Bonus Lesson: Revisiting the Ten Sayings

RECAP:

Israel left Egypt in chapter 12. They cross the Sea of the End in chapters 13 and 14. They celebrate their freedom in chapter 15. By chapter 16, they’re very worried this isn’t going to work out, but God sends manna and quail. Chapter 17 is water from the rock (the first time) and their first battle with Amalek.

(Quick aside about Amalek. Though the Bible doesn’t say this for certain, it is believe that they descended from Esau. Since the Jews came from Jacob’s line, the Amalekites would have been very distant cousins. They pop up again at crucial times in the story as prominent antagonists. Here they are Israel’s first enemy once she becomes an independent people group. They cause trouble in the days of Saul when he spares their king—Agag. David wipes most of them out, but apparently he misses some because by the time of the Persian Empire, a guy named Haman tries to exterminate the Jews. And the story present him as a descendant of King Agag. For the entirety of the Tanakh, from start to finish, the Amalekites are the bad guys from Israel’s side of the story.)

In chapter 18, Jethro/Reuel returns to check in on his family. By chapter 19, the people arrive at Sinai after 2 months, the location of Moses’ first encounter with God.

BACKGROUND:

“And the Lord said unto him, Away, get thee down, and thou shalt come up, thou, and Aaron with thee: but let not the priests and the people break through to come up unto the Lord, lest he break forth upon them. So Moses went down unto the people, and spake unto them.” - Exodus 19:24–25

Note that by the end of verse 25, Moses is no longer on the mountain. He is on the ground with the people.

“And God spake all these words, saying, I am the LORD thy God, which have brought thee out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage.” -Exodus 20:1-2

As far as we can tell, the text seems to imply Moses is still on the ground with Israel. So all those images you have from the movies where he’s up on top of the mountain chiseling out the 10 Commandments—yeah, that’s not how that happened. The 10 Commandments were given by God first at the base of the mountain to all Israel.

Now, let’s skip ahead for a second and see how Israel was experiencing all this. Verses 1-17 are the 10 Commandments. So let’s look at verse 18.

“And all the people saw the thunderings, and the lightnings, and the noise of the trumpet, and the mountain smoking: and when the people saw it, they removed, and stood afar off. And they said unto Moses, Speak thou with us, and we will hear: but let not God speak with us, lest we die. And Moses said unto the people, Fear not: for God is come to prove you, and that his fear may be before your faces, that ye sin not. And the people stood afar off, and Moses drew near unto the thick darkness where God was.” - Exodus 20:18–21

It appears like Moses could understand the words of Yahweh, but the people just perceived loud booming sounds like thunder, flashes of light in the sky, some sort of instrument blaring, and smoke surrounding the mountain. While Moses heard the voice of God, apparently the people heard the voice of Charlie Brown’s teacher but scary. Thus they send Moses to go up on their behalf. By the way, Sinai is not volcanic, but that’s what this imagery sounds like. Some scholars believe certain Canaanite cultures believed El (Yahweh in the Bible) to be connected to volcanoes, so perhaps there is a play on that imagery here.

The majority of the rest of Exodus is a series of Moses’ going up and down the mountain (7 times, go figure), receiving various instructions from God. The traditional number is 613, but even that has debate amongst Jewish scholars through the ages. The second most prominent position is 611, actually depending mostly on how you count the 10 Commandments, but we’ll get to that in a second. Estimates range from closer to 300 to well over 600. It all depends on what you count as law and how you define that term.

So let’s talk about that. Let’s begin by looking at the word Torah. Most preacher would tell you it means “law,” but that’s not really accurate, at least, not law in the way we think of it today. The problem is our law system today looks nothing like law systems from 3,000 years ago. Today, our legal system is based in creating concrete laws that are easy do or do nots. We have developed an overwhelming number of laws. A while ago, I looked up the state laws of New Jersey. I found 60 different categories of laws, not laws, categories of laws. And in those first two categories alone, I found over 2400 laws, just in the first two out of 60 categories 2400 laws for one state in our nation.

