9/26/2011

 

The Ten Commandments

Lesson Two

 

A Brief Review

 

The Hebrew former-slaves-now-fugitives had been in the desert wilderness for three months when God tells Moses to assemble them at the foot of Mount Sinai, the very place where Moses had encountered God in the form of a burning but not consumed bush.  It was here that Moses received his command from God to approach the Pharaoh to ask, on God’s behalf, “Let my people go into the wilderness that they might worship their God.”  You remember that Moses makes this request ten times, and after each of the requests, there is a refusal by the Pharaoh.  Also after each request and refusal, there is a plague that sweeps the nation but leaves the Hebrew slaves untouched.  Finally, after the tenth request and the tenth refusal, the plague is so devastating that Pharaoh concedes God’s power and allows the slaves to leave.  Almost immediately, the Pharaoh reneges, but the people have been prepared to make a quick leave taking and are already a few steps ahead. The story continues with Pharaoh’s chariots racing after the slaves, the looming barrier of water, the splitting of the water to allow the Hebrew slaves to cross, and the relaxing of the east wind and allows the waters to rush back over the river bed, and over the stuck-in-the-mud chariots and their soldier passengers.

 

The three month journey has not been without tension.  The people find fault and cry out their frustration by saying “Would it not have been better to just stay in Egypt?”  But, things have been reconciled, and now we find them, standing at attention, at the foot of Mount Sinai, preparing to hear a State of the Union address by the Almighty God.

 

But we have to interrupt here for a moment to ask, “Why did God wait for three months before He appeared before them?”  In a sense, it was an audition.  If God has just handed them some rules to live by – back when they were getting ready to leave town – what would have happened?  Would they have accepted his credentials – “I am the God of Abraham and Isaac”?  Not likely.

 

                        It would have been as if a tall stranger walked into an

                        out of control Old Wild West town and asked for a

                        sheriff’s badge so he could clean up the mess.  Who

                        would have offered him the job without references?

                        But what if this tall dark stranger came into town and

                        threw out the bad men making the town safe for women

                        folk, children, and older adults?  Then, all the people

                        would have jumped at the opportunity to make him

the new sheriff in town.

 

God proved to the people that his power was greater than that of the Pharaoh and all his army of charioteers.  The people were no longer in Egypt, they were no longer dying of broken backs, and nobody was chasing them.  They were on the way to the Promised Land.  It appears that they are home free.

 

But there is a problem: these people had never known how to live as a community.  A community must have law and order if it is to survive.  In Egypt, there was no code of law, no judicial system, no appeals court.  Whatever the Pharaoh said, that was law, for the people ascribed to the Pharaoh the wisdom and the privilege of deity.  He was, to them, divine.  If the Hebrew people were to survive, even in wilderness, they had to know how to live with one another.  And, more importantly, they had to understand how to live with God.  That’s what the commandments are:  the rules by which the people hold God in reverence and treat their fellow beings with respect.

 

In the Hebrew language, the Commandments are called the Ten Words or the Ten Statements. In their most brief form, they are actually ten statements of two words each – twenty words from which almost all of Western Civilization has taken its law codes!  They even hang in the corridor of the Supreme Court where they are being tested almost every year. In essence, the Commandments are the body of a treaty struck between God and God’s people.  They are the rules by which God’s people are to live in covenant relationship with God.  They mark the renewal of the covenant God made with Noah and then with Abraham and then with Isaac – promising that their descendents would become a great nation, more numerous than the grains of sand upon beach, greater in number than the stars in the heavens.  To Noah, to Abraham and to Isaac, the covenant had no restrictions or demands.  This time, however, the renewal of the covenant took a form very common in the ancient east.  It had stipulations.

 

            Briefly, such treaties always had these stipulations.

 

1) authority of the greater party

2) acknowledgement of the lesser party

3) demands made by the party of the first part upon the party

    of the second part

4) rewards

5) punishment if treaty is broken

6) calling out of witnesses

7)  and a permanent copy to provoke memory always.

