The Ten Commandments

[If you have yet to read The Parable of the Benevolent King, you may want to do so first]

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I remember the day I received my first Bible. It was a leather-bound King James Version of the Bible, complete with my name written on the cover in gold letters. It was a proud moment when I stood in front of the Church to receive my Bible. Along with it, I received a gold “chain” bookmark inscribed with the Ten Commandments. As a third-grader, attempts to read my new Bible usually resulted in me playing with that smooth, shiny bookmark. I can remember the feeling today, decades later. Though I didn’t read much, I certainly became “familiar” with the Ten Commandments.

Think about the process of Yahweh, the benevolent King, redeeming a people from slavery, where they acquired an identity apart from Him. Their identity and entire being were shaped by their bondage to the Egyptian empire and the worship of its gods. When Yahweh redeemed these people, he took them out to the middle of nowhere, where they had no land and no social identity. He was remaking these people, His people.

In the Sinai desert, about a year after their rescue, God gave the people instructions we know as the Ten Commandments.* These were the first of many covenant commands. We think of them as laws. To us, law conjures “right/wrong” thinking. If we obey the law (or don’t get caught), all is well. If we are disobedient (and get caught), we pay the consequences. It fits our Western judicial thinking. What if that wasn’t God’s intent?

I will take you as my own people, and I will be your God. (Exodus 6:6-7)

For this to be true – for Yahweh to be the people’s God, a few things needed to be true. He was the one true God, there were no others. Period. He was sovereign. Period. They didn’t need nor should they make images. Their experience with the Egyptian “gods” included images of those gods, both in and out of temples. These foreign gods were tied to time and space.

Yahweh transcends time and space

So, for Yahweh to be the people’s God, images were not to be utilized in their attempts to understand him. They were an unnecessary distraction. Images, created by human hands, usurp Yahweh’s sovereign role as the creator God. The people needed to know, needed to discover that they were created in his image and not the other way around.

This reminds me of the early 20th-century discoveries of “untouched” civilizations on remote islands of the Pacific. It was an anthropologist’s dream! They discovered a striking similarity between these previously unknown societies – they all worshipped some form of God, and that god resembled themselves. They had created God in their own image. Anthropologists refer to such societies as “totem societies.”

These newly freed people needed to understand what it meant to be bearers of His image. The old identity as slaves was past, dead, and a new identity as Yahweh’s image-bearers was being formed. He was remaking the people. New creation. Consistent with God’s’ call of Abraham (see On Earth as in Heaven), they were being reshaped to mirror Yahweh’s character to the nations, the Hebrews’ original mission. Not only a new identity but a new vocation.

Now, if you will carefully listen to me and keep my covenant, you will be my own possession out of all the peoples, although the whole earth is mine, and you will be my kingdom of priests and my holy nation. (Exodus 19:5-6, CSB)

As a kingdom of priests, they were to be ambassadors of sorts. That’s why they were to worship only the one true God. They were not only to mirror His character to the nations but also to fellow image-bearers. That’s why things like murder, adultery, lying, stealing, and coveting are so damaging – they tear apart relationships, dehumanize others, and violate the dignity of those created in God’s image.

It becomes evident that the Ten Commandments aren’t exhaustive, even with the additional 603 that the Pharisees tried to keep and enforce. They are primarily descriptive, not prescriptive. They describe our relationship to the one true sovereign God and with His creation, including fellow image-bearers. When we see them primarily as prescriptive, we are ripe to becoming pharisaical.

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* It’s important that we grasp the difference between torah and “the Torah.” The Israelites came to refer to the Ten Commandments and the subsequent 603 covenant commands as “torah.” Torah literally means instruction. As said above, these laws, these instructions represented the way that the people of Yahweh’s communal identity, story, and values were being reshaped and recreated. Remember that God’s redemption and restoration project was one of recreation. Formal “Torah” usually represented the Pentateuch, the first 5 books of the Hebrew Scriptures, our Old Testament.

As Christians think about the Old Testament law (torah), we should remember that according to Jesus, a primary facet of torah was to shape people to love God wholeheartedly and to love their neighbors as themselves (Matt. 22:35-40).