It is recorded of the Israelites that when they had heard God speak out of the fire and smoke of Mt Sinai, they answered, "If we hear the voice of the Lord our God any more, we shall die."
If today when we hear the Ten Commandments we know, as they did, that the living God speaks them directly to our souls with all the power and authority that belong to Him as God, we are likely to share their reaction. If they slay nothing else in us, they surely slay our pride. None of us can hear them truly and hold our head up. No response is appropriate but the cry of the publican in the story Jesus told, "God be merciful to me, a sinner."
If that has not been our experience, then we should pray earnestly that it be given, for if it is not, our soul is in peril. We are dead in our trespasses and sins. The first word God ever speaks to us is a word addressed to our conscience, to prod it tremblingly to life. It is not His last word to us, but it is His first. And always, we want to say with the disciples, "This is a hard saying, who can bear it?"
But in reality it is not a hard saying. It is a liberating, life-enhancing, life-enriching word. We are prone to think of the commandments as crippling constraints placed upon us; they are not. They are doors that open on to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. They define our freedoms.
When Moses later recalled the promise the Israelites made to obey them, he said "The Lord heard your words when you spoke to me. He said, 'O that they had such a mind as this always, to fear Me and to keep all my commandments that it might go well with them and with their children for ever'" ... that it might go well with them. (Deuteronomy 5:29)
The Ten Commandments might better be described as the Ten Freedoms, for understood rightly, that is what they are. If we think of them as alien restraints placed upon us, imposed upon us to fence us in, they strike us that way only because our love for God has not yet been awakened. Once it is awakened, the constraints they put upon us are seen as the constraints of love; and as anyone who has ever been in love knows, there is no compulsion so free as the compulsion of love. The young man who has fretted under rules and commandments at home about his habits of cleanliness and dress and thoughtfulness, and has rebelled against them all, will suddenly, when he falls in love, be found eagerly fulfilling them all. And even while he is embracing the very disciplines he has so recently resisted, he will tell you, "I have never been so free!"
Furthermore, no freedom is open to us that does not rest on a willingly accepted discipline. A pianist wins his freedom of the keyboard only out of the discipline of hours of practise: as does the dancer or the athlete. We are free to serve the interests of someone we love only as we accept the discipline of self-denial.
So the commandments spell out the disciplines upon which alone true freedom can be founded. And in doing so they proclaim the sanctity of those things that make life wholesome and fulfilling.
The Sanctity of God and Freedom from Self.
• You shall have no other God but God
... for that ensures God's sanctity, and secures our freedom from self.
No God but God. Nothing and no-one is to occupy the place in our affections which only God Himself may rightly enjoy. Martin Luther said, "Whatever it is you look to to make you happy and secure, that is your God." Is it to God we look? "You're to rely on Me," says God.
This is where the rich young ruler had gone so far wrong. He thought he had kept the commandments meticulously all his life. But he had not been true even to their first intention - to put his whole trust in God alone. If he had been, he would not have declined to let go his wealth and possessions. By his inability to let them go, he gave himself away. The truth was, it was his wealth, not God, he relied on to make him happy and secure and give meaning and fullness to his life.
Whatever it is we could not bear to lose - absolutely, we could not bear to lose it - that is what we worship. That is what it is we have allowed to obscure the face of God, to stand in His place to our soul. Our whole life is to have its centre outside ourselves in God. So long as our life is not centred in God, everything will be askew. It is like trying to arrange the spokes from the rim of a bicycle wheel: you can only do it if you attach them to the hub. God is the hub; all the spokes of my life are to run up to their centre in Him. Only as they do will everything in my life 'come together.'
This commandment would free us from self - from what Keats called "the journey homeward to habitual self" ... which is the inner misery that can sap the life out of every joy we know.
And it proclaims the sanctity of God, who is the one and only fountain from which all true good eternally flows forth. Goodness has no other source than He. Hold to God and you hold to the 'good.'
"God made us for Himself, and our hearts are restless till they rest in Him." (Augustine)
"Man's chief end is to glorify God, and enjoy Him for ever" (Westminster Confession).
The Sanctity of Creation and Freedom from the Powers
• You shall make no graven image
... for that ensures the sanctity of creation, and secures our freedom from the 'powers' of this world.
God is not to be confused with anything in His Creation. Let any part of it claim our heart, and we have already turned away in our heart to it from Him.
In the Bible, not pride, but idolatry is the fundamental sin. It is 'to miss the mark' - to aim crookedly (the most common Bible word for sin means exactly that, as in the case of David's left-handed men who could sling a stone at a hair and not 'miss'; the word 'miss' is the same word as 'sin'). We aim at the good we seek in the wrong place. We think to reach it in the possession and control of some aspect of God's creation, instead of in God Himself. It is a man we must have (or a woman); it is a place under the sun we must have; it is wealth we must have from the fruits of the earth or the labours of others; it is the adulation of others we must have, or success in competition with them; it is art, or culture, or knowledge, or power whose pursuit engages all our energies.
