The Ten What?
Notes
Transcript
Do you know who Normal Rockwell is? He was a famous painted back in the 1900’s. One of his paintings should up on the cover of The Saturday Evening Post. It is a picture of a woman buying her Thanksgiving turkey. The turkey is lying on the scales and the butcher is standing back of the counter, apron pulled tight over his fat stomach, a pencil tucked behind his ear. The customer, a lovely lady of about sixty, is watching the weighing-in. Each of them has a pleased look as if each knows a secret joke. There’s nothing unusual about a butcher and a customer watching as a turkey is being weighed, but the expression on their faces indicates that something unusual is going on. Norman Rockwell lets us in on the joke by showing us their hands. The butcher is pushing down on the scales with a big fat thumb. The woman is pushing up on them with a dainty forefinger. Neither is aware of what the other is doing.
Cecil Myers, who reminds us of that painting, says, “Both the butcher and the lovely lady would resent being called thieves. The lovely lady would never rob a bank or steal a car. The butcher would be indignant if anyone accused him of stealing and if a customer gave him a bad check, he would call the police, but neither saw anything wrong with a little deception that would make a few cents for one or save a few cents for the other.”1
Rockwell gives us a picture of how we seek to live, trying to manipulate life for our advantage. And that’s what the Ten Commandments are all about—they remind us that there are eternal laws in the universe by which we must live if life is going to come out God’s way.
Dunnam, M., & Ogilvie, L. J. (1987). Exodus (Vol. 2, p. 235). Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson Inc.
The journey of the Israelites from Egypt to the Promised Land reaches a peak here in this scripture text. Before we go on, lets go back and look at this grand story of redemption and freedom.
Pastor and author William Willimon put it this way
To a man named Moses, a murderer hiding out in Midian, God calms and speaks from a burning bush that is not consumed.
“I have heard the cry of my people and all that they have suffered under the hands of the Pharaoh and the Egyptians. I’ve heard them, and I come to deliver them” (Exodus 3:7-8, author’s translation).
At last, God has heard the cry of the slaves. And now, God will act.
“Now, you go and tell the mighty Pharaoh to let my people go,” says God.
“Me?” exclaims Moses. “Who am I that I should go and say something so brash to the mightiest man in the world? I’m not good at public speaking. I’m a nobody. And besides, I don’t even know your name.” It has been so long since the Israelites have worshiped the true, living, covenanting God that they have forgotten God’s name.
“Tell them ‘I Am,’ sent you,” says God.
“But, but…” pleads Moses. God says, “Go!”
Well, you know the story. There are negotiations, and Pharaoh steadfastly refuses Moses’s plea for his people’s freedom. The series of plagues. On the final night Moses is told to have the Hebrews gather up everything they can carry with them and head out toward the sea. Then the terrible death of the Egyptian boy babies. Pharaoh relents, saying, “Get out of here! Don’t ever come back, you troublesome Hebrews!”
As soon as the children of Israel head out of town, Pharaoh changes his mind and realizes the economic loss Egypt has suffered in the freedom of the slaves. He sends all of his mighty chariots, his legendary army, to bring the Hebrews back into bonds. But there on the shore of the sea, with their backs to the sea, even as the Hebrews think all is lost, God divides the sea—they race across the dry land. They get to the other side with the Egyptians in hot pursuit, but the sea rushes back upon the Egyptian armies and the parish. Israel is at last free!
Now you may recall that when Moses pled for his people, he first pled with the Pharaoh to let the people of Israel go long enough that they might keep a holy day unto the Lord whose name they have just relearned. Moses tells Pharaoh that they need to go out to the desert to keep this holy day.
Pharaoh must’ve sneered, “We’ve got some good court chaplains right here in Egypt. I’ll send one down to the ghetto tonight for you to have your worship service. I’ll expect you at work first thing Monday morning.”
“But God wants us to come out into the desert to do our worship of him,” says Moses.
“I’m not letting you people go,” says the Pharaoh.
Well, after the plagues, the Passover, the partying, the re-closing of the sea, at last the children of Israel are free. Trouble is it has been so long since worship of the true and living God that they are forgotten how. So, once they are out in the desert—and it’s figured out that by God’s miracles they are not going to thirst to death—Moses says, “Let me go up on the mountain and talk to God and find out what sort of worship service God desires. Contemporary or traditional? Emergent or contemplative. High church or low?”
