Why would we turn to the Old Testament? Why would we turn to the Ten Commandments? The theme verse for this series of my preaching this year is not found in the Ten Commandments. It is not found in the Old Testament, but is found in the New Testament in the book of Romans 15:4: “For whatever was written in former days was written for our instruction, that through the encouragement of the Scriptures we might have hope.” These things written in former days were written for our (that is, the Church's) instruction, that through the encouragement of the Scriptures we might have hope.

(Transcription of audio file from 02:39 to 06:12 omitted.)

Reading of Exodus 20:1-21. 

To live in this day is to live in an antinomian age. We live in an age of minimum law and maximum flexibility. This mountain and what took place here in the life of Israel, as they heard the Lord God deliver his own commands and heard Moses teach them concerning these commands, seems far off. This mountain known as Sinai (also as Horeb) seems so distant to us it is almost eclipsed in the clouds of the past, even as the mountain itself was on this day eclipsed in smoke and in fire and thunder. The God whom most persons acknowledge (insofar as they acknowledge any God) is not in the main a divine legislator. He is not a law-giver. Not someone they fear lest they break his command. The God who spoke, that Israel heard, the God who delivered these Ten Commandments is now dismissed by the literati, by the enlightened ones, by the intellectual elite as a “sky god” of ancient (and now overcome) superstition.

We live in an age that is truly antinomian at its core. It is an age that resists the very notion of a binding authority. Who, after all, can tell us what we must and must not do? Who can tell us how we are to live? Who can tell us whom we are to serve? And then you turn on the television or look at the newspaper or listen to the Supreme Court, and you hear controversies over the Ten Commandments—should they or should they not be posted in public places? The US Supreme Court seems itself to be double-minded on the issue, ruling recently that the posting of the Ten Commandments in Kentucky was illicit whereas in Texas it was lawful. Same words, different placement, different context, different ruling. No obvious logic. I will defend the constitutionality of posting the Ten Commandments in the public place. But I find it rather perplexing that many of those who seem most ardently committed to the posting of the Ten Commandments can neither recite them nor faithfully say that they have taught them to their own children.

So the Ten Commandments in our day seem to serve something of a symbolic role. We know how many there are, we are just not sure what they are. The amazing thing is that the God Who Is has spoken. What people, what nation has heard the voice of the Lord speaking from the fire and yet survived? This nation has! This nation Israel, hearing the word of the Lord, receiving these Ten Words.

How are we as Christians to understand the Ten Commandments? What is our relationship to this text? What binding authority do these words have upon us? Is there continuity or discontinuity? Are we to see the old covenant and the new covenant in Christ primarily in contrast, or are we to see completion and fulfillment and basic continuity? How are we to understand the operation of the Mosaic covenant over against the covenant of Christ? Is this thus binding upon us, or is it non-binding? Do we look back at this as historical context, or is there still binding address? We know what these words meant for Israel, but what do they mean for the church?

Jonathan Edwards acknowledged the difficulty. He said this: “There is perhaps no part of divinity attended with so much intricacy and wherein orthodox divines do so much differ as stating the precise agreement and difference between the two dispensations of Moses and Christ.” I intend today to resolve this issue which Dr. Edwards found so perplexing…not! I want to acknowledge this perplexity, but I want to suggest that the issue is actually less difficult than may first appear.

Those who would most ardently stress continuity have to recognize a difference between Israel under the law and the Church under the covenant of grace. Those who would most ardently argue for discontinuity have to acknowledge that the law of Christ recapitulates and fulfills and extends the law of Moses (in a different way, in a different context, with a different sense of binding address; but, for instance, in the New Testament, nine of the Ten Commandments are repeated). There is no way fully to resolve this issue. It is very important that we understand the distinction between law and grace. But in understanding this distinction, we do not celebrate a lawless grace any more than looking to the Old Testament we should see a graceless law! There is grace in the law. Israel, in hearing the word of the Lord, in receiving these words, received grace. And if we do not understand that, we slander both the Old Testament and the God who spoke to Israel at Horeb.

Grace in The Law⤒🔗

Just imagine, for a moment, the grace that is in the law. 

