Faithbase

Good morning and welcome to Thinking About the Bible. Today we continue thinking about God's law and yesterday one of the things I was thinking about as we were thinking about God's law is how Jesus said that to hate someone in your heart is to violate the law against murder. To lust after a woman was to violate the law concerning the prohibition of adultery. So what I was thinking about was how as a new creation in Jesus Christ I have a higher standard than those who were responsible for the law under the Mosaic dispensation. So it's interesting to think about that as we think about God's law how we don't want to be told what to do in this modern era but the truth is we have a much greater responsibility to God's law as we fulfill it in faith as we express that character of Jesus Christ. So what I want to talk about this morning and we don't have a lot of time in this brief format so I need to quickly get to this but what we see here in the Ten Commandments is the division of five and five. Now it's traditional to say that the first five or six are about our responsibility to God, how we are to relate to God, and that the second section of the Ten Commandments is about how we relate to other human beings. But I would submit to you that what we actually have here is a two-fold outline of the covenant. Now yes, it is God and man, there is some difference there. The first five shows us how the covenant responsibilities relate to God. The second five are more geared toward how in this covenant with our Lord God we are supposed to relate to humanity or to our fellow man. Let me quickly get into this. There are five points to the covenant and we're going to have to unfold this over more than one session but the five points to the covenant are these, that God is sovereign or God is transcendent, He is a sovereign, transcendent God. He has a hierarchy of order or He has representation. He has law, which is what we're talking about here. He blesses for obedience and He punishes disobedience and fifthly, He has continuity to His covenant. Now the first part of this is pretty obvious that there is, I've got to tone down the coffee pot over here making noise, I want to get that into the video if I can help it. But the first part of this is obvious that I am the Lord your God who rescued you from the land of Egypt and slavery. You must have no other gods but me. So there is the sovereign, mighty God, He is the one whom we must worship. He has hierarchy of order, He has representation, no idols. You don't represent God, God is not represented by some sort of a graven image. The third part of this, the law, don't misuse the name of God. Now to use the name of God was to, to misuse it was to in a sense command something to be a particular way, to misuse it by taking up an oath and say this is the way I want something to be, I swear to God that this is such and such. So you are actually trying to, shall we say, alter reality by misusing the name of God. And so you're trying to, in that sense, as Adam and Eve did, alter reality and say that we are in charge, we make our own law. So third point, don't take God's name in vain, don't misuse His name, is tied to the idea of law. He blesses and He curses. The Sabbath day was a blessing. The blessing of those who were in relationship with God, to have rest, to have peace. And there was punishment tied to that, there were sanctions tied to that if you were unwilling to conform to that. But that talks about blessings and punishment. And the last part of this is to honor your father and mother, then you will live a long full life in the land your Lord, your God has given you. And that has to do with continuity. Obviously if we have family, children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, we're talking about the continuity of this covenant relationship and how it is our responsibility as adults and as we have children and grandchildren to pass on that faith, to express that faith both in word and deed. And that's what I want you to think about today as we continue to think about God's law at a time. But I'll see you again tomorrow. May God bless you until then.