Thou shalt have no other gods before Me. Exodus 20:2
If you read this simple verse of eight one-syllable words in any of the modern-language versions of the Bible, you got the wrong message. The King James, of course, gets it right, as do several others such as the American Standard, the Webster’s Bible Translation, and the Catholic’s Douay-Rheims. So what do the others all get wrong? The very first word! Thou. So what is wrong with ‘you’ that the other versions all use? It’s the wrong word. Technically, the word ‘you’ is plural, although modern use has rendered it ambiguous – it’s whatever you need it to be. But the word ‘thou’ is singular – just one person is being addressed. And that is the whole point of this great chapter.
Today’s verse is the opening of God’s great declaration of His commandments to the Israelites, one of the most important portions of our entire Bible. And we need to get it right. Here, God is not speaking to the nation as a whole. He is using the pronoun that pinpoints the one. The same ‘thou’ is used throughout this list of commandments. God is addressing the patient mother with the squirming infant on her hip, the stalwart father keeping his youngsters in line, the nervous pacing teenagers, the aging grandmother in her prettiest shawl. All individuals. All listening to God speaking directly to their own hearts. All understanding, based on what God required of them, that they were individually facing a holy God.
God’s Word to His people is the same today. He is not seeking to sway thousands of people, but to reach the recesses of the single, individual heart. The ‘thou’ in today’s text is precious, to think that the omnipotent God of Heaven is speaking directly to me, just me. -Jim MacIntosh
Here is the link to the video of this message: https://youtu.be/tZKXksH_tI0