But when that happens we exalt some part of God's creation to rank above God Himself, and we thereby corrupt it; and since we become like what we worship, we become ourselves corrupt in consequence. Let anything in the world absorb our devotion the way God alone should absorb it, and it will assume a power over us that is absolute. And being less than God Himself, it has no power to give us life, and will finally bring death to us.
"You shall not confuse God with anything." No images ... metal or mental.
This commandment would free us from the powers of this world that enslave us. Our eyes must look past them all to God, for our life is not in the gifts in His hand, but in His giving hand.
And it proclaims the sanctity of His creation. It is holy because it is His. This world is not a treasury to be plundered, but a trust to be stewarded.
The Sanctity of God's Will and Freedom from Passions.
• You shall not take God's Name in vain
... for that ensures the sanctity of His will, and secures our freedom from our passions, from self will.
This third Word warns us against any attempt to use God for our own ends. In Bible times, as we have seen, the name of a man or of a god had gathered into it the whole force of his character and personality. If you knew a god's name you knew his secret, so you could make him work for you. To invoke God's Name in vain, then, means to try and manipulate the God of Heaven for some purpose of our own that is foreign to His true nature. We are not to try and use God for our own ends.
How many of our aims, even our prayers, does that put paid to? God is not at our disposal, we are to be at His disposal. How many wars have been justified with the cry, "God is on our side!" God is not on anybody's side; we are to be on His. We may protest, "But didn't Jesus promise that whatever we asked, He would do for us?" No, He did not. He said, "Whatever you ask in My Name, I will do for you." He will do for us only those things that He can put His Name to.
This commandment would free us from the tyranny of our own passions. To neglect it is to fall victim to the sole empire of our own wayward and warring impulses.
And it proclaims the sanctity of God's good will and purpose for His creation - of the Maker's Instructions.
The Sanctity of Faith and Freedom from Necessity.
• You shall keep the Sabbath holy
"One day in every seven for Me," says God, for that ensures the sanctity of faith, and secures our freedom from bondage to necessity.
A good commandment, this. It is an order from God to down tools and enjoy high holiday, a day to cast off dull care and renew the inner man by the enjoyment of good company, God's especially. And together ... for Israelite worship was associated with cheerful socialising. Sacrifice itself was normally followed by a sort of sacred barbecue.
Holiday is commanded! The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath. This commandment is the sign that man in fellowship with God can find release from the tyranny of necessity. It is grounded in the fact that when God had finished the work of creation, He rested. He was not under necessity to go on. "Our God is in the Heavens," sang the Psalmist (115:3) "He does whatever He pleases." He is free - free to do, or to rest from doing.
When man fell out of fellowship with God, he fell away from the freedom God intended him to share with Him. When Adam lost his fellowship with God, he lost his freedom; he fell victim to the order of necessity: the necessity of toil, of hunger, of struggle, of futility, of death. But just as fasting in the Bible is a sign that man in fellowship with God is free from even the necessity to eat to stay alive (for it is God, not bread, that sustains us in life, as Jesus demonstrated in the wilderness), so the Sabbath is a sign that man in fellowship with God is free also from the necessity of toil to stay alive. "There remaineth a rest unto the People of God." (Hebrews 4:9)
The Sabbath is God's sign, set up in this doomed order of creation, pointing to the promise that when our redemption is complete we shall enter upon the glorious liberty that belongs to the Sons of God - to that freedom from crushing necessity that is the privilege of children in the Father's house. So it is promised ... and the Sabbath was given to keep alive our relish for it.
Now Jewish tradition has it that these four commandments made up the first table (there were two tables of stone on which the ten were written), these four having to do with our love for God.
The other six, having to do with our love for neighbour, made up the second table. They combine together to proclaim the sanctity of every area of life, and preserve our freedoms in them.
The Sanctity of the Family and Freedom to Grow.
• Honour your parents
The fifth word proclaims the sanctity of the family, and secures our freedom to grow.
Family is God's nursery for the nurture of young human spirits, His laboratory where He grows us in a culture of love. The natural family is the means God ordained whereby we learn the 'honour' - the mutual regard for one another - upon which all good fellowship depends.
Above all we learn the need of steadfastness in our affections. "Honour," not just good parents, but "your parents!" They are the two through whom God conferred on us the gift of life, and whom He made answerable for our care and nurture. They are the pair through whom God passes on to us both our human heritage and our place in all His good purposes for us. To dishonour them is to dishonour God Who appointed them to us. It is the specific reference to parents which gives the commandment its bite. If God's intention here was to protect the family, why did He not add, "Honour your children?" It is implied, but not stated. "Your parents," it says, and sticks there ... because in the area of steadfastness in wholesome attitudes it is with our parents we fail first. Get it right with them, and we shall get it right all the way. If we do not, the soil of love in the family unit dries up, and then everyone's growth becomes stunted and deformed. If we do, our children too will be honoured as they should be.
The Sanctity of Life and Freedom to Live.
• You shall do no murder
... for that ensures the sanctity of life and secures our freedom to live.
