The 10 Commandments

Hey, hey, good morning, good morning, good morning. Welcome to Coffee and Devotions. That's where every day you and I, we get together. We have a little bit of coffee. We get into God's word. We grow in our love for the Lord together. And this year, 2023, we'll make it from Genesis to Leviticus.
So glad to be with you today. We are at one of the most known passages in the entire Bible, although there have been plenty of videos and surveys to show that people don't actually know these words. They've heard about them. but often they don't actually know them. And so we have a huge blessing today to look at an extremely important passage in the Bible.
Let's have some coffee. We'll pray and we'll get into God's word. Let's pray. Father, You are an amazing God. Again, You've woken us up and You've given us a beautiful day. You've given us an opportunity to read Your Word, to hear in our hearts Your voice. And so, Father, we pray that You would please, by the power of Your Holy Spirit, speak to us this morning through Your Word, that You would pierce our souls, convict us of sin where it's needed, but also Let us know of your grace, and let us know of how we should walk before you.
In Jesus's name, amen. All right, so we are at Exodus chapter 20. Exodus chapter 20. I'm gonna kind of work through these one by one. Now, I'm not going to preach to you. If you wanna see the sermon series that I've preached through the Ten Commandments, you can look that up yourself. They're online, it's on Sermon Audio. but I am going to take these one by one and talk about them as we go through and then summarize and then kind of wrap it up with it. Okay, so verse one, and God spoke all these words saying, now this is really important, right?
God had told Moses in chapter 19 to go down and to bring Aaron up with him. And when he went down from the mountain, verse 25, so Moses went down to the people and spoke to them. And while Moses is down, Aaron is down, the people are down from the mountain, God himself speaks. Remember the scene, the cloud is over Mount Sinai.
There's fear and there's trembling. And now there's an audible voice from God And this is him as the sovereign above his people, now speaking to them, a treaty, a covenant. And this is what he says. He acknowledges who he is. First verse two, I am Jehovah, your God. So he uses the divine name here. Your translation would most likely say the Lord. Or if you're using something like the Legacy Standard Bible that's just come out, it might say it's Yahweh, it's fine. Yehovah, Yahweh. The point is it's the divine name of God. He's saying I am, and he says his name, your God.
And then how did he become their God? How did he establish this nation of Israel who brought you up out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage? God had redeemed them. God had saved them. God had brought them to be a nation by himself. He was to be their God.
And then he starts with a series of different what we might say commandments, might say laws or foundational principles. First in verse three, you shall have no other gods before me. Why? He's the only Redeemer of Israel. He was the one who made heaven and earth. He was the one who moved heaven and earth to save them. He was the one who bent all creation to his will to redeem them. And so he says, it's just me.
None other, right? This is the beginning of their monotheism, right? And when it's established, I shouldn't say the beginning of it, but the establishment of it in law. No other gods. And this isn't like, you know, Jesus or God gets first place and then, you know, you can have all these other second place and third place and fourth place gods. No, no, no. There's just one. None other before me. This is, this is not the idea of, of first in rank, but this is none other in front of my face. And we get that as we look at the next few commandments.
4. You shall not make for yourself a carved image, any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. You shall not bow down to them, nor serve them.
For I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children to the third and fourth generations of those who hate me. but showing mercy to thousands, to those who love me and keep my commandments. God here is saying, I'm going to be worshipped. I'm not going to be worshipped by idols. There's a few things he's doing here. God is not saying that they're not allowed to make any carved images. If that was the case, God is going to break his own commands.
Because he's going to tell the leaders of Israel to make a snake, to put it up on a pole and to raise it up high and walk it through the midst of the people so they would be saved. We'll get to that story some other time. But he's going to command for this image to be made. Now what are the Israelites going to eventually do with that image? They're going to take that bronze snake and they're actually going to start bowing down to the snake. later on in Israel's history, which is, that's the violation of this principle.
He's going to tell them as they're making the tabernacle, that they're to actually make little pictures of pomegranates, and on the ark there's to be created two cherubim, this angelic creature. Is God violating his own commandment here? No, he's not. He's saying, my ark isn't going to be worshiped. The pomegranates aren't going to be worshipped. You don't worship me by these images and you don't worship any other God by images either. Your worship of me, this is what Jesus is going to get at, your worship of me is by spirit and truth. It's not by image worship. It's not by worshipping any other gods. These are tied together, how we worship and who we worship.
