The Ten Commandments

Click below to listen to the sermon being preached:

This week we continue our exploration of the Ten Commandments, found in Exodus 20. Those of you who were here last month will recall that we explored what I liked to term the Ten Commandments’ ‘User Guide’, a way of reading the Ten Commandments that was offered to us in the Larger Catechism. In this we considered how the Law is perfect, how it governs both our bodies and our souls, how where we read a ‘You shall not’, we must take the implied ‘You shall’, and vice versa, and that it is not only that which is specifically described that is forbidden or prescribed, but rather anything that leads to it – it is not enough to leave off murdering someone but instead murder them in your heart, or harbour a grudge against them. Having considered these points, we prayerfully and humbly turn to what is known as the ‘Preface’, and the first Commandment, and pray that the Lord will reveal His truth to us as we do so.

This morning’s portion of Scripture consisted of just two verses, Exodus 20. 2 and 20. 3. The Lord God begins the Ten Commandments with something called the Preface. This, like a preface in a book, sets the scene for what He is going to say. In the preface, which was v2 of our reading, we heard the Lord explain who He is and why His people should listen to and obey Him, while in the first Commandment (v3), we hear what it is He expected them to do..

Preface: Who God is So, we begin with the Preface. Bright, in his ‘History of Israel’, explains how this Preface is very similar to the prefaces issued by kings and nations in the ancient world. Ancient treaties, he explains, would “typically include a preamble giving the name and title of the Great King,”1 and we see this in the first half of v2, “I am the Lord your God.” (Ex. 20. 2a) Here the Lord is proclaiming His greatness and glory, His might and majesty. Whereas in the past He simply said, “I am who I am” (Ex. 3. 14), here He proceeds to give an account of Himself. He is the Lord, your God and mine. We should note that God did not always explain who He was. In Exodus 6, the Lord says to Moses, “I am the Lord. I appeared to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob, as God Almighty, but by My name the Lord I did not make Myself known to them.” (Ex. 6. 2-3) It is from this title, ‘the Lord’, that the people of Israel began to know God as Yahweh, or Jehovah (in its Anglicised spelling), and indeed so sacred is God’s name to them that they will only ever write down ‘YHWH’ (known as the Tetragrammaton), and will only ever say ‘Adonai’. In our Bibles, we will likely see that whenever we see the word, ‘Lord’, we actually see it in capital letters. The ESV’s preface explains that, in common with most English Bibles today, they render “the personal name of God (YHWH) with the word Lord (printed in small capitals)”,2 which not only shows that we too hold the name of the Lord in respect, but also means that we can see at a glance when Scripture uses God’s personal name (YHWH) and when it uses His “more general name”3 ‘elohim. Here, in the Ten Commandments, the Lord God chooses to reveal Himself as YHWH, as the Lord, to show the personal nature of the Covenant that He is entering in to with the people of Israel. This is no small thing: the people of Israel are not in covenant with a corporation, with a faceless body of people who can never be identified or named. The Lord God is not a plural word, unlike say ‘The Government’. When we say ‘the Lord’, we mean God Almighty, Maker of Heaven and Earth. It is He who is speaking this Covenant to Moses, and He who is issuing these commands and statutes.

It was Paul, standing on Mars Hill in Athens, who summed up just how majestic and marvellous God is, when he said to the religious leaders there, “Men of Athens, I perceive that in every way you are very religious… What therefore you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you. The God who made the world and everything in it, being the Lord of heaven and earth, does not live in temples made by man,” (Acts 17. 22-24)

Now it’s important we realise that Paul was saying this to a group of polytheists, that is to say, people who believed in a multiplicity of different gods. This is quite akin to the situation that the people of Israel found themselves in. As Dummelow explains, “It was only gradually that Israel rose to the truth that there is but one God.”4 Until this point the people of the Book would have, if not themselves, then certainly around them, encountered the worship of many different gods. Moses’ father-in-law, Jethro, was the priest of Midian (Ex. 3. 1), and would almost certainly have been a pagan, Moses grew up in Egypt where the Pharaoh was worshipped as nothing short of a god.

