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Chapter 1
God’s Ten
Commandments
Become Good News!
“You
shall have no other gods before Me.”
—Exodus 20:3
Careful scholars who have studied the Bible with a depth of insight
have made a fantastic discovery.
Rightly understood, the famous Ten Commandments (“Don’t do this!”
or “Don’t do that!”) which people have long thought spoil our fun,
turn out to be ten categories of Good News if we understand why God gave
them. This discovery is lifting heavy burdens from tired hearts all over
the world.
For example, when the commandment reads, “You shall not steal!”
what it actually says is that God will save you from ever stealing even
a shoelace! You’ll never have a problem, even if you’re alone in the
treasurer’s office with a million dollars on the desk. God will
save you from stealing.
And when it reads, “You shall not commit adultery!” what it
actually says is that God will save you from ever falling into that
deceptive pit, no matter how alluring a sexual temptation might be. “The
mouth of an immoral woman is a deep pit; he who is abhorred of the Lord
will fall there” (Proverbs 22:14). The misery you will escape is
enormous! The Ten Commandments become what most people have never
dreamed of: ten messages of miracles of joyous Good News. (We will study
them in depth, one by one).
This discovery of unexpected Good News is quite
recent.
It is the talked-about topic in some of the highest placed circles of
Bible scholars. As the Internet is a discovery that has revolutionized
modern electronic communications, so this discovery of Bible truth
revolutionizes the preaching of the gospel worldwide. People are waking
up as from a dream; the Ten Commandments have become Good News!
Now at last we can experience the freedom that the Bible has been
telling us but which seemed so difficult to understand: “Oh, how I love
Your law! [not many of us have ever felt that way!] It is my
meditation all the day [boring, we have thought!]. You, through Your
commandments, make me wiser than my enemies.… I have more
understanding than all my teachers.… I understand more than the
ancients.… How sweet are Your words to my taste, sweeter than honey to
my mouth! [this will be a miracle!] Through Your precepts I get
understanding; therefore I hate every false way” (Psalm 119:97-104).
Most people have never begun to discover this joy.
Even church goers have usually had a love/hate relationship with the
Ten Commandments. The law has seemed like a heavy burden, ten precepts
carved in cold stone, heavy prohibitions that crush out all the joy of
life. Everything that was fun doing seemed to be, “You shall not!”
The Ten Commandments seemed like roadblocks in the highway of happiness.
Yet deep in our human hearts we have realized that it’s wrong to
break them; suffering must be the result either in this life or in the
next. Yet we just couldn’t know how to keep them, let alone love them.
They seemed too hard.
Now comes this fantastic revelation:
They are actually ten assurances of victory. And what we have to do
is different than the “Do this or else!” rules we have thought them
to be: our job is to believe the Good News that God has embedded
in them. Then faith will work to produce a loving obedience.
First comes an astounding disclosure: probably we have been
misquoting the Ten Commandments, without realizing what we're doing.
Whoever taught them to us since we were kids usually has inadvertently
left out one verse that God put in at the very beginning before any of
the prohibitions. Leave it out and the ten indeed become Bad News, a “yoke
of bondage.” Many, even preachers and teachers, have not seen the
importance of that preamble verse. Even some who claim to specialize in
preaching “the commandments of God and the faith of Jesus” have not
seen it.
Here it is—the missing verse that belongs at the beginning of any
true version of the Ten Commandments:
“And God spoke all these words, saying: ‘I am the Lord your
God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of
bondage’” (Exodus 20:1, 2).
There are some dynamite-like truths implicit here that can shake the
earth:
First, God tells us what His true name is: “The
Lord.”
In Hebrew that is Jehovah, or Yahweh, a name that has something very
special built in to it. It denotes God in His unique relation to fallen
mankind. The name of Jesus in Hebrew means, “Jehovah saves.”
Thus God is telling us who He is—“the Savior of the world” (John
4:42). In other words, before we even hear the Law itself, He impresses
us with gospel Good News. He is not saying, “I am your Judge; your
severe taskmaster, your Lawgiver who will punish you for any infraction
you do!” A thousand times, No! He tells us, “I am your Savior.
I am your Friend. I am on your side. Here is something good
for you!”
Second, this neglected verse tells us
that He is everybody’s God, “I am the Lord your God.”
