The Law on Mount Sinai
Emily: Welcome to Halting Toward Zion, the podcast where we limp like Jacob to the Promised Land and talk about life, the universe, and everything along the way. I’m Emily Maxson here with Greg Uttinger and Rachel Voytek. We’ve been talking about Egypt and now we’re going to talk about what happened after the Israelites left Egypt.
We discussed briefly the archeological record associated with the exodus and how that is kind of the lynch pin of all ancient history chronology. We are now going to proceed to an event that changed the world in the form of giving us a book that changed the world.
Rachel: Obviously what we’re talking about here is the journey to Mount Sinai by the Israelites, crossing the Red Sea and then actually coming there to the same mountain where Moses first had the revelation of God and his name back in chapter 3. It was then called Mount Horeb, but it’s the same place that we come to. Again God is now going to reveal himself to all of his people by a mega sound system where a couple million people can hear him speak to them. But their response is, “Uh, can Moses please go talk to him for us?”
Emily: “This is too scary.” By the way, it blew my mind when I found out that Mount Horeb was the same as Mount Sinai. I did not grow up knowing that at all. It never was mentioned.
Rachel: Or that you later have Elijah go to the same mountain too. It keeps showing up as the mountain of God and the place where the Lord reveals his name particularly. That’s the important thing as we come to Mount Sinai, because the Lord is going to speak about himself as the Deliverer and particularly continue to reveal himself in his covenant name of Jehovah or Yahweh. That’s something we don’t see as much in Genesis. It’s Exodus where we really get that.
The Lord is going to declare his name in all of its detail to Moses as he passes him by, but particularly we change the world because we’re learning more about this covenant God. And also he shows himself in his character by giving two sets of ten commandments. These are not simply rules because they’re good ideas, but rather they’re the expression of who God is and his character. And they’re not simply spoken.
What is now going to really distinguish Israel from all other nations and religions is that God writes them down himself, with his own hand. That then sets the example for Moses to write his five books and so on, so that we will be a religion of the book, of the written word and not simply oral traditions or poems that are recited or any of those types of things you find in other religions.
Emily: To what extent do you think Moses could have understood how deeply the world would be changed by this event?
Greg: How much does anyone understand a technological information shift like the printing press or the telegraph or the cell phone? “Oh, it’s no big deal. People won’t do much with this. Really, mom and dad, everybody has one but it’s not like it’s a big deal.”
Rachel: This past week I was talking with a lady and she was telling me the story of her husband getting his first computer in the ‘80s. Her comment was, “This is a passing fad. He doesn’t need a computer to write a sermon. Jonathan Edwards wrote perfectly good sermons with no computers. He doesn’t need this.” Of course, somebody then pointed out she was loading her dishwasher.
There are so many things, like computers in the ‘80s, that come out and most people just kind of go, “Eh, okay. Nobody’s going to ever use that,” but I think we don’t know the meaning of technology often until it’s been around for a while.
Emily: So we’re talking about a technological shift here then.
Greg: And a cultural shift and a philosophical/theological shift. As Rachel said, what’s new here is that unlike all the other religions of the world, God is speaking to his people not only in words that can be heard in normal language with normal syntax, but then can be written out phonetically and preserved in a single book for generations and generations after that to 1,000 generations. No other religion had this.
In fact, as we come to the ten commandments – and I hope to look at each of them in turn – we’ll see that the second commandment enshrines this as, “You’re not going to be going over and looking at idols and pictures and images and bowing to them and fixating on them and staring at them,” or as Ezekiel says, doting on them. “You’re going to read words that I have preserved for you, having myself spoken them or inspired one of my prophets to write.” This is huge. This is a new way of thinking about God.
The first commandment enshrines God as the only God. There are no other gods. There are no competitors. From Genesis 1 forward he is Spirit and does not have a body like a man. He’s transcendent. He’s invisible. He’s intangible. And if we want to talk to him or interact with him we need words, and he has chosen to use words to reach out and touch us.
This is revolutionary both for how we think about God and religion, and how we communicate about God and religion. And since religion is at the heart of any culture, that sets the tone for the whole culture. We’re going to be people who have books and who write things out and communicate with words that consist of grammar, tenses, moods, and all the rest of that.
The ancient world had words about God, they just didn’t mean anything. They were gibberish.
Rachel: Or they were only for the elite, the priests, those sorts of things.
Emily: Magic words.
Rachel: Yeah. It was more like spells and incantations, not stories and clear commandments of do and don’t.
Emily: How comforting is that, that the Lord has spoken to us with words, so as we want to reach him we don’t have to follow mystical actions and hope they’re interpreted correctly, hoping we’re doing them correctly. We know that God understands language because he’s spoken to us in language, so he will hear us.
Rachel: Yet the irony is so often – at least we see in our generation – a seeking after those experiences because it seems too simple, too straightforward. We want things to do.