This word proclaims the sanctity of life itself, and the freedom to live, for like parenthood, life too is God's creation and gift; on that account life is to be reverenced. It may be taken only on God's authority and by His command.
The sanctity of our neighbour's person is a thing we are to recognise, not (as the humanists tell us) because his mere humanity gives him worth, but because he is God's man whose worth consists in his value to God.
Freedom to live, because life is God's gift.
The Sanctity of Marriage and Freedom to Love.
• You shall not commit adultery
... for that ensures the sanctity of marriage and secures our freedom to love.
We none of us know what real love is until we see it in God. Love has to take its definition from Him, Who is its only source. And the chief quality of the Divine love is faithfulness. God's love is nine parts sheer, downright loyalty - loyalty that persists in the face of all the frustration and resistance, the rejection and betrayal which mankind heaps upon it. It is pledged love; it is covenant love. God's love for us means unquenchable devotion to our true good. It 'does not alter when it alteration finds'... and marriage is to mirror it.
The sexual component of human love is to be drawn up into that higher quality of divine love and suffused with its spirit, or it becomes corrupt. Adultery is a lie we fling upon the truth. Adultery is never an expression of love, but always a failure of it.
The Sanctity of Property and Freedom to Share.
• You shall not steal
... for that ensures the sanctity of property and secures our freedom to share.
All property belongs absolutely to God, and it is held rightly by us only as we hold it and manage it ... and put it to the service of others ... in trust for Him.
The positive aspect of this commandment is Stewardship. Not a thing we call our own is really ours at all, but the Lord's. To misappropriate it is to steal from God. And that is as true of our neighbour's property as it is of our own - that, too, is God's.
No stealing.
The Sanctity of Truth and Freedom to Trust.
• You shall not lie
... for that ensures the sanctity of truth and secures our freedom to trust.
Unless truth is respected in human affairs the basis of confidence is destroyed. Often, God knows, it can be bought only at the cost of personal loss, and even humiliation. But if the price is not paid, what ensues is national loss and humiliation. The father of lies is the devil, and the moment deception, dishonesty or guilty concealment begin to rule our relations with one another, that moment life begins to be devilish.
The Sanctity of Man and Freedom to Be.
• You shall covet nothing that is your neighbour's
... for that ensures the sanctity of man, and secures our freedom to be.
The last word gathers up all the others that have gone before it, and thrusts the reason for them deep into the vitals of our soul. The reason we break any of the commandments is very simply that there is an evil will in us.
What does it matter whether the bicycle I covet belongs to the child of a poor family or to a factory full of bicycles? The evil of it being coveted is in my own heart; it is not to be measured by its value to whoever owns it.
The moment we covet, our heart is evil, for as the New Testament repeatedly warns us, covetousness is idolatry; and so the last commandment brings us full circle back to the first and the second. We are sinners - our heart is evil - because we worship idols. We have set our heart on something less than the living God, and so we have turned our heart away from Him. Wrote John: "Never give your hearts to this world or to anything in it. You cannot love the Father and love the world at the same time. For the whole world system, based as it is on men's primitive desires, their greedy ambitions, and the glamour of all they think splendid, is not derived from the Father at all, but from the world itself. The world with all its passions is on the way out; but the man who lives in pursuit of God's will is rooted in eternal permanence and cannot die." (I John 2:15-17 JBP)
John's last word indeed - the one word he wanted to linger in the memory after his pen was still - was, "Little children, keep yourselves from idols." (I John 5:21)
These, then, are the ten words of God. Nothing in the New Testament changes a syllable of them. "Not a jot, not a tittle, shall pass from the Law," said Jesus, "till all is accomplished." (Matthew 5:18)
Only remember that it is not by way of the Law itself that it will be accomplished, but by way of faith. The ambition to become righteous by our own effort and our own deed, building a proud record of conformity to God's Law, is one of the lusts of the flesh - one of the subtlest, and most ruinous of them all.
The only righteousness is the righteousness God Himself communicates to faith. When He does communicate it, it fulfils the Law because it is the fruit of love. As Paul said, "Love is the fulfilling of the Law" - love to God and love to man. (Romans 13:10) To drink at the fountain of love, we have to go to God Himself, not to His Law.
The whole thrust of the Exodus narrative underlines this. To such a God as the Hebrews have discovered Him to be through all these months past - a God Who cancels our past with His forgiveness, Who blesses our present with His grace and Who underwrites our future with His promises - we may gladly give our hearts and our obedience. Once that response is awakened, the Law may help shape its expression, for it defines the things that are pleasing to Him.
Our Lutheran friends have a formula which describes very well God's purpose in giving us the Law. It is, they say a mirror, a curb and a guide.
A Mirror ... in which we may see the sin of which we must be cleansed.
A Curb ... to restrain the wanton exercise of our disordered wills until they are made captive to the constraint of Christ's love.
A Guide ... indicating how, when the tide of grace is flowing in our hearts, we may please our Heavenly Father.
A schoolmaster, Paul called it, whose whole business is to ready us for Christ.
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