Today we
end our sermon series, “Holy Moses”, with one of the most famous passages in
the Bible. God gives Moses, and all of
us, the Ten Commandments.
It’s interesting to note how all this came about. We’re told earlier, in chapter nineteen, that God has descended to the top of Mount Sinai and has called Moses to come up. The rest of the people did not come up. They stayed behind, some distance from the mountain. We’re told that they saw thunder and lightning. They heard the sound of a trumpet and saw smoke.
And they were scared to death. They had no desire to go up on that mountain and talk to God. They were terrified of God. It says, “They stayed at a distance and said to Moses, ‘Speak to us yourself and we will listen. But do not have God speak to us or we will die.”
And Moses said, “God has come to test you, so that the fear of God will be with you to keep you from sinning.”
That phrase, “the fear of God”, comes up over and over again in the Old Testament. And as I think about it, I think it explains to me something that I’ve noticed about the Ten Commandments. And maybe you’ve noticed it, too.
Jesus said that the two greatest commandments are that we love the Lord our God with all our heart, all our soul and all our mind, and that we love our neighbors as ourselves. But you know what? Those don’t appear in the Ten Commandments. They’re not there. The closest we come is in the third commandment, the one about not making images, where we’re told that God will show love to those who love God and keep God’s commandments. But even there, the commandment is not to love. The commandment is to not make images. The love talked about there is not love as an emotion or as a feeling. The love talked about there is simply obedience.
Now don’t get me wrong. This is not in any way a criticism of the Ten Commandments. I have absolutely no standing whatsoever to tell God that there’s anything in any way wrong with the Ten Commandments. The Ten Commandments are perfectly fine just the way they are.
But the question is, why are they that way? Why did God not include love, either love of God or love of others, in the Ten Commandments when Jesus said those are the two most important commandments of all? Did God change?
Well, no. We’re told in the letter to the Hebrews that God is the same yesterday, today, and forever, and I’m not challenging that a bit. God has not changed. But what has changed is the people God was talking to.
Today, most Christians are used to the idea of God loving us. Not only that, but we’re used to the idea of God loving us as individuals. We’re used to the idea that God knows each of us by name and knows everything about us. We’re used to the idea that God loves us and that we should feel love toward God.
But it was not always that way. Now, we don’t know just when the events described in Exodus took place, but it was probably more than a thousand years before the birth of Christ. And people had a different way of understanding God back then. Not just the Jewish people, but all people. Lots of societies had more than one god. Lots of societies worshipped gods who were totally arbitrary. Lots of societies worshipped gods who might kill you or might bless you, and you had no idea which it might be from one day to the next.
The idea of a loving God, a God who loved people as individuals, was a completely foreign concept at this time. I mean, God might possibly love someone like Moses, someone who was great and was constantly in the presence of God. But God certainly would not love average, ordinary, individual people. That idea just did not make sense to them. And the idea that average, ordinary, individual people should love God in an emotional way was a completely foreign concept to them as well.
In fact, it was seen almost as an insult to God to suggest that God might love us as individuals or that we should feel an emotional love for God. God was too far beyond us to want to know us as individuals. God was too far above us to want or need our love. God was powerful beyond our ability to understand. God was too great and too awesome to take any notice of us as individuals at all.
We were not supposed to love God and it was silly to think that God would want to get to know us. We just needed to obey God. We just needed to do what God wanted us to do. And then, maybe, hopefully, God would show favor to us rather than killing us or allowing us to be killed. That was the best they could hope for: that God would show favor to them because of their obedience.
And what was the best way to get that obedience? Fear. “The fear of God will be with you to keep you from sinning.” If you don’t obey God, God’s gonna get you. So you better toe the mark. You better walk the line. You better follow God’s commandments, not because you love God so much, but because you want God to be pleased with you and show you favor. And especially because you do not want God to get mad at you and strike you down.
That concept does not work for us today, but it worked for people back then. And that’s one of the reasons the Ten Commandments are the way they are. If Moses had come down from the mountain and told people that God loved them as individuals and that they should feel emotional love for God, they would’ve thought there was something wrong with Moses. They’d have thought he’d been up in the mountains too long and lost his mind. The idea that the great and powerful and awesome and righteous and holy and perfect God would love us as individuals, and would care whether we loved him, just did not make sense to them. People at that time could understand a fearsome, powerful God. They could not understand a loving God.
And sometimes we cannot understand a loving God, either. We say we do, and in some sense we do. But sometimes we wonder. Don’t you? Especially when we mess up. I mean, I’m not just talking about the little mistakes we all make every single day. But sometimes, life has a way of showing us just how flawed and weak and imperfect and sinful we are. And when that happens, when we have one of those moments when we have to come face to face with just exactly who we are and just exactly who God is, and when we see the tremendous difference between the two, it’s really easy for us to think “How can God, a God who is greater and so far beyond anything I could ever be, how can that God love me? In fact, why should that God care about me at all?”
It would not have made sense to the people of Israel in Moses’ time. That’s one of the reasons the Ten Commandments, as great as they are, don’t talk about love. And in fact, it did not make a lot of sense to the people of Israel in Jesus’ time, either. We’ve talked before about how the Pharisees had all these rules for people to follow. If you followed the rules, you got on God’s good side and God blessed you. It did not matter whether you felt any love for God. It did not matter what your attitude was at all. It did not matter what you thought about the rules. It just mattered that you followed them.
That’s one of the reasons Jesus came to earth--to show God’s love to us. Jesus told us about God’s love lots of times. And a few people understood it from what Jesus said, but most people did not. Jesus showed God’s love through his healing lots of times, too. And a few people understood it from that, but most people did not. But then, Jesus was arrested. And he was tortured. And he went to the cross. And he was killed. And through all of that, he kept showing people God’s love. He even prayed on the cross that God would forgive the people who were killing him.
And then, people got it. People finally understood that God did love them as individuals. And people finally felt love, emotional love, for God. “For God so loved the world that he gave his only son, so that whoever believes in him shall not die, but shall have eternal life.” People heard Jesus say that, but when they saw him die on the cross, they actually understood it.
Not everyone, of course. Not everyone then, and not everyone now. And that’s where we come into the picture. We need to understand how much God loves us. And we need to do the work of Jesus. We cannot do it as well as Jesus, of course. But we need to do it as well as we can. We need to show God’s love to people every time we can, as well as we possibly can.
The Ten
Commandments are awesome. We cannot go
wrong by following them. But to truly
call ourselves Christians, we have to also follow Jesus’ two commandments. We need to love the Lord our God with all our
heart and all our soul and all our mind, and we need to love our neighbors as
ourselves. God does not want us to live our
lives in fear. God wants us to live our
lives in love.
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