Grace in God’s Requirements←↰⤒🔗

In the first place, the grace that is in the law is in the revelation that what God requires of his people is this, and not that. In the first place, it is this and not confusion. All around Israel, as it would enter Canaan in particular, it would be surrounded by pagan peoples whose confusion over what God would demand was apparent in the abhorrence of their sacrifices and of their worship. The confusion was rampant. Is God primarily a God of power who demands a worship that would exercise that kind of power? Is he like Baal? Is he a male deity of fertility and of power, whose voice is understood to speak in the thunder, and who demands the kind of worship that you see in 1 Kings 18 with the prophets of Baal slicing their bodies so that the blood ran down into the dirt? Is the one true and living God the one who demands that human blood shall appease him, as those who would worship him would slice their bodies in order to gain his attention?

Around Israel in Canaan were the followers of the Asherah, the Ashteroth—female fertility deities (primarily one deity in different forms of different idols). The worship was of sexual and orgiastic confusion, a perversity that explains why Israel was warned about what was happening under the evergreen trees, the sacred groves of sacred prostitution to these idols. Is that what Israel was to do?

I guess perhaps the most frightening confusion around Israel was the worship of the god Molech, a god who was defined in terms of a holiness that required human innocence to be sacrificed for human guilt. And thus infants, children up to about the age of two, were sacrificed. Burned. Just a matter of years ago, when the runway at the Damascus airport was being extended, a pit of burned infant bones was found dating back to the time of the Canaanites. Little skeletons of babies from newborn to about age two, whose bodies were broken and whose bodies were burned to Molech.

Israel receives such grace at Sinai. Grace of the loving and holy God who said, “This is what I require of my people. This is who I am, and this is what my people will look like. Do not slice your bodies. Do not pervert your souls. Do not sacrifice your children. Pay heed to these Ten Words.” There is grace in the law because of the restraining power of the law. We should live every day with thankfulness that God has given this law—even in the cosmos itself and also in his spoken word—in order that this restraining law would have an effect that is, even now, social in our midst, lest lawlessness be set lose. This law even, that the Scripture says, is written on the human heart. We should be thankful, we must be thankful for the grace that is in this law.

Grace in the Pattern of Expectation and Fulfilment←↰⤒🔗

The church also has to look at the law as grace in a very different sense, and that is in a pattern of expectation and fulfillment. The law kills us. Indites us. As the apostle Paul says in Romans 7, “I would not have known that I was coveting if the law had not said, ‘Thou shalt not covet.' But now I know, and knowing this I must be saved. And who can do this but Jesus Christ?” The law hurts, but the law points to Christ. There is grace in the law, even in the keeping of it. As the Lord God told his people in Deuteronomy 30, “This is not far off from you; it is brought near.” And as is written into the warp and the woof of the Old Testament, keeping this law leads to prosperity, to longevity and to happiness.

Two Covenants←⤒🔗

But there are two different covenants. There are actually many covenants, several covenants. But in particular, looking at this law and looking at the gospel we understand two different covenants but one redeeming God, who is constant. We are told the law was made necessary by sin. There need be no Ten Commandments in Eden. It was perfectly written on the heart, perfectly understood, and before the Fall there was no need for the restraining nor the teaching power of the law. But after the Fall we so desperately need legislation. We need it written; we need to know it.

There was law before the Lord gave these Ten Words. Reading the Old Testament, you read about those like Abraham and like Enoch who pleased God. They did not please God because of their own interior subjectivity that they thought themselves to be pleasing unto God; they pleased God because their lives comported with that which God commanded. They were not perfect, but they were shaped by a law they understood. As Paul writes in Romans 1, it is a law to which we are all accountable.

But at this mountain, through the prophet Moses, we confront this grace and revelation where the speaking God gives these Ten Words. And what drama there is—smoke mountain, lightning, cloud, noise! We cannot sever this text from its canonical context. We dare not take it out of its placement in covenantal history, and we dare not take it out of the narrative in which it is placed. These are not just ten abstract commandments. These are Ten Words of grace and law addressed to God's elect nation, Israel. We have to read the Ten Commandments remembering the smoke upon the mountain that shook. We have to remember even the fear of Israel in knowing that God had spoken to them at all, much less in the form of these words. This is a word addressed to Israel, the elect and chosen nation by a God who reveals himself in the most personal terms.

But then we contrast this with the new covenant, which is radically new. A new law, a new heart through the work of Christ, the law perfectly fulfilled in Christ and in his accomplished work. We are now no longer under the law, but that does not mean that we are no longer taught by the law. John in his prologue, John 1:17, says, “For the law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ.” And Christ too is a legislator. On the Sermon on the Mount, in that sermon Jesus makes very clear his own legislation. And you are familiar with the formula: “You have heard it said, but I say to you there is now fulfillment.” He does not lessen the law; he heightens the law. He takes it from mere exteriority into interiority. Murder, we now know, is rooted in anger. Adultery in lust. So we speak of the law of Christ—those who are under the new covenant, under the law which is given by Christ and to Christ's people.

