"The First Commandment is the hardest commandment," adds Susan Northway, director of religious education for the Salt Lake Catholic Diocese. "It's about putting one's complete trust and faith in God." A person who does not come to know God, she says, will be reliant on self. "And self will always disappoint. Self will always have a hollowness because it is in a sense aimless. Because it's not rooted in the infinite, it's rooted instead in desires, some of which are good and some of which are not good."

To have "no other God before me," add religious leaders and theologians, refers not just to kitchen gods and golden calves but to every other way in which people put anything else before devotion to God and his laws.

"If you take your direction and understanding of reality of who you are and what your purpose is from anything else, then you have another god," says McClenahan. That includes money and the things money can buy, ambition and fame, even despair, says the Rev. Schenck.

These become our idols. Which brings us, next week, to the Second Commandment.

Ten Commandments: an ongoing series

More than 3,000 years after their debut on Mount Sinai, the Ten Commandments are still extolled, displayed, agonized over, sued over and broken. This Deseret Morning News series, which began April 7 and runs through June 16, is looking at the Ten Commandments in the context of a dusty desert of wandering nomads in roughly 1500 B.C., and a continent of multicultural, multitasking Americans in 2007.

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E-mail: jarvik@desnews.com