Great is the Lord and most worthy of our praise. His greatness no one can fathom. Welcome to the audio ministry of God Centered Universe and Pastor Timothy Phan. The following message was preached at Genesis Family Church in Denver, Colorado and is an exposition of Deuteronomy chapter 5 verse 7. Please join Pastor Timothy as he leads us in prayer and asks God to open our eyes to see wonderful things in his word. Oh, sovereign Lord. We thank you, Father, that you're simultaneously the God who. Binds up the wounds. Of the. the sick and the broken, and also who knows the number of stars in the sky and counts them and knows them by name. We praise you, Lord, that you do not put your attention upon the strength of the horse, the might of the army. You look down upon the one who fears you. Your eyes upon the humble one who cries to you for help. Lord, we thank you that your word is powerful. You send forth your word and you turn the rivers into ice. You bring the frost and the freeze over the ground. And then, Lord, you just merely speak the word. And it melts and you turn it back into the flowing river. We thank you, O God, that you've given us your holy word. What people are like the people of your church that have been entrusted with the words of God, your holy words. And what people are like us, Lord, who have been entrusted with the gospel of Jesus Christ? Your judgments are good. Your ways are true. Please awaken our souls, Lord, and let our souls arise to praise you as we listen to your word. Lord, I pray for the the precious people in this room. I pray, especially for those who are facing serious trials and serious pain. Oh, shepherd of their souls, I pray that you would comfort them and carry them. Guide them. In your everlasting way. In Jesus holy name. So you please open to the book of Deuteronomy. Chapter five. Deuteronomy, Chapter five. Verses one through seven. This is the word of the Lord. And Moses called all Israel and said to them. Hero, Israel, the statutes and judgments which I speak in your hearing today, that you may learn them and be careful to observe them. The Lord, our God, made a covenant with us in Horeb. The Lord did not make this covenant with our fathers, but with us. Those who are here today, all of us who are alive. The Lord talked with you face to face on the mountain from the midst of the fire. I stood between the Lord and you at that time to declare to you the word of the Lord, for you are afraid because of the fire and you did not go up the mountain. He said. I am the Lord, your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt. out of the house of bondage, you shall have no other gods before me." Thus far the reading of God's Holy Word. The greatest commandment in the Bible is Deuteronomy 6. Four, five. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and all your soul and all your strength. That's the greatest commandment. However. The greatest commandment, love God with everything you have and all of your being. Is built on top of the first commandment. The first of the 10 commandments is the foundation for the greatest commandment, because If God calls us to love him with everything we have and all that we think and everything we are, it's impossible to do that unless we know who God is. And that's why I think in the book of Deuteronomy, the first commandment comes before the greatest commandment, because you have to get the first commandment first to build the foundation so you can go towards the greatest commandment. You have to know that there's one God and there can only be one God before you can love that one God. with everything you have, with all your heart and all your soul and all your strength. So if we want to love God, if we want to obey the greatest commandment, Then we have to really work on the first commandment. We've got to lay the foundation and know the first commandment. This is the first of the Ten Commandments. It comes first for a reason. And the language of the first commandment is the language of substitution. And it's a prohibition against substituting other gods for the true God. So in the first commandment, God says, I will not allow for you as human beings to substitute other gods in my place. That's the gist of it. And as you think about the nature of substituting things, you put something in the place of something else, in life there are some good substitutes. Sometimes you have to substitute to accomplish a good end. For example, my grandfather, my maternal grandfather, Didn't know. He grew up in the era when smoking cigarettes, they didn't know how dangerous it was. And so he had to quit. You know, the doctor said, you have to quit and you're going to be in trouble. And he substituted cigarette, sorry, lollipops and sticks for cigarettes. That's a good, that's a good substitution. That accomplishes a good end. I've met a few engineers who know how to use duct tape to substitute for just all kinds of things. They get very creative and accomplish very great ends with just duct tape. It's a good substitute. I have this kind of lactose intolerance. Some people have mild lactose intolerance. I have severe lactose intolerance. So I just look at the milk at the store and I get sick. I just look at it. And we discovered a few years back that we could, well, Sarah discovered