The Purposes of The Law←⤒🔗

So how, though, are Christ's people to understand the Old Testament law? The reformers debated this in the famous form of a debate over whether there are two or three uses of the law. The first law: pedagogical. The law teaches us our sin. We come to know that we have sinned against a holy God, and we desperately need to know this. The pedagogical use of the law was accepted by both Luther and Calvin. There is also the civil use of the law, or the political use of the law, where we understand that even this law—the divine law—underlies and undergirds all political law. It is a law that is revealed in nature, although given our sinfulness is never perfectly perceived in nature. It is law that is written in the conscience, but as Paul says in Romans 2, our fallen conscience is an inadequate moral instrument. It is a universal law that undergirds all political or civil law. Those two uses are well understood.

It is the third use that became an issue of debate between Luther and Calvin (that is, in terms of their followers in particular) in their teaching of the didactic use of the law. Does the law now teach us? Does the law now teach Christians? Are we to look to the Old Testament in order to see a pattern for godliness which is to be replicated in us? And the answer has to be, in some form, yes. Calvin clearly affirmed this third use of the law; Luther denied it. But as any reading of Luther and Luther's works and Luther's sermons and even Luther's catechisms will indicate, he denied it but he still practiced it. In teaching children, he taught them the Ten Commandments; in preaching, he preached the Ten Commandments. Whether you want to refer to it as the didactic use of the law, we know that this law still speaks to us in a pattern that is to encourage us, even as Paul wrote in Romans 15.

In Christ, we who have been the recipients of this new covenant are able, even in respect to this law, to fulfill it in a way that Israel was not. It is not because of who we are; it is because of who Christ is. It is not because of our faithfulness; it is because of Christ’s faithfulness. So we read the Old Testament law, we read the covenant of Moses, we read the Ten Commandments as a word that was first of all to God's elect and chosen nation Israel, and specifically in the historical context here as they are preparing to enter the land of promise, but also only after forty years of wandering and a second recitation of the law. But it is also for our good. We are not under this law as Israel in its historical context was under this law. We are under the law of Christ. It is not that we have no law—the last thing we need is an antinomian Church in the midst of an antinomian age—but we are not merely reading the Old Testament as an antique piece of literature that is for our interest. It is for our good. 

God’s Authorship of The Law←⤒🔗

We look back to read these texts in order that the Holy Spirit would apply these words to our heart. And we hear the binding address of these words, even as we must continually go to the New Testament to discern how we are to apply these things in our own times and in our own lives. In verse one of Exodus 20 we read, “And God spoke all these words.” The divine authorship, the divine origin of the Ten Commandments is paramount. This is not Israel's legislation. The Ten Commandments are not the product of human creativity or a legislative assembly. There is no conference committee at Horeb, at Sinai. There is no filibuster, and there is no bill-signing ceremony in the Rose Garden. This is God speaking to his people.

There is no negotiation here. This is divine address. “And God spoke all these words, saying.” This is so odd to the modern and the post-modern mind—the fact that we would claim a divine sanction for law. The prevailing secular mindset says that law is simply a product of human experience codified in legislative form. It is just how we have learned to live with each other. There is no absolute or transcendent 'ought'; here merely is a phenomenological 'is'. But Israel knows something very different.

The fact that God has spoken these words also means that these are not just ten words, these are these Ten Words. Ted Koppel, speaking famously at the commencement ceremony at Duke University several years ago, reminded the students there that the Ten Commandments are not God's ten ethical suggestions. This is law. It is command.

And the God who reveals this law reveals himself: “I am the LORD your God.” First-person intimacy, first-person authority, using the revealed name I Am. This is a personal and a saving word, identified by the God who situates his own law in his redeeming purpose. Look carefully at the text: I am the LORD your God…” Which God? Who God? “…who brought you out of the land of Egypt and out of the house of slavery.” We must see Christ here as well. We see, in the future, the Christ who will take his people not out of bondage to Pharaoh, but will lead them out of bondage to sin. God's redeeming purpose, which is his constant, is here reflected even in the giving of the law. This is the God who brought Israel out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery.

First Commandment←⤒🔗

And thus the first command: “You shall have no other gods before me” (Exodus 20:3).

