9/19/2011

 First in a series of Bible Study of the "Ten Commandments"

 

The Ten Commandments

The Fall Bible Study 2011

 

Here is an image I want to burn into your mind as we begin our study of the Ten Commandments.

 

Imagine a symphony orchestra coming together in preparation for its first concert.  The conductor stands at the podium, ready to lift his baton when he smells smoke coming from the kettle drum:  the drummer is grilling steaks!  He looks over at the tuba, and there is both cabbage and celery growing from the horn – a veritable garden.  The harpist has hung out her laundry on the strings of the inverted instrument.  The conductor demands that the orchestra “shape up”, but the xylophone player uses his mallet to inflict damage upon the trumpeter, and the first chair violinist has stuck the tip of her bow up the nose of the clarinetist.  The conductor demands an end to the horseplay and calls for music. And the orchestra begins to play.  The violins wander into the Blue Danube Waltz, the brass section strikes up Alexander’s Ragtime Band, and the percussion section shows patriotism with a stirring rendition of  The Stars Spangled Banner.  The conductor establishes order with the introduction of a handbook entitled Rules of Proper Orchestral Conduct.  And finally they create a moving performance of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony.

 

Now, in a sense, the run away slaves of Egypt were like this discordant orchestra, much in need of a rulebook for proper ordering of their new lives.  In order to understand their need, we have to turn back the clock for more than three hundred and fifty years.  It was about then that a long lost son of Isaac was in a position to invite his father and his brothers and sister to join him in Egypt, where he was now a major bureaucrat.  You’ll remember his story:  sold into slavery by his jealous brothers, raised to power by a Pharaoh who dreamed of a famine, and finally forgiving his brothers and bringing them off the desert to survive as shepherds in Egypt.  But, after several generations, we read that “there arose in Egypt a king who knew not Joseph” and all his descendant were cast into slavery.  Generations passed and the Hebrew slaves remembered their God.  They called out to him for deliverance.

 

Now the story turns to a man named Moses, and an interesting story it is.  Born as a Hebrew, saved by the daughter of the Pharaoh, raised in the palace, he was given the powers of royalty.  It all goes wrong when he kills an overseer of the slaves, and he is forced to flee to another country.  In Midian, he marries a preacher’s daughter and becomes a shepherd of the family sheep. It is while tending his flock that he encounters the Lord God speaking from the burning bush, and is given the commission to speak on God’s behalf to ask the Pharaoh to free the Hebrews in order that they may go into the desert to worship their God. And Pharaoh refused ten times over.

 

Then, we have the exciting story of escape through parting waters and a rendezvous with their God at the foot of Mount Sinai.  It’s an interesting encounter.  They have been in the wilderness for three months, spent mostly in complaining about this and that, even questioning whether their lot in Egypt might have been better.  Then, Moses is told to prepare the people for his encounter.  For two days they are to wash their clothes and themselves;  they are to meditate and stay away from women!  And then we read…

 

                   On the third day, just at daybreak, ,there were

                   loud claps of thunder, flashes of lightning, a

                   thick cloud covering the mountain, and an ear

                   piercing trumpet blast.  Everyone in the camp

                   shuddered in fear.

 

And then God spoke.

 

There are some questions that seem natural at this point.

First, why did these runaway slaves need laws

 

The obvious answer is that every society needs rules and regulations or it will devolve into chaos.  We need laws to know how to relate to one another and for our protection.  But, there is a far more important answer to this certain circumstance.

 

These people had lived in total slavery.  It was on their backs that the great storage cities of Egypt were built.  Egypt had no code of law, no law books, no judges, no courts. Their law was  whatever the Pharaoh spoke: that was the law of the day.  It might change tomorrow, depending upon his choice of egress from his bed.  The slaves needed no understanding of what was right or wrong:  right was determined for them – rise early, hurry into the fields to dig clay, shape clay into bricks, bake the bricks, and lay them to build the buildings in which the treasures of the Pharaoh were to be stored, or create monuments to glorify the victories of the Pharaoh’s armies.  Wrong was failure to do what they were told to do!

 

So, first and foremost, they needed law to understand how they were to live up to their calling.  God explained to the people that they were to become a “holy people and a priestly nation”.  The word “priest” in Hebrew comes from the root word meaning “bridge” and the word “holy” means “set apart”.  So, God calls these slaves to freedom in order that they might be set apart to be a bridge between God and all his creation, a light to all nations.

