Lessons: Exodus 20:1-17; Mark 12:28-34; Arcana Coelestia
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Sermon: When you hear the Ten Commandments read as we
read them today, do you find that some of them sound a little harsh—maybe even
threatening? You notice that eight of the ten are in a negative form: thou shalt
not or you shall not? Do you ever wonder whether the Ten Commandments are no
longer applicable? Jesus in the New Testament taught a new doctrine—a doctrine
of love. Or perhaps we shouldn’t focus on the commandments, we should think
more of faith or love.
Of course if you look closely at the New Testament you find
that in many different places Jesus emphasized the importance of the Ten Commandments.
One of the most remarkable was when a young ruler came running to Him with a
question: What good thing should I do to inherit eternal life? And immediately
Jesus said: keep the commandments. And since there are so many commandments
and laws in the Old Testament, the young man said which ones? And Jesus then
listed about six of the Ten Commandments. This was still the basis of a spiritual
life. The Ten Commandments were not abrogated or changed by the Lord coming
into the world. In fact in the Sermon on the Mount, the Lord refers to a number
of different commandments, emphasizes them and then shows the deeper meaning.
The commandments still stand.
To understand the wording of the commandments, and to have a
sense of the significance of that event in Sinai, it is helpful to know something
of the custom of the day. Imagine that you belong to a small tribe near a larger
kingdom, perhaps the kingdom of Persia. The people in your tribe agree that
they would like to come under the leadership of the king. They would like to
be absorbed into his kingdom. So after discussions among the tribe, a delegate
would be sent to the king, negotiations would go back and forth, eventually
the agreement would be reached, that they would become part of the kingdom but
a formal ceremony had to take place. The king would make a journey to visit
the tribe; there would be elaborate preparations with much pomp and circumstance,
blowing of trumpets and other things to signal the arrival of the great king.
When the king arrived, the first thing he would do would be identify himself.
Such as “I am Darius the king of the Medes and the Persians.” Then the king
would do would remind the tribe of how they have benefited from his leadership.
So he might say something like this: “I delivered you from the attacks of the
Assyrians.”
Having established who he was and how he had benefited them
in the past, he would then set out the regulations that they must follow to
become loyal citizens of his empire. And of course the first regulation is you
must not create a king of your own. You must not betray me or be disloyal to
me by setting up some other god or bowing down to some image. There would be
other stipulations all written down on a clay tablet. When the clay was baked
and hard they would break it into two pieces: one would be for the tribe and
the other for the king so that the document could not be read until both pieces
were together.
The king was making an agreement with the people, the agreement
to bring prosperity to their land and to protect them. The people in their turn
were making an agreement with the king as if to say: “we understand that in
becoming part of your empire we have to conform to your laws. And if we break
those laws we violate the covenant. The covenant becomes null and void—we then
lose the protection of the king or we lose the privilege of being part of his
kingdom.
It is remarkable how many of those aspects of ancient customs
are embodied in the giving of the Ten Commandments.
First of all the Lord appeared to Moses and told him to lead
the people out of Egypt. So Moses went back into Egypt and after great tribulations
the Egyptians finally let them go off into the desert. They were a people without
a religion, without laws, without any kind of governmental structure; all they
had was the fact that they were descendants of Israel—they were the children
of Israel. They had to be merged into a single nation, and this they did at
the foot of Mt. Sinai. Moses told the people to prepare themselves for three
days: not to eat or to touch any unclean thing. They were not allowed to touch
the mountain. Mt. Sinai was covered in smoke and there was thunder and lightning.
This was a great event because God Himself was going to come down and to talk
to the people and make a covenant with them. The opening words of the Ten Commandments
are: I am the Lord your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of
the house of bondage. God identifies Himself and then He reminds them of what
He has already done for them. Then come the commandments, the first of which
is: you shall have no other gods before My face.
This is an agreement between God and the people. It is a covenant.
They were a covenant people. It becomes so important in their future that they
were accepting a code of laws and conduct. So long as they followed those laws,
then they were the Lord’s people, and they would be blessed by Him and protected
by Him. But when they broke those laws, they were in a sense putting themselves
outside of that kingdom, losing its benefits, its blessings and its protection.
It is interesting that when Moses came down from Sinai with
the tablets in his hand, the people had already broken the first commandment.
After all, they had lived in Egypt. They were impressed by the Egyptian gods
and now in a time of doubt and uncertainty they had reverted back to that Egyptian
worship—fashioned a calf out of gold, bowed down to it and said: “These are
the gods that delivered us.” Moses was furious, broke the tablets, had the idol
burned in the fire and many people died that day. When we read that story, it
seems harsh. And yet the whole safety of the nation depended on their being
a covenant people and if there were those who were not willing to accept the
first condition of the covenant, which was the worship of the Lord, how could
they be the people of the Lord?
If you follow the story of the Old Testament, you will find
a number of examples in which the key issue was: were they willing to hold true
to their part of the covenant? When they did so, they prospered. When they departed
from the covenant, they suffered and eventually were taken into captivity.
Solomon was king at the time of the greatest prosperity of the
children of Israel. But there was one weakness in Solomon’s reign: he married
women from all other nations and beliefs and introduced their worship into the
temple of the Lord. So Solomon for all his glory effectively destroyed the worship
of the Lord—he broke that covenant.
After Solomon’s death, when his son Rehoboam was put on the
throne, there was a rebellion from the tribes of the north, and he was powerless
to stop it. On the north was a man by the name of Jeroboam, the son of Nebat.
When you read through the book of Kings, you keep coming across the name Jeroboam,
the son of Nebat, who made Israel to sin. As one king after the other took the
northern throne it was said he did this or that but nevertheless he departed
not from the sins of Jeroboam, the son of Nebat who made Israel to sin. You
find yourself wondering: what was the sin of Jeroboam the son of Nebat?
