This is the first installment in The Western Journal’s series “Biden Breaking the Ten Commandments.” Read the series introduction here.
The First Commandment is seemingly the simplest: “You shall have no other gods before me.”
As straightforward as it may seem, it is often the most broken of God’s laws. Our fallen nature can make following even the simplest of moral commands endlessly complicated.
Our hearts are easily seduced by false gods, especially when our leaders actively encourage us to exalt them above the one true king.
But which gods, exactly, are the Biden administration propping up? After all, it’s not as if the federal government is mandating prayers to Allah or Vishnu.
An even more simple question needs answering when it comes to this topic: What does God mean when he speaks of “other gods”?
The Importance of the First Commandment
The First Commandment establishes the absolute nature of God’s authority.
God isn’t asking to be given preference above other gods. He’s claiming total authority in the absence of any other.
Do you trust the Biden administration?
When the Bible was written, there were many religions, each of which had vastly different cosmologies. People worshiped and deified everything. The sun, the moon, the ocean, the earth — everything was personified and deified.
And yet, in one small verse at the very beginning of Genesis, God cemented his position at the head of creation — trivializing every other god and false religion — by stating that he alone created the heavens and the earth.
There’s no room left for sun gods anymore.
This sentiment is reiterated in the First Commandment. As the one true authority over creation, God asserts himself as the sole arbiter of morality.
Following his rules and knowing his character is the only true path to goodness, because goodness is defined by the one who rules over creation.
Without the acknowledgment of an absolute moral authority, there can be no absolute claims to “good” or “evil.”
This is why the First Commandment is so important: It establishes God as the only true source of all that is good.
In “A Doubter’s Guide to the Ten Commandments,” John Dickson sums this up rather succinctly: “In short, the first commandment … is first not just because it concerns the first priority (our Creator) but also because it grounds all other commandments in a coherent reality.
“Anyone who sincerely adheres to the one God described in the Bible has a deeply logical reason for naming some things good and some things bad.”
Worship and False Gods
Many assume that so long as they haven’t bowed down before another religion’s god, they’ve followed the First Commandment.
Unfortunately, it’s not that simple.
The category of “false god” isn’t limited to religious deities. You can make for yourself a false god out of anything — money, sex, your job, a sports team, a political party, a life philosophy, etc.
As theologian Sinclair Ferguson put it in a 2021 article, “Anything can be deified. The smallest coin brought near enough to the eye can obscure the entire universe from sight.”
We bring false gods near enough to the eye to supplant God when we offer them that which belongs to him alone — our worship.
As the reformer John Calvin defined it, to worship God is “to ascribe and render to Him the glory of all that is good, to seek all things in Him alone, and in every want to have recourse to Him alone.”
We do this to acknowledge that God is “the only source of all virtue, justice, holiness, wisdom, truth, power, goodness, mercy, life, and salvation.”
When we derive our virtues and morals from sources other than God — when we put our ultimate faith, praise and trust in them — we are giving those idols the authority that belongs to him and him alone, as he made clear in the First Commandment.
God’s Authority Over Government
In Psalm 146:3-4, King David wrote, “Put not your trust in princes, in a son of man, in whom there is no salvation. When his breath departs, he returns to the earth; on that very day his plans perish.”
Jeremiah put it even more pointedly in Jeremiah 17:5-6: “Cursed is the man who trusts in man and makes flesh his strength, whose heart turns away from the Lord. He is like a shrub in the desert, and shall not see any good come. He shall dwell in the parched places of the wilderness, in an uninhabited salt land.”
We are not to put our faith in or give our worship to human authorities.
That isn’t to say human authorities are all bad. According to Scripture, government has a specific, God-ordained role.
During the COVID pandemic, many lockdown apologists were quick to point to Romans 13 to say we should submit ourselves to authorities (even though such “authorities” were in violation of a higher authority, the Constitution).
Few of those people read the following verse describing the government’s role.
“For [the one in authority] is God’s servant for your good. But if you do wrong, be afraid, for he does not bear the sword in vain. For he is the servant of God, an avenger who carries out God’s wrath on the wrongdoer,” Romans 13:4 reads.
They are God’s servants — that is to say, the authority of government is nestled under that of God — to bring judgment on the wrongdoer.
The late R.C. Sproul, a renowned theologian, expands upon this.
“We are called to respect, honor, pray for, and be in subjection to our earthly authorities, but the minute we exalt the earthly authority over the authority of Christ, we have betrayed Him, and we have committed treason against the King of kings. His authority is higher than the authority of the president of the United States or Congress or the king of Spain or any ruler anywhere else,” Sproul wrote.
“Every king is subject to the laws of God and will be judged accordingly. It may be that the president is completely ungodly, but for reasons known to God alone, God has placed him in that seat of authority.”
We are indeed called to submit ourselves to our human authorities. But true biblical submission rests in the knowledge that those authorities are under the command of Jesus Christ.
As responsible citizens, it is our duty to call out the ungodliness of those chosen to lead us.
It is our duty to call out the Biden administration’s attempts to overstep its bounds. It is our duty to call out its attempts to replace the authority of Christ.
The False God of Government
Good-faith arguments can be had over the degree to which sin should be outlawed and regulated by earthly authorities.
What’s not up for debate, however, are two things.
One, that the government has the God-given responsibility to punish evildoers, and two, that even if the government shouldn’t regulate sin, it most certainly shouldn’t be incentivizing it.
Our nation’s government, especially today under the Biden administration, fails to punish evildoers.
Illegal immigration is encouraged and rewarded at a rate never before seen in history. The Biden administration is notoriously soft on crime despite its rhetoric.
Even worse, the Biden administration actively empowers evildoers. It encourages and incentivizes rampant sin and subverts the Ten Commandments at every turn (as will be discussed throughout this series).
Just take a look at Biden administration policies on LGBT issues, its repeated insistence that children belong to the state rather than to their parents, and the fact that it honors and funds those who murder children in the womb.
Those are just a few of numerous examples.
This has led Biden to endorse the breaking of other commandments.
After all, all Ten Commandments are intrinsically connected, with the first at the head. Once you break the First Commandment, the breaking of others will inevitably follow.
By doing these things, by pushing its own twisted anti-biblical morality, our federal government is placing itself as an authority above God. It is proclaiming itself the ultimate moral arbiter, in effect demanding your worship.
The Biden administration has fashioned itself into a false god.