Monotheism←↰⤒🔗

Very quickly, this means there is one God and only one God. It begins with the assertion of theism. It is not just theism though, it is monotheism. This God reveals himself, and in so doing he automatically and necessarily reveals himself simultaneously over against the false gods of that day of that age and any other. A quick survey of modern theology reveals the false gods of our day—not just looking out beyond us in terms of the various paganisms and world religions and forms of blindness, but even inside what is called the world of Christian theology. All these false gods that fall short of the biblical witness: the well-intended deity of American popular culture; the “lighter than air, dehydrated, just add water” God; as one author says, the “break glass in case of emergency” deity. Over against the infinite perfection of the God who reveals himself in the Bible, we have the finite god of modern theology.

Finite in so many ways. He is not omnipotent, he is just more powerful than we are. He is not omniscient, he just knows everything that presently can be known or currently may be known. The infinite God of the Bible is omnipotent and omniscient, omnipresent, self-existent, self-revealing, self-defining, sovereign and holy. The list truly is itself infinite. We understand when we read this first commandment that there is, as Calvin said, a “semen divinitatis” within the human being; there is this seed of divinity. There is this interior knowledge that is a part of our conscience and our constitution, being ourselves in the image of God, that cries out for some object of worship. And it will happen! We are worshippers and we will worship. The question is what or whom we will worship.

Herbert Schlossberg, in his book Idols for Destruction, says this: “Western society, in turning away from the Christian faith, has turned to other things.” That is something that is often missed. This is not just a turning from; it is a turning to. He went on to say: “This process is commonly called secularization, but that conveys only the negative aspect. The word connotes the ‘turning away from the worship of God while ignoring the fact that something is being turned to in its place.’” It is inevitably so! A. W. Tozer expressed so powerfully this truth when he said, Whatever first comes to your mind when you hear ‘God’ is the most important thing about you.” Whatever first comes to mind when you hear the word ‘God’ is the most important thing about us.

In Britain several years ago there was a study (I have cited it before; I find it so fascinating) in which the researchers went door to door asking persons about their belief in God. One of the questions was, “Do you believe in a God who intervenes in human history, who changes the course of affairs, who performs miracles, etc.?” And the study, when it was published, actually took as its title the response of one man, who was seen as rather typical of those who responded, when he said, “No, I do not believe in that God, I just believe in the ordinary God.” Whatever that is! How many of our friends and neighbors believe in just an ordinary God? Turning on the television, listening to evangelicalism, would anyone believe that we worship anything other than an ordinary God?

Ultimate Allegiance←↰⤒🔗

Secondly, this loving God demands ultimate allegiance. Of course, nothing less will do. This redefines all reality; everything is different. If God exists, then everything is now different. As James Orr made clear over a century ago, this explains the radical antagonism between the two worldviews—one believing in God and one not. Two different starting points for all thought. Two different realities. On the one hand silence, on the other hand speech. On the one hand nihilism, on the other hand theism. And those, in the end, are the only two great alternatives.

There is a Creator with whom we have to do. How do we understand this basic issue today? What is our Canaan? What is our context? Well, look around. We live in the land of idolaters! Homiletically it is a challenge to talk about this without being trite, because we at least have to give the tip of the hat to the idolaters of old who knew what they were doing more than the idolaters of late. At least we knew who someone was talking about when they spoke of Baal or Asherah or Molech or Dagon or Zeus or Wotan or Thor or Artemis. They are mostly gone, but in their place are other idols. Not only the idols of the religious pluralism around us, but the idols of those who do not think themselves religious at all.

The idols of self. As Oscar Wilde said, “To love oneself is the beginning of a lifelong romance.” It is a lifelong romance for just about all of God's human creatures, but especially those who worship not the one true and living God. Eventually we worship ourselves. Joy Davidman, the wife of C.S. Lewis, in her book Smoke on the Mountain, said, “He who is not continually fizzing like champagne with sexual excitement is condemned as a failure in life.” She said, “The modern idols are the idols of sex, the state, science and society.” And she was right, speaking a half-century ago. Sex, the state, science and society—those are idols of our day. If we are not fizzing like champagne with sexual excitement, if we are not bowing down to the state, if we are not celebrating science and scientism, if we are not finding ultimate meaning in human society, we are written off as simply out of step. Francis Bacon, in his famous aphorism in the Nova Organum, said there are four classes of idols: the idols of the tribe, the idols of the cave, the idols of the marketplace, and the idols of the theater. And so they are still with us.

