Law II: Ten Commandments

 Does your house have a "no playing football in the house" rule? If it does  how did you come to have that rule? More often than not, it's because someone was playing football in the house and something broke. How does God create laws? Surely He knows all things and makes them according to His personality and to His knowledge, but from our perspective He can also make laws that remind us of the past and our interaction with Him. This is certainly true of the most famous of the Old Testament laws: The Ten Commandments.
 First let's consider the first commandment: Have no other Gods before Him. This should immediately bring up thoughts of the creation narrative. In Genesis 1 we don't see any interaction with other gods, we only see the assumed nature that there is only one God. We also see that we aren't to have any idols for number 2. In Genesis 3 we see Eve and Adam make an idol out of themselves by trying to become gods themselves through the forbidden fruit. Paul tells us that greed amounts to idolatry, that certainly would be true of Adam and Eve.
 Next we seek that we shouldn't take the Lord's name in vain. Hopefully this brings to notion our relationship with God. We should know who God is, but also know Him personally. You cannot take His name in vain if you don't know Him. You might know the President of the United States, or you might just know who they are. This was broken when Adam & Eve ate the fruit, betraying God, whom they knew. The Sabbath should be plainly obvious being drawn from Genesis 1. Just as God rested we are to rest.
 Honor our parents should be obviously from both Adam and Eve's rebellion against their Father in Heaven. The next few, do not murder, commit adultery, or bear false witness are also seen in this part of Genesis. Murder is brought about through the eating of the fruit, and thus death entered the world. Adultery shows purity which was lost when Adam and Eve realized they were naked and then bore false witness to God by hiding and then casting the blame one after the other from Adam to Eve to the Serpent.

 Finally, the idea of coveting comes from Eve's looking upon the forbidden fruit. The serpent tempted her and she coveted being like God. So she coveted the fruit as it was desirious to the eyes, looked delicious to eat, and was boasted to give her wisdom.

 Hopefully this has shown that the 10 Commandments weren't arbitrarily formed, but rather God, through His wisdom ordained them based upon past human failures to show us His excellence, His standards, our shortcomings, but also God's foreknowledge and over-arching plan. May this encourage us to strive continually to be like Jesus, and have peace knowing that God is in control whether we succeed or fail.

Introduction to the Law

​When people think of God what attributes come to mind: omniscience, omnipresence, mercy, or wrath? Do people relegate some attributes to the Old Testament God rather than the New Testament? We Christians know that God is the same and does not change (the immutable attribute), but sometimes we fall into a worldly pitfall and think of God differently in Leviticus than we do in Romans. In order to understand the law and all its intricacies, we must first understand why we need a law in the first place. As with everything else, our reasons begin in Genesis. 

​In Genesis 1 we see the order in which God created all things. We see His omniscience when He names things like “Day” and “Night”, but we also see Him not name things like the stars and the planetary bodies. This is not a glaring oversight, but it is to show His sovereignty. False gods in the middle-east would name the stars or perhaps the stars would be gods themselves, according to their respective tradition. In Judaism and Christianity, outer space (also known as the second heaven) is considered almost unimportant, except to show the power and infinite nature of God. Everything of significance occurs upon either earth or Heaven (the third Heaven, where God is). 

​We also see in Genesis the fall of Adam and Eve. They were tempted by the serpent and gave in. First of all they gave in because they didn’t know the scriptures, but also because of their covetous desire. It was in their fall that sin entered the world, thus ensuring the need for a law. At their time they had only one law: do not eat from the tree of knowledge of good and evil. The fact that this law was broken illuminates why every other law was broken from this time forward. 

​As we begin our study of the law it is important to keep these two things in mind, first that God is the same today as He was when He gave the law to Moses. Also that our salvation is contingent upon Messiah always and that keeping the law either during the time of the Old Testament or today will not assure you of salvation, only grace through faith in Jesus. Second, that we all fell in creation and that the law will be predicated upon the assumption of our knowledge of this. Job had no knowledge of Genesis, we however, do. Let’s use this knowledge to interpret the law through a historic and Biblical lens, to better understand what it meant for Old Testament believers and modern ones.