that we could substitute soy milk and lemon juice, mix it together for buttermilk. And all of a sudden, I could eat things that I couldn't eat before. There's a good way to substitute things. But the first commandment is focused on the bad form of substitution. When something takes the place of the nature of something else in a bad way, you can have all kinds of trouble. So, for example, my generation grew up, in many ways, with the television. substituting for the parent. Not all parents did this, but the television became the babysitter and the parent, and you just plug it in as the substitute, and it wasn't healthy. People today say, well, you don't need to read the book, just watch the movie. So the story of the classic, you substitute the movie for the book. And the good literature teachers will tell you it's not a good substitute. One of the worst ones I can think of, just in human realms, is when a high school daughter is in the home of an absentee father, and she goes out and finds a boyfriend. to substitute for the father, everything that the father is not giving her. She goes and tries to find it in the boyfriend. First of all, I don't think she should even have the boyfriend. She's not ready to get married. But secondly, even more sadly, what she needs is the father. She doesn't need the boyfriend. It's a it's a horrible substitute for one of her deepest needs, which is her dad. In terms of the first commandment, when it comes to trying to substitute something in the place of God, To take the place of God in your life, it's an all statement. All substitutes for God are bad. If you try to take the place of God or you shirk the place of God, put some substitute in the place of God in any manner. It's always wrong all the time. Substituting other gods in the place of the one true God is always an abomination to God. But the mystery, I think human sin is a gross mystery. The mystery of human sin and depravity includes this propensity in the human heart to make substitutes for God. We just create them. And what the first commandment does in just eight powerful words, it's very short, just eight words, is it exposes this human propensity to try to create substitutes for God. in our lives or in our hearts, and so it prohibits it. Deuteronomy 5, 7, You shall have no other gods before me. Just absolutely no substitutes. It's completely prohibited. Now, if you read Deuteronomy 5, 7 from the Hebrew text, just very face value, you would you would read, You shall have no other gods before my face. And I don't want to press that language too much because it's a Hebrew idiom, but I think the face part is important. It kind of gives us a picture to think about with the First Commandment. Think as it were of a painting in which Israel is invited to come into God's throne room and stand before the throne of God and even see or look up towards, anyway, the face of God. And as Israel goes into the throne room of God, she drags her false gods in the throne room with her. She brings her false gods into the throne room of God. And so God is facing Israel and Israel brings her false idols and gods before the throne of God. And God has to face the idols. They bring the idols even before his face, in front of his face. And he says, you shall not have any other gods. in front of my face. Don't bring them in front of my face. Deuteronomy 34, one has this kind of idiom or language used that way. Speaking of mountains, then Moses went up from the plains of Moab to Mount Nebo to the top of Pisgah, which is across from before the face of Jericho. And the Lord showed him all the land of Gilead as far as Dan. So here we have these geographical landmarks, these great mountains, Mount Nebo on the one side and on the other side, the city of Jericho, the geographical landmark. And they're facing each other. It's like two giants. They're personified, sort of. Mount Nebo, east of the Jordan, is like a tall man staring face to face at the man across the Jordan, the broad-shouldered city of Jericho. They're facing each other. And the picture is God says, hopefully not the fire alarm, Oh, smoke alarm, OK. God says you shall not bring the false gods into my throne room before my face. I don't want to see the faces. of your false gods in my throne room. So there's that picture. But then this language of bringing them before my face in the Hebrew Bible also has the idea of being a substitute, substituting something in the place of something else. Deuteronomy 21, 15 through 17, same idiom, but now used in terms of substitution. If a man has two wives, one loved and the other unloved, and they've born him children, both the loved and the unloved, and if the firstborn son is of her who is unloved, then it shall be on the day he bequeaths his possessions to his sons, that he must not bestow firstborn status on the son of the loved wife, and then it says, in preference to, but there's our idiom, it's in the face of, right in the face of, the son of the unloved, the true firstborn. But he shall acknowledge the son of the unloved wife as the firstborn, by giving him a double portion of all that he has, for he is the beginning of his strength, the right of his firstborn is his. So do you see how now you've got the language of substitution? When you bring this in the face of, now