Life in God’s Family: The Basis and Nature of the Ten Commandments

How would you describe an ideal family?

Is it a family in which the children always obey every rule the parents make?

We know that is not the case. Indeed, outward obedience to parents can co-exist with deep anger and resentment, as displayed by the older son in Luke 15.

Instead, love and trust characterize the ideal family. There is obedience to parents, yes – but that obedience flows out of love, out of trust, out of a feeling of security and acceptance.

Just so in the family of God. God’s family members surely obey – but not with the outward, formal obedience of the Pharisees. Their obedience instead is joyful and willing, flowing from confidence in the loving character of God.

Consider the Ten Commandments in this regard. These commandments summarize God’s torah, His instructions to His people. Many misunderstand both the nature and implications of these commandments. So let’s examine, first of all, the basis and nature of the Ten Commandments. From these we’ll draw out four implications for all the Commandments. In future devotions we’ll consider the Commandments one by one.

The Basis of the Ten Commandments: Relationship with God

The people of Israel do not come into a relationship with God by obeying the Ten Commandments; they are already in a relationship with Him when He speaks the Commandments.

  • When Moses first approaches Pharaoh, God says, “Israel is my firstborn son” (Exodus 4:22).
  • God told Moses at the burning bush that the people would worship Him at Sinai (Exodus 3:12).
  • God reiterates that plan multiple times in words spoken to Pharaoh (Exodus 4:23, 5:1, 5:3, 8:1, 8:20, 9:1, 9:13, 10:3).
  • When they first arrive at Sinai, God says, “You yourselves have seen what I did to the Egyptians, and how I bore you on eagles’ wings and brought you to myself” (Exodus 19:4, emphasis added).
  • Immediately prior to speaking the Commandments, God says, “I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery” (Exodus 20:2, emphasis added).

So the Israelites’ relationship with God precedes the giving of the Law. They enter into a relationship with God through His love, by His grace (Deuteronomy 7:6-8).

Furthermore, they do not remain in relationship with God through keeping the Law. In Exodus 32, they explicitly break the Commandments. God’s judgment falls on a small percentage, but He reveals Himself as “merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, … forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin” (Exodus 34:6-7).

Now, He goes on to say He “will by no means leave the guilty unpunished” (Exodus 34:7 NIV) – He is the God of both grace and justice. We only understand fully how God’s grace and justice both hold when we see Jesus’ death on the cross.

But our point for today is this: Neither the Israelites nor we today enter into a relationship with God through obedience to the Law. Neither the Israelites nor we today remain in a relationship with God through obedience to the Law. We enter into a relationship with Him by grace through faith. We remain in that relationship by grace through faith.

 

The Nature of the Ten Commandments: Life in God’s Family

When we hear the word “law,” we normally think of some set of restrictions on our behavior. A sign on I-485 says that there is a law prohibiting you from driving faster than 70mph. If you see a police car in your rearview mirror, you will restrict your driving speed. You will not drive 80mph.

But God’s Law is not fundamentally a set of restrictions on our behavior. Instead, God’s Law fundamentally is a revelation of His character. Through the Law, He tells us what He loves and what He hates: “I the LORD love justice; I hate robbery and wrong” (Isaiah 61:8). God in His holy essence hates and despises sin, He despises evil; in His essence, he loves righteousness and justice.

 

Now, connect this with the idea of God’s people being His family. When we had six little children running around the house needing correction, we would sometimes say, “We’re Pinckneys – we don’t act that way.” We then explained how we behave.

That’s similar to what Jesus says in the Sermon on the Mount: “You therefore must be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect” (Matthew 5:48).

Thus, when God tells us to obey His Law, He is saying, “Become like Me! I have brought you to Myself! You are part of my intimate family! This is your identity; this is who you are. So act like it’s true! Act like Me!”

So God does not give us the Ten Commandments, saying, “Obey these and you will be in My family.” Nor does He say, “Obey these in order to remain in My family.” Instead, He says to the Israelites – and to us! – “You are in the family. And this is how those in my family live. This is how they reflect my character.”

 

Four Implications for Understanding the Ten Commandments

a) The Ten Commandments are positive, not only negative

We don’t become like God simply by avoiding certain actions – we must change positively!

For example, consider the seventh commandment: “You shall not commit adultery” (Exodus 20:14). Many never commit the physical act of adultery, but lust after others. Jesus tells us these too break the commandment (Matthew 5:28). But we can’t just modify the commandment to include a prohibition of lust! Rather, the Commandment exhorts us to take on the character of God. We positively are to honor marriage, to build up own, to assist others to strengthen their marriages, all to the glory of God.