Greg: We want things to feel, an experience. And the one thing you didn’t mention is that reading is hard work, as any of our students will tell you. “I don’t like to read.” I am sympathetic a little to anyone who says they don’t like to read. I can understand that. There are a lot of things I don’t like to do too, and some of them are very good profitable things I don’t like to do. But when your God has spoken to you in words and has said, “Hear the word of the Lord,” it rather behooves you to learn how to pursue that communication process, which means you’ve got to learn to read.
Reading doesn’t mean simply knowing that if I have these particular phonograms in this particular order, I am to sound them out so that they sound like this, “The cat sat on the mat.” Who is this cat? Why is he sitting on a mat? What’s the mat doing on the ground anyway?
Emily: Intrigue!
Greg: Yes. Reading becomes more than decoding. It becomes this thing we call literature. It becomes an art form where we have to learn how to connect words that we’ve received before with the words we’re coming to now.
Emily: And that process should be done even if you’re hearing rather than looking at a page. God doesn’t exactly say in the Old Testament “read the Word of the Lord” very often. He says, “Hear the Word of the Lord.” So I don’t want us to look down on the process of audio Bibles or audiobooks as long as it’s that active engagement, that active seeking to understand the communication.
Greg: Yes, because either reading or listening can become purely automatic, ritual, passive. “I sat here and the preacher said something and I’m done. I heard a sermon.”
One of our presidents went to hear a sermon and a reporter grabbed him on the way out and said, “What did the preacher talk about?”
“He talked about sin.”
“What did he say about it?”
“He said he was against it.”
Emily: A safe guess. I don’t think he was listening, though.
Greg: It doesn’t sound like it, does it? Or he just didn’t want to talk to the reporters. So reading or listening.
You point out something I point out to my students often. There aren’t many commands to read the Bible for a real simple reason. For the first 5,500 years of human history most people didn’t have Bibles to read. They were expensive. They were written out by hand. You’d have bits and pieces, but until the invention of moveable type about 1452 or so, depending on who you believe or what exactly you consider an invention, unless you were really really wealthy or you were a church, most people didn’t have Bibles.
They went to church and they listened to the Bible read out loud and they tried to remember what they heard, and then they sang scripture, particularly the psalms, and that was a great way to commemorate God’s Word. There was a lot of emphasis upon listening well, remembering, and putting pieces together. So although it’s not what we think of necessarily as literary, the man bringing the sermon has got to deal with the written text and he’s got to explicate it in a way that we see how the literary elements are coming together to communicate more than we might have thought at a first glance.
Why do men meet women at wells so often in scripture? Why do so many things happen on the third day? Why did Jesus have to be crowned with thorns, of all things? You go on and the questions begin to multiply. What does Son of God mean? It could mean a lot of things. What does it mean here? What does it mean when Jesus uses it of himself?
As I said, reading is more than just decoding. It’s bringing lots of information from a lot of sources and putting it together. You have to have a memory that holds these things together. You have to be trained to remember, and as you do these things you find yourself being trained to think and to reason with what was originally the written text, but for you it may be the preached text.
Now, just picking up something in the background. And no, for any pastor listening I’m not suggesting that folks should stop reading their Bibles.
Emily: We have Bibles now and we can read them. That’s a great blessing. Good luck meditating on the Word of God if you don’t know what it says.
Greg: Yes, we’re told to meditate day and night.
Rachel: That is the great struggle. We have more Bibles than any other generation possible, and we know it less than most of them did. So clearly the simple presence of the physical object does not make us more spiritual than others before us, or more knowledgeable.
Emily: Does this mean I can’t fall asleep on my textbook and absorb it?
Rachel: You can’t even do subliminal messaging, where you put headphones on at night and play your audio Bible all night. That’s not how it works.
Emily: You might have some weird dreams, though.
Greg: So the children of Israel come out of Egypt amidst many plagues, the parting of the Red Sea, the destruction of Pharaoh and his army, and they’re led by fire by night and the glory cloud by day to overshadow them and protect them.
Along the way God feeds them with manna from heaven. He opens a rock at the base of Sinai and lets a river flow all the way back into the wilderness so that they and their animals have plenty to drink. He ordains a Sabbath day, a day of rest and worship. And little by little he gets them to Sinai.
By the time they get there it’s what we now call the Day of Pentecost, and it’s at this point that God comes down in glory and reveals himself and invites Moses up, and Moses goes up and down a couple times.
Something to remember if you ever try to calculate exactly how long it took for all this to happen – and one of the great surprises to me was, “Oh wait, climbing a mountain is not something you do in an hour. Moses went up to the top of Sinai? That was a day.”
Rachel: And he was 80 years old, as well.
Emily: And on one occasion he had 70 people with him.
Rachel: Although they went only halfway. Still a long journey. They needed to eat.
Greg: And here’s something else I completely missed. Again, my complaint against chapter breaks, as much as I love being able to find things in scripture. Chapter 19 ends with, ”So Moses went down unto the people and spake unto them,” and then chapter 20 begins with, ”And God spake all these words saying…”
I think I was in my 30s before I made the connection of, “Wait, God isn’t talking to Moses. Moses is back on the ground. He’s talking to all Israel. Oh, wow. No wonder they were terrified.” And although he would write these words on tables of stone, as Rachel suggested – most likely two copies, because that’s what you do with receipts and treaties and things, but they were still written on both sides so that still leads us to the question of how they were divided by God.