it's the language of substitution. So there's the unloved wife and the loved wife. And he says, you shall not substitute One son, the love son for the actual firstborn son in the face of the firstborn son, you shall not do that. You cannot switch the nature of things. You cannot create the substitution. God prohibits in the Bible. Substitutions of one thing for another that violate the nature of the things. Scripture prohibits. making substitutions in a way that violates the way God designed things. So you get the commandment not to substitute false gods for God, but you also get commandments in the Bible that go against violating the natural order of things. You can't make substitutes for how God created things. And so, for example, in Leviticus 27, God says in verses 32 and 33, and concerning the tithe of the herd of the flock, I'm sorry, tithe of the herd, the tithe of the herd or of the flock. or of whatever passes under the rod, the tenth one shall be holy to the Lord. So when the tenth one passes under the rod, that's the one that you can't substitute. He shall not inquire whether it is good or bad. You can't say, oh, that's my best one. We won't count that one. Nor shall he exchange it. No substitutions. And if he exchanges it at all, then there's a penalty. He's sinned. then both it and the one exchanged for it shall be holy, it shall not be redeemed. So in other words, the rancher lets his lambs pass under the rod. The best lamb is number 10 and he's holy to the Lord. And the rancher is not allowed to say, well, not that one. We'll hold that one back. And here this one's got a broken leg. Let's let's sacrifice him to the Lord. No substitutes. By nature, the 10th is to be sacrificed and there is no substitutes. And then, of course, this applies. That's the analogy that now applies to God. Psalm 106 20. Thus, they substituted, they changed. their glory, the glory of God, into the image of an ox that eats grass. That's the folly of idolatry, whereas Jeremiah puts it in Jeremiah 2.11, has a nation changed its gods? Substituted its gods, which are not gods, but my people have changed. They have substituted their glory for what does not profit. In the New Testament, Paul speaks against substituting the natural order for an unnatural order. That's why we read in Romans 1.26, For this reason God gave them up to vile passions, for even their women exchanged. They made a substitution. They exchanged the natural use for what is against nature. It violates God's order of things. God prohibits the substitution. Lesbianism just defiles the created order. And so God prohibits it, but why? What's it built on top of? Well, it's built on top of verse 25 of Romans 1. The people exchanged, they substituted the truth of God for the lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the creator who is forever blessed. So you see how they take the created order, turn it upside down, and they substitute the creature for the creator. That leads to all kinds of sin. The essence, according to the first commandment, the essence of false worship. Is a wicked substitution. Of the glory of false gods. Instead of the glory of the living God, you try to ascribe glory to what is not God, when we substitute anything in the place of God's glory in any area of life under the sun. We are in violation of the first commandment. And for me, this makes sense of things like adultery. Why is adultery so painful? Why is adultery so severe? A wife comes into her husband, say it's a Christian home, and confesses the sin of adultery to her husband. Why does that shatter everything? Why is it so painful? Can't they just say, well, we're Christians here. I committed adultery. God commands you to forgive. Let's move on. Why does adultery have the power, in some instances, to even shatter the marriage covenant? Well, I think it's because adultery is the great analogy for idolatry in this sense. that when the wife confesses to her husband that she has committed adultery, what she's basically saying to him in the confession is that at some point in time she decided to substitute the value and the glory of another man in place of his own value and glory as her husband. And that has the power to shatter things. It's extremely destructive. The first commandment says you shall have no other gods. You cannot substitute anything in the place of God's glory. Now we live in the Western world and we look across the seas at India and the religion of Hinduism. And we see Hinduism with thousands of gods. You know, you ask a Hindu, do you worship God? And they say, well, actually, we worship thousands of gods. You know, they all have names and we can teach you about them. Thousands and thousands of gods. And so in Hinduism, it is true that Hinduism violates the first commandment in thousands upon thousands upon thousands of ways. God says you shall have no other God, not a single other God. And Hinduism has thousands of other gods. So everyday Hinduism is an affront to God, is defiling before God. But as we look over the seas at India, we dare not snicker. We dare not say, well, we're a monotheistic kind of culture. We have a monotheistic heritage. We're one God kind of people and sort of snicker at the, well, you actually worship thousands of gods. We dare not, because in American culture we do