So, do you think 613 laws covered everything for Israel? No, they weren’t meant to. It’s not specific enough for that. There are a lot of grey areas. And ancient people groups didn’t have a problem with that like we do. We try to fill in the gaps to have an answer for what to do in every situation, but that’s not the aim of ancient laws. That’s not the aim of the Bible. Even here in the 10 Commandments, we think of them as pretty cut and dry, but there’s a lot of grey. These commands actually have a lot of wiggle room when you consider them. Sure, I’m not supposed to lie, but can I ever lie if it helps people? Ok, don’t kill, but can I kill to protect myself? What exactly does it mean to rest on the sabbath? That’s pretty broad. What does respecting parents mean? These are pretty ambiguous when you stop and think about them.

The point of the Bible is not to give you an answer book to solve every problem you have in life. It doesn’t work like our modern rulebooks. Ancient law codes didn’t work that way. You didn’t consult your 50 volume legal book and see what it said to do in this exact case. Instead, they’d set up a wide range of case studies. Here’s what happens when an ox accidently mauls a passerby. If the person dies, do x. If he lives, do y. But what if it’s a donkey that tramples someone instead of an ox that gores them? Is it the same rules? What if the person antagonized the animal first, threw a rock at it? The text doesn’t address those possibilities. It’s not trying to. It’s giving you overarching guidelines, and you’re supposed to figure out the rest from there, how best to apply it to your own life. That’s how ancient law codes worked. They’re not a list of dos and don’ts even though that’s what they can look like at first to us. They’re examples, case studies, of how to live out an ideal existence. And there are always exceptions to the rules.

So, Torah does not mean “law” the way we think of it today. It actually means instruction, guidance. It’s guidelines, not rigid commandments you can’t ever adapt. Speaking of commandments, The Bible never calls the 10 Commandments “the 10 Commandments.” In Hebrew, they’re called the 10 Words or 10 Sayings. They’re not called commandments. We’ve named them that in English because we have that western law mindset. We’re not thinking like an ANE culture.

And interestingly enough, they’re not called the 10 Sayings anywhere in chapter 20. You have to go all the way to Exodus 34:28 before they are given that name.

“And [Moses] was there with the Lord forty days and forty nights; he did neither eat bread, nor drink water. And he wrote upon the tables the words of the covenant, the ten commandments.” -Exodus 34:28

Yet even with this, there are some Jews who would tell you that there are 13 sayings in total, not 10. There are 13 imperative statements, thou shalts or thou shalt nots in the passage.

1. Thou shalt have no other gods (v 3)

2. Thou shalt not make (v 4)

3. Thou shalt not bow (nor serve) (v 5)

4. Thou shalt not take (v 7)

5. Remember (v 8)

6. Thou shalt labor (v 9)

7. Thou shalt not labor (v 10)

8. Honor (v 12)

9. Thou shalt not kill (v 13)

10. Thou shalt not commit adultery (v 14)

11. Thou shalt not steal (v 15)

12. Thou shalt not bear false witness (v 16)

13. Thou shalt not covet (twice) (v 17)

There’s even a difference in how Jews, Catholics, and Protestants arrange the 10. There’s a helpful chart if you scroll to the very bottom of this page https://www.hebrew4christians.com/Scripture/Torah/Ten_Cmds/ten_cmds.html.

Now, let’s talk about the tablets themselves. (All this and we haven’t even looked at the sayings themselves yet!) Most of you likely have the image of 5 commandments written on either tablet, but that’s not how it went. Look at Exodus 32:15 with me. This is while Moses is on Sinai and the people have made the golden calf.

“And Moses turned, and went down from the mount, and the two tables of the testimony were in his hand: the tables were written on both their sides; on the one side and on the other were they written.” -Exodus 32:15

They had writing on both sides of the tablets. That doesn’t mean left and right side. It means front and back. All 10 were on either tablet, being written on both the front and back—10 on one tablet, 10 on the other. They were duplicates of each other. Why? In ancient cultures, it was common to have a covenant ceremony where a ruler, called a suzerain, would set up a mutually beneficial contract with someone in his kingdom that he wanted to help, called a vassal. The suzerain would draw up the specifics of the contract and have two copies made. One for him and one for the vassal, so they could both remember the treaty. That’s what the 10 Sayings were. They were a covenant, an ANE suzerain-vassal treaty.

