Beyond the 10 commandments
Sunday April 2nd, Jeremiah 31: 31 "The time is coming," declares the LORD, "when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and with the house of Judah. 32 It will not be like the covenant I made with their forefathers when I took them by the hand to lead them out of Egypt. As children grow in years, parents change the way they deal with them. The household rules for a 10 year old are much different than for a 3 year old. The Lord took the children of Israel by the hand and gave them a covenant at Sinai, the covenant we call the Ten Commandments. It was a good set of external rules for where the children were in life. Now that they no longer need to be lead by the hand, now that they have grown up a bit, it is time for a new set of rules. The reason we as a society hang on to the Ten Commandments so tightly is that it is easier to control with external rules than with love. God calls us to a higher calling.
posted by Dan at 2:05 PM
2 Comments:
Interesting analogy. Obviously, God has made different covenants with different people throught history, depending upon their location, their culture, and their capacity to obey.
However, I find the traditional Ten Commandments to be quite useful today. For example, if you don't commit adultery, you get to keep your wife. If people don't steal, you get to keep what you own. And if you obey the last commandment, "Thou shalt not covet", you automatically obey a number of others, because most breaches of the commandments are triggered by covetousness, meaning you want something that belongs to someone else. These commandments are actually designed to simplify our lives, and if people would voluntarily obey them, we could spend less money on war and more money on peace.
One final note: Jesus said "Think not that I have come to destroy the law, but to fulfill it." To me, this means that His sacrifice, being the ultimate sacrifice, obviated the need to continue animal sacrifices, which were implemented by the Israelis as a teaching device to constantly remind them of the Ultimate Sacrifice at Calvary to come. However, His response to the repentant adulteress indicates he still considered the Ten Commandments valid. He told the adulteress "Go thy way and sin no more", the last three words indicating that He still considered adultery a sin.
I think that rather than God making different covenants with different people, God has made the same covenant in different ways. It boils down to the way Jesus answered the question, “what is the greatest commandment?” His answer to love God and love others is the covenant God has made. The rest is window dressing. I am not saying that the Ten Commandments are not useful but in reality they serve one purpose, to convict us of sin and drive us to the foot of the cross where we find Christ. The trouble with using the Ten Commandments as a guide for life, as you state in your example of keeping your wife, is the misunderstanding that we can really follow them. It is a smokescreen of course and only allows us to use this smokescreen to judge others. It is the difference between keeping your wife because you don’t commit adultery (unless you look at how Jesus radicalized the law on the sermon on the mount and I dare say you and I have most likely looked at another in lust, as the only alternative is being dead) and having a loving relationship with your spouse that is so deep and true that you could not imagine acting on some of those fantasies. Writing the law on the hearts is moving beyond the external control to a state where love of God and love of one another is the guiding force and the purpose and the wisdom of the Ten Commandments is fulfilled more deeply and more completely than could ever be accomplished with external rules.
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