in fact have our own thousands of gods. We may not categorize them and call them by the same names that the Hindus do. But there are so many other gods in American culture that they're just way too numerous to list off. But I do think they fall into broad categories and you can kind of categorize the gods of America. And the first major category of the gods of American society is the big broad category of money. You watch the presidential election, last presidential cycle, election cycle. You hear, listen to what the media is saying. What I heard over and over and over again is the number one issue in this coming election, the election that is now passed, is the economy. It was always the economy. What's the candidate going to do to fix the economy? How's he going to make the economy better? The issue is the economy. But I say that was not God's number one issue for the election. God's number one issue in the American elections may well be both the one that's passed and the ones that are coming. The fact that America has become so indifferent to the first commandment that America is becoming ripe for divine judgment. That very well may be one of God's number one issues. You've forgotten the first commandment. That's not what the media says. The politicians aren't concerned with the First Commandment. It's not their political platform. They say that the economy is our number one issue. Why do they say that the economy is our number one issue? Could it be that it's because money is our substitute god in America? We have so many gods, they fall into broad categories. Another one I would call sensuality. when Robin Williams did the movie Dead Poets Society, really what he was doing, remember the East Coast prep school English teacher who said, quote, suck the marrow out of life, end quote, and America was just taken by storm by that movie. Really what Robin Williams was doing in the movie Dead Poets Society is he was introducing existentialism, the worldview or the philosophy of existentialism, to the broad American public who didn't have the intellectual capacity to read the old existentialist books. So they just put it in a movie form and it takes America by storm. Why? Because America substitutes the false god of sensuality in the place of biblical worship. We're made by God to worship, to experience the thrill of worship, but we substitute sensuality in the place of true biblical worship. That's why you have church leaders who are preaching from their pulpits and simultaneously addicted to pornography. It's also why in the American churches, the ones that are growing, the big, booming, popular churches, if you look at the format and the structure of the worship, it's very, very sensual. It's not biblically saturated. It's not biblically focused. It's fleshly focused. It appeals to the flesh. It appeals to the sensuality of the American culture. And then you have to ask the question, well, yes, you're drawing a lot of people, but which God are you worshiping? I shall have no other gods before me. One of the other, the third major category for the gods of America, I would call the category of self. Children, through child psychology, pop child psychology, parental psychology, are taught to grow up and say, I will determine what I will and will not do. I'm a self-determining child. Psychology says I'm allowed to be a self-determining child. And the job of the parent is to let me self-determine myself. And then they grow up and become relativists. And they say, your truth is not my truth. My truth is not your truth. My truth is whatever I want to determine it to be. And we wonder why they grow up and believe those things. American psychology teaches us to substitute self, this self-determinism, this autonomy of self for God. Thousands upon thousands of ways, thousands upon thousands of gods in America. So then the question is, how does God feel? If we substitute things in the place of God, if the wife comes and confesses adultery to her husband, how does God feel? Then here's where it gets really sober as we study the first commandment. We're told how God feels in the Bible through this language of the no other, no this idea of other gods. God tells us how he feels about it. The first commandment is you shall have no other gods before me. There should be no competing lovers. And in the Bible, the false God is called the other. And when you listen to the language of the other, the other God in the Bible, you hear how God feels about it. And here's the sobering thing. Whenever you get this phrase, the other God in the Bible, God is always responding with feelings of anger. He's angry. And there's so many places we could go, I could go to show you this. There are just. Hundreds and hundreds of places, I'll just give you a few, just mix a few texts together, but even just a few, just take a few texts, put them together. The mixture, I think, is is spicy. It's hot. It's like hot chili pepper sauce. It's serious. In fact, one time in front of a church, I didn't say anything much. I made a few comments, but I just read a collection of verses like this. That's all I did was read from the Bible. And I was accused of being hateful just from reading these verses. I just read straight from the Bible. This is how God feels. Exodus 23, 13 says, And in all