Exodus 20:1-3 My Responsibilities to God
“And God spake all these words, saying, I am the Lord the God, which have brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage. Thou shalt have no other gods before me”(KJV).
That’s pretty straight forward. He, alone is God, and we are bound to Him. Of all the gods that man has invented, none can make that claim. He was actually our God long before He spoke these words through Moses. He was our God even before He created us. We were in His mind and in His heart from before the moment He began creation. He desired to have fellowship, so He decided to create someone suitable for fellowship, and that was us. But before He created us, He created a world for us—a “livable place.” And He went way beyond livable. He went even beyond magnificent. Just go outside and look around. He made a world that we could see. He created a world that we could hear. He created a world that we could smell. He created a world that we could taste. He created a world that we could feel. And after He did all that, He created us. He created us and a universe in which we can live, so I’m pretty sure that we are responsible to thank Him for all this. Wait a minute. I forgot something. God didn’t just create us, He formed us with His hands, in His likeness He formed us. And then after he formed us, He blew His breath, the breath of life, into us. Yep, we are responsible to thank Him.
He planted a garden and walked with the first man and woman in this garden in the cool of the day, and He intended that we would live with Him there forever. But there was a catch. God did not want automatons who had to love Him, so He gave us freedom of choice, and then He gave us something to make a choice about. There was one tree in the garden whose fruit was forbidden. We were not to eat of it. To eat of it was to disobey Him and disrespect Him. (Don’t blame Adam and Eve. You know that you and I would have done the same thing they did.) When they ate the fruit, sin came into the world, and sin cannot exist in the presence of God, so man was separated from God, His creator.
Before I began to write this, I prayed and asked God what our responsibility was to Him. His answer was short and it was definite. He said, “Love me.” It did not come to me as a command, but rather, as a yearning. God yearns that we love Him. We can show that first by accepting the sacrifice made by God’s “only begotten Son,” Jesus, who took the sins of everyone on Himself and paid for them in full on the cross of Calvary. That made it possible for each of us to spend eternity with God.
There are other responsibilities listed in the Bible, “Love your neighbor as yourself.” “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” “Whatever you do, do it as unto the Lord.” “Go into all the world and preach the Gospel to every creature.” There are more, but they can all be summed up in the two word desire of God’s heart, “Love me.” Let us fulfill our responsibility to God as well as we can every day in every way.
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