 

Notice how exact these stages are followed.  The authority of the party of the first part is not questioned: “I am the Lord who brought you up out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage.”  The acknowledgement of the party of the second part ought to be just as obvious:  you were slaves in Egypt. The third part of the treaty – the demands – form the body of the commandments.  These are the things you must do!  Of course, there are rewards:  this is the promise of the land I will give you, the same promise found in the covenant to Abraham and Isaac.  It is easy to skip on down the list of the parts to ancient treaties and see that the covenant has followed the traditional form.

 

The people were expected to make these commandments their code of response under the rule of God.  Now some people might decide to argue that the commandments are too negative, but don’t let this bother you.  They don’t attempt to tell you how to structure your life for every occasion – like answers at the back of the book.  They give you a few absolutes which you can discuss and debate in the faith community to learn how to apply them properly; and they tell you that there are certain things that we just don’t do!  Most of us have family rules like, too.  If the kid asks “Why?” we are eventually reduced to saying, “Because I am your parent and I know what’s best and God gave you to me and until God takes either you or me, that’s just the way it’s going to be!”

 

But, there’s a better way of looking at it.  Here is a parable for just that occasion.

 

Once upon a time, a tribe of people lived between the jungle and the sea. They were happy, for the Great Power, which is what they called their            deity, had given fertile soil in which to grow their grain, a jungle in which to pick their bananas, and the sea for abundant fishing. However, one  day, a series of disasters began to mar their idyllic existence. A beautiful girl was on the way to meet her lover when an explosion erupted and blew her body into a hundred pieces.  Some days later, a child reached down to  pick up a rock to put into the sling he had made from a piece of animal hide; an explosion ripped through his little body as if it were paper.  Another day, an explosion erupted the sea weed that tangled in the nets of a fishing boat.

The elders met and realized that the village was circled by explosives, and they didn’t know what to do.  People could not just stay at home: they had a living to earn and a need for the freedom to enjoy life. And so they prayed to the Great

Power.

Several days later, following even more tragedies, the  village bell rang to call all the people together. An elder stood to announce “Last night I had a dream in which the Great Power swept me up and revealed to me where all the land mines are hidden.  He gave me a map so we might avoid them. If we learn to avoid all the places where the X  And the people rejoiced at the love of the Great Power.  But those who ignored the map were destroyed and a great sadness was brought to the hearts of their loved ones and friends. has been marked, we will live happily ever after.”

 

The Ten Commandments were given as a gift of love to all God’s people.

 

And so it is that we come to the Commandments and we discover that they begin with establishing God as worthy of worship, just as we saw in traditional treaties of the ancient societies around them. Even before the commandments begin, there is a statement to that effect:

 

            “I am the Lord your God who brought you out of the land

            of Egypt, out of the house of bondage.”

 

In the Protestant church – with the exception of the Lutherans – this beginning phrase stands as an introduction to the Ten Commandments, not a part of them.  In the Hebrew Bible and the Roman Catholic Church, this phrase is combined with the following verses about “no other gods” to form the first commandment.  They are able to stay within the framework of Ten Commandments, by separating the last commandment about coveting into two parts.

 

As an introduction, what does it say?  It pronounces the authority of God as the One who is “party of the first part”.  “It gives us the name, and thus. the identity of the one who places these obligations upon the people.”[1] It is important enough to be repeated throughout the Old Testament (the Hebrew Bible) each time God prepares his servants and prophets to speak on his behalf.  There is always the reminder to the people that they are indebted to God for their freedom.

 

Note:  The commandments are divided into three parts:

            1:  a prologue in which God identifies himself by

                 name and by authority.

            2.  the commandments that deal with religious duties

                 by which we honor God  (1-5)

            3.  the commandments which detail our moral duty.

                 the ethical manner in which we will live in the

                 faith community with one another. (6-10)

 

Note 2:  We should also be aware that the giving of the Law and the commandments, in Exodus and then in Deuteronomy, do not always appear to exactly match in detail.  It is as if they were woven together from two different stories.  Indeed, they were.

