Two Lords, One Loyalty & No Love

So these nations feared the LORD and also served their idols.

~2 Kings 17:41

(Jesus said), "No one can serve two masters, for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other."

~Matthew 6:24

In our first text, we are told that the Assyrians and the other pagan nations that displaced the Israelites during the exile served both their gods and the Lord God of Israel because they saw how the Lord punished them by sending lions to attack them. The Hebrew word for fear in this verse means to be "afraid" or "frightened of". This is a slavish fear that shrinks from God out of terror and has no personal love for Him. But whenever the Bible speaks of "the fear of the LORD" it speaks of an awe and reverence of God that causes us to honour Him in our hearts and through our words and deeds.

It is therefore clear that these pagan nations only acknowledged God's power and might but did not truly worship Him or ever love Him. This is evident from the fact that they "also served their idols". But our Lord Jesus Christ emphasised that the greatest commandment involves loving the LORD our God with all of our being not with a divided heart. And this is why He explained the impossibility of serving two masters in our second key text.

Not only are these verses revealing of our subjective, pluralistic culture that places Jesus among other gods but sadly also of some professing Christians who claim to follow Jesus but live as though they had no Master over their lives. They say with their lips that Jesus is their Lord but live for their own desires and pleasures. Christ has no Lordship over their thoughts, what they watch, the friends they keep, what they do with their free time, their words or how they treat others. To such hypocritical professors, I warn that since they do not know when their last breath will be, they will be summoned before the Judge at any moment to give an account of what they did with the life He gave them (Matthew 25:14-30).

To my brothers and sisters in Christ, I want to tell you of the most noble privilege and indescribable joys of serving Christ wholeheartedly. Firstly consider how costly a price He paid to give you a new heart (Ezekiel 36:26-27). You may go to all the ends of the earth and amass all the most precious stones and place them on scale and the scales will not move an inch. Then drip one drop of Christ's blood on the other and it will outweigh all the world's riches. Will you give your heart to another idol when God Almighty shed His own blood for you? Secondly, consider the joy: When a man or a woman's heart is filled with the King of the universe, can there be any room for other worthless trinkets? A glimpse of Christ is more breathtaking than the grandeur of all the mountain ranges in the world and more fragrant than all the world's flowering fields. Surely the one who has met Christ now considers everything else as dung (Philippians 3:8).

They that seek to serve both God and the world know nothing of the excellencies of Jesus, the Man of Galilee. To serve two masters, is to love neither but to love ourselves.

So let us pray along with the psalmist that the Lord "give (us) an undivided heart, that (we) may fear Your name." (Psalm 86:11).