Introduction

The law of the Lord

How many Christians see God’s law as perfect, trustworthy, radiant, sure and altogether righteous? How many of us find God’s law sweeter than milk chocolate and more valuable than stock options in a dot.com company? How many of us eagerly receive the law of the Lord as a gift to be cherished?

The outset of the third Christian millennium is an age in which authority is suspect, an era when human potential is deified and self-esteem exalted as the most pressing human need and the most basic human right. The language of entitlements not only forms the framework of much public discourse but has become so pervasive in the Church that it seems on the verge of replacing “Thus saith the Lord” as the standard by which we order our common life and work. Under such constant pressures, Christians find it hard to keep faith from being squeezed into the mold of the world, which in turn makes it difficult to live, let alone to love, the law of the Lord.

Fortunately, our struggle comes as no surprise to God. When he engraved the Ten Commandments on tablets of stone at Mount Sinai, God knew what the world would be like today. He knew his people would be tempted to bow before the attitudes and actions being worshiped in our culture. He knew we would be living in a time of intellectual, moral and spiritual chaos.

So God said, in effect, “Please, let me remove all confusion. … I know what is best for us, for you, for me, for our relationship. There are some parameters here – ten of them – that are literally matters of life and death.”¹

It is in this context, God’s law as God’s gift for ordering our relationships with him and one another, that we consider the place of the Ten Commandments in the Church and the world.

‘A triumphant social epidemic’

“In those days Israel had no king; everyone did as he saw fit” (Judges 17:6).

The terrible epitaph of the days of Israel’s judges is being lived out yet again. We watch the evening news or read a magazine and wonder if anyone still knows the difference between right and wrong or whether Christians should simply capitulate to culture and “call evil good and good evil” (Isa. 5:20).

Moral relativism, which uses the tools of modern philosophy to justify the ancient desire to call evil good and then do what is right in our own eyes, has become “a triumphant social epidemic through (among others) three principle intellectual brokers, all atheists – Freud, Marx, and Nietzsche.”²

Having absorbed, in shifting and unequal measures, Freud’s psycho-sexualized projections about human personality, Marx’s economic theories on the structures of human society and Nietzsche’s nihilistic affirmation that human life is meaningless, modern Western culture is without a moral compass. Evidence of the resulting ethical crisis runs from the Oval Office to high school hallways.

“Our society’s standards have been moved off their biblical foundations to rest on opinion polls.”³ As a result, we cannot even agree on the ground rules for debating moral issues in the public square. What one person calls “adultery” another calls an act of “justice-love” between consenting adults. What one person calls “murder” another calls “intact dilation and extraction.”⁴

What God says is “Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness, who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter. Woe to those who are wise in their own eyes and clever in their own sight” (Isa. 5:20-21).

Public truth

Since our society no longer shares a common foundation for determining moral and ethical behavior, should Christians acquiesce to the secularist demand that the Ten Commandments be kept out of classrooms and courtrooms and confined to our churches? Or should we support public display, even public discussion, of the Decalogue?

Consider Joy Davidman’s observation, made nearly 50 years ago, “It is on the thunderstone of the Tablets that Western civilization has built its house. If the house is tottering today, we can scarcely steady it by pulling the foundation out from under.”⁵

Consider also Jesus’ reply when asked to name the greatest commandment, “‘Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’ The second is this: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no commandment greater than these” (Mark 12:29-31).

The Ten Commandments are the norm for human conduct. They lift high that which is right and boldly name that which is wrong. If Christians shrink from declaring the Commandments as public truth, if we disengage from the world rather than risk the rebukes of those who do not share our faith, we abandon our calling to be salt and light in the world (Matt. 5:11-19).

Only an authentic love of God can enable a genuine love of other people and, in turn, a successful social ethic. Resolving the ethical crisis undermining Western civilization requires understanding and applying God’s will as expressed in the Ten Commandments.

Unfortunately, while Christians may complain about the threat to society posed by moral relativism and aggressive secularism we have not always been disciplined enough to learn the law of God ourselves, nor have we been careful to teach it to our children (Deut. 4:5-9). The resulting biblical ignorance within the Church, and therefore within the culture, ought to be a powerful spur to the study of law of the Lord.

A window into the heart of God

God’s law is not an end in itself. Keeping the law is not the ultimate goal. That is the error Israel fell into. Instead, the law is God’s gift, one that enables us to maintain the covenant relationship he graciously established with us.

The preamble to the Ten Commandments (Ex. 20:1-2) is a reminder of God’s grace, an affirmation that Israel was delivered from Egypt for no other reason than God’s good pleasure (Deut. 7:7-8). In response to this grace, God’s people were to live for him in obedience to the Commandments, not with the idea of earning by works salvation already given as a gift, but in thanksgiving for what God had done.

The Commandments were never a way to earn salvation. They were, and are, pure grace. They reveal God’s holiness and his moral character. In so doing they reveal the chasm between God and humanity. And by showing us our own sin, they reveal who we are and our inability to bridge the gap between us and God by our own thoughts and actions.

The Commandments lead us to Mount Sinai, to the consuming fire of God’s holiness. From there we can be led to Calvary, the mount of grace and the consuming love of God. Beyond providing guidelines for living, the Ten Commandments reveal the mind of our Creator. They are a window into the heart of God. They are the way the Christian expresses new life in Christ.

Now that the law has led us to Christ (Gal. 3:24-25), the Holy Spirit gives us the power to live it (Rom. 8:1-4). Meditating on the law of the Lord (Psalm 1:1-3) keeps us in step with the Spirit (Gal. 5:22-25). Of course, staying in step with the Spirit will mean that we will often find ourselves out of sync with society. But that is part of what it means to be in, but not of, the world (John 17:14-17).

An encounter with God

“When your child swallows poison, you don’t sit around thinking of ways to adapt his constitution to a poisonous diet. You give him an emetic.”⁶

God, better than anyone, understands how life works. He understands what happens to our heart, soul, mind and strength when we swallow what this world tries to feed us. He understands the consequence of disobedience, the result of life lived apart from his help and his blessing. He knows that loving and living his law will allow us to enjoy all that he desires for us.

We no longer have the tablets on which God’s finger etched the Ten Commandments. But when we encounter all the words God spoke to Moses on Mount Sinai, we meet more than just the law of the Lord.

In the Ten Commandments, we encounter God himself.

Endnotes

1. Ron Mehl, The Ten(der) Commandments: Reflections on the Father’s Love (Sisters, Ore.: Multnomah, 1998), p. 28.

2. R. Kent Hughes, Disciplines of Grace: God’s Ten Words for a Vital Spiritual Life (Wheaton: Crossway, 1993), p. 14.

3. Mehl, The Ten(der) Commandments, p. 27.

4. This procedure, more widely known as “partial birth abortion,” involves delivering a nearly full-term unborn child until all but his head has passed through the birth canal, puncturing his skull, suctioning out his brain, then declaring successful the “termination” of the pregnancy.

5. Joy Davidman, Smoke on the Mountain: An Interpretation of the Ten Commandments (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1953), p. 16.

6. Davidman, Smoke on the Mountain, p. 20.