No Other Gods: On Moses' First Commandment

Idolatry:

On Moses' First Commandment

My pastor recently sent an email sermonette on the first "commandment" of the New Testament. It motivated me to set down a few musings I have had on the first commandment of the Old Testament:

"You shall have no other gods before me."

Traditional wisdom has it that this means "our God is a jealous god". Naturally, I have a somewhat different slant on it's significance. I think it means "don't put God in box"

For me, the original sin is to limit the nature of His Endlessness (G. I. Gurdjieff's terminology). I agree with the teachings of Joseph Campbell: The ineffable exceeds the boundaries of being effed. How  often I look at traditional conceptions of the Divine and think how small that conception of the godhood seems. God has no boundaries.

"Worship mammon?", says God. "Nothing wrong with money but I'm a lot bigger than that. Power? Very useful stuff, power, but not the Be All and End All. Oh, yeah I did say don't eat pork - it was a guideline to keep you from getting trichinosis not an unbreakable rule. The only unbreakable rule is that every rule can be broken."

Don't put God in a box. Don't try to limit the nature of the limitless. How many religious "crusades", "jihads", have been started in the name of some conceptual entity that fails to be even noticeable in the face of the immensity of His Endlessness. It is said that no one can see the face of God lest they go mad. Well, yeah. I've been privileged from my training in mathematics to see a small glimpse of the meaning of infinity (which explains why some think me mad as a hatter). It's overwhelming. Take a little time to watch a meteor display in the wee hours of a mountain night, realising that each of those points of lights we call stars are suns like our own, and you'll get a hint of what I mean.

Don't put God in a box. You can't make the box big enough. "You shall have no other gods before me." If you worship the box (which is in the nature of the way our minds work), you've made a god that doesn't match the real thing.

"What about the old saw: can God make something so big even He can't move it? Doesn't an unbounded Divine result in the creation of paradox?", you ask. Yes, it does. And I think that's a very good thing. It allows for free will. Without ambiguity there isn't any real choice.

So, since it is the nature of our thought to put things in categories, in the nature of our very thought to "put God in a box",  it might be a good idea to make the box as big as we can possibly imagine. In fact, I'm going to start a meditation practice: "How has my conception of God grown today?" How have I managed to conceive of a bigger box. That way my "god" has grown every day and my "god" is a Living God:

"You shall have no other gods before me."  The tao that can be told is not the Tao. The god that can be told is not the God.

Build a bigger box.