Remember, there was no secretarial scribe writing down every word as if issued forth; no historian called to transcribe all that was happening.  These stories were written down, sometimes several hundred years, at least, after they happened.  Before that, they were passed from one generation to another by word of mouth, and not by just one designated story teller each decade or so.  Many different traditions told the story as they heard it.  How do we know all this?  We know by the words that they used.  Some people, when speaking of God, used the name Yahweh, and they spoke often in anthropomorphic terms;  others used the named Eloheim, and still others refused to call God by any name, believing that it would be blasphemous.  This happened not just in the accounting of the giving of the commandments, but in earlier stories as well.  For instance, we have two accounts of the Noah story – one in which Noah gathers 2 of every kind, and another in which he gathers seven of every kind.  When the stories were finally gathered into a written form, the scribes would have perhaps four different traditions to draw from.  They would often weave them together, as one might take wool from different skeins when knitting:  and sometimes, they just didn’t fit exactly.  Should this bother us?  No!  The human mind is not infallible, even when receiving the revelations of God.

 

“You shall have no other gods before (besides) me.”

 

Let’s begin with a grammar lesson.  The pronoun “you” is singular, not plural.  God is addressing the people, one by one.  Don’t hide behind you neighbor’s coat tail – the word is directed to you!

 

A second grammar lesson:  The small phrase at the end of the 1st Commandment has been translated four different ways – and all could be correct.  How they are translated makes a different:

 

            1. before me,   that is “in front of me”

            2. beside me,   that is “alongside of me”

            3. besides me,  that is “in my place, instead of me”   

            4. over against me, that is, “in hostile confrontation with me”

 

In the ancient world, including the highly developed civilization of Egypt, the people had many gods, and they needed every one of them.  This was a time when an impacted wisdom tooth meant death, as did any infection.  This was a time when agriculture was at the hands of unseen forces of nature.  And so, the people had gods for every occasion:  gods of the field, gods of the planting, gods of the harvest, gods of the kitchen, gods of fertility (we need those children for the heavy lifting when dear ol’ dad gets old!)   This was called polytheism.

 

But, gods had their limits.  They were provincial – they just couldn’t cross tribal boundaries.  And so the people asked, before they went into battle, “Whose god is more powerful?”  In the Bible we read that Solomon had a thousand wives:  it is likely that each of them brought their own national or tribal god with them when they moved into the palace in Jerusalem.  Jezebel brought her baals with her when she married Ahab – and Elijah was called upon to destroy every prophet of every baal that showed up on Mount Carmel when he challenged them.  These gods – called baals in the Bible – were the result of what is called henotheism.

 

What the first commandment demands, however, is monotheism, the worship and acknowledgement that there is but One God,  Look at Deuteronomy 6:4 (called the Shema, the 1st Hebrew word of the sentence) – the verse with which every worship service in the Jewish tradition begins:  “Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God is one Lord, and you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all you might.”   Monotheism means that it is not enough to affirm    the One God of the Bible;  you must repudiate the other idolatrous gods.

 

Now look at what immediately follows the Shema, Deuteronomy 6:4.  It is essentially a long sermon by Moses which offers the 1st commandment in a negative form, a positive statement, and the reasoning for its acceptance.  It shows a connection between the Prologue statement and the commandment which follows, prohibiting idols.  And this is to remind us that the Ten Words do not stand alone:  they are amplified for understanding in the multiple chapters that follow, even into Deuteronomy and Numbers.

 

Look at Deueronomy 6:10-16, the first part of Moses’ sermon.

Again we see a reminder to the people of God’s authority over them, an authority, however, of grace.

 

The very expression “other gods” presumes that there were other gods in the mind set and understanding of ancient Israel, a pluralism, if you will.  This idea of pluralism brings some questions with it.  Are there other gods?  “If one worships God under any name, one worships the true God, for there is but one God.  There are many ways of perceiving God, of experiencing God, of naming God, or worshipping God, but all that variety, by all its names  and in all its nuances, is finally directed to one God.”[2]  Look back to Genesis, chapters one and two where God created everything; one people (not many people) from the hand of One God, not many gods.  The Hebrews did not have to worry about pleasing many deities, perhaps even with different demands.  They knew One God and they knew this was the Only God.  Is the one Islam calls Allah the same God that Israel calls Yahweh and we call Lord?  If there is but one God, can that one God be known by different names?

