Monotheism, as we all know, lay at the foundation of the law of Moses.  But there are different kinds of monotheism.  In one sense we have seen almost all ancient religions to have been monotheisms.  All taught the existence of a Supreme Being.  But usually this Supreme Being was not the object of worship, but had receded into the background, while subordinate gods were those really reverenced.  Moses taught that the Supreme Being who made heaven and earth, the Most High God, was also the only object of worship.  It does not appear that Moses denied the existence of the gods who were adored by the other nations; but he maintained that they were all inferior and subordinate, and far beneath Jehovah, and also that Jehovah alone was to be worshipped by the Jews.  “Thou shalt have no other gods before me” (Exod. xx. 3; Deut. v. 7).  “Ye shall not go after other gods” (Deut. vi. 14).  “Ye shall make no mention of the name of other gods” (Exod. xxiii. 13).  “For the Lord your God is God of gods and Lord of lords” (Deut. x. 17).  The first great peculiarity of the theology of Moses was therefore this, that it taught that the Infinite and Supreme Being, who in most religions was the hidden God, was to the Jews the revealed and ever-present God, the object of worship, obedience, trust, and love.  His name was Jahveh, the “I am,” the Being of beings.[355]

In a certain sense Moses taught the strict unity of God.  “Hear, O Israel; the Lord our God is one Lord” (Deut. vi. 4), is a statement which Jesus calls the chief of the commandments (Mark xii. 29, 30).  For when God is conceived of as the Supreme Being he becomes at once separated by an infinite distance from all other deities, and they cease to be gods in the sense in which he is God.  Now as Moses gave to Jehovah infinite attributes, and taught that he was the maker and Lord of heaven and earth, eternal (Deut. xxxiii. 27), a living God, it followed that there was no God with him (Deut. xxxii. 39), which the prophets afterwards wrought out into a simple monotheism.  “I am God, and there is no other God beside me” (Isaiah xliv. 8).  Therefore, though Moses did not assert in terms a simple monotheism, he taught what contained the essential germ of that idea.

This one God, supreme and infinite, was also so spiritual that no idol, no statue, was to be made as his symbol.  He was a God of truth and stern justice, visiting the sins of parents on the children to the third and fourth generation of those who hated him, but showing mercy to thousands of those who loved and obeyed him.  He was a God who was merciful, long-suffering, gracious, repenting him of the evil, and seeking still to pardon and to bless his people.  No doubt there is anthropomorphism in Moses.  But if man is made in God’s image, then God is in man’s image too, and we must, if we think of him as a living and real God, think of him as possessing emotions like our human emotions of love, pity, sorrow, anger, only purified from their grossness and narrowness.