Initially the words were spoken words that two million people could hear – the first sound system in history, so this is a good time to start to think about these. Again, as Rachel said, the ten commandments set the pattern for Exodus and for the Torah, the first five books, which are the beginning and fountain of the Old Testament, the old covenant book, and so of the whole Bible. It’s at this point that history is changed forever.
We’re going to talk about a God who invisible, intangible, transcendent, spirit. He’s going to tell us that although he institutes many rites and ceremonies and sacrifices, his primary concern is ethical. He actually cares how his people live.
The gods of the pagan world didn’t really. They wanted to be fed. Beyond that, any morality – and eventually when we ever get to Greece we can talk about how Greek morality, such as it wasn’t, kind of grew out of how they thought about the gods.
It wasn’t because the god said “do this.” It was because, “We’re worshiping our ancestor and he’s in a plot of ground, so we need to keep the ground, so you can’t steal my ground. And I need to pass on the keeping of dear granddad to my son, so I better have a legitimate son, so my wife better not cheat on me. I can cheat on anybody, but she can’t.”
It was a logical development out of their religion, but their gods didn’t tell them to do any of these things. They just figured this was the safest way to make this thing work, whereas here is God, the Creator of the universe, condescending to his covenant people and saying, “Here are ten things that define me and our relationship and how you’re going to live, particularly in the Promised Land. These are tools of dominion. They’re revelations of my nature and ultimately the pictures of the Messiah to come.” So from here we can begin to talk about these things.
When I first started teaching, two of my students came and said, “We’d like to have a Bible study,” largely because they both had girlfriends that they were getting serious about and they thought maybe their girlfriend should study the Bible more, which they should have.
I said, “Okay, I can do that for you if you want. What do you want to talk about?”
“Well, you know all kinds of things, just practical things like the ten commandments. Yeah, the ten commandments. Why are there ten of them? Why these ten? Why are these ten more important than all other commandments? Why are they in this order?”
I began to appreciate the question at the time. I know much better now what the answers are. I had some of the answers then and I’ve learned a lot more in the last 30-40 years, but you know what, those are good questions. I think that both Christians and certainly non-Christians come to these oftentimes and just say, “God picked a weird bunch of things to impose on his people.” There doesn’t immediately seem to be a lot of coherence to them.
First of all, they’re all negative except for honor your parents and remember the Sabbath day, so a lot of, “Don’t do this.” It’s not so much, “This is what you should do.” A lot is assumed. We’re supposed to know what murder, adultery, and theft are, for instance, already.
Emily: Something that just struck me now is how we often talk about the internal nature of the 10th commandment, where everything else seems to be external about action until “Thou shalt not covet,” which is about the desires of the heart. But those two commandments that you just mentioned are also internal. “Honor your father and your mother. Remember the Sabbath day.” Can you check a box and say that you did those things? That’s rough, buddy.
Greg: Yes. “I’m sure I did those things somehow.”
Rachel: It’s a general demeanor towards the person or the covenant sign of resting on the Sabbath day. But eventually Jesus will also tell us that these things are all things that we do first and foremost in our hearts and our minds, and therefore break the commandments there. But we tend to check them off as actions.
Greg: Yes, as actions. And yet long before we get to our Lord’s Sermon on the Mount, say, we have Proverbs and we have the prophets who bring us back to, “No, what’s going on in your heart here? It doesn’t work that way.”
Jesus in that sense was not a revolutionary. He was just bringing them back to what God had always meant. Although God in the first instance here in the ten commandments does not expressly speak to the heart, these are heart things.
First of all, God announces who he is, not that they didn’t know, but it needs to go under the formal covenant document.
I am the Lord thy God which have brought thee out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage.
He has already done this for them. They’re not going to get out of Egypt by keeping these rules. They’re already out of Egypt. God brought them out. He brought them out, we’re told earlier in the book, because of his covenant, his promise to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. We’ve already talked a good deal about the Abrahamic covenant and the long-term view of blessing all the nations through the work of Messiah, who will grant forgiveness of sins, and the gift of the Holy Ghost, so that’s all in play here.
If we make the mistake of not seeing that or saying, “Well, that was God’s plan with Abraham, but now he’s starting something brand new that involves getting blessed by obedience…” – ala Scofield in dispensationalism in its classic form – then we’re missing what’s going on here.
As we read through the rest of the Old Testament and on into the new, we will constantly be reminded that law keeping as a way of salvation was never God’s plan. The law does something really great for us with regard to salvation. It shows us we need it. It points out our sins. It shows us what God would like us to be like, but it can’t make us that. It cannot change us. It cannot conform us to the image of Christ.
It’s a mirror. That’s the image that James uses in chapter 1 –
Whoso looketh into the perfect law of liberty and continueth therein, he being not a forgetful hearer but a doer of the work, this man shall be blessed in his deed.
