Year 1, Day 69: Exodus 20

One of the Most Famous Chapters

Yeah!  The Ten Commandments are here!  Yes, this is genuine excitement.  I love the Ten Commandments because there is just so much good stuff here.  In an interesting twist of fate – considering as much build up as I have given them in the past few days – I am actually not going to speak about them first.  It builds the tension, you know…

Response to God’s Presence By the People

What I am going to talk about first is the people’s response to God’s presence.  I quote from the ESV, Exodus 20:19-21: “And [the people] said to Moses, ‘You speak to us, and we will listen; but do not let God speak to us, lest we die.’  Moses said to the people, ‘Do not fear, for God has come to test you, that the fear of him may be before you, that you may not sin.’  The people stood far off, while Moses drew near to the thick darkness where God was.”  The people were afraid of God!

Now really, that shouldn’t shock anyone.  But it does disappoint me on a very deep level.  In a way, I think it truly points to the major problem with humanity – a problem I have been pointing to often in the past 40 chapters or so.  People will go to great lengths to convince themselves that there is no way that they can be in an intimate relationship with God.

So, we elevate our clergy.  We don’t want to lead worship.  We don’t want to pray in public.  We are so convinced that we will fail and either be humiliated or that God will smite us for not being perfect that we allow our fear to paralyze us.  Like the Hebrew people, when we actually see God at work we recoil and let someone else get close.

Today that really makes me genuinely sad.  Here the people allow their fear to erect a barrier between them and God.  Modern humanity is no different than ancient humanity.

I do realize that God had told Moses to make sure that they knew they could only get so close to the mountain.  But what we see here is that the people aren’t really even willing to get as close to God as God allows!  I can see that all through Christianity today.  We are content allowing ourselves to have a “safe faith.”  We only let ourselves get so close before we get consumed and paralyzed with fear.

A World Without Leaders

Imagine what this world would have been like without Moses and Aaron able to overcome their own fear?  What about the judges like Gideon (Judges 6-8) and Deborah (Judges 4-5) who also overcame their fear to do God’s will and draw close to Him?  Or even Samuel who ran to God when He beckoned Samuel as a child (1 Samuel 3)!  Or what about Peter who went out on water just to get close to Jesus (Matthew 14:28-29)!  Or Paul, who had persecuted the church, what if his fear of rejection would have kept him from ministry (Acts 9:23-30)?

Over the course of the last 3,500 years since Moses walked the earth, how many hundreds of thousands of people have allowed their fear to paralyze them into a “distant faith” with their God?  How many potential spiritual leaders haven’t risen up because of their fear?  As I said, it makes me sad today.

Back to the 10 Commandments

Okay, so let’s come back to the 10 commandments.  You can read them for yourself, so I won’t post them here.  But let’s talk a little about their importance and structure.  Notice how the first three (or four, depending on how you count them) deal with our relationship with God.  Our relationship with God is primary in the Law; it should therefore be primary in our lives, too.  The remainder deal with living in community with each other; therefore our relationships in community are also to be of vast importance as well.

Let’s also look at the difference here in the commandments between an absolute command and a treaty.  Often we live in the world of conditions.  “If you do ___, then I will respond by doing ____.”  This is not how the commandments are worded.  These are moral absolutes.  “You shall (or shall not) do ____.”  There is no arguing.  There is no weighing the consequences to see if the benefit is worth the cost.  There is only “do.” 

Essentially, the point of the commandments is this: Either do it, or deserve the death you will earn in disobedience.  There is not much grace here – other than the fact that God loved us enough to clue us in on how to live a grace filled life to begin with!  But there is also comfort in absolutes.  You know where you stand with absolutes.  At the very least, the 10 commandments are black and white.  Thanks be to God!

Fortunately, we can read these in the light of Christ.  It may be impossible to live in complete obedience.  Thank to Christ, we can still be in relationship with God without being perfect.

A New Testament Aside

Here’s an interesting tidbit of information.  Do you know that the commandment to honor the Sabbath is the only one of the 10 never mentioned in the New Testament as something that the followers of Jesus must do?  Yes, Jesus talks about it in Matthew 12, Mark 2, Luke 6, and John 5.  But those passages are all references to Jesus speaking to Israel. 

All the other commandments the followers of Jesus are explicitly told they must keep.  The Sabbath one is eerily left out.  Don’t get me wrong, I think it is good to honor God and have a day of rest.  So I’m not saying we should violate the spirit of the commandment.  But there certainly seems to be an indication that the specific day is not as important as the Old Testament writers asserted.  I can get into a theological rationale for this in the comments section if anyone desires.

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