These “laws,” these instructions had nothing to do with salvation. Ancient Jews did not have to keep these rules in order to be saved. Salvation means deliverance. God already saved them when they left Egypt. This was an ancient covenant treaty between a ruler (Yahweh) and a people group who needed a benefactor (Israel). It had nothing to do with “Do x, y, and z so God will be happy with you and not strike you down.” It had everything to do with God’s setting up an ideal community and giving the guidelines for what would make it the healthiest community possible.

You’ll hear some preachers today try to use the 10 Sayings as an evangelistic tool. They try to use them to prove you’ve sinned before God. “Everyone’s a sinner,” they say. “Don’t believe me? Let’s look at what God says it takes to be a good person.” And then they list off the 10 Sayings. “Have you ever stolen? Have you ever told a lie? Have you ever taken God’s name in vain (cussed)?” Of course, most honest people say yes to those. So the preacher responds, “So you’re telling me you’re a lying, stealing, blasphemer, and you think you’re good enough to get into heaven on your own? Let me tell you how to get to heaven.” While I appreciate their zeal, I don’t appreciate their mishandling of the text. The 10 Sayings never had anything to do with salvation. They were not meant to be a measuring stick of how bad of a person you are. They were an ancient treaty between a God and a people, and we aren’t that people. They were simply God’s way of saying, “Stealing hurts relationships. Lying hurts relationships. Don’t do that stuff.” And as we’re going to find out in the rest of our time, most of the 10 Sayings don’t even mean quite what you’ve likely thought.

So let’s get started on the 10 Sayings themselves.

THE 10 SAYINGS:

“And God spake all these words, saying, I am the Lord thy God, which have brought thee out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage.” - Exodus 20:1–2

I think it’s significant that while we tend to focus on the thou shalts and thou shalt nots, the 10 Sayings don’t begin with a commandment. They begin with a statement of identity—I am Yahweh. That’s one of the reasons why I prefer the Jewish ordering of them. It doesn’t begin with what you do. It begins with who God is. I’m going to follow the most common Jewish ordering for our study here today. The first saying is, “I Am Yahweh your God.”

“Thou shalt have no other gods before me.” -Exodus 20:3

Interestingly enough, there is no “thou shalt not” here. Most of the 10 Sayings are second person singular imperatives, hence why we tend to view them as commands. They’re directed to the average Israelite personally. But this one isn’t. It’s not “thou shalt not have other gods.” It’s literally, “There will not be to you other gods in My presence.”

We often say that Israel is monotheist, mono being one and theist being God. Monotheists believe in the existence of only one God. You’ll hear people talk about the three main monotheist religions in the world—Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. But the fact of the matter is that no ancient culture was monotheistic. We’ve talked about this before in class. Even ancient Israel knew that other gods existed. They’re all over the Bible. Today, we treat them like they were just idols that people thought were gods. But the gods are real supernatural beings. Neither Israel nor the Bible is monotheistic. They practice monolatry, not monotheism. Monolatry acknowledges the existence of other gods but worships only one.

This second saying doesn’t make sense if the Israelites didn’t believe in other gods. “Don’t have any other gods before My presence.” If none of the other gods are real, that would be like Yahweh saying, “Don’t worship wookiees and ewoks.” Wookiees and ewoks don’t exist. They’re made up creatures from Star Wars. It would mean nothing for God to say, “Don’t worship something that doesn’t exist.” Even Yahweh believed other gods were real and could accept worship.

The Jewish idiom “in My presence,” or even more literally, “before my face” is somewhat ironic since shortly after receiving this direction, the Israelites do just that. They construct a golden calf in the presence of God right at the base of the mountain. At its heart, this saying is about worshipping Yahweh alone, not the gods of the other nations. Since Yahweh is in the place of the suzerain making this treaty, it’s only natural he’d ask that His vassals not go serve another suzerain while under His treaty.

The next verses are usually considered to be a part of the same saying.

Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth: Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them: for I the Lord thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me.” -Exodus 20:4–5

Some people, particularly of the extremely conservative Anabaptist/Amish communities, read this as a command against any religious imagery. Our circles don’t do imagery well. You can search Open Bible from top to bottom and you won’t find a single depiction of God, Jesus, or any Bible stories aside from a few cartoony ones in the children’s ministry area. But when you think of the average Protestant or Catholic church, they’re often filled with stain glass windows and images. They’re very meaningful to the majority of Christians in the world. But our circles have looked at this part of the 10 Sayings and assumed it was forbidding religious iconography, or at the very least suggesting that it could lead to idolatry. We’ve avoided that stuff all together, somehow thinking that people who use religious images worship the images themselves.

