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80’s Band Tears for Fears nailed it in their hit song: Everybody wants to rule the world.
When you rule the world or the state, or the city, or the household, you become the standard.
If you are not the standard, then you point to the standard that you and others will follow.
When it comes to our culture of today, we see that it isn’t just one person, or deity, but everybody wants to rule the world.
Our President wants to tell us how we should live.
The Supreme Court wants to tell us how we should live.
Activists want to tell us how we should live.
Hollywood wants to tell us how we should live.
Religious folk want to tell us how we should live.
Everybody wants to rule the world.
But who actually rules the world and what is really expected of us?
Today we will seek to discover the answer to that very question.
Today we begin our new series on the 10 commandments.
A series on 10 laws, 10 commandments, literally in the Hebrew, 10 words, that have been at the center of biblical life
and worldly controversy for thousands of years.
A series that will seek to reveal the true meaning and purpose behind these laws and help us understand them fuller.
In the process I hope we will uncover the mysteries and controversy that surrounds them.
I want us to look to answer questions that naturally arrive as we wrestle with the implications of God’s rule and reign.
Before we begin, I want to lay before us the road map that we will be traveling.
There are 4 points that I will return to each week as we discover the truth behind each commandment.
Each week we will look at a new commandment.
Yet, we will use these same 4 points and seek the understand to each commandment.
Let’s get these 4 points before us right now so that we can be thinking about them as we begin our journey this morning.
1.)
Ten Commandments: Reveal God’s Character.
What God calls us to do and be, reveals to us something about who God is.
God’s Character becomes evident in what God prioritizes.
2.) Ten Commandments: Reveal what God requires of us.
The commandments give us a roadmap to what is good, what is right,
it is a standard that we can view ourselves and the world around us through.
3.) Ten Commandments: Reveal our depravity (sin)
The ten commandments will reveal with crystal clear clarity something that is drastically wrong with not just the world,
But what is drastically wrong with ourselves.
4.) Ten Commandments: Reveal our need of a Savior.
The ten commandments will point us, like everything in the old Testament is designed to do, to our need of a Savior.
Someone who can be, what we fail to be.
Someone who is worthy, holy, righteous, that we can trust to navigate this life we have been given.
Each week we will also answer one common misconception about the Ten Commandments.
We will seek to debunk or bring clarity to a myth or opinion that can be brought up when discussing the 10 Commandments
As you can see, we have a lot to explore together.
So let us start with a basic, but big question.
What is a commandment?
A command in its most basic definition is an authoritative order.
When it comes to the word biblical commandment, it is a divine authoritative order.
Which brings us to our first myth and common misconception:
If a commandment is a divine authoritative order.
And God is who has set forth these 10 authoritative order.
Then God is a cosmic dictator.
I believe the answer to this, and other questions, will become clear when we break down our first commandment.
So let us jump in.
Open your Bibles or turn them on if that is your preference to the Old Testament book of Exodus.
We will be in chapter 20:1-3.
You may want to bookmark this page because we will be returning to it each week.
Our first of the 10 commandments is this: You shall have no other gods before me.
Not only is this the first commandment, this is also the most important commandment of the 10.
Hear me this morning as this is so important.
All commandments funnel through this first commandment and none of the other commandments make sense apart from this one.
If we do not live according to this commandment, form our purpose around this commandment,
and seek the meaning behind this commandment, then there are no reasons to live according to any other commandments.
Because God is our Creator and Sustainer, we are to have no other gods before, or besides, the One true God.
We are not to find our hope, our purpose, our meaning, outside of the one true God.
We are not to worship, to glorify, to honor, anyone or anything above the one true God.
We are not to put any created thing before or beside the Creator.
But doesn’t this turn God into the idea that He is a Cosmic Dictator?
Well, if we look at just the commandment and rip it out of context, you might be on to something.
But let’s look closer at verses 1 and 2 before we make our decision.
You see, God is declaring something amazing here.
It is not, I am God, thus you will do this.
God is saying, because I am God, because I have rescued you, because you have been saved, because you are now protected and set apart, here is what you shall do.
The Bible does not begin with these words: In The Beginning God said You shall have no other gods before me.
Actually want to see something wild?
God doesn’t say these words until the 70th chapter of the Bible!
Now yes, chapters and verses were not invented and inserted into our Bibles until the 1500s
Chapters and verse numbers are a man-made creation and thus not authoritative.
But they do help us see something very powerful.
We see that it isn’t until God revealed Himself more fully that He shares these words.
So, for us to understand the context, it will be helpful to do a brief overview of what has happened to lead up to these commandments.
To do that we must turn to the very first book, the very first paragraph, the very first verse, the very first 4 words of our Bible.
Now this is an overview sentence for what Moses is about to tell us about Creation.
But it is exactly what we need to know.
In the beginning, meaning when time first began, God created.
Now God is eternal and outside of time.
God is everlasting to everlasting with no beginning or end.
Dylan keeps asking me, Daddy, who created God? or Daddy, when did God become God?
I will keep answering, Dylan, God was never created He is our Creator.
He is eternal and always existed!
Dylan’s eyes start to squint and he cocks his head to the side as if straining.
Kaiden looks over at Dylan and say, “Don’t do it Dylan.
Your head will hurt, trust me, I’ve tried.”
Everything begins for us with the eternal, uncreated God, bringing forth time.
The one who is outside of time who exists apart from time, creates time and places us in it.
I try, to explain to Dylan that everything we see and know and experience is inside of time.
Everything has a start and an end.
Which is what makes God so amazing.
He is the only one without a start or an end.
Thus our Creation was not an accident.
It wasn’t a random bang.
It wasn’t dust particles randomly colliding in the vastness of nothing.
It was the spoken word of God.
Thus in the Beginning, God Creates and is the author and authority of that which He has made.
In God’s creative artistry and wonder He creates the heavens and the earth along with His crown creation, Humanity.
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