So, in general, each commandment forbids some attitudes and behaviors while commending others.

b) No one will succeed in fully taking on the character of God

Those at the moment outside God’s family are “dead in trespasses and sin” (Ephesians 2:1). God graciously brings the redeemed into His family, making us “alive together with Christ” (Ephesians 2:5). He grants us His Spirit, enabling us to “put to death the deeds of the body” (Romans 8:13), providing a way of escape from temptation (1 Corinthians 10:13) and producing in us Christlike character (Galatians 5:22-23). Yet we all fail; “If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us” (1 John 1:8).

The Day is coming after Jesus returns when He does away with sin forever. We will be like Him, seeing Him as He is (1 John 3:2). But until that Day, we will stumble and fall. However much we grow – and we should grow! – we will never be perfect as our heavenly Father.

c) Jesus fully displayed the character of God

Jesus said He came to fulfill the Law (Matthew 5:17) – and He did. He showed us what God is like: “Whoever has seen Me has seen the Father” (John 14:9). He loved God with all His heart, soul, mind, and strength every minute of every day. He loved every person He encountered as He loved Himself.

d) How then can we be like God? Though union with Jesus!

When we come to God by grace through faith in Jesus, God not only saves us from our sins, wiping out the negatives from our accounts; He also credits us with the righteousness of Jesus – in Him we become “the righteousness of God” (2 Corinthians 5:21). His active obedience to the entirety of the Law is credited to us.

 

Thus, the Ten Commandments do not constitute a law code for ancient Israel (in our contemporary sense of law code). Rather they are a revelation of the character of God, so that those in His family might know Him better and become like Him by His grace. And that happens only via Jesus.

So salvation is not primarily about saving us from hell – it is that, but also much more. Salvation is primarily about being in God’s family, credited with Jesus’ righteousness, transformed to become like Him – partially in this life, completely in the next.

(This devotion is based on the first half of a sermon on Exodus 20:1-3 preached May 9, 2010, “Having Been Saved By Grace, Do You Put God First?” The audio is available here. An earlier blog post covering some of the same material is here.)

At Last! The Psalms!

This Sunday we begin a multi-year sermon series on the book of Psalms. If our Lord is willing, over something like 75 sermons, we’ll cover the entire book from “Blessed is the man who does not walk in the counsel of the wicked” (Psalm 1:1) to “Let everything that has breath praise the Lord! Praise the Lord!” (Psalm 150:5). Most weeks, as on October 9, we’ll consider more than one psalm. We’ll also break up the series into groups of about 15 sermons, returning to Romans to complete that series after the first set of psalms, and interspersing other New Testament series with the remaining psalms.

Why the book of Psalms?

At one level, it’s about time to consider it! While we read Scripture from this book almost every Sunday, only a handful sermons at DGCC have taken any of the psalms as their text.

At another level, the book of Psalms fits well with where we are in our preaching. Both Fred and I have focused in the past several months on key doctrines of the faith – who is God, what is man? How are we not condemned before Him? Where is the world headed? The psalms help us to see and to live out what must follow from such doctrines – the emotions, the affections, the praise, the crying out – as we live life in a sinful, fallen world.

Furthermore, when you read the psalms – personally, in your family, or in corporate worship – you are linking yourself with followers of God over the last three thousand years. Over centuries and millennia, these psalms have expressed and shaped the affections and emotions of God’s people. We pray that God will do the same with us – that our prayers might be shaped by these psalms and our attitudes might become more consistent with biblical doctrine as we hear and speak and live out these psalms.

Let’s look at seven forms that this expressing and shaping of emotions takes (modified from Mark Dever’s similar list in The Message of the Old Testament):

Praise: We proclaim the greatness of our God to all peoples and, indeed, to all creation, citing who He has proclaimed Himself to be:

Oh sing to the LORD a new song; sing to the LORD, all the earth! 
Sing to the LORD, bless his name; tell of his salvation from day to day. 
Declare his glory among the nations, his marvelous works among all the peoples!  
For great is the LORD, and greatly to be praised; he is to be feared above all gods. 
For all the gods of the peoples are worthless idols, but the LORD made the heavens. 
Splendor and majesty are before him; strength and beauty are in his sanctuary. 
Ascribe to the LORD, O families of the peoples, ascribe to the LORD glory and strength!
Psalm 96:1-7

Remembering: We remind ourselves of God’s faithfulness to His covenant, especially as shown in the history of His people:

