultimately divides the heart – which is really a godless heart – is not healed, there will be no other defects that can be healed. Where the First Commandment has no power, the remaining Commandments also have no effect.

My Beloved, does not the First Commandment truly touch the fundamental defect [Grundschaden] of Christendom? Is that not the fundamental defect out of which all individual defects come? Is it not out of that defect that the war and all the suffering it brought on us ultimately comes? Was it not under the cover of official Christianity that God Himself was overthrown?

“God,” that is for so many still just a word, hardly more than a word, maybe just a faint feeling, or some sentimental memory. Or maybe “God” is like some magical, superstitious lost people [Rest] from a fallen world long ago, where, on extraordinary occasions, one of them may at some point serve a purpose – who knows – maybe, after all the other means have failed, this one could still help somehow. But is that God the LORD? Is that God the one whose hand has completely surrounded and embraced you? Is that God truly the source of all being, all life, all joy, of all that’s good. Which of us sees that our entire experience is totally dependent on Him alone? Which of us has drawn the conclusion, the only possible conclusion, namely, that the heart’s undivided devotion to God is worship, which is focused completely, exclusively, and undividedly on Him? Therefore, the First Commandment is about Christendom coming out of its half-heartedness. It’s about Christendom coming out of the real falsehood in which it lives. It’s about Christendom coming out from under its mock piety that shields man’s heart from ever being touched. It’s given so that we’d want to be afraid of the real secularization of the heart, of the real godlessness of the heart. It’s to tear us out from under the flimsy cover of a detached Christian spirit [Christlichkeit], to make us recognize how God still is being overthrown, betrayed, and denied. It’s so that we’d want to recognize where something else is competing with Him for our faith and trust, and that by recognizing we’d see for ourselves the only saving work, the only constructive work. It’s so that we’d want an undivided devotion of the heart to lead us to the only real and true God, our Lord Jesus Christ. That is what God wants from us and His whole Christendom today, when He calls to us and says: “You, my people, whom I have chosen to be my possession; you, my people, in whom I have confided; you, my people, whom I have purchased with the price [Hingabe] of My Son, you shall have no other gods before Me.” Amen.

Dr. Peter Brunner was the pastor in Elberfeld and professor at Wuppertal School of Theology.

Jason Lane, the translator, is a student at Concordia Theological Seminary in St. Louis, MO.

Text: Exodus 20:2