You don’t pull the mirror off the wall and try to wash your face with it, but while you’re washing your face it is convenient to have a mirror to see where the dirt is. This is one of the functions of the law of God, and there’s more.
Let’s look at the first commandment –
Thou shalt have no other gods before me.
A lot of liberals a century or two back said, “See? This shows us the ten commandments are a relic of an earlier phase in Israel’s history when Yahweh was simply the chief among many gods. Here he’s claiming not to be an exclusive God, because religion hadn’t evolved that far. That won’t happen until Isaiah.”
Emily: Right. The liberals say that monotheism was invented around the time of Isaiah.
Greg: Yes, and that Akhenaten beat him by just a little bit because “before me.”
Emily: That’s not talking about rank.
Greg: It’s not talking about rank, it’s talking about where you are. “Before me” literally is “in my presence” or “before my face.” Where is God’s face? There are two answers to that. On the one hand you could say everywhere and that’s true, so don’t have other gods where God can see them. That would be everywhere.
Emily: The all-seeing God, that one?
Greg: Yeah, that one, the all-seeing God. But the other thing is that God’s face, particularly as we find out in the New Testament in John’s gospel and the Pauline epistles, the great emphasis is that God reveals himself in the face of Jesus Christ. God’s face is Jesus. That’s God down where we can look at him in the eye literally.
So as we come to God we don’t get to come trying to juggle value systems. “I have this value system for entertainment, and this for marriage, and this for my politics, and for church on Sunday I have this little value system that I’ve scraped together out of the New Testament and the red words of Jesus.”
God is the only God. It is God who defines right and wrong. It is God who makes the laws. It is God who saves. It is God who legislates. It is God who judges. That’s the first thing here.
We often speak of idolatry and there are two types of idolatry. The first idolatry is what Adam and Eve initially faced in Eden, “You shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.” Who’s going to make the rules for you? Who’s going to decide what’s right and wrong? Who’s going to be your final authority?
God right up front says, “Look, I saved you. I’m your final authority. You cannot have other final authorities alongside me, because then none of us would be final.” Of course, what happens then is it falls back on us as we choose among them as we will. We become the final authority, doing a smorgasbord approach to authority structures and worldviews as is convenient for us.
Rachel: Can I add one other comment on the “before me”? The words there in Hebrew, al pānāi, are the same words of the Spirit hovering upon the face of the waters in Genesis 1:2, so literally “on” or “over upon my face” is actually what they’re saying. So it’s not just “me,” but pretty much “don’t smack me in the face with another god,” if you want to put it in really modern idiom. It’s important to realize that it’s right in front of him.
Greg: Yes. Christianity, and Old Testament religion in its time, was exclusive. It literally said, “There are no other valid religions.” How offensive. How arrogant. “Wow, it sounds like Nazis. They believe in absolute truth.”
Emily: “Only a Sith deals in absolutes.”
Greg: That was where I was going. I couldn’t remember if it was Siths or Jedi. Yes, only the Siths believe in absolute truth. “Your father was slain by a young Jedi named Darth Vader.” “Close enough.”
Emily: True from a certain point of view. Talk about the greatest character assassination in all of cinema history. Alas, Obi Wan Kenobi. We knew him well.
Greg: So that’s the first commandment. The second commandment turns to a different sort of idolatry. This is the idolatry of trying to imagine for ourselves what God is like. The first commandment says no other gods, so the second commandment assumes that we read the first one, not that we always have. It says, “All right, so we know we’re talking about Yahweh, Jehovah, the Creator God, the God of Israel, God of Abraham. As you’re thinking about him, as you talk to him, you shall not imagine for yourself, out of your own heart…”
Emily: Notice that word ‘imagine.’
Greg: Exactly, because this is about making images, and there’s a couple ways you can do this. You can literally make an image. You can make what we generally think of as an idol, 3-dimensional if you’re West, 2-dimensional if you’re East, and say, “This is how God communicates with us. No, we don’t really worship it, we just show it a lot of reverence because God contacts us through it. It becomes a talisman, a point of contact, a cell phone to the Divine.”
In the ancient world they didn’t think that their gods really looked like bulls, mermen, Ibis-headed two-legged men or whatever. They knew that these were representations of ideas and forces that lay beyond, but they helped them understand their gods. They helped them worship, particularly once you made it concrete in the form of a statue or a picture. You just felt so much closer. You could reach out and physically touch something that tunes you in to the divine power behind it.
So later on we see Constantinople and Rome defending icons and images with those very arguments – “It’s comforting. Everybody does it. We show reverence to them because you’re showing reverence not to the thing but to that which it represents and which is behind it. It’s an aid to spiritual growth.”
These, by the way, are the defenses given at the 7th so-called Ecumenical Council, the last council of Nicaea, for the use of icons in the church, and they’re all horrible reasons. They’re exactly the same reasons that are given for worshiping idols that the pagan world would have given. “We don’t worship this image of Zeus. We worship Zeus through the image.”
“Right. Well, are you bowing down to it?”
“Well, yes, we bow down to this but it’s Zeus on the other side that receives the bowing.”
