I thought I would talk to you today about the first commandment: "I am the Lord thy God, thou shalt not have strange gods before Me."(Ex 20:2f)

We can define God, so to speak, as the end of ends: that for the sake of which everything is.  Or you can define God as the one positive infinity. Man having reason can never be satisfied with anything which is limiting, so "that for the sake of which you do everything else" would have to be God in one way or another. The mind can never be exhausted by anything which is limited, and since the human appetite is moved by the mind, there would be an innate desire for that which is unlimited. Were made for what is infinite: but that doesn't stop us from infinitizing what is finite and that is the "strange god".

So if you ask a miser how much money he would want he would say, "More!" He would never be satisfied with anything he already had.

If you want to keep the first commandment, you should ask yourself the question, what have I infinitized? You can't be receptive to the true God if you’re really seeking your happiness in a false god. Man being rational could not exist without seeking his total happiness in something, without infinitizing something he has put in place of God. Unless you see what you do in that way, the first commandment has no meaning for you.

A person could infinitize pleasure, power, money, the respect of others, getting along with people - what you want is to have people think well of you; understanding - "forever seeking but never attaining to the knowledge of the truth."(2Tm 3:7)

What do you infinitize?

It is important to see your strange god, and not try to build on a rotten foundation. What I am talking about is that for the sake of which you do everything else; like a playboy wants money in order to have pleasure. Your god is that for the sake of which you do everything else. Everyone has one, and you don't give it up easily. Unless you see what your god is and face it, you're not disposed to receive the truth. The proof of what your god is, is that you never have enough of it. Also, you know it from what depresses you. What depresses you is the privation of your end. To face your false god you have to be supported by something; you have to be supported by a spiritual father who loves you, because when you see this false god, you know you have no support anymore.

Another sign of your god is: what do you take your delight in? A religious person could take his delight in what he thought was his own humility. The end is always some good without measure. That is what God should be! Since we're made for God, we're not fulfilled without Him. We would have to fabricate a false god in order to exist at all because there has to be some ordering principle of our life no matter how disordered it is. That ordering principle is that for the sake of which you do everything else.

Homosexuality is a case in point in this matter of natural drives: the need to be loved by a father becomes perverted when it is frustrated. The frustration of a natural need doesn't make the natural need disappear. The natural need moves you to find an alternative in another object.

You have to get wise to yourself. You can't love God unless you do, because that quasi-infinity that motivates you dominates your life unless you look at it straight. The first commandment is the foundation for the whole building. It also connects with the saying of Jesus, "unless you hate your soul you’ll lose it."(Jn 12:25; Mt 16:25; Mk 8:35; Lk 9:24) To hate your soul is to hate the soul that loves the false god. You hate your soul because you hate your soul seeking to rest in the false god, and therefore your own soul is your enemy, destroying you with the false god that it seeks.

That is why it is said, "correct a wise man and he'll love you." (Prov 9:8) Because if you correct a wise man who wants to love God, he’ll love you.

"Honor thy father and mother."(Ex 20:12) This involution by which you withdraw from your mother and father is the beginning of the way you withdraw from other things. If you had a vicious father, you would look for a good father to fulfill that instinct for God. Since you depend on your father totally and since you have an instinct for God, if his authority kept you from God, you would hate him because the need for God is the most universal desire of all. And a father is a kind of god to his child. The way a bad father keeps you from God is by making you feel that whatever you want is bad. So if he convinces you that you can't please him, you think you can't please God.

Since the fourth commandment is the first one after the commandments to honor God, if you don't have the right relationship to your natural father, it is the beginning of all sin. It is through a true spiritual father that you recognize that God is God and so we are able to keep the first commandment.

If you never had the experience with a father, you would become your own father and you would be living in order to take delight in yourself. A person who says, I better take care of myself, no one else will - his god is himself! Unless you give up that trust in yourself as something infinite, you can't be receptive to me because I can't communicate with you. You’ll take what I teach you to implement the relationship to yourself. To the extent that you're not wise to yourself, everything that I teach you will be implementing this false god.

"Forgive them for they know not what they do."(Lk 23:34) But remember, you wouldn't be in this room unless you were seeking the true God. The trouble is no one showed you how to seek Him before. We're the victims of a perverse society and we do perverse things, but God does forgive us. You have to learn how to be merciful to yourself, because then you’ll be merciful to others. The more you believe that God loves you, the more you can face the false god. The more you can face the false god, the more you can love God.

In a healthy soul there have to be those two things: an unyielding hatred of self and an unlimited confidence in God's goodness. Confidence in God without self-hatred is fatuous. Hatred in yourself without believing in God's love is despair.