that I have said to you, be circumspect and make no mention of the name of, and here's the phrase, other gods. There's there's the phrase from the first commandment. Nor let it be heard from your mouth. And then here's how God feels about it. Deuteronomy 6, 14 through 15. You shall not go after other gods. How does God feel? Well, He says, the gods are the people who are all around you. For the Lord your God is a jealous God among you, lest the anger... There's the emotion. Lest the anger of the Lord, your God, be aroused against you and destroy you from the face of the earth. Of course, the sad news is that Israel didn't obey the first commandment very quickly in the history of Israel. By the time you get to the book of Judges, she's already going after other gods, already violating the first commandment in blatant ways. Judges 2, 11 through 12. Then the children of Israel did evil in the sight of the Lord and served the Baals. And they forsook the Lord God of their fathers who had brought them out of the land of Egypt. And they followed. Here it is. Other gods. from among the gods of the people who are all around them. And they bow down to them. And here's how the Lord feels. And they provoke the Lord to anger. King Solomon is really representing all the kings that are going to come after him. It says in 1 Kings 11, 4, this is what he did. For it was so, when Solomon was old, that his wives turned his heart after other gods. And there's the association of adultery and idolatry. It's just throughout the Bible. And how does God feel about other gods? Jeremiah 7, 17 through 18. Do you not see what they do in the cities of Judah and in the streets of Jerusalem? The children gather wood. This is what it looks like on the ground. The children gather wood. The fathers kindle the fire. And the women knead dough. to make cakes for the Queen of Heaven. They pour out drink offerings to, there's the phrase, other gods, that they may provoke me. How does God feel? To anger. To wrath. And then the question is, why is God so angry? If violations of the first commandment evoke anger and wrath, from God. Why? Why is God so angry? And the answer to that question takes us into the heart of the divine glory, Isaiah 42, 8. This is the answer. God says, I am the Lord. That is my name, my glory. I give to no other. nor my praise to carved idols." Why is he so angry? He's angry because his glory is at stake. The other, the divine substitute, competes with God for his glory. Therefore, God must be wrathful. because he cannot share his glory with another. It's against his nature. So Romans 1 18 says, for the wrath of God is being revealed from heaven. This is the really sobering part, divine substitutes, other gods evoke the righteous wrath of God. They compete with his glory. and thus they must be dealt with with his wrath. The fire of God burns hot whenever there are substitutes for God, whenever there are idols. Is it okay for a Christian mother to sometimes get pretty angry with one of her children? Is that acceptable? Can a Christian mother get angry at one of her children. Of course, modern psychology says no. Anger is always bad in all cases, at all times. There is the warning in the Bible. The brother of Jesus, James the brother of Jesus, says everyone should be slow to speak and not quick to anger, for the anger of man does not accomplish the righteousness of God. But still the question remains, are there times, are there exceptional circumstances when a Christian mother ought to be angry with one of her children? Suppose she has a rebellious teenage son who decides that he doesn't want her to be her mother anymore. He's mad at her. He's a teenager and he's mad. because she won't let him do what all of the other teenage boys get to do. So in his rebellion, he starts to run away. He leaves and runs. He's gone for nights. He finds the right homes of his friends who will take him in, the friends with whom he can live and drink and party the night away. And he asks their mothers to take him in. I need a place to stay. And they become kind of his honorary mothers and he becomes their honorary son. Why? Because they allow him to do what he wants to do. So he goes after other mothers. So will the real mother be angry? I think the Bible says she ought to be angry. She ought to find herself feeling an infinitely small portion of the wrath of God, the wrath that God feels when his children do such things to him. But why does she feel so angry? Why does she have a righteous sense of anger in her bones? She feels it because she loves her son. She knows that other mothers, substitute mothers, will destroy her son. So she's jealous for her son, and her jealous anger is therefore a loving anger. It's rooted in love. Sometimes, as parents, you have to express anger in order to express love. This is the good news about God's wrath against all divine substitutes. The good news is that it's rooted in the love of God. It's not that wrath and love are two competing, contradictory emotions. It's that love expresses itself in wrath when there's a competing substitute that will destroy the Beloved. The universe has an order. There is a Creator and there are creatures. First the Creator and then there are creatures. And the glory of the Creator is one unique glory. No one else