Moses goes up the mountain and says to the Lord, “Okay, I’ve got everybody together for the worship service. Now, how do you want us to worship you? (I hope you don’t insist on organ music because we’re out in the wilderness with nothing. Nor do we have a drop-down screen to read the hymn lyric off of.)”
And the Lord says, “I’ll write this down in stone because it’s important. These won’t be ‘the Ten Suggestions;’ they will be the Ten Commandments: You will worship only me. I am the only God who heard the cry of the slaves. I am the God who showed that I am on your side against the Empire and the Pharaoh and all they represent. I delivered you out of Egyptian slavery with a mighty hand and brought you to freedom. Therefore, you will worship only me. I am the God to whom you are responsible—I gave you your freedom. You will not desire those things that I have given to others. You will not steal. You will not tell lies about your sisters and brothers. You will honor your forebears. You will not have sex with other people’s spouses.”
Moses surely must’ve said, “Wow. This is a strange sort of worship service!”
And the Lord replied, in so many words, “There are gods who are into all sorts of music—drums and bands—and beautiful, highfalutin, spiritual words; I am a God who is into righteousness and holiness. You worship me not only by offering praise nor only obeying me by listening to my word but also by treating your neighbor as yourself. The kind of worship that I like best is that worship where the way you live your life matches up well with the words you say to me in church.”
Moses gets back down the mountain and finds that the people are already having a worship service. They bought a golden calf from the church supply catalog (they couldn’t afford the Deluxe Fully Grown Golden Bull), and they are off to the races having themselves a wonderful time in worship.
Moses flies into a rage and breaks the stone tablets that God has given him because the people have by their false worship shown that they badly misunderstand the God who has so miraculously loved them in the Exodus.
God has risked a great deal for the slaves. God has gone head-to-head with the Pharaoh over who will determine the fate of the Hebrew people. And now, God graciously gives a practical, mundane, daily guide for how they are to live out their freedom.
Sorry if you define “freedom” as the ability to live your life anyway you want. God defines freedom as the freedom to be who God has created us to be. We’re now freed by being bound to God. We are freed from having to concoct our lives on our own. We’re now freed into the service of the God who makes our lives mean more than we could make them mean on our own. Therein is true freedom.
One of the story prayers in the Jewish Passover ritual says something like, “God freed us from Egyptian slavery so that we might be slaves to him and him alone.”
That’s us. The Ten Commandments are not some difficult assignment, an unbearable burden, an idealistic set of rules that we can never follow; they’re the basic guides, the signposts that point the way toward fulfilling lives, God’s gift.
The issues addressed in the Ten Commandments are acts that are wrong, but not because the Ten Commandments say so. God said they were wrong because the moral law of the universe won’t support killing and stealing and committing adultery. It doesn’t matter in what period of history we live, it’s still wrong to steal—wrong whether we do it by shoplifting or cheating on our income tax or failing to give our employer a full day’s work or by manipulating a stock market sale.
It’s still wrong to kill, whether it is done in the heat of a domestic argument with a “Saturday night special,” or by the outrageous bombing of an innocent population on the “killing fields” of Cambodia.
It’s still wrong to commit adultery, though that has become one of the most socially acceptable sins of our day. It portends the tearing apart of the entire family structure and thus the fabric of our culture.
It is still wrong to bear false witness against our neighbor, whether in deliberate lie, or in the sweet morsel of innuendo that makes malicious gossip destructive of character. Dunnam, M., & Ogilvie, L. J. (1987). Exodus (Vol. 2, p. 235). Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson Inc.
Something that stands out to me when I read the story of Israel is that God doesn’t start with the rules and move on from there. God starts out with wanting a relationship. He wants a relationship with these people of promise. The descendents of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.
God told Moses on the backside of the desert that he heard the cries of his people. From that moment at the burning bush, God puts into action his plan to set his people free. It is all about relationship. It goes all the way back to the beginning in the Garden of Eden. God was in relationship with his creation, Adam and Eve.
The people were delivered from slavery. There was the guiding of God by a cloud by day and a fiery pillar at night. God provide food in the manna and water from a rock. All of that God did before any rules were put into place.
It is about relationship. First we learn who God is—loving, caring, active in deliverance—then we are told, in effect, “Because this is who God is, now here’s how you ought to live in the light of the reality of God’s true nature.”
Now that there has been a relationship established, God now lays out the standard for living in relationship with God. On author reasoned that these are standards to stretch and reach for, these are the lowest level of living and still be humn.
