Ten Words to Live By: Delighting in and Doing What God Commands

Our patterns of work and rest reveal what we believe to be true about God and ourselves. God alone requires no limits on his activity. To rest is to acknowledge that we humans are limited by design. We are created for rest just as surely as we are created for labor. An inability or unwillingness to cease from our labors is a confession of unbelief, an admission that we view ourselves as creator and sustainer of our own universes (pp. 64-65).

Though Edison’s “Let there be light” may have ushered us into sleeplessness, the divine Creator who uttered “Let there be light” also benevolently and pointedly declares “Let there be rest.

Herein lies our forgetfulness. Rather than seeing the sin of lawlessness as the barrier to relationship with God, we have steadily grown to regard the law itself as the barrier. We have come to believe that rules prevent relationship.

While legalism builds self-righteousness, lawfulness builds righteousness. Obedience to the law is the means of sanctification for the believer.

Until that time of faith becoming sight, we strive to look like Christ. If there is to be whittling, let it be the whittling away of our sins of commission. If there is to be carving, let it be the carving out of our sins of omission. The Ten Words show us how to live on earth as in heaven, conforming to the image of Christ as representatives of Yahweh. They are engraving tools. The more we obey them, the more we reflect his character, visibly, to a world that very much needs us to.

But aggressions against the reputation of God are uttered in his name on a smaller scale on a regular basis. Has wise counsel questioned your plans? Just tell them that “God told you” this was the direction to take. Not interested in taking on a ministry opportunity? Just say you need to pray about it, and then a few days later say you sensed the Lord calling you in another direction. Need to add punch to your political view? Be sure to attach the word biblical to it in a way that implies all other positions are not. The sin of misattribution is the perfect smokescreen, presenting as piety and humility while masking pride and hypocrisy.

Jesus warned, “Take care, and be on your guard against all covetousness, for one’s life does not consist in the abundance of his possessions” (Luke 12:15). To live a life that consists in the abundance of possessions is inconsistent with abundant life.

What a mercy that God sees the end from the beginning. He engraves good boundaries for us even before we know we need them.

Is Jesus adding to the law by broadening our attention from murder to anger and contempt? By no means. He is pointing out the seedling that grows into the thorny vine that chokes out life. He is appealing to us to fastidiously weed the garden of our personal holiness. He is teaching that if every person dealt with anger quickly and rightly, there would be no need for the sixth word at all (p. 94).

Perhaps the most sinister aspect of covetousness is the way that it keeps our eyes fixed on the horizontal plane. When we reject the tenth word, we say, in effect, "I will cast down my eyes unto the dirt. From whence cometh my help? My help cometh from the world.

Stealing prays, "My kingdom come, my will be done." It turns to my neighbor and demands, "Give me this day my daily bread.

That deliverance entailed not just leaving behind the land of Egypt, but leaving behind the ways of Egypt. Each of the ten plagues was more than just a dramatic sign to Pharaoh that he must release the Hebrews. Each was a symbolic defeat of an Egyptian deity. Osiris, whose bloodstream was believed to be the Nile, bleeds out before his worshipers when Yahweh turns the Nile to blood. In reverence to Heqet, the frog-goddess of birth, Egyptians regarded frogs as sacred and not to be killed. Yahweh slays them by the thousands. Egyptian gods governing fertility, crops, livestock, and health are all shown to be impotent before the mighty outstretched arm of Israel’s God. In the ninth plague of darkness, Yahweh demonstrates his rule over the sun god Ra, whom Pharaoh was believed to embody. And in the final plague, the death of the firstborn, God shows himself supreme over the entire Egyptian pantheon by demonstrating his power over life and death.