Returning to Bright, we can see that the second half of our preface in Exodus 20. 2 also matches up with what we would expect to see in ancient treaties and covenants. Having established who the king is, the next natural step is to “remind[s] his vassals of his benevolent acts which obligate them to perpetual gratitude.”5 We see the Lord God do this where, having established exactly who He is, we see Him declare that it is He “who brought you out from the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery.” (Ex. 20. 2b) This is, of course, referring to the escape from Egypt that we can read of in Exodus 6 to 14, where God Himself heard the cries of the oppressed Israelites and took decisive action, leading Moses and Aaron to confront Pharaoh (Ex. 7-12) and to escape via the Red Sea which was miraculously parted when God commanded Moses to hold his hands over it (Ex. 14. 21). Having escaped through the dry gap, God commanded Moses to do the same thing again, and the parted sea closed and re-formed, drowning the chasing Egyptian army. This will not have been ancient history to the people – indeed many of them will still have been talking about the miraculous things the Lord did in bringing them forth out of Egypt.

However, as with all these things, there is a danger that the person who God uses as part of His plan can be mistakenly identified by the people as the cause or source of the great power and miracle. After all, the Lord spoke to Moses directly, commanding him to cast his hands over the waters to part the sea. For anyone looking on, it might have seemed like Moses was himself controlling the tide. Now, of course, Moses would have been quick to explain that it was the Lord’s doing, but by reminding His people of this at the beginning of the Ten Commandments, the Lord God is quickly establishing Himself as the source of these wonderful miracles.

And, having established Himself in this way, the Lord has also explained why the people of Israel should follow the commands which will soon pass from His lips. Just as Bright reminded us of how the king reminds the people of all the good things he has done for them, and shows how this obligates the people to obey him, so here the Lord has reminded the people of all that He has done for them, and shows them that this is why they ought to obey Him. Dummelow sums this up nicely when he declares that the people of Israel’s obedience “springs, not from fear, but from gratitude and love.”6 When the people of Israel remembered what the Lord had done for them, it was with gratitude in their hearts that they obeyed them. This is why, to this day, even after thousands of years of persecution and destruction, the Jews still hold the Ten Commandments as sacred – because the Lord their God brought them out of slavery in Egypt. They are instructed to obey, yes, but their obedience springs from gratitude and love.

The Law and the Christian

I’ve been speaking to a few people about this wee sermon series I am preparing and preaching for you here at Glenboig. I’ve explained how I am doing a series on the Ten Commandments. A number of church-going folk have expressed surprise that I should bother to speak for eleven months (well, eleven Sundays) about the Ten Commandments, when ‘surely Christ came and died to free us from all that’.

But while it is true that Christ freed us from the great burden, and instead instructed us to cast our burdens upon Himself (Matt. 11. 28), in no way are we to disregard the Ten Commandments, or the Law of God. Peter, in his first Epistle, explains this when he writes:

But as He who called you is holy, you also be holy in all your conduct, since it is written, “You shall be holy, for I am holy.” And if you call on Him as Father who judges impartially according to each one’s deeds, conduct yourselves with fear throughout the time of your exile, knowing that you were ransomed from the futile ways inherited from your forefathers, not with perishable things such as silver or gold, but with the precious blood of Christ. (1 Pet. 1. 15-19)

Indeed, as Dummelow continues, “Christians, while freed from the obligations of the Mosaic law of ceremonies, are still bound, bound more than ever (see Romans 6), to ‘the obedience of the commandments which are called moral.”7 Christ came, we can read, “not to abolish the Law…” (and make it null and void in our lives) “…but to fulfil [it].” (Matt. 5. 17) Furthermore, just as the Lord God gave the people of Israel the commandments which they obeyed out of gratitude, so too we receive them and, in the words of the Larger Catechism, find them “of special use, to show [us] how much [we] are bound to Christ for His fulfilling [the law on our behalf], and enduring the curse thereof in [our] stead, and for [our] good; and thereby to provoke [us] to more thankfulness, and to express the same in [our] greater care to conform [our]selves thereunto as the rule of [our] obedience.”8