But that’s not what this statement is about at all. The Bible doesn’t forbid you from having an artist’s rendering of Jesus or of your favorite Bible story on your wall. Images were allowed for religious purposes in ancient Israel. In the chapters following this one, God gives Moses instructions on how to construct the tabernacle. In those instructions, we find Exodus 25:18.

“And thou shalt make two cherubims of gold, of beaten work shalt thou make them, in the two ends of the mercy seat.” -Exodus 25:18

Just five chapters later, God commanded the Israelites make statue representations of cherubim for the tabernacle. The problem wasn’t using an art form to represent something spiritual. The problem was using it in worship. In fact, if you look back at verse 4, this Saying doesn’t just forbid images of Yahweh. It forbids images of “anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth.” If you take this to mean you can’t have a picture of God or Jesus on your wall, then you better also have no pictures of eagles or fish or dogs or anything. Hopefully you can see how ridiculous that would be. This verse doesn’t mean that it’s idolatry to have a painting of God or Jesus or anything in your house. It means that the Jews were not supposed to try to make an idol through which to channel Yahweh.

Most cultures throughout world history have used idols as representations of their gods. They do not believe the idol is the god. They see it as a channel, a place the god can inhabit near them. But Yahweh never wanted that. He never wanted idol-images to be made of Him because He already made them Himself.

“And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth. So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.” -Genesis 1:26–27

God already made images of Himself—us. He didn’t need any others.

We don’t have time to get into it this week, but the rest of verses 5 and 6 are super important for understanding the character of God. We tend to skip over them since they aren’t commandment-y enough for our tastes, but they do merit more study. If you’d like to learn more, I preached a message on the parallel passage of Exodus 34:6-7 that pretty much quotes Exodus 20:5b-6 verbatim.

“Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain; for the Lord will not hold him guiltless that taketh his name in vain.” -Exodus 20:7

What could be more plain than that, right? Don’t go cussing or saying “OMG.” But this verse doesn’t mean that at all. And it all comes down to a very unfortunate English word choice—take. The verse literally reads, “Don’t carry the name of Yahweh your God falsely (or worthlessly).” This wasn’t about the words they used. It was about identity. By agreeing to this treaty with their new suzerain, their new deity, the Israelites were accepting His name. Much of the Sinai story is structured like a marriage ceremony. When Janna and I got married, she took on the name Connor. Now, she bears my name, carries it around with her everywhere she goes. For good or ill, she is now tied to what it means to be a Connor and what it means to be a Connor is tied to her. It has its perks. Since my dad was a cop for 28 years, we have a good number of connections with local police if we ever needed anything. But Connor men have a hard time shutting up. We can yak your ear off if you get us going on something that interests us, and we’re probably going to run into someone we know just about anywhere we go. So now she has to deal with that too. It’s all part of having the name Connor. She carries the name Connor wherever she goes. In general, we have a pretty good reputation, but if one of us started cursing at everybody we saw in public and got a few DUIs and started up fights everywhere, well, eventually the Connor name would be associated with trouble.

That’s the idea of this verse. Cursing or even saying “OMG” or “Jesus!” is not the point. This saying isn’t about using God’s name as an exclamation. It’s about how you act. Now, I’m not saying you should start going around swearing or shouting “Jesus” every time you get upset. But I am saying that’s not the point of this verse. It’s about identity, not 4 letter words.

“Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy.” -Exodus 20:8

Hopefully you’re realizing by now that these 10 Sayings are not quite what we’ve thought they were. They’ve very meaningful, but they are not a set of rules for you to put outside your courthouse or inside your house and demand that everyone follow exactly. They’re an ancient treaty for an ancient people in an ancient place. They’re not about us. They’re full of good moral advice for everyone, but they’re not binding to us. In our circles, we like to think we keep the 10 Commandments, but none of us do. Every week, we break this one.

