Title: Basic Commands
Author: Christopher Harbin
Text: Exodus 20:1-17
I am routinely finding people who get so focused on an individual tree, they can't see the forest. They get hung up one one particular verse they may or may not really understand and cannot see it in the context of the rest of Scripture. Jesus summarized all of God's commandments as loving God and loving one another as ourselves. If that is appropriate, we should see those two commandments at work in the Ten Commandments. So, what does loving God look like? What does loving our neighbors look like?
We talk of today's passage as "The Ten Commandments." It's what I have heard all of my life, with very few exceptions, going back prior to Charlton Heston's movie. If we go by Jewish counting, I just read 17 commandments. That is because every imperative verb counts as a commandment. On the other hand, the underlying tradition of the text is likely to have been ten actual commands. Those which gave the Hebrew people more trouble were seemingly expanded in their retelling before the text was set down as we have it today. The original may have been more like this:
Never have other gods. Never make an idol. Never take emptily the name of Yahweh. Remember the sabbath day. Honor your father. Never murder. Never commit adultery. Never steal. Never witness falsely. Never covet.
That's pretty succint and direct. It is essentially ten imperatives, most with a negative adverb, no or never. That's more how we actually portray them in so many pictures of Moses holding up two stone tablets. These commands are mostly two words each. That fits on two stone tablets small enough for Moses to hold up. (An inch thick paper-sized tablet of stone would have the weight of at least a gallon of milk.) It is also a pretty simple way of reducing God's basic commands into a form that can be easily memorized. These are the ten words.
Jesus quotes some o ...
Author: Christopher Harbin
Text: Exodus 20:1-17
I am routinely finding people who get so focused on an individual tree, they can't see the forest. They get hung up one one particular verse they may or may not really understand and cannot see it in the context of the rest of Scripture. Jesus summarized all of God's commandments as loving God and loving one another as ourselves. If that is appropriate, we should see those two commandments at work in the Ten Commandments. So, what does loving God look like? What does loving our neighbors look like?
We talk of today's passage as "The Ten Commandments." It's what I have heard all of my life, with very few exceptions, going back prior to Charlton Heston's movie. If we go by Jewish counting, I just read 17 commandments. That is because every imperative verb counts as a commandment. On the other hand, the underlying tradition of the text is likely to have been ten actual commands. Those which gave the Hebrew people more trouble were seemingly expanded in their retelling before the text was set down as we have it today. The original may have been more like this:
Never have other gods. Never make an idol. Never take emptily the name of Yahweh. Remember the sabbath day. Honor your father. Never murder. Never commit adultery. Never steal. Never witness falsely. Never covet.
That's pretty succint and direct. It is essentially ten imperatives, most with a negative adverb, no or never. That's more how we actually portray them in so many pictures of Moses holding up two stone tablets. These commands are mostly two words each. That fits on two stone tablets small enough for Moses to hold up. (An inch thick paper-sized tablet of stone would have the weight of at least a gallon of milk.) It is also a pretty simple way of reducing God's basic commands into a form that can be easily memorized. These are the ten words.
Jesus quotes some o ...
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