Furthermore, if it wasn’t for God’s laws, we would not know how we ought to live. There’s a rather nice line I picked up from a book when preparing for this sermon – it is rather old, but very true:

If I measure a crooked wall, with a perfect plumb-line, it reveals the crookedness, but does not remove it… the plumb-line… [does] not create the evils which [it] points out; [it] neither creates nor remove[s], but simply reveal[s]. Thus it is with the law; it does not create the evil in man’s heart, neither does it remove it; but, with unerring accuracy, it reveals it.9

The Law, in showing us those places where we have failed ourselves and God, pushes us firmly into the open arms of Jesus who is ready to receive us in His love and grace. Not only is the Law helpful, it is essential.

No other gods but Me

Having considered the preface to the Commandments, where we have discerned who God is and why He gives us the Law, let us now turn our attention to the first of these Commandments. Before we get into the do’s and don’t’s concerning this commandment, allow me just to draw your attention to the grammar in your Bibles. You will notice that where, in verse 2, God describes Himself, our Bible prints G-od, yet where, in v3, we are instructed to have no other god but God, that word is printed g-ods. Now we know that this is because there are no other gods – the false gods of this world, be they manmade idols or, indeed, other religions’ deities, are not gods like the Lord God Almighty. This may not be a popular thing to say, and in saying it to you I don’t do so with the intention of upsetting anyone, but this Commandment is clear – on the one hand we have God Almighty, and there is nothing on the other hand. Only God is God.

You’ll remember that, in my previous sermon, we considered that in the Ten Commandments, every negative has an associated positive, and every positive an associated negative. This Commandment is a ‘you shall not’, so what is printed is what we must not do. The flip side of this shows us what we should so. Let us first explore just two of the negative requirements – and there are a lot more, but time doesn’t allow us to go into each – before we explore their inverse positive commandment.

Atheism Now this one may seem obvious, but this Commandment shows us that atheism is wrong. I realise that I am preaching to the converted here (literally), and this argument alone is unlikely to win new souls for the Lord, but I feel I should just state it here. In his letter to the Ephesians, Paul explains that once the people in Ephesus were “separated from Christ, alienated from the commonwealth of Israel, and strangers to the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the world.” (Eph. 2. 12) Those people who do not have God in their lives are, sadly, without hope. Yes their lives may appear to be brilliant, but there is a God-shaped hole in their hearts which can never be filled by anything or anyone else. Of course, atheism can actually become a form of religion, and can become an idol or source of worship in itself. This is, of course, a huge irony, but I have met a number of atheists who look up to Prof. Dawkins as some sort of saviour figure, a person who has come to rescue the world from theism. If we turn to atheism, and believe that there is no God then, well, the Psalms would describe us as a “fool”. (Ps. 14. 1)

Idolatry This is, perhaps, the biggest single sin that this Commandment challenges – from the dawn of human history mankind has had the tendency to make himself an image and then fall down at its feet in worship. We see it in Exodus – just as Moses comes down from the mountain, carrying the very Commandments we are considering in this series in his hands, he sees the Camp beneath him prostrated before a golden calf (Ex. 32). The Psalmist describes this where he writes:

They made a calf in Horeb and worshipped a metal image. They exchanged the glory of God for the image of an ox that eats grass. They forgot God their Saviour who had done great things in Egypt. (Ps. 106. 19-22)

He then, only a few Psalms later, considers the madness of this way of thinking:

Their idols are silver and gold, the work of human hands. They have mouths, but do not speak; eyes, but do not see. They have ears, but do not hear; noses, but do not smell. They have hands, but do not feel; feet, but do not walk; and they do not make a sound in their throat. Those that make them become like them; so do all that trust in them. (Ps. 115. 4-8)

