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.