Faithbase

Hello and welcome to Thinking About the Bible and we are of course in a series called Thinking About God's Law. I didn't say good morning because as you may be able to tell from the lighting here I'm actually coming to you in the evening or at least videotaping this episode in the evening. And before we begin to look at the Ten Commandments I want to touch on something we talked about a little bit in the series Thinking About Love and just a reminder that Jesus summed up the commandments, summed up the entirety of the law, he said these are the chief commandments. He summed that up in a couple of laws that aren't found in the Decalogue. One of them is to love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, and strength, that's in Deuteronomy 6.5. And the other is to love your neighbor as yourself and that's in Leviticus 19.18. So what's interesting is that those chief laws, those most important laws according to our Savior Jesus Christ, and again I should mention that Paul reiterates that in his letters as well that to love your neighbor as yourself is to sum up the whole of the law. And it's interesting that we don't find those specifically mentioned in the Ten Commandments. And what we are reminded of is that the Ten Commandments again are really an outline of God's covenant relationship with his people and the principles that are to be adhered to in keeping this covenant relationship intact to keep it fruitful and rich and full. So I just wanted to touch on that because a lot of times when we talk about the Ten Commandments, I've actually had people say, well, which commandment of the Ten is to love the Lord your God and the other one is to love your neighbor as yourself. And my answer has been in the past, all of them, because as we're going to see here, to love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, strength, it has to be an expression of what these commands are calling us to do. And we'll describe how we live that out on a day-by-day basis. First thing we see here when we look at the Ten Commandments, and by the way, I'm going to be using both Exodus 20 and Deuteronomy 5, we'll be referencing the commandments as they appear in both those texts. And I guess I should say that the reason it's recorded twice is because in Exodus, the law was given for the first time, and we have the record of that being given for the first time as the people who had just come out of the land of Egypt. And then in Deuteronomy, it is, and that's what the name of the book means, the second giving of the law, same law, but it's just given now to the generation that has survived the wilderness wandering. Remember, God said everybody, all the men over age 20, all the fighting men would die in the wilderness. They couldn't go into the land. And so the law was given a second time, or expressed a second time to the people. Not in the same way, because in the first time around, God had actually spoke to the people. In fact, that's one of the first things we see, is that God was speaking directly to the people. Apparently, they said, no, please, Moses, just be the mediator. Let God speak to you, and then you repeat to us what he says. And so the remainder of the law, the case law, and so forth, as we find in the book of Exodus, was actually given first to Moses and then to the people. But that's really all we have time for in this particular episode, but just a reminder that Jesus' summation of the law embraces the Decalogue, but does not appear there, the two laws that he cites. And as we go through this, we're going to see that there are some differences between Exodus and Deuteronomy, but we'll describe and explain those as we go on. God bless you. We'll see you in the next episode.