 

“If men believe in gods at all, they will necessarily wish to be like the gods in whom they believe, and therefore, the kind of god they believe in will make all the difference as to the kind of life they will live.”[3]

 

It is important what kind of God we worship.  If we worship a licentious god, we are apt to become licentious in our life style.  I we worship a stern unbending god, we are likely to be stern and unbending and hard.  If we worship a sentimentalized god, we are likely to be victimized by a sentimentalization of religion, seeking a grandfather god with a long white beard who allows just about anything in the name of love.  The Christian worships the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, a God of grace and love.  This is our one true God.

 

Henry Sloan Coffin once said, “The world today would rewrite this commandment to read ‘You must have at least one god.’”  And the world has many demi-gods – anything to which it might ascribe ultimate power:  the alignment of the planets revealing the future through our daily horoscope;  the fates which act for or against us; or anything else that turns up our personal thermostat.  This is what the Harvard Business Review once called a man’s religion;  anything that raised his temperature!

God says, right up front, you may worship no other power, no other God.

 

            You shall not make for yourself a graven image, or any

            likeness of anything that is in the heaven above, or that

            is on the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the

            earth;  you shall not bow down to them or serve them…

 

Has it occurred to anyone else that while God is making these pronouncements and Moses is recording them, the people down below are already breaking the first two commandments? Moses is up in the far reaches of the mountain, hidden by the clouds that are representative of God’s presence – out of sight, and the people panic.  There is no Pharaoh to tell them what must be done.  There is no leader, for Moses has disappeared, and God only knows (literally) when he will return.  And they have begun to question  if indeed he will return.  And so, without an authority figure in their lives – no king and no word from God – they ask Aaron for an idol, a graven image if you will.  And he melts down all the gold trinkets that had been thrust upon them as they left their neighborhood in Egypt.  And, behold, when it is poured out, it looks a little like a calf or a bull, and the people said “These are the gods who brought us up out of the land of Egypt.”[4]

 

The second commandment has a double meaning:  you are to make no image of God, nor are you to make any image of any other deity.  Once again, we have a reminder that the ancient Hebrew people – just rounding the bend out of Egypt – still had a double mindedness about themselves:  they were challenged to worship “the one true God” but they were aware that there were many other gods surrounding them.  Pure monotheism had not yet reached it full form in their mind set.

 

As we have seen in the previous commandment, Moses has a sermon about interpretation.  For the second commandment, we find the sermon just prior to the listing of the Commandments in Deuteronomy.  In Deuteronomy 4:15-20, we read his interpretation of this second commandment, reminding them that when they heard God’s voice from the flaming smoke enclosed mountaintop, they did not see God.  And so, they should not try to capture an image by imagination – no idols, no images of anything in heaven of on earth or even under the sea (where some mythological gods dwelt).  Read Deuteronomy 4:15-20

 

There is a very practical reason why the people should not make idols not bow down to them.  God chooses when and how to make an appearance to the people, and only God has determined how to be accessible.  Although the Bible sometimes attributes human characteristics to God – God’s hand, God’s face. God’s back – this is just a way of opening a theological conversation about God and thinking about God in personal language, a significant antecedent to the Incarnation.  When God a human manifestation, it was in the form of Jesus Christ.  Any idol making, any graven images, any attempt to represent God in a physical form would only damage the image that God would propose in the Christ figure.

 

The commandment is referred to in many parts of the Bible, but it is most easily seen when the prophets refer to the absurdity of idols and images.   Isaiah 46:1-2, 46:5-7  (sharp contrast is 46:3-4) Jeremiah 10:5-6.  Then, hear the Psalmist speak of the absurdity of trusting idols – Psalm 115:3-8.