 

Now here we have to stop a moment and reach back even further into their history, back even to the pre-history days recorded for us in the opening chapters of the Book of Genesis.  It was here that we find the “covenant” that God established first with Noah – promising that the world would not again be destroyed by the raging waters, and that his bow would be a remembrance of the pact.  Then, as history is first recorded in the Bible, we find a man named Abraham who is called to go into the wilderness that he might establish a new nation, a new race that would outnumber the grains of sand on the beach and be more plentiful than the stars in the heavens.  And God makes a covenant with Abraham that God would always be with him in this promise.

 

When the Hebrew slaves are freed and come to Mt Sinai, the covenant is renewed.  They shall be God’s own treasure, his chosen people, who will fulfill God’s promise of a new nation, a new land.  However, there is a difference.  In the previous covenants, God made no demands of the people.  They were covenants of grace.  In this renewal, however, the people are expected to do what God has commanded:  that is, they are to follow his commandments

Notice that the Commandments fall into a general pattern of the introduction of a covenant.  The first statement, immediately preceding the body of the commandments, is the statement of authority – “I am the Lord your God who brought you up out of Egypt, out of the place of bondage.”  The demand is “You shall have no other gods before me…”

 

And so, the commandments come into being, first as they are spoken by God Himself and then as they are delivered to Moses on tablets of stone, as a permanent record for the people.

 

Note:  when the people were dragged into Babylonian Exile, in 687 BCE (or thereabouts), they could no longer commit themselves to the ritual worship.  They feared they would, over years, forget their heritage, and so they asked for a brief statement to remind them of their covenant with God.  They were given the Ten Statements – the Hebrew name for the commandments.

 

 

If the Law was so important, why did God wait three months to give it?

To be practical why didn’t God issue a rule book on the night of the Passover, indicating that they had to sign off on it in order to be freed?  What would have happened?  Would they have read over it, debated it, appointed a blue ribbon committee and then voted on the committee’s report, 51-44 with 5 abstaining?  That’s the human way we tend to do things now, to assume that a positive vote by the people indicates God’s will.

 

Let’s change the scene a little and bring it into our Olde Wild West.  A man rides into Dodge one afternoon, takes a stand on the steps of Miss Kitty’s Bar and Grill, and announces that he has come to rid the town of the bad guys.  He asks, “How many of you are going to ride with me?”  In all likelihood he would ride out of town alone.  But what if this man rode into town and set about chasing the bullies out of town by himself, making the streets safe for women and children and older adults?  Then, if he asked for allegiance, he might be more apt to get it, wouldn’t he?

 

This is the way it all unfolded in the Sinai wilderness.  Thousands preparing to slip out of Egypt under cover of darkness, Pharaoh’s army giving chase, receding waters, crashing waters and mud stuck chariots, and a free passage to the holy mountain.  Three months to get used to being free, and then a magnificent pyrotechnic display on Sinai.  This is the kind of thing that engenders loyalty!

 

Are these the first laws that existed in the ancient world?

 

No, we have to remember that the Bible was written just to reflect the story of the ancient Hebrew people, to tell just what was happening to them.  However, all around them, the world continued to exist.  Wars were fought, kings went to battle every spring, nations rose and fell, civilizations perished never to be heard from again.  And, there were laws on every side.

 

The Exodus has been dated about 1250 BCE under the reign of Pharaoh Ramesses the Second.  However, we have records of the Laws of the Sumerians in about 2050 BCE and The Code of Hammurabi in the year 1690 BCE.  This set of 282 laws were written on clay tablets and transferred to stone pillars called steles, one of which was discovered in the early 1900 AD and presently is on display at the Louvre, in Paris.  The best known of these laws is the one that reads “An eye for an eye”.  In this body of laws there was no number 13.

 

All of the known laws of the ancient world differed from the commandments in one certain way:  all of those laws were circumstantial – that is, they said “If such and such happens, the punishment will be such and such.”  The commandments are “absolutes”, expressed as “You shall not do such and such.”  It is interesting to note also that the Ten Commandments do not have a penalty clause.  If you break these commandments, it is understood that you break your bond with the community to which you have been invited.

