Exodus 20:1-21

02/01/12 Exodus 20:1-21 GUMC Youth

Tonight, we continue on in our series, "What in the World has God Been Up To?" by looking at God giving his law to his people on Mount Sinai. I'm sure that most of you have heard the Ten Commandments before. Often, throughout history, Christians have tended to separate the commandments into two "tables" (that is, tablets), based on the kind of relationships that they have to do with. Most traditionally, you have the "first table" which includes the first four commandments: No other Gods, no idols, don't take the Lord's name in vain, and honor the Sabbath. These commandments focus first and foremost on our relationship with God. The "second table" includes the other six commandments: Honor your parents, don't murder, don't commit adultery, don't steal, don't lie, and don't covet your neighbor's stuff. These commandments are primarily focused on our relationships with other people.

Now, I want to point out something that you may or may not have noticed in the last few years. Every once in a while, you hear people arguing that America was founded on the Ten Commandments, or there will be some big story in the news about whether or not the Ten Commandments should be displayed in some public building. What are people really talking about when they say things like this? Are they really talking about all the Ten Commandments? What I find is that most people, when they want to emphasize the Ten Commandments, are really just looking at a few of them. We want to emphasize that it isn't acceptable to kill one another, to just break the marriage promises that we make without consequence, to take what doesn't belong to us, or to lie, especially in court. Those are all great and important values, and they are all found within the Ten Commandments, but can we really say that by affirming those values, we are affirming the Ten Commandments? It seems to me that we are only affirming four of them. We aren't all that interested, it seems, in ensuring that there are no other gods before God; in fact, one of the things you have to live with if you want religious freedom is that other people might not follow your God. By the same token, how often do you hear people arguing that a shared Sabbath is crucial to American success? How about looking at how people treat their parents, however old they may be, as a major part of whether they are "good" people? Almost never.

The reason why I bring this up is that most people I have heard who talk a lot about affirming the Ten Commandments are really only supporting what we could call the Four Commandments, and they aren't even at the top of the list. The worship of God is, if we can make any claim that the most important things are listed first, which I think we can, far more important than the things we usually hear about. To talk about the Ten Commandments as if what they have to say about our relationships with other people is what really matters, or even if it is the only thing we care about is to miss the whole point. The Ten Commandments have much more to do with our relation to God than they do with our relation to one another.

I understand that not everyone likes rules. What I want to ask you is, "What function do rules or commandments have?" Are there good functions or are there only bad ones? All of us, not least you who are still in school, can give examples of rules that we don't like. We don't like rules that tell us when we need to go to bed, when we need to get up in the morning, that tell us how to dress, what we can and cannot say, what movies we can watch, and any number of other things. Sometimes, we want to break rules, not because we actually want to do what we aren't supposed to do, but that the very declaration, "This is bad," makes us want to do it, even if we never wanted to do it before. There was a famous poet, Carl Sandberg, who wrote, "Why did the children put beans in their ears when the one thing we told them they must not do is put beans in their ears? Why did the children pour molasses on the cat when the one thing we told them they must not do is pour molasses on the cat?"

There have been people who have tried to spell out what kinds of uses the law can have. Martin Luther, for example, had two uses for the law. The first was to convict us of sin. So long as we never look at something like the Ten Commandments, we might be able to convince ourselves that we have never really done anything wrong or, if we have, we can convince ourselves that it really wasn't that bad. After all, few of us have committed murder or adultery. But have you ever coveted something that someone else had? Did you ever find yourself wanting what you didn't and couldn't have? Even if we never broke any other commandment, we still find ourselves, as the "good" people, in violation of the laws God gave to his people. So long as we look at those four commandments that our society likes to look at, we can talk about ourselves as people who don't break the laws of God. The moment we look at the rest, we realize that there are many times when we allow other things, even if we don't call them "gods," get in the way of our relationship with God. Sometimes its school, sometimes its relationships, sometimes its sports or other activities. The point is that if we actually had to answer for everything we've ever done we would find that we break the Ten Commandments all the time. Psalm 130 says, "If you, O Lord, should mark iniquities, Lord, who could stand?"

The second use of the law, according to Luther, is that law can be used to hold people back from acting on their sinful ideas. For example, you might be incredibly mad at someone; you might feel that your life would be so much easier if they simply weren't around. However, even if you would get to the point where you would be willing to kill them, the fact that you would be severely punished for doing so might stop you from following through. In a similar way, though a little less serious, you might want to go as fast as you possibly can down the highway in order to take as little time as possible to get where you are going and yet, because you can get a pretty serious fine, you might not actually do it.

Now, a little later on, John Calvin comes along and adds a third use of the law. He points out that, as true as it is that the law can be a mirror, showing us the sin that we commit every day, and as true as it is that the law can be a kind of curb, that keeps us, at least sometimes, from doing wrong, it is also a guide, a resource we can use to help us live as we are supposed to as Christians. Calvin really emphasized this third use of the law. If Luther focused on how the law is used by those who are not yet Christians, Calvin wanted to emphasize how the law functions for those who are already Christians. For those of you who are thinking to yourselves, "This isn't a Lutheran or a Presbyterian Church, why do we care what Luther and Calvin had to say" (which may be none of you I know), John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, absolutely agreed with Calvin that we should use the law as a guide for Christian behavior. In fact, he emphasized the importance of a transformed life more than just about anyone else in the history of the church.

