The Ten Commandments

There are 613 laws in the Torah, but ranking at the top are the Ten Commandments, written on tablets of stone when Moses went up on Mt. Sinai to meet God. Thirteen sentences in Hebrew make up the Ten Commandments. Various Jewish and Christian groups arrange these in various ways to get the ten, and the commandments differ slightly in their versions in Exodus 20 and Deuteronomy 5. We won’t go into why, how or who. We’ll just look at content.

From Exodus 20 (in the most common delineation among Jewish sources):

•          I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage.

•          You shall have no other gods before Me. 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.

•          You shall not take the name of the LORD your God in vain, for the LORD will not hold him guiltless who takes His name in vain.

•          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 son, 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.

•          Honor your father and your mother, that your days may be long upon the land which the LORD your God is giving you.

•          You shall not murder.

•          You shall not commit adultery.

•          You shall not steal.

•          You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor.

•          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.

First Commandment

Note that commandment number one isn’t a commandment, but an assertion of authority and power, which is why those that follow it are commandments to be obeyed and acted upon, rather than suggestions to be entertained. Some sources, both Jewish and Christian, combine the second with the first into a single first commandment, which is then actually a commandment with a preface, but let’s consider just the first commandment as enumerated above: “I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage.”

Jews believe that this declaration implicitly requires every Jew to believe that God exists, and that this has practical consequences in how we conduct ourselves in everyday life, as well as in the world to come. Jews believe that lack of belief in the existence of God excludes a Jew from the world to come, and makes understanding and fulfilling the Law impossible.

Second Commandment

God not only declares that He is LORD and God, He also makes it clear that nothing else is:

You shall have no other gods before Me. 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.

This second commandment is of enormous importance in understanding the centerpiece of both the Old and New Testament teachings, righteousness and Law. Fundamentally, it calls for our full attention and devotion to the one and only God, and explicitly tells us not to give honor or attention to anything else.

The purpose of the commandments is not just in the doing (i.e., actions—recall what James said), but in the attitude of the heart—the faith, devotion and spirit with which the commandment is fulfilled. Which, of course, sounds just like Paul.

The Talmud says the fulfillment of the Second Commandment is so foundational that it is the equivalent of fulfilling the whole Torah. (Jesus makes a similar kind of foundational statement when He says all the Law and the Prophets rest on two commands: to love God, and to love one’s neighbor as oneself.) This form of expression (“all things depend on one thing”) is an ancient way of highlighting something’s importance—the typographical equivalent of boldface or yellow highlighting.  

Love God

Following the giving of the Ten Commandments, there is this exhortation:

Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one! You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your strength. And these words which I command you today shall be in your heart. You shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, when you walk by the way, when you lie down, and when you rise up. You shall bind them as a sign on your hand, and they shall be as frontlets between your eyes. You shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates. (Deuteronomy 6:4-9 and 11:13-21 and Numbers 15:37-41)

This passage is the first part of what in Judaism is called the Shema (“sheh-mah”), from the Hebrew imperative “Hear!” Jesus quotes the first two sentences of this and says it is the most important commandment.  Isaacs observes that “the love for God is one of the first instances in human history that such a commandment was demanded in any religion.”  He makes three other key observations:

            •          “The best expression of love for God occurs when people conduct themselves in such a manner as to make God beloved by others.”

            •          “Hosea, Jeremiah, and Isaiah saw God and the Israelites in a love relationship, where God metaphorically was portrayed as the groom and the people of Israel as God’s bride.”

            •          “Love of God … can be done everywhere and anywhere, whenever the opportunity for performing commandments exists.”

Remember this quote from Ramchal, which reinforces this point: “Whoever sets God always before him and is exclusively concerned with doing God’s pleasure and observing God’s commandments will be called God’s lover. The love of God is, therefore, not a separate commandment but an underlying principle of all of God’s commandments”.

NEW TESTAMENT VERSUS OLD TESTAMENT

The New Testament is not a replacement for the Old. If anything it is more rightly seen as Midrash, commentary, using the passages of the Old Testament to show how the Law is fulfilled in the Messiah, Jesus, and how God reaches out to the Gentiles through Him. As Shulam and Le Cornu put it:

The New Testament is indissolubly bound to what Christianity has traditionally erred in calling the “Old Testament.” The New Testament as a written text is both a continuation of and a commentary on or explication of the Tanakh, the Hebrew Bible. It cannot be understood without reference to the Tanakh, which provides it with its primary interpretive context. … The New Testament is a Jewish text.

Since the early centuries after the life of Jesus, much of Christian theology has been focused on showing how different it is from Judaism. But the methods used to construct this argument are largely within the confines of Greek philosophical structure, not Jewish thought. Thus, distinctions claimed of “Christianity” from Jewish thought are illusory, manufactured, the product of Greek-style thinking by Gentiles, rather than true distinctions discovered in the text of the New Testament.

Paul’s (and other) claims about Law and Grace, about Covenant and Messiah, were not innovations and did not depart from existing streams of Jewish thought, debate and belief. The distinction wasn’t what was believed about the coming Messiah—many already believed such things—the distinction was the proclamation that the Messiah had arrived, and

His name was Jesus.

In Christ,

Pastor George