The Commandments - #1 and #2

The Commandments for God - #1

Since I was a teenager, I started to really enjoy trivia games as well as books like ‘The Book of Lists’ and the Guinness Book of World Records. Little bits of information compiled into a list was great fun for me. Today we have much greater access to things like that through the internet. Things like Ten Worst States to Retire, Top Ten Colleges for Zoology, Three Things to Do Before You Die dominate our browsers and home pages. As we are living in a short attention span world, snippets and sound bites have altered our mental approaches and capacity for retaining information. Some things are well worth following and committing to memory. In my opinion, one of the best things to retain is the Ten Commandments, the laws that God gave Moses on Mt Sinai just after the Israelites left Egypt. These ten ‘commands’ set the foundation for the Jewish law and behavior for the next three millenium. Furthermore, since they came from God himself, they are also worthy of our attention and obedience even to this day.

With the advent of Jesus, the Jewish law was rendered obsolete and effectively useless. The atonement that Jesus gave through his death and sacrifice covered our salvation and the teachings that he imparted upon his disciples and others pointed us in the direction that our behavior needed to follow so that we could properly project the love of Christ to others as Jesus did when he walked through Galilee, Samaria and Judah.

In looking at the Commandments also known as the Decalogue, the first four commandments are generally referred to as commandments that show man’s relationship to God. The first two are easily combined since they both refer to the common theme of worshipping God and God alone. The first commandment states in (and in ):

The Holman Christian Standard Bible Chapter 20

2 I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the place of slavery.

3 Do not have other gods besides Me.

One of the first and biggest issues I had was the problem of God’s ‘egotism’. I thought that if God was truly loving and holy, it seemed a little egotistical that God would be telling us that we had to worship him alone. That in itself seemed like a sin of arrogance, but my pastor at the time helped me through this. First off, lets look at the attributes and characteristics of God.

3 Do not have other gods besides Me.

God has many traits that are referred to as attributes. There are two kinds that people classify One group is the incommunicable ones, which God has and we don’t. These are his eternity, immensity, immutability (doesn’t change), independence (doesn’t need any outside influence or help), incomprehensibility (we can’t possibly understand everything about God), spirituality (not physical but invisible) and unity (He is the only true, Living God). We can look at ourselves ans see that there is no way we are any of these things. But these are things that point to his being above anything we can be.

God also has characteristics. These can be looked at as God Is: Love, Good, Love, Merciful, Gracious, Holy, Peace, Righteous, but also Wrathful, and Jealous. These last two cause people a lot of grief but cause they always want to see God as loving and kind. However, God hates sin and he cannot stand to be near sin.

Love, Good, Love, Merciful, Gracious, Holy, Peace, Righteous, but also Wrathful, and Jealous. These last two cause people a lot of grief but cause they always want to see God as loving and kind. However, God hates sin and he cannot stand to be near sin.

The Holy Bible: Holman Christian Standard Version. (Nashville: Holman Bible Publishers, 2009), .