By S.G. Dargan, March 19, 2006

 "God spake all these words saying, I am the Lord thy God,
which have brought thee out of the land of Egypt,
out of the house of bondage, thou shalt have no other gods before me." ¹

Today’s Old Testament reading, the giving of the Ten Commandments, has been considered, in New Testament as well as Old Testament times, a supremely important passage of Scripture. ²  For example, the old colonial era churches in Charleston typically have the Ten Commandments engraved on the wall near the altar. What is it about Exodus 20:1-17 that the Church through the ages has found important?

For one thing, the narrative here records a remarkable miracle. God spoke to the whole people audibly, and in a language they could understand. In other words, this was a theophany, when God, who is a spirit, made himself manifest to the senses of men. I was surprised when I realized this a few years ago, while reading the previous chapter, Exodus 19, with its solemn preparations for a great meeting between God and his people. The "audible" is confirmed by Exodus 20:19-20, 22, just after the Ten Commandments are given:

This is confirmed again in Deuteronomy 5:22, where Moses says, after recounting the Ten Commandments:

Of course, we are supposed to consider all Scripture inspired, but it seems especially important to look closely at the very words spoken in a theophany, and to get the translation right. "I am the Lord thy God…" The old form "thy" translates the second person singular of the Hebrew text. Our modern English says "your" for both singular and plural, so we might miss the personal implications of this phrase. God is addressing each person individually, and he is also addressing the whole group as a unity. Either way, he is speaking "one-on-one" to his people, and indeed, we are his people, both individually and communally.

"Thou shalt have no other gods before me." "Before me" implies a richer meaning than "but me." "Before me" includes the sense of "in my sight." This suggests that worship of another god is totally illusory. When we worship some other supposed god, the real God is sitting up there watching us, because there is no other real god.

"…which brought thee out of the land of Egypt…" God begins the Decalogue by reminding the people of the freedom he gave them by rescuing them from slavery. This certifies his authority, since they owed him their lives, but it also suggests that he is now leading them deeper into their new life, where they will find their freedom secured by submission to his sovereignty. The exodus from Egypt signified not just freedom, but life and well-being. The Egyptians had been squeezing the life out of the Israelites, by intentional overwork and by state-ordered infanticide. God had brought them out from the place of death; now he was going to show them the way of life.

It is significant that the Exodus drama began with a request to Pharaoh to let the people go into the desert to make sacrifices for the atonement of their sins. Thus, the history of the Exodus implies that freedom from sin and guilt is the goal, and the essence, of all the other freedoms. By recalling that history at the beginning of the Decalogue, God links freedom with the laws of atonement.

A Balanced Faith

Being creatures, we cannot see at a glance all the aspects of God’s relationship to us. Sometimes we contemplate his grace, and at other times we think on his law, but revelation tells us that the two are inseparable in God’s character. Over the ages, much damage has been done by believers trying to exalt one aspect of God, to the exclusion of other aspects. The Pharisees focused on their idea of the law and forgot about the grace and mercy shown in the sacrifices required by the very law they revered. In their unbalanced use of law, they lost a true understanding of the law. Jesus said of them:

In our day, many mainline churchmen have lost their balance in another direction, by using God’s love and mercy to obscure his law. They like to say that God would never judge us or demand that our behavior conform to his word. Some of our fellow Episcopalians affirm people in behaviors which are medically dangerous, in addition to being immoral according to God’s law. Thus, these champions of love have become unloving, just as the Pharisees became unlawful.

We often hear it said that God’s love for us in unconditional, but strictly speaking, it is conditioned by his law. Jesus died to pay the lawful penalty for our sins. In his life here, he obeyed the law, so that we could be counted law-abiding in him. In rising again and sending the Holy Spirit to us, he made us born again, so that deep down we want to be people who obey his law. In his letter to the Romans, Saint Paul said, "Do we then make void the law through faith? God forbid: yea, we establish the law." [Rom. 3:31] Jeremiah prophesied:

In his Summary of the Law, Christ speaks of loving God and loving our neighbors. That is the summary of the law, not a replacement for it. To understand the Summary, we need to know what it summarizes. The law teaches us how to love, and love teaches us how to obey the law. God’s law and his love are two aspects of the same reality. We need to balance our modern enthusiasm for God’s love with the Bible’s reverence for his law. That reverence is expressed eloquently in Psalm 19.