“But you’re actually kneeling in front of a piece of rock.”
“Yeah, but you don’t seem to grasp the theological subtleties.”
“God does.”
Emily: Can I tell a funny story? A friend of mine belongs to a church tradition that does not take so strict a view of the second commandment, and normally she’s very sensible about this thing. It’s just a picture, but she picks up the church magazine or whatever it is that had a so-called picture of Jesus and she was about to make war upon a house centipede with it. She saw the picture and it gave her pause and she was like, “I’m not sure why,” and I told her, “This is why I don’t approve of pictures of Jesus. God would not approve of you hesitating in this situation. That house centipede needs to die!”
Greg: It’s violating your dominion. Take it back.
I did ask my students just a couple days ago, “If your Bible gets worn out and trashed and pages are missing, what do you do with it?” and they knew what I was asking but there was this momentary pause as they kind of looked at me like, “I’m pretty sure the answer is throw it away, but that doesn’t seem right somehow.”
Rachel: We can be like the Muslims and hold a burial service for our holy books and make its own little coffin.
Greg: You’re kidding. I missed that.
Rachel: No. That’s actually why they have some really old copies, because they were buried in special little coffins.
Greg: Okay. At this point you’re turning the book into an idol.
Rachel: Which they do. They can’t put the book on the floor. The book has to be at the top of every stack of books. It has to be held above a certain point because the physical book itself, as you would say, has become magical or a touchstone to Allah.
Greg: In good Aristotelian philosophy form it becomes incarnate matter.
Rachel: But it seems like in all of these different places, even in the Western and Eastern churches as they started to defend physical objects, it’s because they had reduced the value of the Word in their services. They would say, “Oh, the people can’t understand our services but they can understand the images. They can’t read,” and all of those different arguments, “So we’ll just give them pictures. We’ll dumb it down for them and keep it simple.”
Greg: Rather than, “Wow, what a great opportunity to start an educational program and teach all your people to read,” what is what the Jewish people traditionally have done. It’s what the Puritans would do. Scotland in the 1700s was the most literate society in the world because they wanted to be able to read their Bibles. It was that important to them.
That’s what God is saying here. He’s expressing it negatively rather than positively. He doesn’t say, “Talk to me in prayer. Listen to my word.” He simply says, “Get rid of your images.” And once we do we realize, “What are we going to do now?”
“I don’t know. Once God told us…oh, he told us. He spoke to us.”
Emily: “Maybe we can, like, speak to him?”
Greg: “Yeah, then maybe he’ll speak to us some more. Wait! That book. What was in that book? Get it out of the closet. Let’s find out what God said once upon a time. Wow, this sounds so relevant, like he’s talking to me right now.”
Emily: “When was this written?”
Greg: At this point I must needs mention Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman. I don’t know the gentleman’s personal biography. I know he had affiliations with one of the liberal big mega-churches, National Council of Churches or World Council or something like that, and he does mention that in his youth he was familiar with the Bible.
He shows surprisingly more reverence for scripture than a lot of pastors, and he’s very critical of how the electronic church has used the Bible. But he looks at this passage and says, “Look, this is about medium through which communication happens, and the Bible is being absolutely revolutionary in saying that if you want to have a relationship with this God you have to use words, which means you have to become literate. You have to read. You have to write. You have to study, and you have to write more about what’s been written. That’s the only way this thing is going to work. You’re not allowed to fall back into images again. The second of all of God’s ten commandments says the way of images is not the way of knowing God.”
Someone like Neil Postman, who’s certainly not an evangelical Christian as we would understand such a thing, let alone a Reformed Christian, he nailed it pretty good. He understood that this is a turning point in the history of the world.
The third commandment –
Thou shalt not take the name of the LORD thy God in vain; for the LORD will not hold him guiltless that taketh his name in vain.
You don’t carry it around in an empty fashion. One pastor said, “Or use it in a cavalier manner.” Then we have to talk about names. The ancient world knew something of the power of a name, and we see this as late as the book of Acts when the Jewish exorcist tried to use the name of Jesus to cast out demons and it doesn’t go so well.
Emily: We can think of the Celtic fairy traditions, where somebody knowing your name gives them power over you.
Greg: Oh yes. Lord of the Rings, when the little hobbits find Treebeard and they say, “I’m Pippin,” and “I’m Merry. What’s your name?”
“Whoa, you’re awfully hasty folk, telling people your name. I don’t know about that. We’ll get to names later, but you can call me Treebeard for right now.”
Tolkien knew what he was talking about. He was reflecting on exactly what you’re describing. Names have a power. Now, names do have a power of sorts even in a biblical worldview, but not that kind. They’re not magic. When we say, “In Jesus’ name” that’s not a magic spell.
The Jewish sorcerers tried, “I adjure thee in the name of Jesus, who Paul preaches, that you come out of the man.” The devils looked at him and said, “Well, we know Jesus and we know Paul. Who are you?” and turned on the guy and sent them running out naked.