The “you” is you, right where you are. You may say, “Sorry,
I have never worshipped Him. I am a pagan, or an atheist, or a bad
sinner. I don’t deserve Him to be the Lord my God, or to have Him tell
me any Good News, any more than if He told me I have a million dollars
in the bank.” Well, He says to you, “I am … your God. I
belong to you, even though you have never known Me, and even though you
have acted as My enemy. I am ‘the God of all flesh,’ and when people
crucified Me, I prayed, ‘Father, forgive them, for they do not know
what they do.’” That prayer of His included you. He forgave you
before you asked Him.
Before God even spoke the first commandment of His law, He preached
the gospel in those preamble words, “I brought you out of the house of
bondage.” When Jesus taught us to pray, “Our Father which art in
heaven,” He meant for all of us, no matter how bad, to think of His
Father as our Father. Here is special Good News: Pray that
prayer from your heart, and your life will be changed.
Third, in His preamble God tells us that we don’t
belong in spiritual Egypt.
That’s true even though we were all “born” there. The land of
darkness is not our real home. He speaks in the past tense: “I brought
you out of the land of Egypt.” I have already delivered you; you are
like a prisoner huddled in your jail cell not knowing the doors have
been opened. The message says, “O Lord, truly I am Your servant; I am
Your servant, the son of Your maidservant; You have loosed my bonds”
(Psalm 116:16). Know this, and believe it, before you start worrying
with do’s and don’ts.
Fourth, God has already delivered you “out
of the house of bondage.”
Just as He chose Israel to be His “child,” so in Christ He has
already chosen you. (Israel never truly were “slaves” in Egypt. The
Egyptians made them think they were slaves, and they
believed it, and thus they served mistakenly as slaves, but all
the while they were a free people waiting for Moses to tell them the
truth, “Leave! Get out — to freedom in your own land”).
What the world is waiting to hear is the full truth of God’s past
message of freedom. The Father sent His Son with an express mission: save
the world! Just before He was crucified, He prayed to His Father,
“I have finished the work which You have given Me to do” (John
17:4). How could He say that if He had failed to save the world?
The Samaritans were the first to believe the truth, for they
confessed that He is “the Savior of the world” (John 4:42). John
said that His sacrifice is a propitiation for the sins of “the whole
world” (1 John 2:2). Paul said He is already “the Savior of all men”
(1 Timothy 4:10), and that He has already brought salvation “to all
men” (Titus 2:11). He died the final death, “the second death,”
“for everyone” (Revelation 2:11; Hebrews 2:9). All of that includes
you!
Fifth, such Good News is true because the Son of
God became incarnate.
It’s very simple. Just as our first parent, Adam, the head of the
human race, brought “condemnation” upon “all men,” so now our
second Adam, Christ, has brought a “judicial … verdict of acquittal”
upon all men (Romans 5:15-18, NEB; all responsible translations say
virtually the same). That doesn’t mean that “all men” will
automatically go to heaven; it means simply that when Christ died on His
cross, He died for “all men,” and unless they disbelieve and throw
away the salvation God has already given them “in Christ,”
they will be saved eternally. The life we already enjoy is a gift from
Him, and He has always intended that it should be the beginning also of
eternal life.
When God named Adam, He gave the same name to the entire human race.
Not one soul on earth was born on the planet Mars. We are all by nature
“in Adam.” But the Father sent His Son into the world to become our
new Adam, to fire the first Adam and take his place. God cannot disown
His own Son! Therefore it follows that He has adopted the entire human
race “in Christ.”
It’s like Jesus brings us home with Him to dinner, and the Father
says, “Fine, bring them all in; I adopt them all.” We see this from
the story of Jesus’ baptism. When He was baptized in the River Jordan,
a voice was heard saying, “This is My beloved Son, in whom I am well
pleased” (Matthew 3:17). That same Voice embraced you at the
same time! All this is included in God’s preamble to the Ten
Commandments. It’s past tense! I brought you out of the house of
bondage. Perhaps you have been in “Egypt” all your life and didn’t
know your true freedom in Christ!
The first commandment seems to many to be the
hardest to obey!
It says, “You shall have no other gods before Me” (Exodus 20:3).
But now let’s see how it becomes Good News:
“Other gods before” the Lord can be anything (or anybody!) that
captures our heart’s devotion in place of devotion to Him. We may
smile at the ancient Israelites’ constant temptation to worship those
silly, grotesque “idols” of wood or stone, or even of gold or
silver. How could they be so dumb?