When the waters saw you, O God, when the waters saw you, they were afraid;
indeed, the deep trembled.
The clouds poured out water; the skies gave forth thunder;
your arrows flashed on every side.
The crash of your thunder was in the whirlwind; your lightnings lighted up the world;
the earth trembled and shook.
Your way was through the sea, your path through the great waters;
yet your footprints were unseen.
You led your people like a flock by the hand of Moses and Aaron.
Psalm 77:16-20

Thanksgiving: Giving thanks in the psalms is not private, between an individual and God. Rather, thanksgiving in the psalms is always a form of public praise. Whether the psalmist is thanking God for assisting him personally or for helping the people, the thanksgiving praises God for such acts:

Some were fools through their sinful ways, and because of their iniquities suffered affliction; 
they loathed any kind of food, and they drew near to the gates of death. 
Then they cried to the LORD in their trouble, and he delivered them from their distress. 
He sent out his word and healed them, and delivered them from their destruction. 
Let them thank the LORD for his steadfast love, for his wondrous works to the children of man! 
And let them offer sacrifices of thanksgiving, and tell of his deeds in songs of joy!
Psalm 107:17-22

Trust: Praising God for who He is, remembering His covenant love and faithful deeds, and thanking Him for His work on our behalf all serve to deepen our trust in Him. So the psalms call upon us to trust Him always, especially in the midst of trials and difficulties:

Now I know that the LORD saves his anointed;
he will answer him from his holy heaven with the saving might of his right hand. 
Some trust in chariots and some in horses, but we trust in the name of the LORD our God. 
They collapse and fall, but we rise and stand upright.
Psalm 20:6-8

Honest Lament:  Yet while we are in such trials and difficulties, God often seems distant and confusing. We cry out and don’t see an answer; we ask God to intervene, and don’t understand how He is at work. Many psalms reflect this confusion, this darkness; indeed, more than one-third of the psalms contain a lament. One author says there is so much lament in the psalms to “show that the experience of anguish and puzzlement in the life of faith is not a sign of deficient faith, something to be outgrown or put behind one, but rather is intrinsic to the very nature of faith” (R.W.L. Moberly, as quoted by B Waltke et al, The Psalms as Christian Lament, p. 1). Often these laments sound similar to Job’s cries:

O LORD, why do you cast my soul away? Why do you hide your face from me? 
Afflicted and close to death from my youth up, I suffer your terrors; I am helpless. 
Your wrath has swept over me; your dreadful assaults destroy me. 
They surround me like a flood all day long; they close in on me together. 
You have caused my beloved and my friend to shun me; my companions have become darkness.
Psalm 88:14-18

Love for and Obedience to God’s Law:  We delight in God’s revelation of His character in His Law, and strive to follow it by His grace, knowing that in following Him we find true life, true joy.

Oh how I love your law! It is my meditation all the day. 
Your commandment makes me wiser than my enemies, for it is ever with me. 
I have more understanding than all my teachers, for your testimonies are my meditation. 
I understand more than the aged, for I keep your precepts.
I hold back my feet from every evil way, in order to keep your word. 
I do not turn aside from your rules, for you have taught me. 
How sweet are your words to my taste, sweeter than honey to my mouth! 
Through your precepts I get understanding; therefore I hate every false way.
Psalm 119:97-104

Repentance: Though we love His Law and strive to follow it, we often fall short. So we turn from our sin, confessing that God rightly condemns us and seeking forgiveness by His grace and mercy.

Have mercy on me, O God, according to your steadfast love;
according to your abundant mercy blot out my transgressions. 
Wash me thoroughly from my iniquity, and cleanse me from my sin! 
For I know my transgressions, and my sin is ever before me. 
Against you, you only, have I sinned and done what is evil in your sight,
so that you may be justified in your words and blameless in your judgment.
Psalm 51:1-4

May God be pleased to express and shape our affections and emotions through this great book, and so continue to transform us into His people who live to His glory among all the nations.

 

God’s Law and Life in His Family

Those of you following the Bible Unity Reading Plan read the Ten Commandments this last week. How is that Law relevant for us today?  Why did God give the Ten Commandments to the people of Israel? Did God give these commandments so that the people could enter into a relationship with Him by keeping them?

How can we answer questions like this?

We must look at the context of the commandments:

  • Including the immediate context of the passage,
  • Including the context of the storyline of the book of Exodus,
  • Including the context of the overall storyline of the Bible,
  • Including what the New Testament has to say about these commandments.

Consider first the immediate context and the storyline of Exodus. The people of Israel were slaves in Egypt. While they were still slaves, God said, “Israel is my firstborn son” (Exodus 4:22).  Not after they kept the Law. Before they even received the Law, Israel was in the family of God. (more…)