Exclusivity←↰⤒🔗

Third, the loving God demands exclusivity. This is the “mono” in monotheism. This is just too much, say some. Looking to the experience of Israel, there are those who even try to explain that Israel was not sure about monotheism. Folks like William Barkley, who tried to describe the evolution of Israel's faith from polytheism to henotheism (a hierarchy of gods) to monotheism. I love the response of Philip Ryken, who says, very simply, “God has always been a monotheist.” In 1 Corinthians 8 we find a testimony to this when we read, as Paul puts this in a Christian context:

Therefore as to the eating of food offered to idols, we know that “an idol has no real existence,” and that “there is no God but one.” For although there may be so-called gods in heaven or on earth—as indeed there are many “gods” and many “lords”– yet for us there is one God, the Father, from whom are all things and for whom we exist, and one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom are all things and through whom we exist.1 Corinthians 8:4-6

The idol is a nothing, but it is a dangerous nothing. Monotheism is controversial in the church today. This whole idea of exclusivity—the exclusivity not only of Jahweh, but the exclusivity of Christ as Redeemer. And thus there are those who would consider themselves and call themselves evangelicals who flirt with various universalisms and inclusivisms as a way of getting around the awkwardness, the angularity, and the political incorrectness of this exclusivity.

One God. As we read in the New Testament, one Mediator between God and man. “I am the way, the truth and the life. No man comes to the Father but by me” (John 14:16). One name given under heaven and earth “whereby we must be saved” (Acts 4:12). This exclusivity is inherent in monotheism. That is what scares some people.

I mentioned this notion of a “sky god.” Gore Vidal, one of the leading lights of the literary left, attacks the very idea of monotheism. He says this:

Now to the root of the matter. The great unmentionable evil at the center of our culture is monotheism. From a barbaric Bronze Age text known as the Old Testament three anti-human religions have evolved, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. They are sky god religions. They are literally patriarchal. God is the omnipotent Father, hence the loathing of women for 2000 years in those countries affected by the sky god and its earthly male delegates. The sky god is a jealous god, of course. He requires total obedience from everyone on earth, as he is in place not just for one tribe but for all creation. Those who would reject him must be converted or killed for their own good. Ultimately, totalitarianism is the only sort of politics that can truly serve the sky god's purpose. Any movement of a liberal nature endangers his authority and that of his delegates on earth. One God, one king, one pope, one master in the factory, one father-leader in the family home.

If we do not understand the antipathy towards the very notion of monotheism, we do not understand a part of what it means to bear the scandal of the gospel in this generation. We are worshipers. We will worship. We will worship either the one true and living God, or we will worship an idol of our own devising or our own adoption. We will worship the idol of the tribe or the cave or the marketplace or the theatre, or the idol of the self.

“You shall have no other gods before me.” This is not a hierarchy. This is not saying this is an issue of preeminence. “I must be the highest of all gods, that you must have none other before me.” That is not what this text means. It means, “You dare not bring even the acknowledgment of any other so-called god into my face.” No acknowledgment. This truly is monotheism. To understand the very heart of this is to understand, as Calvin wrote in his exposition of this text in The Institutes, this is like a shameless woman who brings in an adulterer before her husband's very eyes only to vex his mind the more. That is as idolatry to God.

Luther, explaining what a god is, and thus what an idol is, in contrast said this, in his Larger Catechism:

What is a God? Answer: A God is that to which we look for all good and in which we find refuge in every time of need. To have a God is nothing else than to trust and believe him with our whole heart. As I have often said, the trust and faith of the heart alone makes both god and idol. If your faith and trust are right, then your God is the true God. On the other hand, if your trust is false and wrong, then you have not the true God.

We have to read this first commandment along with that word that was given to Israel through Moses and Deuteronomy, the Shema: “Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul with all your might. And these words that I command to you today shall be on your heart” (Deuteronomy 6:4-6). As our Savior said, the greatest commandment is to “love the Lord your God with all your heart, and soul, and mind…The second commandment is like unto it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments rest all the Law and the prophets” (Matthew 22:3-4).

What is it in the end? Who is it in the end that we truly trust and truly adore? For in answering that question, we find who our God is. “I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slaves. You shall have no other god gods before me.” And brothers and sisters, we must not. These words, written to Israel of old, are for us, in order that we might be instructed. They are for our instruction that through the encouragement of the Scriptures we might have hope.