The Ten Commandments As A Way Of Love

Freedom sounds simple until you actually have it. The wilderness is where you learn what still owns you, what you keep reaching for, and what kind of community you’re becoming while you figure it out. That’s why the Ten Commandments arrive when they do in Exodus: not as random religious rules, but as guidance for newly freed people learning how to live without Pharaoh in their head.

We walk through the Exodus journey we’ve been tracing during Lent and zoom in on the commandments as both personal and communal formation. We explore why the list is structured in two directions, trust toward God and responsibility toward neighbour, and how Jesus later condenses the whole thing into love God and love neighbour. Along the way, we share a handful of biblical insights that open up the text: the commandments as the beginning of a much larger set of laws, the idea that grace comes before law, what it means that early Israel’s faith wasn’t always “monotheism” as we imagine it, and why Scripture preserves two versions of the commandments in Exodus and Deuteronomy.

Then we bring it home to everyday life. Most of us know the feeling of trying to give something up and discovering it has more control than we thought. Whether it’s food, a habit, a reaction, or an old pattern that keeps pulling us back, Exodus gives us language for that struggle and a way forward. The goal isn’t behaviour management; it’s learning a better way that makes God’s love real to the people around us and, just as importantly, real inside our own hearts. If this conversation helps you, subscribe, share the episode with a friend, and leave a review so more listeners can find it.

Transcript

Lent Journey Through Exodus

Pastor Darren 0:00

So we have been on our own journey. An Exodus of sorts. An Exodus through Exodus.

unknown 0:12

Wow.

Ten Commandments As Community Guide

Insights On Law And History

Pastor Darren 0:13

Okay. Just so you know, up here, I'm treating laughs and groans equally. If I can get either one, I mean it's worked. So, quick update as we've journeyed through Lent here and through Exodus, week one, we're talking about being that baby on the river and kind of uh uh moving through life with all the different influence that life offers. Then we talked about God coming to us in this burning bush with uh a something better, a better way to live life. Then we make our commitment in faith, right? The blood on the door, and God delivers us. Uh then the journey itself gets kind of difficult as we realize that uh that enslavement, or the Israelites realized that enslavement from back then at least came with some stability. Now they're wandering, they're eating manna, they're eating quail. Finally, God provides in a different way for this community of people that are adrift, right? They're wandering through the wilderness. God offers them these ten commandments for them to follow. So if you're reading through them, you'll probably notice these aren't just individual instructions or guidelines or even commandments. These are communal guidelines as well, right? They're for us as individuals, but they're also for us as a community. It's not just about how we're going to live, but it's also how are we going to live together, right? So we can tell this kind of by the nature of the list. The first five are kind of me and God. How are we going to live together, me and God? How am I going to live and trust God? And then the last five are a little more social. Social and communal, me and everyone. For me, I use this cross kind of metaphor to kind of keep me in that mode and in that mindset. So um, so why don't we take this litmus test here? This little uh uh set of uh guidelines, these commandments. How many have uh broken some of them just today? Right? Right this last week, you know, have you wrestled with some of these? The last one to me might be the hardest, that coveting. You know, it's one thing to be able to stop my behaviors, the things I say. It's another thing to be in my head and stop me from from coveting things. Sometimes I think it might be an easier test if we went the other way. I mean, how many of you got five out of ten just this week? Right? That's commitment in its own way, too. You've got to dedicate time, you gotta be organized. That's a lot to get done, is what I'm saying to you. So a little bit of breakdown, some of the exegesis, the deconstruction of the passage. This is stuff I get largely from Pete Enns, who's uh part of uh the Bible for Normal People, a website you might enjoy, and a podcast that me and Stephen actually enjoy a lot. Uh, I got about five points, I think, worth uh worth pointing to. How many are engineers? Right? Okay, five. So get your pencils out. You can list all five. You're welcome. All right. First of all, this is just the beginning of things as concerns laws. The Pentateuch, right? The first five books of our Bible are really full of laws. It's laws and then it's narrative. Laws and narrative. 613 laws that are part of that Pentateuch. And you'll see that it's really one large story of the laws being given and us kind of wrestling with them, and then God responding with new laws to help us with and just to grow together. And part of the ultimate goal of all of this is that we might live our lives in a way that point to God and who God is. We follow these laws, and then people come to understand the loving God that we follow. So, a second point of deconstruction, these laws or the Ten Commandments, as written, they really are kind of a response to their deliverance, right? God, God came and delivered them, and now it's your job to follow God's laws. God came through, now we need to come through. I wanted to point that out just because that's slightly different than the understanding that I've been working on with this theme. To me, I it's more of an understanding of God coming to us, promising us a new way, and not really quid pro quo, but more us just saying, Yes, I want that better way. I want that life. So just a little bit different experience of God and different theology. Another one, and here's some good fun Bible words for you. The early Israelites, they were not monotheists. Ah, you thought you thought they were, didn't you? You're like, oh yeah, those early Israelites, of course they were monotheists. Anybody even had that thought in their life yet? No, monotheists, we tend to think that Judeo-Christian faith has always been this monotheistic faith, meaning there's one God, right? And we worship the one God. Well, we can tell from these commandments that they weren't monotheists, they were actually monologists. Did I say it wrong?