And then verse seven, the third commandment, you shall not take the name of Jehovah your God in vain. For Jehovah will not hold him guiltless who takes his name in vain. Again, if you're reading your English translation, it's going to say the Lord, capital L, capital O, capital R, capital D. This is the Tetragrammaton, Yod, He, Vav, He. This is the name that God revealed himself to Moses. I am who I am. This is a God of creation who stands alone. eternal, who always was and is and will be. And it is that God, who his name shall not be used lightly.
Now, the Jewish people, they took this name and they wanted to use it, or they wanted to so reference this name that they even stopped using it. If you went to a Jewish school today, you wouldn't even say Yehovah, or you wouldn't say Yahweh. Instead, you would just say, Hashem, the name. And if you were to be writing this verse on a whiteboard, you could erase every other word, but wherever it said the name of the Lord, you would just put a little placard, Hashem, there instead.
But that's not what the Lord's talking about. He's not talking about not using His name at all. He's talking about using it in an irreverent way, using it in a false way, using it in a way that minimizes Him, trivializes Him, or does dishonor to Him. He says, I will be holy, and I will be reverenced by you, and my name carries weight. So don't throw my way, my name around foolishly. Or irreverently. And then verse eight. The eighth commandment.
Remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy. Six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is the Sabbath of the Lord your God. In it you shall do no work, you nor your sons, nor your daughter, nor your male servant, nor your female servant, nor your cattle, nor your stranger who is within your gates. For in six days the Lord made the heavens and the earth, the sea and all that is in them, and rested the seventh day. Therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and hallowed it." God tells them there's a creation ordinance. The command verse is, you shall honor the Sabbath day. You shall sanctify, you shall keep it. There shall be a holy rest the seventh day.
And then there's a reason annexed to it. The reason annexed to it is because he created it. The Sabbath didn't come about in the fourth commandment, the Sabbath came about at creation. And it's seen, we've gotten hints of it throughout the book of Genesis, and now it's codified.
In Deuteronomy chapter five, where these 10 words are repeated, what we're gonna find there is that God says, this is specifically gonna be a day that you remember because I redeemed you. The Sabbath and the remembering of his redemptive covenant mercies are tied together.
So he says, this is for everyone. It's not just for you. Not a day that you can rest and everybody else has to serve you. No, no, no. Even your servants, they get the day off. Oh, and your cattle. Your oxen? Yeah, they don't have to work either. No beast of burden's working. Neither your male servant nor your female servant. Everything. Everything gets the day off. Take a rest. Remember who I am. Remember what I've done for you.
And then there's a hinge here in verse 12, the fifth commandment. This ties to the first four and now it goes to the last six. But notice what those first four were about. Those first four were about our obligations, our duty, our love shown to God. Now the commandments turn toward our duties, obligations, our love towards our neighbors.
Verse 12, the fifth commandment, honor your father and your mother, that your days may be long, may be long upon the land, which the Lord your God is giving you. Honor your father and your mother, right? This is this idea that there is a hierarchy in society and that children are to honor those who are above them. And this principle is seen elsewhere in scripture that it applies to those who are in authority over us.
I love the Westminster Larger Catechism when it comes to these commandments. It talks about the duties of inferiors to superiors and superiors to inferiors and, you know, equals to equals and all sorts of, what does this require of us? And it will go through, I'd encourage you sometime if you ever want to pick up the Westminster Larger Catechism or the Shorter Catechism, but especially the Larger Catechism, on what is forbidden in these commandments and what is required in these commandments. And it uses nothing but scripture to go through and give practical applications for these.
It's really, really helpful. But here it's, this is the first commandment with a promise. so that your days may be long upon the land which the Lord your God has given you. God wants his people to prosper and he knows that at the core of that prosperity is going to be a functioning family where children obey their parents and parents lovingly care for their children.
And then verse 13, the sixth commandment, you shall not murder. If you're using the King James, you might find that and it says, you shall not kill. It's not actually, you shall not kill. This is the taking of innocent life. This is not somehow, you know, making us into pacifists or against capital punishment, or, you know, we have to turn vegan or something like that. That's not what this is getting at. This is getting at the taking of innocent life.
God himself is the one who commands all the way back in Genesis, I think it's six or nine. We had looked at if somebody kills another man by man's, he should be killed, right? God's the one who instituted this. So once again, we're going to see that God is the one who's going to tell them to go to war with certain people. It's just happened before. When Joshua was commanding the army of God's people against the Amalekites, this isn't saying that war isn't going to happen or capital punishment doesn't need to be meted out.
But it's saying the taking of innocent life, though, is evil. So we ought to preserve life. We ought to care for people. We ought to love them. We ought not to take innocent life. Well, then we have the seventh commandment. You shall not commit adultery. Right. There ought to be marital fidelity. And this applies. Notice it doesn't say you shall not commit adultery against your husband. or you shall not commit adultery against your wife.