can match the glory of the Creator. And the glory of all else is a different glory. It's a derivative glory. So if we try to violate that order, that there's only one God and no substitutes can be made for the one God, then we're headed for destruction. We put ourselves in the path of destruction and God loves his people. He's gracious and compassionate and he loves us. And so his wrath is a loving wrath. Because it's a passionate warning for us to stop violating the God centered order of life and to flee from the coming judgment. It's love. The wrath of God in the Bible turns out to be the love of God in the Bible. They're one in the same expressed in different situations. Parents. You have to fight this. You have to fight this battle and you have to win it. You cannot allow substitutes for the father-mother role in the lives of your children. It cannot be allowed. No one and nothing can substitute for you as the father or you as the mother. One of the reasons why many of us are passionate about Christian home education is not about education. It's not about academics. We frankly are not out to get high SAT scores. What we care about is the parent-child relationship. We care about the fact that there can be no substitutes for dad and for mom in the lives of our children. And the public school teacher or sometimes the soccer coach or whoever it is becomes the substitute and that's dangerous. It's dangerous. But parents, as you shepherd your children, the most important thing is that you're jealous for their holiness and their walk with God. There can be no substitutes for God in their lives. And if there are, sometimes there has to be a loving anger, a strong, firm, non-abusive, self-controlled, parental, jealous anger for the holiness of your child. God, when he sees the substitute, expresses his love and wrath. So the first commandment is filled with divine love. You're you're having a hard day as a Christian. You've had a horrible week. You're tempted to create some kind of substitute to take the pain away. You're tempted by some form of sensuality or entertainment or indulgement to just take the boredom or the payment, the pain away. And then you remember God's wrath. You remember that the first commandment is connected to the emotion of God's wrath. And if you read it right, you feel infinitely loved. You feel loved by the wrath of God, the warning of God's wrath is a warning and you feel loved by the warning and you can throw down the false God and pick up the hymnal and worship and find your fulfillment and all your satisfactions met in God alone. No substitutes means no other gods. And God says, not one, you shall have no other God before me, which means in the Christian sense, in the New Testament sense, there can be no other Christ. If there can be no other gods, then that means for the Christian, there can be no other Jesus. It's one Jesus, no other, no other Jesus. Any description of God that does not recognize the name of Jesus as God's self-revelation to man is by definition a substitute God and therefore a false God. Specifically, Mormonism substitutes a false God in the place of the biblical God and is therefore idolatry. Islam claims to worship God, but has a substitute, false God, and is therefore idolatry. Non-Messianic Judaism, meaning a kind of Judaism that doesn't acknowledge the Messiahship of Jesus of Nazareth, has a different God, a substitute God, and is therefore idolatry. And then in the popular American culture, this yoga craze, the yoga culture that seems to be taking over the world in America, is built on top of Hinduism and pantheism, a sort of monistic view of the universe where God is kind of all in all of us. And the yoga culture, therefore, presents a competing God, a substitute God and his idolatry. The New Testament epistles say there's the one God. And the one savior, Jesus Christ. And then the New Testament epistles add. There can be no substitute Jesus's. Even if you name the name of Jesus, there cannot be a false Jesus in the church or in your life. 2 Corinthians 11, 4, for if someone comes and proclaims another Jesus, no other gods, no other Jesuses than the one we proclaimed, or if you receive a different spirit from the one you received, Or if you accept a different gospel from the one you accepted, you put up with it readily enough. That's a rebuke and Galatians 1 6. I'm astonished, says the apostle, that you are so quickly deserting him who called you in the grace of Christ and are turning to a different gospel, another gospel. And then verse nine says that we've said before. So now I say again, if anyone is preaching to you a gospel contrary to the one you received, let him be accursed. So a substitute Jesus, a different Jesus, is an abomination to God. It violates the first commandment. The father hates nothing more than a substitute Jesus robbing his own son of the glory that is due to him. But but in our culture, these abound. People preach in the name of Jesus, they prophesy in the name of Jesus, but so many times they prophesy another Jesus, a different Jesus than the one that the apostles preached that's revealed to us in the New Testament. C.S. Lewis wrote the children's series, the Narnia series, and I took the time to read the whole series aloud to my children. We read book by book, straight