The Top Ten

      The people of Israel are in the desert at Sinai.  God has led them through His servant Moses from long, bitter slavery in Egypt .  They have come through the Red Sea and endured the first dangers of the desert.  Egypt was never like this.  They are now emergency-oriented.  They are bound to each other by shared danger.

      The question for them as they stand at Mt. Sinai is, "now what?" They have been through the danger.  To this point, they have been carried along on waves of adrenaline.  But how are they going to live together after the revolution?  What is going to bind them to each other and shape their life?

       "God is a life preserver for the one who is drowning" wrote Joy Davidman, the wife of C.S. Lewis. "But you can't drown all the time.  Sooner or later, you need to start merely living.  How do you live?"

         The answer God gives for His people at Sinai is the commandments.  These commandments form the minimal foundation God sees as necessary for a people to live together --whether they are the people of Israel in 1280 B.C. or the people of the United States of America in 2007 A.D.

        This is not popular teaching in our nation today.  In some schools it is not permitted to post the Ten Commandments on the wall because it seems to suggest that there is one preferred form of religion or even that there is such a thing as moral absolutes.  I read of one court that removed the Ten Commandments from the wall at the request of a defense attorney who argued that statements like "you shall not kill" and "you shall not steal" would inflame the jury against his client.

       It has been many years since I have preached on the Ten Commandments.  I'm not sure why.  Perhaps I have assumed that we already know what the commandments say or else that we don't need them.  This is because the commandments are, by their nature, minimum requirements for healthy relationships.  And as Christians, we need to focus on something much greater than minimums.  As a believer, it isn't enough for me not to kill you.  I am called to love you.  As a disciple, it is not enough for you to refrain from telling lies about me.  For the New Testament says that even the truth you tell has to be spoken in love and for my growth.  Jesus said that if we "love the Lord our God with all our heart, soul, mind and strength, and if we love our neighbor as ourselves that we have fulfilled the law.  In love we have already covered the commandments.  The Apostle Paul wrote "Love one another and thus fulfill the law of Christ." 

       The trouble is that our minds are not capable of understanding everything that God means by love.  We pride ourselves on being rational beings but we are also rationalizing beings -- capable of deciding what we are going to do and then finding an excuse for doing it in the name of love.  In the early '60s the Crystals recorded a Carol King song which has since been re-recorded by Courtney Love.  The song is titled, "He Hit Me And It Felt Like A Kiss."  This is the song of a girl who is smacked around by her boyfriend for looking at another guy.  To her, being hit showed how much he cares. 

       That is the awesome power and trap of rationalization.  We can excuse our own behavior and the behavior of others by calling it love. So we require further definition -- further guidance as to what love actually looks like -- at least at a minimum -- in specific situations.

     Take a look at the Ten Commandments.  The first four commandments tell us what it really looks like to love God.  If we really love God, we will not put other gods before Him.  We will not worship idols.  We will not profane His name.  We will follow the rhythm He gives us for life.  The last six commandments give us some definition of what it really looks like to love our neighbor.  If I love you I will not murder you or your good name.  I will not steal from you or even desire what you have.

     Without this definition, I could steal from you and label it love. I'm that clever.  I could convince myself that you are overly dependant for ego support on that shiny new barbeque and that the most loving thing I could do for you would be to liberate you from your unhealthy briquette addiction. I could certainly commit adultery and call it love.  I could even kill you and call it love.  I would be liberating you from you obviously miserable existence.  This means that I need that hard, minimum definition: "you shall not kill, you shall not steal, you shall not commit adultery."

       We need the law as individuals -- for definition if for nothing else.  But on this July 4th weekend, it is fitting also for us to give thanks for another event that took place on Mt. Sinai -- the fact that Moses is not only the carrier of the law but that he is also a receiver of the law.

      In the United States of America we live under a system of government that was created by people who knew their Bibles.  Our nation was founded by people who, as thinking, informed Christians, had a hearty distrust of human nature left on its own.  It was not a distrust of only the worst people in society.  It was also a distrust of the best people in society.  In looking at the relationship of human leaders to the people, they looked to this event on Mt. Sinai as a model for what is called the "Lex Res" -- the rule of law.  Lex Res means that we don't depend on our leaders to tell us what is right and wrong.  We depend on the law -- a law to which our leaders also stand accountable.

      For the only alternative to the rule of law in human society is the rule of individual people.  And in the rule of people, power is the key. There is no protection for the one on the bottom.  Either a street gang or the secret police can terrorize a city.  One's anarchy.  The other's totalitarian.  But the effect is the same because both come out of human whim and power.

      In giving the Ten Commandments, God intervenes with another option.  Moses goes up Mt. Sinai as the absolute leader of his people. But on Mt Sinai, God not only puts the people under the law.  He also puts their leaders under the law.  By making His will public, God establishes the essential equality of every human being.  Moses isn't the only one with the law.  Everyone has the law.  Everyone can read it.  So Moses can't make it up as he goes along to suit his own purposes -- "oh, yeah, I forgot to tell you before.  Commandment twenty two is "thou shalt not give Moses grief."  A system of checks and balances is created.  In giving the law God not only protects His people from a criminal underclass.  He also protects them from a criminal overclass. We are founded as a nation not only on the words of the Ten Commandments but also on the fact that they apply to everyone.

       There is no "divine right of kings" in Israel where the king can do what he wants and no one can call him on it.  When David commits adultery with Bathsheba and has her husband murdered, he's not above the law.  The prophet Nathan confronts David, "you are the man."  No one could have said that to Hitler or Stalin.  But David is under the law. 

       He’s not exempt.  That's what the rule of law means.  That's a gift God gives us at Sinai.  In Clear and Present Danger Harrison Ford can march into the office of the President of the United States and say "how dare you sir!"  The rule of law is a great gifts God has given us. 

       The law can't save us.  As we recognize in the Lord’s Table, only the cross can save us.  But the law at least establishes those minimum requirements we need if we are to function as a healthy human society.  We have a hard time in this nation with absolutes.  They make us uncomfortable. But the fact remains that God has given us Ten Commandments -- not ten suggestions but Ten Commandments.  We can no more repeal God's commandments by getting together and voting them invalid than we can repeal the law of gravity.  We don't break the law of God as individuals or as a people without the law eventually breaking us.  We may do fine for awhile.  We may seem to get away with it.  But we're like the guy who jumped off the Empire State Building and was heard to say as he passed the 40th floor, "so far, so good." Eventually it will catch up with us.

      So as we prepare to come to the Lord's Table in gratitude for all of God's gifts -- and especially for the gift of true liberty we have in Jesus -- let us also come in prayer for our nation -- in thankfulness for what our nation is when it remembers God, in repentance for what we so easily become when we turn our backs on God, and in hope that we may yet achieve the liberty in law which was the vision of those Godly people who came here before us.