We are familiar in the West better with something called power of attorney. If you sign a check, the bank will honor it because that signature represents your wishes, your person, your authority. If you turn it over to someone who has your power of attorney, then they can sign the check. They can sign your name, and if that’s recorded safely someplace on some secret document at the bank, the bank will honor that too, not because you’re anybody in particular but because the man who has the account has given you representative authority to act on his behalf.
When God gives us his name he allows us to pray in his name, preach in his name, bless in his name, exercise church discipline in his name, exact oaths and vows of people in his name. This is incredible power within society, but again it’s rooted not simply in magic words, as if the very syllables of Jehovah or Yahweh somehow shake heaven and earth, but we’re calling upon God, who most certainly hears because he’s already made it clear that his face is everywhere. He’s always at hand. We’re calling on him to witness and to enforce the promises and the commitments we’re making.
So now we have a society with a set and exclusive worldview rooted in things that cannot be seen. We have a society that is word-based rather than image-based, and now we have a society that is bound by covenant and contract, by verbal commitments explained in words, so we’re back to words again.
It’s not just, “Love him, love her, $3” kind of thing. No, this relationship, this covenant thing called marriage comes with words that tell you what you owe each other and what you have to do to live up to this.
Being a citizen of a country, or this country say, you swear to uphold and defend the Constitution of the United States. That’s a big document, a lot of words. You’re promising to defend the words, and not simply as phonetic sounds in the air but as statements about rights, liberties, and authorities that the federal government, the state governments, and the individual people have.
This is a huge thing. You’re pulled into covenant relationship and its ugly step-sister, contracts, which are a way step-down from that but they echo it because you sign your name to a contract. You’re expected to live up to it. Courts will enforce it. By the way, marriage is not a contract, it’s a covenant. It involves a self-maledictory oath and that’s what we’re talking about here. When you swear in God’s name, God is going to hold you accountable.
So what we’re already seeing is that in these commandments God is not simply spitting out a few random unrelated ideas. He is shaping a culture, a society, a way of living with one another in light of who he is. These are all reflections of who he is.
The fourth commandment is “Remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy.” We’re not told explicitly that there was a Sabbath day before the journey to Sinai. There was a seventh day that God sanctified by resting. Whether or not they called it the Sabbath is something else again. They may well have.
We’re told in Nehemiah that on Sinai God made known his Sabbaths, but that could be referring to all the other Sabbaths as well, the holy days. But certainly now we’re being told that the Sabbath is taking on a new significance, and honestly new rules, because up to this point there’s no mention of executing anybody for violating the Sabbath day. But now the Sabbath day is going to be the seal of God’s covenant relationship with Israel, and willful violation of it is going to carry the death penalty. It's a big deal because on that day you’re going to rest as a testimony to the covenant reality that you are in God’s hands. You can stop working a day and the world is not going to fall apart.
That was huge in a world where the common peasant was struggling with nature, which were gods. Nature consisted of a plurality of demons and demigods that you had to struggle with to get your crops out. You pleaded with them and you begged them and you bargained with them and you sacrificed to them, sometimes your firstborn child, just so you could have a good crop. It’s all on you, because if things get screwed up the gods are not all that nice.
Emily: And they’re sure not going to take any hits for a bad year.
Greg: No. Now we’re being told, “You know what? God’s got you covered. Yes, I do expect you to work, this thing of dominion, but six days will cover it. That seventh day…” And here again there is not the explicit command of “go worship,” but it shows up elsewhere.
In Leviticus, Moses lists the festivals of the Lord, the feasts of the Lord. The Sabbath is one of them. It was a time for feasting before God. That means worship. It’s also called a solemn assembly so you were supposed to get together with God’s people and you were to hear his Word and you were to worship. Then you were to celebrate with festival time, eating and drinking in the presence of God and with one another and this was a blessing. It wasn’t, “All right, but what can’t we do?”
Emily: Think of Laura Ingalls Wilder being forced to sit in a chair all day doing nothing.
Rachel: Even today the Jews, as they celebrate this, call it Sabbath delights and they talk about the good things like, “Wear your best clothes. You get three meals in the day,” and they have a couple other things, but they speak of it as Sabbath delight versus a Sabbath requirement.
Emily: That’s lovely.
Rachel: The other thing I was thinking is that this in another way shapes culture because it’s counting and it’s structuring their time, whereas most cultures we know from chronology and things like that are very bad at counting and don’t care. They’re having to keep very close track of every single day for this, and then they’re going to be counting for all their different festivals.
It’s emphasizing the importance of time, but particularly it’s giving them weeks, not just seasons like crops are planted now, they’re harvested now, it’s cold, it’s hot, but rather every single day is significant so they can keep track of the week that the Lord has given.
Emily: Not to mention the combination of the lunar and solar calendars, which is a whole mess to sort out.
Greg: And then you come to weeks. I had a student ask me this years and years ago. “Why do we have weeks?”
“The Bible.”
“No, no, I know it’s in the Bible but why do we have weeks?”
”The Bible.”
“No, you don’t get it. I mean why do…”
Emily: The Bible actually happened.
Rachel: God made a week.
