Q. Are there more gods than one?
A. There is only one, the living and true God.
Commentary
Having confessed what God is, the catechism now insists that there is only one God. This is the great confession of the Bible, the Shema, by which God’s people have always distinguished themselves from the nations: “Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one” (Deuteronomy 6:4). The unity of God is the foundation of all true religion. There are not many gods competing for dominion, nor a hierarchy of deities as the pagans imagined, nor an impersonal force diffused through the universe. There is one God, and beside Him there is no other. Every form of polytheism, every idol of wood and stone, and every god of human invention is thereby exposed as a lie.
This one God is described as the living and true God. He is living, possessing life in and of Himself, the fountain of all life, who neither slumbers nor sleeps and who gives breath to every creature. The idols of the nations, by contrast, have mouths but do not speak and eyes but do not see; they are dead things that can neither help nor save. He is also true, the only real God in distinction from the false gods that exist merely in the imaginations of men. As Jeremiah declares, “the LORD is the true God; he is the living God and the everlasting King. At his wrath the earth quakes” (Jeremiah 10:10). To worship anything other than this living and true God is to bow before a phantom.
The oneness of God carries immediate and searching consequences for the human heart. If there is but one God, then He alone is to be worshiped, loved, feared, and served, and the whole soul is owed to Him without division. The first commandment flows directly from this truth: “You shall have no other gods before me.” Idolatry, then, is not merely the crude bowing before carved images but the subtle elevation of anything (wealth, pleasure, self, or even good gifts) to the place that belongs to God alone. To confess one God is to renounce every rival and to give Him the undivided allegiance of a heart that knows it was made for Him.
Scripture Proofs
“Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one” (Deuteronomy 6:4).
“But the LORD is the true God; he is the living God and the everlasting King. At his wrath the earth quakes, and the nations cannot endure his indignation” (Jeremiah 10:10).
2nd London Baptist Confession of Faith of 1689
2.1: The Lord our God is but one only living and true God; whose subsistence is in and of Himself, infinite in being and perfection; whose essence cannot be comprehended by any but Himself; a most pure spirit, invisible, without body, parts, or passions, who only hath immortality, dwelling in the light which no man can approach unto; who is immutable, immense, eternal, incomprehensible, almighty, every way infinite, most holy, most wise, most free, most absolute; working all things according to the counsel of His own immutable and most righteous will, for His own glory; most loving, gracious, merciful, long-suffering, abundant in goodness and truth, forgiving iniquity, transgression, and sin; the rewarder of them that diligently seek Him, and withal most just and terrible in His judgments, hating all sin, and who will by no means clear the guilty.