Jeroboam was a practical man. He thought: “How can I have a
separate country if all my people go to Jerusalem once a year to worship?” So
he set up a false god at the border between his land and the kingdom of Judah
and another idol in the northern part of the land and said: “These are your
gods.” As a result the whole nation turned away from the worship of the Lord..
That was the sin that the northern country never recovered from. Within a few
generations, they had been invaded by the Assyrians, taken captive and the tribes
were scattered, lost and never found again simply because they failed to obey
the first commandment. They broke the covenant; they were not the Lord’s people
any more.
Even the southern kingdom of Judah had times in which they lost
sight of this essential ingredient of their life. AS a result they too were
taken captive. But the difference with the southern kingdom was that in Babylon
they repented, revived their worship, were brought back into their land, and
renewed the covenant with the Lord, the very first part of which is: You shall
have no other gods before My face. How can you be part of My kingdom if you
worship some other god or bow down to an idol?
One of the fascinating things about this covenant is that it
is a covenant made by all the people. Let’s take for example: if someone were
to murder. Obviously it is a crime against the person murdered. It is also a
crime against the civil laws. But on the deepest level that one person committing
murder is breaking the covenant with God. He is sinning against God and hurting
all the people. There is a story in the book of Joshua about the battle of Jericho.
At the end of the battle of Jericho trouble came into the land because one person
had stolen from the city. Joshua found out about this and he realized that they
could not go on until they found this one person who had broken the covenant.
That man, Achan, was eventually killed and all his family. It seems very harsh
but you realize that each person kept the commandments not just for himself
but for the whole nation. This is an agreement of all the people that the Lord
was going to be their god, they would be His people and they would keep the
ten laws—the ten words. When they broke those laws, the whole nation was in
jeopardy. The whole nation was hurt by it.
Now of course that was back in a time when the state and the
church were one and the same. We have separated them. Religion is one thing
and government is another. But isn’t it still true that where one individual
breaks a commandment other people are hurt by it? Think of the deterioration
of morals in a country such as ours and how even a few individuals can wreak
havoc with the national conscience and really bring injury to the whole country.
You cannot just sin alone without hurting other people. And we have lost that
concept over the years thinking that somehow our civil life is separate from
our spiritual life.
The thing that was different with the giving of the Ten Commandments
from any other covenant made with the king and the new subject people was that
this was to be a spiritual kingdom. With natural kingdoms, the king comes and
goes—has a short reign and is then followed by someone else. When you make a
covenant with the Lord and become a part of His kingdom, you are connected with
a king who never dies—an eternal kingdom. To be part of that eternal kingdom,
there are civil, moral and spiritual laws. The wonderful thing is that the Ten
Commandments contain all three. A civil law against murder, adultery, theft
or false witness. It’s a moral law not to covet. It’s a moral law to honor your
parents and it’s a spiritual law to worship the Lord and not worship other gods,
to keep His name holy and to respect His day.
The Ten Commandments are really inviting us to become part of
a spiritual kingdom that transcends time and space. Each one of us has been
called to be God’s people. Each one of us has to look at our life and ask: “Have
I made a covenant in my heart to be the Lord’s and let the Lord’s laws rule
my life?” It is not always easy to know.
There was a man who was living his life in a very worldly way,
not involved in any kind of spiritual program. At one point someone asked him
about his spiritual life: “Did he believe in God?” —well he didn’t think so.
“Was he spiritual?” No, he didn’t think so. And finally his friend said: “What
is it that you love more than anything else?” He wondered what he meant by that.
So the friend put it this way: “What is there in your life that you would die
for, that you would give up other things for?” The man thought long and hard
and wondered if it was money. Money is a terrible god, at first giving great
rewards but then putting people into a deep prison. Maybe it was self, maybe
it was his ego. People can be so wrapped up in themselves their selfishness
is a barrier to their marriage, to their relationship with their children, to
their relationship with life. Whatever it is in your life that means the most
to you, that in a sense is your god. This man really had to look at himself
and first of all say: “What is my god, what do I live for and secondly
do I like the kingdom that my particular god that creates for me? Do I enjoy
living in that kind of kingdom?” In the end he had to admit that he really did
not know.
We are all called upon to look at our spiritual life and what
kind of spiritual kingdom we would like to belong to. Are we willing to accept
this very first commandment: to worship God above all else and to have it be
the supreme thing in our life? How would we know if that were true? It is partly
a question of whether we keep the other commandments because if you want to
know whether you serve the king, all you have to do is ask yourself do you obey
the other stipulations of the covenant? Do you honor the laws of His kingdom?
We are invited to live in the natural world and at the same
time be part of a spiritual kingdom. A kingdom, which transcends time and space.
A kingdom which endures forever. And in this sense it is useful to stop and
look at the Ten Commandments and see how they apply to our life. Especially
if we look at the first commandment and wonder what is it that is so important
in our life that we would sacrifice everything for it? If it’s some external
god like money or prestige or pleasure or self, we might find after a while
we get very restless in that kingdom, very unhappy; we feel like prisoners in
that kingdom. If we worship the one god, we find a greater freedom, a prosperity
and the promise of eternal life.
When the prophet Jeremiah spoke to the children of Israel the
people were in great distress. Their lives were falling apart. Their kingdom
was in danger. He suggested to them that their deepest problem lay in the fact
that they no longer put much importance in the Ten Commandments. He then suggests
the solution:
“Obey my voice, and I will be your God and you shall be
my people; and walk only in the way I commanded you, so that it may be well
with you.” (Jeremiah 7:23)
Amen.