We read into it as meaning “go to church.” But does it say, “Go to church”? Nope, it says to remember, keep, observe the sabbath day. Which day is the sabbath? Saturday. Not Sunday. And I know what you’re thinking, “But we’re still following it; we just changed the day.” How would that fly with any other commandment? “I’m not lying; I’m just not telling the whole truth.” “I’m not stealing; I just moved the merchandise outside the store outside of normal business hours.” If you take the normal modern Christian mindset that these are exact, rigid rules that have to be followed, you’re either following the rule or you’re not. You don’t get to change it around to fit your schedule. Obviously, I don’t think it’s wrong for us to meet on Sunday or to play sports on Saturday or what have you. I’m just pointing out the holes in the mentality that these are strict rules we have to adhere to in order to make God happy.

There’s so much more we could go into about the significance of the sabbath, but I’ll just point out that it was very unusual for a god to mandate a day of rest for his people. That’s unique. You and I are not required by God to take a day to rest, but I firmly believe that purposefully scheduled ritualistic times of rest are extremely beneficial. For more on this concept, check out Reset and Refresh by David and Shona Murray. By having an established self-imposed interruption of my weekly routine, I am reminding myself that I am not the master of my life. I’m also making it easier on myself when external interruptions come in because I’ve trained myself to be ok with not having life go exactly the way I demand.

“Honour thy father and thy mother: that thy days may be long upon the land which the Lord thy God giveth thee.” -Exodus 20:12

This seems a little random when you think about it. In the middle of all these big statements like “Don’t worship other gods” and “Don’t murder” we get “Honor your parents.” It feels out of place. . . until you consider how the Genesis scroll is filled with stories of children carrying on the sins of their parents and even sometimes deceiving their parents like with Jacob and Isaac or Joseph’s brothers and Jacob. For this new community to work, everyone needed to be treated with respect, even the elderly. We tend to view this as a command to children to obey their parents, but that’s reading in Ephesians 6:1-3. This verse isn’t to children. There’s no time limit here. It’s directed at all Israel, saying to honor your parents.

In the Bible, children are told to obey their parents, and adults are told to honor their parents. In God’s eyes, your responsibility to your parents changes when you become an adult, whatever that age is in your culture. In Hebrew, the word for honor is the same word for weight. In Greek, the word for honor is the same word for value, even monetary worth. In other words, an adult honors their parents by listening to them and giving a little extra weight and value to their opinion than the average person’s advice. But at the end of the day, an adult makes their own decisions. Even if that decision is the opposite of what the parent recommended, an adult is still honoring their parents so long as they have given due consideration to the opinion of the parents. Honor does not require obedience. Once you are an adult in the eyes of your culture, God expects you to make your own choices based on His leading to you personally.

I want to reiterate that all these instructions were directed to Israel. We preach this verse today at kids as if obeying your parents will guarantee you a long and happy life. But this is about adults honoring, not children obeying. And don’t miss the key at the end of the verse— “upon the land which Yahweh your God gives you.” The land was Israel. The promise was that if the Israelites formed a community that honored the people society often overlooks, they’d create a culture that would live on for a very long time in the promised land. It’s not a promise to every human that if you say “Yes, sir” and “No, Ma’am” and don’t roll your eyes, you’ll live to 90. It’s a promise to all of Israel that they will remain in the promised land if they respect everyone in their community. And even then, we have to remember that these are generalities, like Proverbs. We all know good, respectful people who have died young and jerks who have lived long. Because this verse isn’t a contract to all of humanity that if you’re respectful you’ll get a long life. It was about Israel’s time in the land.

“Thou shalt not kill.” - Exodus 20:13

I won’t spend much time here, but I do need to stress that the word used here means “murder,” not kill. Well-intentioned people with strong consciences have looked at this verse and determined that they needed to be pacifists. Other have looked at the wars that God commanded Israel to wage in the Tanakh and struggled to equate the two. But this particular word is never used in contexts of war, and it’s never used to speak of something that God does. It is used to describe murder and manslaughter. It’s killing that brings violence into the community. God is not forbidding war. Sometimes war is a necessary evil. But to murder another human being is to put yourself in the place of God. Only God decides when a person’s life should be over. Taking that on yourself is playing God, and that’s not a job that’s open for applications.

