Delighting In The Ten Commandments

Derek Rishmawy and Alastair Roberts explore the Ten Commandments — their structure, their two tables, the bookending parallel between the first and tenth commandments, and how the law is always oriented toward delight rather than mere prohibition. The law shapes the Christian life, testifies to Christ, and reflects the character of God.

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Chapters

00:00 Exploring the Ten Commandments
04:48 The Structure and Order of the Commandments
08:35 The Heart of the Commandments: Internal Motivation
12:38 Positive and Negative Aspects of the Law
18:08 The Law as a Source of Delight
23:03 The Law in the Context of Freedom
29:51 Navigating Ethical Dilemmas in Ministry
32:10 Understanding the Nature of God's Law
36:07 The Role of the Ten Commandments
40:20 The Law as a Reflection of Christ
44:45 The Law and Holiness in Christian Life
46:50 Delighting in the Law of God

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

This episode is brought to you by Lexum Press, who publishes books that love the word, love the faith, and love the church. Lexum Press was recently acquired by Baker Publishing Group, and there will be more news to follow. Our March book of the month is Keeping Kids Christian, Recovering a Biblical Vision for Lifelong Discipleship by Cameron Schaefer. You can receive a 30% discount on this title and all previous books of the month by visiting BakerBookhouse.com, backslash pages, backslash Mere Fidelity. You can find that link in our show notes and get 30% off our book of the month from Lexum Press. My name is Derek Rishmaui, and I'll be your host for today. I'm also joined by cast and crew member uh Alistair Roberts. How are you doing, buddy? Doing very well. Good, good. I I forgot, are you in the UK or New York? Where are you right now?

SPEAKER_02 1:05

In the UK.

SPEAKER_01 1:06

Okay. Okay. So we'll pray for you. Um it's it's uh good that uh you're home. But uh we're we're not here to talk about the UK. We're here to talk about uh something else today. We're here to talk about the Ten Commandments. Uh we were trying to think about what to discuss today. And one of the things I I don't think we've actually ever just discussed the commandments straight out and wanted to kind of think a little bit about the place of the Ten Commandments in the Christian life, their shape, uh, their form, and and um kind of how we should approach them uh personally, individually, pastorally, preaching-wise, their use. Uh it's on my mind because I've been preaching through them with my students uh this year on campus at UCI. I'm I've kind of tried to do um, trying to do a catechesis year, went through the Apostles' Creed, one quarter, now I'm doing the Ten Commandments, and we'll hit some kind of spiritual disciplines or well, prayer, prayer life in the next quarter. But thinking about the shape of the Ten Commandments, how comprehensive they are, right, there they're these, it's kind of a, you know, it's a stark and spare little chapter, as it were, uh initially in in the first, in the first iteration of them, Exodus chapter 20, they get more expansive in Deuteronomy and then uh the presentation there, but then all of you know all of Deuteronomy is kind of an expansion of the commandments. Um but on on kind of the the the little um the little skeleton of those ten words, those ten commands, uh arguably you you could you can map out the whole of Christian, the whole of the Christian life and the whole of Christian ethics. Um they seem deceptively thin at first, uh some some very basic moral ABCs, but um but Christians have for centuries written commentary upon commentary, expansive, uh expansive um reflection on these. And so what we want to do is kind of wrestle with them a little bit today. And so, Alistair, I was wondering if you could just start us out with some kind of biblical theological and maybe structural reflections on the shape of the commands as we receive them, more especially in in Exodus 20, but you you can venture out if you want. So, Alistair, go to town.