God starts with a reminder in verse 2
2 I am the Lord your God who brought you out of Egypt, out of the house of slavery.
We need to hear that reminder today in an updated format
I am the Lord your God who brought you out of sin, out of the house of slavery to sin.
God is not just some cosmic power source. God is the Lord your God.
Edward Mcmanus in his book An Unstoppable Force wrote
"Anything below these standards is choosing to live like an animal, a barbarian. The Ten Commandments don't calls us to the extraordinary spiritual life; they call us to stop dehumanizing one another. The law is the minimum of what it means to be human. The reason the law condemns us isn't because of our inability to live up to an extraordinary measure. We couldn't even pass the test with a D. When God gave Moses the Ten Commandments, God was establishing a nation for himself. God was giving them the tools to form an ethos that, through honoring him, would result in the nurturing and elevation of the human spirit." (Erwin McManus, An Unstoppable Force, chapter 10).
Jesus reminded the Pharisees that the two greatest commandments are to love God with all that we got and then to love our neighbor as our-self. He also told us how to live
33 Instead, desire first and foremost God’s kingdom and God’s righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well.
It begins with relationship with God, seek God first. God is able to be known. The Bible is full of scriptures that remind us that.
2 “I called out to the Lord in my distress, and he answered me. From the belly of the underworld I cried out for help; you have heard my voice.
19 My God will meet your every need out of his riches in the glory that is found in Christ Jesus.
4 Even when I walk through the darkest valley, I fear no danger because you are with me. Your rod and your staff— they protect me.
32 “Don’t be afraid, little flock, because your Father delights in giving you the kingdom.
These Ten Commandments reminds us of the basics of demonstrating our love to God. It is not a matter of whether we believe in a god, but it is all about if we believe in God. It is not whether we believe in Him, but it is whether we worship Him and commit ourselves to Him without reservation.
Do you see the difference?
These 10 Commandments as I said earlier are not some standard that we aspire to attain. They are the basics of life here and now.
Something else that stands out to me from these commandments is that the ones that deal with our relationships with others are not about creating community, they are about protecting community from behaviors that have the potential in destroying community.
The commandments don't give us an exhaustive list of right attitudes and good behaviors. They point us in God's direction and keep us attuned to the divine.
But if we don't get the basics right, if we don't build our lives on this firm foundation that makes us humane, we can't begin to live as God is calling us to live.
The Ten Commandments remind us of whose we are and how we are to live in relationship with him and our fellow human beings.
Those commands are not so much about the negative behavior such as not killing, committing adultery, stealing. These commandments are more about preserving our relationships, preserving and celebrating life, preserving and celebrating marriage, preserving someone else possessions.
The Preacher’s Commentary Series, Volume 2: Exodus You Shall Not Take the Name of the Lord in Vain
Elton Trueblood was right when he said this is a commandment warning against taking God lightly. We break this commandment when we say we believe in God and that we accept the ideals of His kingdom, but we don’t take Him seriously. This is a form of atheism. We’re atheists in practice, though we may be Christians in profession. We’re atheists when we live much of our lives as though God did not matter.
If you think that’s a crazy notion that has no meaning for you, that there’s no way you could be a Christian in profession but an atheist in practice, perform this very serious experiment. Sometime during the coming week, set aside maybe thirty minutes, and honestly answer these three questions:
(1) What do I think about most when I’m not thinking about my work?
(2) How do I spend my leisure time, the time not required for my Job or my keeping the household going?
(3) How do I spend my money? Get beyond your normal complaints about big grocery bills and high utility rates and huge house payments and doctor bills. Look at those things, but look further at how you spend the rest of your money.
My hunch is that our answers will provide some shocking revelations. We may discover that we think far more about what we don’t have that we wish we had, or about how we can get more of what we think will make us happy, than we do in expressing gratitude to God for His gifts and grace. Probably most of us will discover we spend much more time watching TV than reading the Bible, or in prayer or worship. And most of us will be shocked at the things we spend more money on than we spend on the mission of the church and the needs of others. Many will discover that they spend far more time and money on recreation and relaxation than on serving God’s children who need us desperately. (Dunnam, M., & Ogilvie, L. J. (1987). Exodus (Vol. 2, p. 242). Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson Inc.)
This morning we stop to remember the Ten Commandments, not the highest peaks of spiritual achievement, but the basics all life, a life that we share with all creation. Or to put it in words that come from the Psalmnist, the Ten Commandments are the rock and bedrock on which every life must be built.
14 Let the words of my mouth and the meditations of my heart be pleasing to you, Lord, my rock and my redeemer.