“Thou shalt not commit adultery.” -Exodus 20:14

Pretty straight forward, right? Well, yes and no. We’re actually more restrictive with this standard than the Bible is. Today, we consider adultery to be any sexual activity a married person takes outside of that marriage covenant of one man and one woman. But the Bible presents it as leaving one love for another. You say, isn’t that the same thing? No. If a married man found another woman and brought her into his marriage relationship, creating a polyamorous or polygamous relationship, most Christians I know would call that adultery. The Bible doesn’t. You can search the Bible from top to bottom. There is no prohibition on polygamy. Now, before you freak out on me too much, I do believe the Bible presents polygamy in a relatively negative light, suggesting that monogamy is more ideal. But it allows for polyamory as a legitimate expression of a marriage relationship. God’s guidelines for acceptable marriage were looser than ours. Adultery was wrong, not because it broke “one man and one woman forever” but because it was about trying to gain power in the community through treating people like objects.

In fact, Deuteronomy 25 commands polygamous marriages under certain circumstances. Deuteronomy 25 covers the concept of Levirate marriages. When a husband died in an ancient culture, the widow couldn’t just go get a job and be alone or be a single mom. Women didn’t have the opportunities they have today. If her husband died, she pretty much either had to become a prostitute, find the first (likely abusive) bozo that would marry her, or starve and die. To avoid such a horrible fate, Yahweh instructed Israel to develop a system where the deceased husband’s next of kin, his brother, would marry the girl. . . . even if he was already married himself. There is nothing in the law that says he could pass it on to whoever in the family wasn’t married yet. In those situations, polygamy was required, and it wasn’t adultery. And do you really think in situations like that, they always stuck to one wife a night and separate beds? Just something to think about.

“Thou shalt not steal.” - Exodus 20:15

This direction is also tied into the Eden ideal of what it means to rule the earth as God’s image. Stealing is an affront to another human’s ability to rule. It’s that scarcity mindset we’ve talked about. “If I don’t take this now, I’m not going to have enough for everything else I need.” That mindset will eat away at you. It’s better to respect other people’s belongings even if they have what you wish you could have. God is the one who blesses. You don’t have to grasp at someone else’s blessing. God has blessing for you as well. This concept is also a play on the Jacob and Esau story as well as the contrast of the two Pharaohs between Genesis and Exodus. I’ll also note quickly that some scholars think this Saying was directed mainly at kidnapping, stealing another person. I’m not fully convinced of that (though I obviously believe kidnapping is immoral).

“Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour.” - Exodus 20:16

We’ve addressed this a little bit back in our discussion on Exodus 1 and the midwives who lied to Pharaoh. The verse doesn’t forbid lying. It forbids bearing false witness. That’s legal terminology. This is for a courtroom setting, not everyday life. Again, this isn’t to say we should go around lying all the time. But it is important to understand that the Bible has room for when lying to prevent a greater evil is ok, even right. To put this saying in modern terminology, it really means, “Don’t gaslight other people.” (If you’re not familiar with the term “gaslighting,” a Google search is in order. It stems from a 1940s movie based on a 1930s play and is unfortunately quite common in religious circles.)

I also want to note that the word most English versions translate “neighbor” is really friend or lover. It’s a broad term for anyone close to you relationally. It doesn’t mean neighbor as in who lives near you. It’s who’s close to you in your relationships. Those are the worst people to lie to. But those are also the people we lie the most to—perhaps after ourselves.

“Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s house, thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s wife, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor any thing that is thy neighbour’s.” - Exodus 20:17

Interestingly, this is the same word from desiring in the Garden. And of course there’s 7 things you’re not to covet. It can seem impossible to control desires, and I don’t think that’s the point of this passage. The verse isn’t about regulating desires as much as it is controlling how you act on your desires. You can’t help the thoughts and desires that come into your mind. But you can help what you do about them. And over time, as you become the better human God wants you to be, your desires change.

The first commandment tells you to find your satisfaction in God alone. The last one is also about heart desire in not finding satisfaction elsewhere. They bookend the 10 Words. I think they’re there to remind us that all the right actions don’t mean a thing if the heart isn’t changed. We have plenty of Christians who do good things for the church every week and then emotionally, verbally, and spiritually abuse other people every week. Do good things, but don’t think that you’re safe just because you check off the boxes. We’re going to talk more next week about why that’s the case. A fire escape out of hell isn’t enough to mean you’ll be free from judgment. It comes down to the motives behind our actions and why we do what we do.