Greg: God created a week by using seven days in which to create and rest, and that was the first one. Then Israel maintained it, then eventually as Christianity spread over the world the world copied it because it seemed really cool to have a day off.
Rachel: It also shows how God runs the world, and therefore when he says, “This is the way it is,” and we follow it, it makes sense and it works and things come out correctly, because it’s how he made the world to be.
Greg: In our first season of Halting Toward Zion there is an episode called Sociology of the Sabbath. I won’t repeat everything that’s there, but you’ve already hit some of it, Rachel. We’re looking at linear time that can be numbered. We’re looking at things that cycle, and yet every week is a new week and the previous weeks are presupposed.
That is, you have now gone to synagogue X number of times, and presumably you learned something and you drew closer to God and you’re more mature. So although there’s a cycle it’s a spiral. You’re spiraling upward and forward to something better.
The Sabbath itself says that the future can hold something better than what you have now, and ultimately the Sabbath was a picture of Messiah’s kingdom, of the world to come. They understood that after a fashion and then all of the other festival days sort of fill in other aspects of what the Sabbath was saying.
Also as the Sabbath came you had to be prepared. You had to think ahead. “I was planning on doing this on Friday, but I can’t because I have to be ready for the Sabbath. So I either have to do it sooner or I have to kick it into the next week, because on the Sabbath day I can’t do this thing.” Planning time, a major thing. Every day is not like every other day, and there is this sense of sacred time.
Now, under the new covenant we don’t sense it exactly the same way, but there is a Lord’s Day. We no longer have a holy place or holy land or holy objects. We have holy processes like praying and preaching and serving the Lord’s Supper, but strangely enough we still do have a holy time, a day that God himself has set apart.
And unlike the Sabbath day, which looked back to creation and back to the Passover and the deliverance from Egypt, ours looks backward to the resurrection of Christ and looks forward to the final resurrection, so it comes at the beginning of the week rather than at the end, but it still sets for us some of these same things.
There is an order and rhythm to life. The future can be better than the past. Some things take preparation and forethought. Work is not the end-all and be-all of everything. Life centers in worship, and worship centers in the Word. Again, if you want to go back and listen to the Sociology of the Sabbath, we develop this a bit more.
I know we’re getting toward the end so we’ll have to pick up the rest next time, but for reasons that will become clear next time I want to do one more.
The fifth commandment is “Honor your parents,” but it’s a little more specific than that or phrased a little oddly. “Honor your father and your mother, that your days may be long upon the land which the Lord your God shall give you.”
A couple things. First, the commandment is addressed to grown-ups. We often think of this as a commandment for children. It is not, and Jesus made this very clear in talking to the Pharisees when they would break this commandment by not supporting their parents in their old age. He said, “You’re not honoring your parents.”
Children are told specifically to obey their parents by St. Paul, but all of us are required to honor our parents and that means honoring, first of all, our covenantal and biological parents, the ones who brought us into the world and raised us, but more broadly our ancestors, our forebears, those who went before us in Church and State, those who laid the foundations of our nation.
Emily: And the offices of them, too.
Greg: Yes, the offices. The law says on more than one occasion, and so does Proverbs, “Don’t remove the landmark which they of old time have set.” That’s part of what that is. The principles, the rules, even the physical boundaries that previous generations have put in place we need to take very seriously. We need to respect them.
“You’re old-fashioned” is actually a compliment, because what’s the alternative? You make things up as you go?
When I was a kid we spoke of the “now generation,” but then someone came up with a button, we would say a meme, “the now generation is a has-been” because they found out an odd thing. These teens and 20-somethings, guess what after 10 years?
Emily: They were ‘old people.’
Greg: They were. Originally the slogan had been, “Don’t trust anyone over 30.” Well, that didn’t work very well, didn’t it?
Emily: That didn’t age well.
Greg: But having told us to honor the past, particularly in the person of our parents, it says “…that your days may be long upon the land in the future,” so this is a point of continuity. We look backward and respect what God has done in the past, and give our ancestors a vote as it were, as Chesterton would say, with a goal that with those roots firmly planted we can grow into the future and enjoy its blessings more firmly.
A society that’s rootless, to maintain the metaphor, is a society that’s going nowhere. It doesn’t know what it’s doing. It doesn’t know what it’s about. It fiddles away its time and self-destructs because it doesn’t have any solid ground to hold onto, and therefore has no chance of surviving the future.
Emily: “The old that is strong does not wither. Deep roots are not reached by the frost.”
Greg: And I can’t remember the rest of it.
Emily: Something about from the ashes a fire shall spring.
Greg: “Not all those wander are lost.”
Emily: “All that is gold does not glitter.”
Greg: “And the crownless again shall be king.”
Emily: So now that we’ve said the whole poem out of order…
Greg: Yes, but you know what? We said a very old poem. There are people listening saying, “What in the world are they talking about?” Read an old book. There is wisdom in old books. This is part of what’s going on here.
“I don’t want to read old books. They’re old. I don’t want to watch an old movie.”
“What’s an old movie?”
“Anything that was made more than two years ago.”