Steve Langberg 6:27

Monologers.

Pastor Darren 6:28

Monologers.

Steve Langberg 6:29

Monolatrists.

What Enslaves Us Today

Jesus Summarizes Law As Love

Making God Real By Living Love

Pastor Darren 6:31

Monolatrists. Oh, see, this is why I'm glad Stephen walks with us here. He keeps me. I can run a church, but he knows the Bible really, really well. This is what I'll say. So, in any, those are people who understand that there's multiple gods, they just believe the God of the Israelites is the best God, the strongest God, the God that was able to free them from their enslavement. So, uh a bit kind of interesting for a lot of people who study this kind of thing. Um, also, we should be careful when we start talking about comparing Old Testament and New Testament, Old Testament being about law, New Testament being about grace, you know, and the mindset of the New Testament fixes the Old Testament or evolves into, right? And we kind of minimize our Old Testament. We should remember that grace came before the law, right? God delivered the Israelites, an act of grace for the Israelites, before the law comes. So grace has always been a part of the faith. It's not something that comes along with just with Christianity. Finally, number five, engineers, I got to my fifth one. There are two versions of these commandments. It suggests that there were two different communities of faith that were tracking these and keeping these. And when it came time to put it all together into one Bible, they decided to keep both. And if you're interested in digging in, uh, the commandments themselves are pretty similar. It's actually how they uh describe the response and the reasoning for the commandments. It's a little bit different. You'll find that the the list from Deuteronomy, different than our list from Exodus, is a little more humanistic. Commandments were made for and out of love for the humans to be helping them as opposed to instruction, as it comes off in Exodus. So there, a little meat on the burger for you right there. Those of you who like to study this stuff. So, what are we going to make of it? How does this matter to us today? You know, I've been talking about this overarching understanding of Exodus, not just as a journey that's taken by this ancient people and this ancient land, but actually a journey to faith, as a metaphor for this journey to faith. And along that line, we're at this point on that journey to faith, where the people who were formerly enslaved had all of their lives dictated for them, now had to figure out how to live without that dictation, without those laws, without the guidance, without that oppression, they had to be taught how to live. So when we take that in a more metaphorical sense and bringing that sense of how am I on this journey to faith and deepening? How am I or was I enslaved to something, connected to something that uh I needed to move away from and needed instruction about to be able to get to that place? I know did any of us take uh the Lenten season a little more seriously and give up something that you liked maybe a little bit too much, or something that isn't so healthy for you? Did anybody go on that journey? Or maybe you left here on a Sunday morning recognizing that something kind of had hold of you, just a little bit more than you were comfortable with, hold in the way you'd rather God had that focus. And so you've tried to minimize it a little bit, right? You've tried to to get some of that control back, you've tried to get that focus back on God, only to find it wasn't that easy. It's not that easy to to let those things go behind. All right, Jane, I have to ask. Uh oh. I meant to ask you before. We had confession, me and her. Can I share your confession? Oh, thank you. This is why Jane's going to heaven. And it's why I'm not. So we had full confession, and Jane was telling me that her thing that draws her back, that thing that grabs at her, Big Mac double fries. Hey, amen. Amen. I go to that church every now and again myself. Right? Sometimes it's hard to give that up. And I use food a lot because I feel like that's accessible, right? You use a word like sin, and we're like, oh, here comes the Bible stuff. But when I start talking about, oh, have you ever tried to give something up? And food is just that easy one, because we've all got a little something. Just a little something. And if it isn't food or something