Posting the Ten Commandments

I’m in the midst of a four part sermon series on the Ten Commandments. I wasn’t sure that I wanted to given that the Commandments are the center of a political fight going on in various parts of the country right now. But I decided to go ahead with it. I was unwilling to cede the Commandments to those who are using the Commandments as some kind of political prop.

Several states have passed legislation (mostly in the South) related to the public display of the Ten Commandments in public school classrooms and libraries.

If you are familiar with this issue, then you have probably already heard the arguments for and against such displays and I won’t waste time re-printing them here.

What I want to do instead is talk a bit about something I have heard no one talk about in relation to the whole debate – the context. Talking about context is not fun. It’s complex. It doesn’t nicely match up with our current situation or culture. And when we completely ignore the context of the Ten Commandments, we are openly declaring that we don’t understand what they are about, or worse, we don’t care because they serve some kind of means to an end. When we do that, whatever specialness they may have had, is lost. They just become another list, another document, another thing that is used. We actually devalue them when we use them without understanding the context in which they came about and what they are really about.

The Ten Commandments are listed in two locations in Scripture – Exodus 20 and later in Deuteronomy 5. They aren’t actually numbered and that has created disagreement between Jewish and various Christian sects as to the numbering of the commandments. In fact, there are three variations of what the commandment list should be.

If we stick strictly to the list in Exodus 20, we need to start by looking at Exodus 19. I did a whole sermon this and why the context is important. The key point is this – these commandments didn’t come out of thin air. They came about in a context. And the context is in the story. The people of Israel were set free from enslavement in Egypt. God set them free. God claimed them. Grace was extended before any law was set down. Grace before law. That’s what’s often missing in the debate about the public display of the Ten Commandments. In our modern fight over the commandments, we hear arguments about law and order. But we don’t hear anything about grace. Without grace, the commandments are just rules that any empire could have come up with. Without grace as the lens, these are just impersonal rules.

Two other points about the story context that are essential and are essentially missed in the current debate. It is often agreed upon that the commandments can be divided into two parts. The first part has to do with our relationship with God and the second has to do with our relationship with our neighbor/others. There’s not really a debate about that. But what’s often missing is the context of these two groupings.

The first set of commandments has to do with our relationship with God. Remember the context. God frees Israel from enslavement in Egypt. The Exodus story is a story of judgement against the Egyptian gods. Each plague that comes about is judgement against a different Egyptian god. Exodus 19 reminds Israel that it is God who brought them out on eagles wings and has claimed them. Exodus 20:2 states, “I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery;…” From there, God speaks the commandments. The foundation is important.

The first group of commandments confronts the theological foundation of the Egyptian society and pantheon. Remember, according to Scripture, the Israelites were in slavery for several hundred years. Enslavement was all they knew. There were no other options presented. And the empire’s pantheon was the norm. God’s action and the Ten Commandments shatter this long established norm to set up a new norm.

You can see it in each of the first few commandments and how they build on the ones before them and on the foundation for why the commandments came into existence. In Egypt, there were multiple gods. They all had carvings. They were worshipped. There was no days off. The only value a person had was in what they produced for the empire and their gods. They were disposable, not loved. They were owned. They could be disposed of. The first group of commandments counter all of that.

The second group of commandments is about the relationship between people. These commandments conflict with the Egyptian legal system that enslaved the Israelites. The commandments are a way to ensure that the Israelites won’t set up a similar system. Loyalty will be to families, not the empire. People have value, so no murder. You don’t get to do sexually abuse and use slaves. You don’t get to steal people’s labor. People will have standing in courts in legal matters. And people’s stuff is not your stuff.

The Ten Commandments aren’t about just laying some rules down to be followed. They are about breaking people away from an abusive governmental system that dehumanized and used people and their resources and property and intellectual property and more. They are about seeing the value of people, rather than trying to force some kind of compliance to a religious belief. They are about loving one’s neighbor so much that you are willing to not harm them by forcing them to do something, or take something from them.

I don’t hear any arguments about the public display of the Ten Commandments that includes the context of the commandments and the deeper meaning of what they are designed to do. Maybe that’s because including the context would show the hypocrisy of the whole desire to display them. The Ten Commandments aren’t weapons in an ongoing, exhaustive culture war. The context alone is something to learn from – not by forcing others to follow them, but rather, to hold up as a mirror in our own lives and see how we are going to continually fall short on them because we are human. And yet the context reminds us that they aren’t the end of the story. God loves us. God has claimed. There’s more to the story. There always is. Grace comes before law. That’s the end of the story.