And when we look at it like that, we see what insane folly it is. The very thought of us making an idol and then falling at its feet seems stupid to us; and yet this is exactly what so many of us fall into the sin of doing day in and day out. Yes we may not be carving an image from precious metals, we may not be kneeling before it and trusting that it alone will save us, and yet the moment that we fall in awe of the false gods of this world, whether that be money, power, prestige, sex, technology, learning, or anything else, whenever we think that these things have the power to make or break our lives, whenever we think that we’d not cope without them, whenever we think that we depend on them more than we depend on our Father who gives us our daily bread, then we may as well fall down at its feet and give it alone the glory. Whether we made the thing or not, is irrelevant. Whether it knows us by name or not, matters not a bit either. All that matters is that it, whatever it (or, indeed, whoever they) may be, has pushed God aside in our hearts and has taken His place.

Now, linked to this is what I’d perhaps describe as Christian idolatry. This, too, has plagued the Christian Church for centuries. Perhaps you have been into a great cathedral or monastery and seen statues depicting certain saints? Perhaps you have noted that these statues often have candle stands by them, where you can make a donation and light a candle? Or perhaps you’ve noted how some branches of the Church (Eastern Orthodoxy mainly, but sometimes Catholicism and even Anglicanism) make a big thing of icons, that’s to say religious drawings of saints and martyrs? Now in each of these cases, those in favour would argue that they help the Christian to focus their attention on the things of God, but what tends to happen in such circumstances is that the person ends up believing that in some way these saints are able to intercede before God on our behalf. Or, worse still, that these saints (who are long dead) have some power over things going on down here on earth. Perhaps it is St Christopher, Patron Saint of Travelling, maybe you or someone you know wears a St Christopher and kisses it before going on a long journey? Or perhaps it is St Anthony, the Patron Saint of Lost Things, to whom Catholics are invited to pray in these words:

St. Anthony, perfect imitator of Jesus, who received from God the special power of restoring lost things, grant that I may find [name the item] which has been lost. At least restore to me peace and tranquility of mind, the loss of which has afflicted me even more than my material loss. To this favor, I ask another of you: that I may always remain in possession of the true good that is God. Let me rather lose all things than lose God, my supreme good. Let me never suffer the loss of my greatest treasure, eternal life with God. Amen.10

You can probably see the issue here – the Catholic is being invited to pray to St Anthony. Not only is he called the ‘perfect imitator’ of Jesus (which rings alarm bells anyway – for how can any human ever perfectly imitate our Lord?), but this saint is said to have the “special power of restoring lost things”. Far from helping the Christian focus his mind on God, this prayer is leading him or her to pray to someone or something other than God! This is just as much idolatry as worshipping a golden calf or the latest technology.

What, then, are the positive instructions? For we know that the Commandments are not all negative. Well, for this we can take the inverse of what we’ve just considered:

Theism Just as we have seen that atheism is forbidden, we can read that theism – that’s to say a belief in God – is required. Now again, this may seem stupidly obvious, and perhaps I am wasting my time explaining this one as you wouldn’t be here if you didn’t believe that there is a God, but allow me just a couple of minutes on this before we move on.

You see, the world around us does not want us to believe in God. Yes the UK, and Scotland in particular, has a long and proud Christian heritage – but that is largely in the past now. Christianity, indeed theism itself, does not fit into the zeitgeist of Scotland any more. In societies such as ours, we are encouraged to be our own boss, to be a self made man (or woman), to plough our own furrow, to look after number one, to focus on what’s best for us (and, sometimes, for our families). And if we follow that line of thinking, then there is no space for God at all. God has been removed from the spirit of the age, and those who seek to make a throne for Him in their hearts are at best considered weirdos, and at worst are considered a threat to society. As Christians, we must make sure that we hold firm to the truth that “God is in the heavens; He does all that He pleases.” (Ps. 115. 3)

Abstain from Idolatry Similarly, as we have seen that idolatry is forbidden, one of the positive instructions that we see in this Commandment concerns knowing God as the only true God, and loving Him accordingly. And, of course, for those of us blessed with children, this means encouraging them along this path. Let us remember what the elderly King David said to Solomon his son:

And you, Solomon my son, know the God of your father and serve Him with a whole heart and a wiling mind, for the Lord searches all hearts and understands every plan and thought. (1 Chr. 28. 9)

Jesus Himself, when challenged with the temptation of idolatry, knew how to answer the challenge. Let us remember the occasion, in Matthew’s Gospel, where He is fasting in the wilderness. For forty days He abstains from food as He prepares to begin His ministry. Satan comes along and offers Him all the kingdoms of the world, if only Jesus will worship him. Jesus, remembering the commandment of Scripture, replies by saying, “Be gone, Satan! For it is written, ‘You shall worship the Lord your God, and Him only shall you serve.’” (Matt. 4. 10) As Christians may we ever keep the Lord in His place in our hearts and be on our guard against any thing or any one who seeks to put Him from that place.

I know I am often quoting it, but let us remember the answer to question 1 in the Shorter Catechism, which reminds us that “Man’s chief end is to glorify God, and to enjoy Him for ever.”11 Or perhaps the words from Micah will put it equally helpfully:

He has told you, O man, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you, but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God? (Micah 6. 8)

In the first Commandment, the Lord God instructs His people to take and/or worship no other gods but Him. To the people of ancient time, this would have been a prohibition against making carved images or worshipping other nations’ gods. For us today, we too know this to be wrong, but the goalposts have changed, and our biggest temptation is to disclaim God altogether, or to allow some sort of societal value or creation to take His place. The ever-present temptation is to allow someone or something else to ascend to that hallowed place in our life where God alone should dwell. While it is only natural that things and people are important to us, we must never forget that God alone has first claim on our lives, as He is our Creator and Sovereign. No other allegiance, whether to our nation, an organisation, an individual or an item can ever usurp God’s primacy in our lives. Let us pray that the Lord will incline our hearts and our minds to obedience of this, and ever other, Commandment, that we may live lives worthy of a relationship with Him, from whom are all things, and to whom all things return. Amen

Works cited:

  • Bright, John. A History of Israel. The Old Testament Library. London: SCM Press Ltd., 1967.
  • Dummelow, J. R., ed. ‘Exodus’. In A Commentary on the Holy Bible. London: MacMillan and Co. Ltd., 1946.
  • Holy Bible: English Standard Version. London: Collins, 2007.
  • Lawson, Roderick. The Shorter Catechism: With Explanatory Notes and Review Questions. Christian Focus Publications ed. Great Britain: Christian Heritage, 2017.
  • Mackintosh, Charles Henry. Notes on the Book of Exodus. 3rd ed. London: George Morrish, 1862.
  • Westminster Divines. ‘The Larger Catechism’. In The Confession of Faith, 49–112. Edinburgh and London: William Blackwood and Sons Ltd., 1969.
  1. John Bright, A History of Israel, The Old Testament Library (London: SCM Press Ltd., 1967), 134. 

  2. Holy Bible: English Standard Version. (London: Collins, 2007), ix. 

  3. Ibid. 

  4. J. R. Dummelow, ed., ‘Exodus’, in A Commentary on the Holy Bible (London: MacMillan and Co. Ltd., 1946), 67. 

  5. Bright, A History of Israel, 134. 

  6. Dummelow, ‘Exodus’, 67. 

  7. Ibid., 65. 

  8. Westminster Divines, ‘The Larger Catechism’, in The Confession of Faith (Edinburgh and London: William Blackwood and Sons Ltd., 1969), 74, Answer 97. 

  9. Charles Henry Mackintosh, Notes on the Book of Exodus, 3rd ed. (London: George Morrish, 1862), 238. 

  10. Taken from https://aleteia.org/2020/06/24/prayer-to-st-anthony-to-find-an-item-that-was-lost/. Accessed 5th April 2024. 

  11. Roderick Lawson, The Shorter Catechism: With Explanatory Notes and Review Questions, Christian Focus Publications ed (Great Britain: Christian Heritage, 2017) A1.