in that range, it might even be something weightier, like an emotional thing, a personality thing, a weight you were trying to change to make yourself better, and you're trying to let something go, and you realize it is a lot harder to do than you might think. And we laugh at these silly Israelites who started to pine for their abusive master, the Pharaoh. And we have to ask ourselves, are we really that much better? Pining for whatever that thing is that we know is not right for us, and yet we're finding our way back to it. We're being drawn back to it. To me, uh there's uh a program called the Bible Project Video, and these are these are resources I pointed you at toward at the beginning of Lent, and it does a really good job of shaping a fuller understanding of what we think might be going on here. We learn from Scripture, in particular in Exodus, we follow the law to make God known to the world. Right? So we do those commandments and we live out this story of God giving us guidelines and us trying to follow the guidelines, and God continuing to grow with us as we stress and wrestle over these guidelines, that ultimately we're trying to express the God that we know so that others might see that God. Right? And for us as Christians, Christ is the fulfillment of that law. In fact, he even calls himself the fulfillment of that law. So, what what does that mean? Do you remember when he summarized the Ten Commandments? Some of you might have that on your mind. He brought it down to two. Some of you are gonna remember it. Love God, love neighbor. Do you remember this cross I was making earlier? Love God and love neighbor. It's kind of how our Ten Commandments are set up, right? Love God, the first half, love neighbor, the second half. I think this this is why it it helps me to remember that when I make the cross with it, he will remember that that the Ten Commandments mirrors that, that he's summarizing the Ten Commandments, but there's this addition of love. The love is significant, really significant. When we add this component of love to our commandments, there's a layer formed that goes a bit beyond just behavior. An example. To love somebody means I gotta go even past keeping myself from living out whatever anger that I might have. Jesus made God known by showing the love that God holds for us. A love so deep it included loving enemies. In other words, Jesus made God known to the world by loving the world. I think the invitation to us, the invitation for us today is that we're we're on this journey, right? We're taking this journey, and it's going through rivers, and it's going through burning bushes, and it's going through blood on the doors, and parting seas, and eating manna, and eating quail, finding some water, all with this promise and this hope of finding this better way that God is offering. And on this journey, God offers us a bunch of laws. You can see how it probably feels like. The difference is when we follow these laws and we make God known by following these laws, we also make God known to ourselves. When we live out these laws, when we leave out these guidelines, it not only becomes real to those who experience us on that journey, but it becomes real for us in our hearts. We're reminded of the value of that authority in our lives. So when we're struggling in all the ways that life offers challenge, part of our prayers every week, when we are struggling, we can remember that there was a time when God's love did win my heart, did win in my life, and not only that, but it was good. We made a point to look for God, and God was there, maybe not in the way we thought, maybe even hoped for, but God was there with us. And when we sit in our own wilderness trying to understand exactly how we are supposed to be moving, somewhat freed from our former gods and temptations, but still being tempted by those old masters by living these laws, by living these commandments, we give ourselves a glimpse of that better way. And the more glimpses that we get, the fuller the picture is, the fuller that life experience is. God becomes real for us when we live these commandments. Maybe Paul in our New Testament says it best in his letter to the Romans. This is chapter 13, verse 8, for the one who loves another has fulfilled the law. When we love another, we make God's love real for that person. But let's not forget we make it real for ourselves as well. Amen.