through the series, and it was a wonderful adventure. Lewis did an amazing task, amazing job, work in putting together that series. He's trying to teach people about Aslan, and Aslan is the symbol or the representative of Jesus. So the children learn about Jesus as they get to know Aslan and the stories, and there's a lot of truth in the stories, and it's done in such a beautiful way. We always joke that Lewis is always talking about food. He must have loved food. Everywhere he goes, it's food here and food there. They're always eating. We got to the end of the Narnia series. The last book is called The Last Battle. We're so enthralled with the whole thing. We made it all the way to the last chapter of the last book. And then, Lewis made a fantastic blunder. Now, I'm not accusing C.S. Lewis of not being a Christian. He certainly was a Christian and a wonderful, amazing gift to the church. I'm not saying that this Narnia series needs to be thrown in the trash. I think that there are wonderful things about the Narnia series. But in the last chapter of the last book, Lewis paints a picture of Aslan that is a false picture. I wish he would have left the last chapter out. It's a false Aslan. It's not the biblical Aslan. And we were so sad to finish the Narnia series that way. He wrote a book for adults called The Great Divorce, in which I think he also paints a distorted picture of Aslan, of the god of Narnia, which is a warning to us. Have not all of us, at some point, created a false Aslan in our minds. Haven't we all at some point distorted the Jesus of Scripture and tried to make him a different Jesus, a Jesus who's more tame, who's more obedient to what we desire and substituted that false Jesus for the for the true biblical Jesus. In fact, I would say I would venture to say that we violate the first commandment, you shall have no other gods before me every day. every hour and perhaps every minute. And therefore, we deserve wrath. If God is wrathful against those who substitute other gods, then all people deserve wrath because all have violated the commandment. And so then we need the gospel. The gospel is that Christ Jesus who will allow no substitutes on his eternal throne, you cannot put any substitute on the throne of Christ, knew, he knew before time began, that human sinfulness would require a human substitute on the cross. With God, there can be no substitutes. The first commandment stands. No other God But with sinful man, there must be a substitute. He must become our substitute on the cross, or else we perish. First Peter 2.24, he himself bore our sins in his body, which means his body substituted in the place of our bodies on the cross. on the tree that we might die to sin and live to righteousness by his wounds, you have been healed. So here's the great reversal of the gospel. The God who allows no substitutes for his glory. Became our substitute in terms of eternal retribution. He died as our substitute, it was truly blood for blood. Blood substituting for blood. Flesh for flesh, the flesh of Christ in place of our own sinful flesh, but it was also the sinless one for the guilty ones. The gentle one for the violent ones. the Lamb of God in the place of, in substitution of, the enemies of God. And therefore, the death of Christ was indeed substitutionary atonement. It was substitutionary. This calls me to repent. You have to you get done with the first commandment. You have to examine your heart. You have to ask the question, where are the substitute gods in my heart? And when I identify those substitute gods, I must renounce them. And then it calls us to worship. If I want the real God, the one true God who will not share his glory with another nor give his praise to idols, then I must come to the cross and I see the bleeding face of the man Christ Jesus despised and rejected, hated by the world. spit upon, mocked at, and I worship. There's the true God up on the cross. And then we, as Christians, ask what story can compete with that story? What history can rival that history? What false God can challenge such a great and awesome God as that? He is without rival. Nothing can compare to Him, unmatched in beauty, power, majesty, dominion, holiness, love, righteousness, mercy, and kindness. Our triune God alone is worthy of worship. He's the King on the throne of heaven and earth, and there shall be no substitutes for His inapproachable, unending glory. We will close by coming to the table of the one and only God. Before we do that, here's the doxology. Praise be to God, our Father, who allows no substitutes for him in our hearts because he loves us. Praise be to God, the Son, our Lord Jesus Christ, who became our substitute and died an infinitely valuable death in our stead. Praise be to the Holy Spirit, who teaches us to abhor all substitutes for God and to delight ourselves in the true and living God. Thank you for joining us for the preaching of the Holy Scriptures. You can find more resources at our website, www.godcentereduniverse.org. You may also send correspondence to us at the following address, PO Box 461978, Aurora, Colorado 80046. God-Centered Universe is a faith-driven ministry that exists to encourage the Church in family-based discipleship and to call the Church to continue trembling joyfully at God's Word.