This is that God places a hedge around marriage. He's done it with children, and now he's doing it with husbands and wives, and he's saying, this is how a well-functioning, ordering society of mine is to operate. When husbands love their wives, and when wives love their husbands, when they're in covenant with one another, and they're not going outside that marriage bond. They're not sharing their bodies with another, but what God has brought together, let no man tear asunder. This is this one flesh union between a husband and a wife. God says, do not violate that. And then the eighth commandment, you shall not steal.
There are so many people who are so tempted to just throw this out the window. There's a whole myriad of different ways in which people steal, but a functioning society does not work well when people are able to steal. And so God is the one who institutes property rights. He is the one who says, it's okay to have your stuff. It's okay to have a right to your own things. but it's not okay to take other people's. It's not okay to rob other people of what they need.
And so we ought to be those who are both preserving our own estate, but also promoting our neighbors. We want other people to prosper. We want other people to do well and to be selfish and steal other people's things is evil. then the ninth testimony ninth law this is a really important one in verse 16 you shall not bear false witness against your neighbor right when a functioning society can't exist If there are people lying in courts of law, if people are opening their mouth with untruths, we ought to be those who are promoting preserving the truth. We ought to be those, as God's people, who love the truth, stand up for the truth. And even though it might cost us, even in courts of law, we show our love for the neighbor, for our neighbor, in speaking the truth. And then verse 17, the 10th foundational law for God's people.
You shall not covet your neighbor's house. You shall not covet your neighbor's wife, nor his male servant, nor his female servant, nor his ox, nor his donkey, nor anything that is your neighbor's. The Lord doesn't want us to be so about this world that we would seek after other people's stuff, zealous, jealous for other people's things. but that we would walk before him.
Now, we've read through all of this. I don't think I actually want you to underline what you think is the best verse. You can, because that's almost like choosing which foundational law is most important. Maybe it's the first commandment, right? You shall have no other gods before me.
And then everything else flows from here. This is rooted in God's gracious love for these people. We often want to see the Ten Commandments as this reestablishment of the covenant of works, right? They have to keep every single one of these laws perfectly or else God's not going to love them. No. This is foundational morality, but it's based, it's rooted in God's love for them. He has redeemed them. He has purchased them. He has loved them. And now he's telling them, this is how you will succeed. This is how you will prosper. This is how you will show your love for me and your love for your neighbor. None of them are going to be able to keep this perfectly, though. You can't keep these laws perfectly. I can't keep these laws perfectly. But we sin daily and thoughtward indeed.
But Jesus Christ did keep every one of these perfectly. These show us the character of God. These show us what God loves and what God is like. And they show us, pardon me, and they show us how we are to walk before Him as redeemed people. We're freed from the curse of the law by Jesus Christ, but we're also given His Spirit. that these things might continue. If you don't think these continue, I'd encourage you to go pick up the book of Ephesians, where you'll see many of these laws are still applicable for us today. The law of Christ still exists. Let him who steals, steal no longer, but labor with his hands that he might be able to give to those who are in need. Put off lying. Put off adultery, but instead put on purity. Contain your or control your own vessel, right? You can go through these and you can find them all over the place in the New Testament.
How do we love God and how do we love our neighbor? But it's rooted in who God is, what he has done in redemption. And for us Christians today, we are called to live lives of holiness, as we abide in Jesus Christ, as we find our life in Him, we repent of sins, and we find fruitfulness by the power of the Holy Spirit. Let's pray. Father, we pray that we would indeed abide in Jesus Christ, that we would not go to legalism, trying to think that if somehow we kept all these commandments perfectly that we would be saved. The Lord, knowing that each and every one of us will fail each and every one of these commandments.
But that you have given us a king, a redeemer, and that he is the one who has taken the curse of the law. But you. But you have given us your spirit. To teach us what is right. Father, please help us to walk in your ways. to live our lives motivated by your grace and your loyal love. In Jesus's name, Amen. May the Lord bless you. May you walk in the joy and peace of Jesus Christ and I'll see you next time. Bye.
Thanks for listening to this week's message from God's Word for You, a ministry of Sharon R.P. Church in rural southeast Iowa. We pray that the message would be used by God to transform your faith and your life this week. If you'd like to get more information about us, feel free to go to the website, SharonRPC.org. We'd love to invite you to worship with us. Our worship time is 10 a.m. every Sunday at 25204 160th Avenue. Morning Sun, Iowa, 52640. May God richly bless you this week.