 

It is also of interest to note that the Ten Commandments were not meant to stand alone.  They are followed, in Deuteronomy, Leviticus and Numbers by some 613 other interpretive laws.  Therefore, as Patrick Miller says, “It is ludicrous to say ‘I follow the Ten Commandments’ unless you have read the interpretive laws by which they are defined.”

 

What then are the Commandments supposed to do?

 

The Ten Commandments are supposed to act as a compass, pointing the people toward the new life style they are to adopt.  They are no longer slaves;  they are now people bound by a covenant to worship God. 

 

The Commandments are to serve as a thermometer, testing our energy toward God.  As one man has written, “Some people wear their faith like an overcoat.  It warms only them.  Others, however, build a fire and it warms those around them.”  How warm is our faith can be determined by our ability to live within the code that is the commandments.

 

William Barclay has said it in another way.  “The Ten Commandments do not form a body of detailed rules and regulations;  they are a set of principles.  They do not give us a series of ready made answers to apply to every situation;  what they offer us is a certain attitude toward God and man, a constant that is our reverence for God and our respect for fellow man.”

 

If we live in the New Testament, are the rules different?

 

Jesus did not come to trash the Law.  He said that he came not to abolish the Law but to fulfill it.  That word literally means “to make more full”.  Jesus came to explain and apply the Law to new circumstances. In fact, nine of the ten commandments are mentioned in the New Testament. The Ten Commandments form the essence of Jewish ethics.  These ethics are the foundation of the Christian ethic, as well.  They are the universal basis of human conduct in society, laws which form the staring point of life for all people who have agreed to live in community one with the other.  You and I live in the shadow of the commandments that were given more than three thousand years ago.  Are they important?  The Bible records the giving of the Ten Commandments as they only time God spoke directly to the people!

 

And God spoke all these words, saying, “I am the Lord your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage.”

 

In the Jewish Bible these words stand as the first Commandment. In the Roman Catholic Bible, these words are combined with the words of the traditional first commandment.  In the Protestant Bible, they stand alone as an introduction to the Commandments.  It is only in the first commandment (and the introduction) that God speaks in the first person singular.  In the other commandments, it is “You shall not…God’s name….”  Some Jewish scholars are able to suggest that it is because by the time God got through the 2nd Commandment (our intro and first) the people were so frightened of the voice of God that they begged that only Moses speak to the them in the future.

 

Note:  At this point, look at the introductory verse and see in it the reflection of the Covenant procedure. Remember that we said that the Ten Commandments were given as an outline of the behavior God expected under the covenant that he had offered.  This is not a legal code:  it is a guide to how to live the life as one of God’s holy people.  In what form were the ancient treaties or covenants written?   In ancient form, it ran like this:

 

                   First there was a statement of authority.

                   God said, I am the Lord your God who

                   brought you up out of the land of Egypt.

That is his claim to have authority.

 

                   Next, the lesser party is identified.

                   You were in slavery and I made you free.

                   That identifies their lack of power without God.

 

                   Then, the stipulations.

                   The Ten Commandments.

 

                   Then, the reward.

                   The Promised Land.

 

                   Then the punishment in event of refusal

                   Failure to live in community of the Holy.

 

                   Then the calling forth witnesses

                   Normally this would be deities.  In this

                   case, God is His own witness.

 

                   Then, the recording of the treaty.

                   The hard copy Moses receives is to be placed

                   in the Ark of the Covenant and carried with

                   them.

 

No wonder the people of the Exile, when they wanted a reminder of their position with God, would receive a bare bones recitation of the Ten Commandments, twenty words.  This is the covenant which binds you to God!

 

In this verse, we have perhaps the most oft repeated statement of fact in the Old Testament:  you were slaves and God redeemed you.  You owe your allegiance to God.  It even comes as a reminder to the people at times,

 

“Welcome the sojourner in your midst, for once you were sojourner in a strange land and God’s freed you.”

 

It is well that we understand, as we approach the commandments, that the Bible looks upon us in the same way:  we have been freed by the grace of God from all that might have enslaved us before God reached out.  God chose Israel;  they did not choose God.    God chose us before we were even aware of our need to be chosen.  This is the repeated message that we bring to the commandments as we learn how to worship God and respect our fellow man.