Introduction to the Ten Commandments, Part I
Passage: Deuteronomy 5:1-6; Psalm 19
The Ten Commandments have fallen on pretty rough times these days. They are being voted off courtroom walls and out of city parks all across our country. But that isn’t such a great lose since they have been ignored in human hearts all across our country for a long time now.
But then why should we care about some 3500-year-old rules written by hand on some stone and given to an old shepherd in a time and culture completely different than ours and in a language completely foreign to ours? Why are they any better than the texts of Nag Hammadi or Pharaoh or Nebuchadnezzar?
We are told religion doesn’t belong in the classroom or the stateroom and then we can’t figure out why there is so little morality anymore. We mock God and His laws but then still think everyone should do what is right.
But what’s right? And who gets to decide? Now days we are under the spell of situation ethics where what’s right depends on the circumstance or situation. What is wrong for one might be OK for another.
One of the strange ironies of our present day is that the more we throw off the Ten Commandments the more laws we need and the more lawyers there are.
The Ten Commandments in the original Hebrew are 173 words long. I read there are 30,000 words in the European Unions regulations for the importation of cauliflower.
Ancient Tacitus of Rome once wrote, “The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws.”
God’s law library fits in one book on a very short shelf. Our law libraries are so huge because we don’t keep these ten simple ones. Think of the staggering costs of this simple disobedience, lawsuits and litigation, courts, judges, lawyers, police, prisons, alcohol, violence, greed, hatred, vengeance, abuse. The cost of sin and disobedience in human lives and emotions and cultural chaos is incalculable.
We are in full scale moral meltdown and picking up speed. Every year we push the doors of sexual immorality and tolerance open even farther. The judgment of God is not coming, it is already on us. He has handed us over to our own sinful desires.
We try to talk about values, virtues and ethics toward one another and wonder why it doesn’t work. But without the first tablet of the law, the second can’t stand. Without love toward God we won’t have a basis for love toward one another.
The mess and confusion in the church among Christians is not much better. Bring up the Ten Commandments and Christians start to hem and haw. Either we end up in the ditch of legalism or we over steer and end up in the ditch of antinomianism, no law, just love and tolerance.
It’s either too binding or it’s dismissed as irrelevant.
We are going to need God’s help and the guidance of the Holy Spirit through His Word to help us. We are a long way off the path of love and liberty that under gird God’s original intent in giving us His covenant law. The law comes to us out of God’s loving purposes for us, they are His guide to peace and freedom from the bondage of sin. And behind all of this is the sheer undeserved grace of God.
To show just how confused we are concerning the law and how much of our thinking about the law is off base, all we have to do is turn to Psalm 19 and 119 and hear how the OT saints thought of the law.
Psalm 119 is the longest chapter in the Bible is devoted to praising the law of God. The law is a delight, a source of joy and peace, it is loved. It is revered as the truth, as the means of liberty. It’s a treasure to be sought more that gold and silver and earthly wealth.
They loved the law and revered it, held it in highest regard. All through the OT reverence for and obedience to the law of God is the path of life and joy and freedom from bondage.