I want to bring up something that I read for a class in high school. It was a book that was written as a novel but was a vehicle to talk about philosophy and life. This particular author criticized the formulation of the Ten Commandments, not so much because he felt they didn't form a good way to live, but because many of the commandments are of the form "Thou shalt not." He argued that putting rules in a negative form (that is, putting restrictions on what you can do) is just setting people up for failure. Like we talked about earlier, telling someone, "You can't do this" might just make them want to do it more. This author suggested that instead of saying, "You shall not commit murder," God should have said, "You shall value life and work to preserve it."

As much as I agree with the idea that telling someone they can't do something might make them want to do it (even God recognizes this, as we read in Romans 7), I think we need to realize that God was not being dumb when he put the commandments in the form of "Thou shalt not." If you say, "You shall not commit murder," you've got a line in the sand, you have a point where you can say, "Once you cross this line, you have gone too far, but until you do, don't lose too much sleep over it." For example, and actually this example come from the Bible, that you and I are out chopping wood. You swing the axe up to strike again and, all of a sudden, the axehead flies off and hits me in the head, killing me. Is it a tragedy? Absolutely, will it cause problems of various kinds in the community, of course, but did you sin? Not really. You might feel horrible, you might wonder what you might have done differently that could have prevented it, but you didn't hate me ahead of time, you didn't plot at home how you could kill me. It is deeply unfortunate, but not truly sinful.

On the other hand, if you say, "You shall value life and work to preserve it," we never know quite how to interpret it. How can we tell the difference between someone who does not value life as much as we would like them to and someone who is working against life? How do we determine what life is supposed to be and what it looks like to value it? Maybe, for most of us, this isn't a problem we come up in daily life, but it is something that people in hospitals, for example, have to deal with all the time. What if someone is in serious pain, battling hard against a disease against which they simply cannot win, especially if the medicine is a big part of what is making them so miserable? Is it treating life more valuable if we insist that they keep fighting until their final breath or is it treating it as more valuable if we allow them to spend their last days in relative comfort, perhaps even in their home?

I think the beauty in the negative form of the commandments is that it gives us some concrete boundaries, not altogether unlike the boundaries our parents have given us, especially when we were very young and simply didn't know what was good for us and what was bad for us. God tells us, "You need to know that there are certain limits within which human beings were designed to live and if you get too far outside of them, you are going to create lots of problems for yourselves. It is true that you might figure out many of these things for yourself, but there are some you wouldn't necessarily notice unless you were told and I want to save you the turmoil that comes from doing those things." To say "Thou shalt not," you set up guideposts to show you boundaries, inside of which you can do more or less whatever you want. To say, "You shall do this," gives us a general direction, but no guidance as to what to do in concrete situations.

My point, and what I want you to really get out of this tonight, is that, in spite of the fact that people today seem to say that God's law is all about holding us back and making sure we don't do anything wrong, the law is actually intended to be liberating, to make us free. It's true that there are some things that God tells us not to do, but the things we aren't supposed to do are things that aren't good for us anyway, so by saying, "I don't want to listen to God," what we are really saying is, "I want to make poor choices." The whole point is to free us up to love God and love our neighbors more.

Let me give you an example. Most people around, if they believe in God at all, only believe in one God. Polytheism, or the belief in multiple gods, has gone pretty seriously out of style in today's world. But it wasn't always the case. In fact, until Judaism came along, basically everyone was polytheistic. What this meant, especially in the ancient Greek world, was that most people believed that there were gods or spirits in every tree and under every rock. If you wanted to drink from a river, you were supposed to ask permission of the river god; if you wanted to chop down a tree for firewood, you were supposed to ask permission of the god who lived in the tree. You couldn't hardly walk down the street without asking for forgiveness for kicking a stone with your foot by mistake. The fact of the matter is that this is not an easy way to live. You were never sure if you had offended some random god by something you did, either on purpose or by mistake.

The point is that the laws that God gave the Israelites in the Ten Commandments, helped to free them from this kind of mentality. You don't have to worry about appeasing all the gods of the trees and rocks and rivers because there are no such gods. The only God there really is is the God of the universe, the God of the Israelites, the God who came among us as Jesus Christ. God wanted his people to live free from all the silly things that people can get caught up in, so he made sure to tell them the truth about the gods that everyone else got worked up about; they simply don't exist, or at the very least, they are so weak, that they can't even be called "gods."

Notice that the most liberating of the Ten Commandments are the first ones, where God tells us that he is the only God. He is the only real authority, he is the only one that we need to make absolutely sure we listen to. Every other authority is subject to him; and that is really freeing. The point is that God is not trying to micromanage your life; he is trying to free you for more joy, more celebration, more devotion, more love. Love is spontaneous; you can't force it, but you can do things that hinder it. That is why Jesus says that all of the law is summed up in these two commandments: Love the Lord your God with all your heart, mind, soul, and strength, and love your neighbor as yourself. If you kill your neighbor, or even hate them, you aren't loving him or her. If you are stealing from them, or even just being driven by jealousy, you aren't loving them. If you constantly talk back to your parents and do what you know you aren't supposed to do, you aren't loving them. If you say you worship God but then put all kinds of things in his place, you aren't loving him.

The law marks out boundaries, outside of which, love for God and neighbor cannot really happen. So long as you stay within those general boundaries, you are free to be who you were made to be, free to love as God moves you to love, free to have fun and live life to the fullest. The law wasn't given to ruin your life, it was given to free you from the problems that we often cause ourselves. The law was given in love. Let it free you to love others. Let us pray.

AMEN