The problem was that they imagined that those useless things could
substitute for God and bring them happiness, so in their minds the idols
assumed an aura of “sacredness.” Isaiah describes how foolish they
were: “The workman molds an image, the goldsmith overspreads it with
gold, and the silversmith casts silver chains.” “He burns half of it
in the fire; … he even warms himself, … and the rest of it he makes
into a god, … He falls down before it and worships it, prays to it and
says, ‘Deliver me!’” (Isaiah 40:19; 44:16, 17). How silly!
But we imagine that our modern “gods” can substitute for God.
They will make us happy: a new Rolls Royce; a new dress; a new
house; a million (better now a billion) dollars in the bank; some woman
or some man whom the Lord has not given us (“can’t live without
him/her!”); major sports; a selfish career. There’s no end to our
“gods.” Everybody has his/her particular temptation of “other gods
before Me.”
But all idolatry leaves us feeling bitter and cheated, because like
ancient Israel’s handmade idols, each “god” turns to ashes in our
hands.
“But the allurement is so intense! How
can we overcome our infatuation?”
Here’s the Good News: when we understand and believe the inspired
preamble to the Ten Commandments, when we appreciate what the Son of God
has done for us, all this modern idolatry loses its charm. It’s
not the gold or silver or wooden crosses in churches that captivate our
souls; it’s the understanding of the love of Christ that is revealed
at His cross. In the light of that cross of Christ, our beloved
“idol” turns into “ashes” even before we worship it! All the
glitter that once attracted us has lost its sheen and we actually begin
to “glory in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by whom the world has
been crucified to me, and I unto the world” (Galatians 6:14).
You may just now be wrestling with some almost overmastering
temptation to put some thing you don’t really need, or some person
outside your marriage, to be an idol, the object of your heart’s
devotion in place of your true Savior.
- Before you are tempted to sacrifice your soul, God shows you a
glimpse of how wonderful Heaven is.
- Before you snatch at some earthly riches, He reveals to you the
true wealth of His salvation “in Christ.”
- Before you worship some earthly “idol,” He shows you how
precious is His eternal friendship.
- Before you seek fulfillment in some forbidden infatuation, He
shows you the eternal preciousness of true love.
- Before you are dazzled by the “glory” of Times Square
lights, He shows you a glimpse of the eternal glory of the cross
of Jesus!
All this is in that blessed preamble: “I am the your God, who
brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage.”
How can we be so stupid as to let anything in spiritual “Egypt”
confuse and bewilder us?
Moses was a man in Egypt and also a
tempted man of Egypt.
But he overcame the allurement! Hebrews 11:24-26 tells how the Good
News in that precious preamble saved him from getting enmeshed in the
temptations of a slave-pit idolatry: “By faith Moses, when he became
of age, refused to be called the son of Pharaoh’s daughter [he turned
away from a selfish career], choosing rather to suffer affliction with
the people of God than to enjoy the passing pleasures of sin, esteeming
the reproach of Christ greater riches than the treasures in Egypt; for
he looked to the reward.”
The Bible tells us that Moses was given a special resurrection, and
is now in heaven (Jude 9). Think where he would be today if he had not
taken up the cross of Jesus and “looked to the reward”! You and I
would pay a few coins to see his moldering mummy in some Cairo museum
along with the “great” Pharaohs he so wisely said “Goodbye!” to.
God never asks us to give up something unless first
of all He shows us how precious is the Gift He has already given
us! Maybe we can say it this way: He never asks us to give up a silly
stuffed doll until He shows us a precious live baby in our arms. He
never asks us to give up a plastic toy car until first He shows us He
has already given us a genuine new “Lexus.”
He never asks you to turn your back on Satan’s clever counterfeits
until first of all He shows you how precious Christ is as your Savior.
Inheriting the wealth of the universe “in Christ” for all
eternity — this is why you cannot place any other “gods”
before the Lord when you believe the truth of the gospel. It’s
not a works trip. It’s a faith trip. Faith is like dynamite; it’s
powerful, it “works.” It saves you before you sin! It saves
you from sin!
One great little nugget of truth
is in Galatians 5:16, 17.
If you let the Holy Spirit hold you by the hand as
you choose to walk with Him, you “do not [you cannot] do the [evil]
things” that otherwise your sinful nature would want you to do! |
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