“You’re a child.”
With books it’s worse. “They use funny language and they’re long, and I don’t have it on my Kindle.”
Emily: It’s for free on your Kindle, guaranteed – well, not that one but many are.
Greg: So we’ve seen here five commandments so far that tell us about the ultimate source of authority in a godly society, about how that authority is and is not to be represented, about the bonds that hold that society together, about the transforming power of worship and of hearing the Word of God, and finally about how that culture will pass itself on into the next generation.
For anybody who’s listened to us for very long, you’ll begin to recognize the five dimensions of the biblical covenant. But we’re out of time, I suspect.
Emily: We are, indeed. We must conclude and promise to get to the next five commandments next time. But until then, let’s have some recommendations.
Greg: Okay. Speaking of old books, this is a book by the Reverend T. Robert Ingram. It’s called The World Under God’s Law. It was printed or published in 1962. The author, I believe, is an Episcopalian pastor. It was one of the first serious attempts in the ‘50s to ‘70s to actually look at the ten commandments and say, “Here’s their social significance. This is not a light matter. Here are some things to think about.”
It’s not heavy detailed exegesis. It’s not something like say Rushdoony’s The Institutes of Biblical Law. It’s more of a “Let’s sit down and talk about this,” so it’s fairly easy reading, but it is very blunt in looking at what happens to a society that no longer is interested even in the superficial nature of the ten commandments. What happens when you abandon marriage? What happens when you feel free to kill people? What happens when you will not worship one day in seven?
It’s a good book, not very thick, but you would almost certainly have to find it in a used bookstore. I imagine it’s been out of print for a while. The World Under God’s Law, which of course sounds absolutely horrible to people. “You want the whole world to obey God’s law?”
“Better that than Muslim law,” but people have trouble with that one, because “Islam is a religion of peace.”
Rachel: With that, I will go next. I’m not going to recommend something about Islam, though. Instead I’m going to recommend a book that I have used in teaching high school students in literature class, which is called Lit: A Christian Guide to Reading Books by Tony Reinke.
I appreciate it because he is very succinct and quick and to his point. He spends half the book establishing a theology for why we should read, including where the place for imagination actually is. We do have a God, as he says, who slays dragons, so we need imagination, but how do we use it.
The second half is practical tips for how to learn to read, basically. That’s understanding that many people don’t read or don’t even know where to start. He goes through lots of different practical approaches and ways that you can learn to read and read lots of different things.
Emily: Cool. I think I have that on my shelf and have not yet read it, ironically.
Rachel: It’s a very quick read, I would say, overall.
Emily: I’ll have to get to that soon. I guess I’m going to recommend reading books to small children. If you don’t have your own, borrow one. They will love for you to read to them.
Greg: A book or a child?
Emily: Both.
Rachel: I thought you meant children, but I wasn’t sure.
Emily: Yes, I’ve actually sort of semi-accidentally started a tradition of bringing books for my friends to read to my daughter. Sometimes it’s a really intentional choice, like this person is going to love this book so I’m going to ask them to read it to Gretchen. And sometimes she just pulls one out of her backpack and is like, “Read please! Read please!” and then she gets to spend some special time with a friend and it’s lovely.
No two people will read the same book exactly the same way, so it’s always a new experience. Gretchen is just getting to the point where she will read parts of the book from memory, which is very fun.
Rachel: Just be careful, because I had that as a child and therefore faked out my parents and my teachers that I could read when I couldn’t, because I memorized the books and I memorized when to turn the pages. It took them a while to figure out I wasn’t reading.
Emily: You have to test with novelty. You’ve got to get the new book. Her favorite right now is Your Personal Penguin by Sandra Boynton, which of course delights my penguin-loving heart no end.
Greg: I still prefer But Not the Hippopotamus though.
Emily: Oh, that’s a good one too. I don’t think she’s got around to saying hippopotamus yet, but penguin she can say.
Greg: Unlike Benedict Cumberbatch.
Emily: Right. She’s ahead of a world-class actor in that respect.
Greg: Before you sign us off, I don’t know that we’ve officially acknowledged this, but I’ll say it as the odd man out. I want to congratulate both of my co-hosts on being with child.
Emily: Thank you.
Rachel: Thank you.
Greg: We give God thanks for this and look forward to meeting said children in 8, 9, 10 months, whatever it is.
Rachel: Hopefully not 10 months.
Emily: I didn’t sign up for that. No thank you.
Thank you both so much for this conversation. As always, it’s been a delight. Thanks also to David, our producer and my lawfully-wedded husband. Thanks to you, our listener. We appreciate you tuning in.
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Thank you so much again for listening. We’ll see you next time.
SHOW NOTES
Scripture: Exodus 20, James 1
Resources: Amusing Ourselves to Death (Neil Postman); The Institutes of Biblical Law (RJ Rushdoony)
Recommendations:
Greg: The World Under God’s Law (T. Robert Ingram)
Rachel: Lit: A Christian Gide to Reading Books (Tony Reinke)
Emily: Read to small children, and bring books places for other people to read to your children.