The first requirement is, that this covenanting God shall be recognized as the only God; that no other god shall be conceded a place in God's universe. And this requirement is vital to any such covenant. A divided heart is no heart at all. He who can see any other object of love and devotion comparable with the one to whom he gives himself in covenant-union, is thereby incapacitated from a covenant-union. Therefore it is that this first word of the Ten Words of the covenant of God's people with their God is not an arbitrary mandate, but is the simple expression of a truth which is essential to the very existence of the covenant as a covenant of union. And this principle is as vitally important now as it was in the days of Moses. The human heart is always inclined to divide itself when it ought to be undivided. It is reluctant to be wholly and always true to God alone. But, now as hitherto, without wholeness of heart a covenant of union with God is an impossibility. And, indeed, the very idea of other gods is an outgrowth of man's sense of an unfitness to be in oneness of life with the One God,--in consequence of which man seeks a lower divinity than the supreme God as the immediate object of his worship. The second requirement in this covenant of union is, that no material image or representation of this covenanting God shall be made use of as a help to his worship by his covenanting people; that, as a Spirit, God shall be worshiped in spirit by his people. Here, again, is no arbitrary mandate, but only the recognition of a vital truth. Because God is Creator of all, no creation of God can be like God. Because God is a Spirit, the human mind can best commune with him spiritually, without having its conceptions of him degraded by any image or representation--which at the best must be wholly unworthy of him. In this second requirement, as in the first, a danger is indicated to which the Israelites were peculiarly exposed in their day, and to which all the people of God are exposed in any day. In the Assyrian, or Chaldean, home of Abraham, there was practically no image worship, but there was a belief in a plurality of gods. In the Egyptian home, from which the Israelites had just come out, images in great variety were the objects of worship. As the covenant people of God, the Israelites were to refrain from the polytheism of their ancestral home in the far East, and from the grosser idolatry of their more recent home in the West. And so it must be with the people of God at all times; they must worship only God, and they must worship God without any help from a material representation of the object of their worship.