There is an embarrassing social faux pas I make when I meet new people. In an effort to be outgoing and say something nice, I meet someone, shake their hand, smile and say, “Hi! Great to meet you.” Unfortunately, there have been too far too many times when my greeting is not met with, “Great to meet you too.” Instead, I hear the words, “Actually, we’ve already met - about three times before.” Then there’s that awkward moment when I pretend that of course I knew that I meant that it’s great to meet you this particular day. It rarely works. The person is offended anyway. What I thought was a new aquaintence was actually someone who was already a part of my life.
Likewise, when God gave the Hebrew people the Ten Commandments, it was not a first-time meeting. The Hebrews were meeting the God whom they had not only met before, but this God had been already been working in their collective story to liberate them and give them a bright new future. This is evident in the the very first words of the Ten Commandments, “I am the LORD your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery.”
In Jewish tradition, this is considered the first “commandment”. Actually it doesn’t sound much like a command. That’s because the Hebrew word which we translate as “commandment” literally means “word”. So Judaism speaks of the ten words or ten utterances of God. Although different traditions number the Ten Commandments differently,in the coming weeks we will be following the Jewish schema for numbering them. So we start with the commandment that doesn’t seem like a commandment, yet is the lens through which we see all of them, “I am the LORD your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery.”
If you were God and you wanted to tell human beings how to live their lives, how would you do it? Would you just give them rules about religion? Would you tell people just to be nice to each other? Would you ask for their input? What would be the first thing you tell them?The first thing God tells people is not a law, but a proclamation of who God is and has been for them.
If you have ever needed a standard legal document such as a will or a lease, you or your lawyer probably began with a boilerplate template. There are standard conventions we follow for legal documents and agreements in our day. The same was true in the ancient world. When two nations carved out a treaty between them, it was customary to begin the tablet with a preamble that identified who was making the agreement, followed by a review of the history of the two parties. This was followed by the stipulations of the agreement and other elements such as punishments for breaking those stipulations, where the tablets should be deposited, instructions for reading them regularly, lists of blessings and curses and finally, witnesses to the agreement.
Many biblical scholars, such as the late Nahum Sarna, pointed out that the beginning of the Ten Commandments follows this format of a treaty. In this first commandment we read a preamble in which God identifies himself and his history with the Hebrew people. The other elements are paralleled in later portions of the Jewish Law or Torah.
When we think of the Ten Commandments, we sometimes imagine them as a set of divine orders from a capricious and condemning God. As if God just wanted to spoil all our fun and on an arbitrary power trip told us, “Follow these rules - or else!” As a text, the Ten Commandments, most resembles not the barked orders of a military general, but a treaty, a mutual agreement. The Hebrew word for that is b’rit and you may be more familiar with that term than you think if you have ever gone to the b’ris of a young Jewish boy. In English, we translate that word as “covenant”. The Ten Commandments are not just a list of rules. They are a covenant.
So what? The Ten Commandments are a covenant. Isn’t that just an arcane piece of historical trivia? No, it’s more than that. Actually it’s revolutionary. Before Israel, no people had ever described their religion using the concept of a treaty between a single God and a whole nation of people. In fact, no one spoke of there being only one God before. This God was not merely an explanation for natural phenomena such as weather or natural disasters. This was a God who worked in the lives of people, who loved and cared for them. Not only that, this God heard their cries in slavery and took up their cause of justice and liberation. It is out of that framework from which this God spoke these ten utterances.
Many of these commandments were nothing new to people at the time. For thousands of years, human beings already realized a functioning society needed laws such as don’t steal or don’t murder. People figured out that if you coveted your neighbors wife, and your neighbor came home and uncoveted the two of you together, it would lead to big trouble (my 7th grade history teacher told us that joke).
We are all familiar with this innate sense of justice, of right and wrong. In his book Simply Christian, N T Wright describes it as an echo of a voice we once heard. Our inborn sense of morality reflects our innate knowledge of God. He says we can see it on any playground when a child inuitively knows and cries when something is “not fair.”
So it should come as no surprise that many ancient legal codes, such as the Code of Hammurabi, contained similar laws. The difference is that in those texts, the source of the laws is not divine, but human. It is the teachings of a wise person.
In contrast, the Ten Commandments begin with the startling claim that they are not just good ideas or a pragmatic necessity, they are nothing less than the revealed will of God for human relationships. They are a picture of what the Creator of the universe designed our lives together to be. As such, they are not just a means to create a just society, they are a description of that just society. They are simultaneously the world that God is creating and the means to get there.
In the Ancient Near East, many cultures had civic laws and separate from that was their religion. Rarely were the two considered as interconnected. In contrast, the Ten Commandments speak of our relationship to God as well as with our neighbor. To be sure there are everyday ethical injunctions such as not to lie or steal, but there are also unique religious instructions like keeping the Sabbath. The Ten Commandments are a holistic approach to life. The line between the sacred and secular was blurred for the children of Israel, if it existed at all.
The reason that line was blurred was because as God says in this commandment, he had been part of their story. This covenant, these laws and the story of the people were inseparable. This is not like the distant apathetic gods of the ancient world or the immovable God of much Christian theology. This was a God who was already passionately involved and in relationship to his people.
That was not true only for ancient Hebrews, it is true for you and me today. As Christ’s church, we are the inheritors of this covenant. We are called to live in a particular way. Some Christians mistakenly believe that since Jesus forgave their sins, the Ten Commandments are no longer important. Nothing could be further from the truth. Jesus of Nazareth lived and died as a Jewish man. He never renounced his religion. In fact, he intensified it. As we’ll see in the coming weeks, Jesus took each of these commandments and called his followers to follow them more deeply and more authentically. He even did it with this one. The story of liberation that began with the God who brought the Israelites out of slavery in Egypt, continued in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus and will ultimately culminate in the fulfilled Kingdom of God.
In the meantime, that same God, the one and only God, has already worked and continues to work in your story and in mine. Through these rules for living, that God continues to liberate us and free us from the things that enslave us. It may not happen in a theophany of smoke and fire on a mountain, but can you hear that same God call to you today?
What does God say to you? I am the Lord you God, who brought you through your divorce? Who delivered you from cancer? Who journeyed with you through that dark time of doubt? Who liberated you out of addiction? Who freed you from depression?
This is the LORD your God. The one who has always been there, even if you didn’t know it. The universe is not a cold and lonely place. This God has a claim on your life and on mine. In these commandments, we will discover God’s dream for how we are to live as God’s people.
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