SPEAKER_02 3:21

Yeah, so one of the basic um questions is how do we do order the commandments? There are different orderings. Protestants have generally followed the order of the first commandment being no other gods before the Lord, the second commandment, no graven images, the third commandment not to take the name of the Lord and bear the name of the Lord your God in vain, fourth commandment, the Sabbath, fifth commandment, um, the law concerning honoring father and mother, sixth is um the start of the second table of the law, and this is another question of the division, it's you shall not murder, and then all the way down to the final commandment being not coveting. Now, when we think about that ordering, it's one that has a certain pattern to it. As I said, there are two tables to the law, the summary of the law in terms of two great commandments that our Lord um presents, but also some of his interlocutors presents. So this is a more generally understood division of the law, using texts from concerning loving God from Deuteronomy chapter six and concerning loving neighbor from Leviticus chapter 19. These two divisions relate to the sort of vertical duties, our relationship to God and to his representatives, father and mother, and the more expansive authority figures represented in the fifth commandment, and then the ver the horizontal commitments to our neighbor. So murder, adultery, stealing, bearing false witness, and then coveting, all assaults of various degrees upon the other person. Now we can think about that ordering then in that bipartite character. We can also think about the way that there's a sort of progressive development. In terms of the first three commandments, there's the beginning in having a form of idolatry that supplants God with another God. Then there's the next form of idolatry, a more subtle form, where you make a graven image of the Lord and imagine him or present him in a way that is unfitting to who he is. And then the third, to bear the name of the Lord your God in vain, which most people take as cussing, but it seems to me to be more precisely referring to bearing the name of God in vain. God has placed his name upon his people. If they bear his name in a way that dishonours him, then they're causing the nations to blaspheme. Um and so that it's that more specific sense. Then you go through the second table of the law, for instance, and you see this movement from the direct assault upon the person in murdering, the assault upon the union of man and wife in adultery, the assault upon a man's uh person's property in stealing, it's another form of assault upon the person, the um bearing false witness, an assault upon a person's reputation, and then coveting, which is behind all of these things and which draws the attention to the inner complement to these external sins. Um and so, in some ways, reading back through the commandments in the light of the tenth commandment is illuminating. Now, some have argued for a different ordering of the commandments with the tenth commandment, Roman Catholics would divide that into two, joining the first two commandments together, or the first two commandments, as we'd understand it, and they'd present that final commandment as two parts. The problem is when you come to Deuteronomy, that means you've got 10, 9, 10 in the division of the commandments. So it doesn't make sense. So that's a rough description of the internal ordering of the commandments. We can say a lot more about how they get refracted elsewhere, but that would be a good place to start.

SPEAKER_01 7:08

No, yeah, that's good. Well that that whole the you know, the the two tables, the the various uh kind of expansions of the law um are important for the general structure. The other the one of the other structural parallels that I I think is really important is just thinking about the bookends, right? The first commandment and the and the last commandment uh parallel each other in in terms of you know the analysis of what it means to have any God before God, right? Making any, you know, making the the kind of the Lutheran read, the classic Luther's catechism read is, you know, what is it to have a God? It's you know, it's anything to which you you put your trust, your hope, your meaning, your value, you know, anything to which you place your salvation, which is to say what is most important in your life. Um that that is not when you start to read it that way, that that makes it go from a kind of formalized, what religion are you, right? Such that like, okay, well, if I'm not a Hindu, I'm not violating this command, if I'm not a Muslim, to the existential level of, okay, there's a lot of different ways to violate this command that have to do with the with you know being formally a Christian, but your heart is actually placing its hope in something else entirely. Coveting, coveting is the command that um that brings that out again in parallel in that it it talks about the motivation of your heart, the the deepest drives of your heart, the desires of your heart, um, that often what you covet is often, you know, small-scale idols, right? You you you've you've you've um you've made an idol of your romantic affection, you made an idol of idol of possessions, you made idol. And so you covet, you inordinately desire that which is not yours. And so um they they there's they they both bring to the fore, in a sense, uh desire, internal motivation, loyalty, love, highest loves, deepest loves, most internal loves. And they kind of uh cast a forward and backward light on the rest of the commandments. There's a way in which you can tell a story about every single commandment where um you know pe some people don't like this mood, but every single commandment is flows from having not properly kept the, you know, violation of every other commandment flows from not having properly kept, you know, the first commandment. And and you can also tell a story where every single uh violation of a commandment flows from not having kept the tenth commandment, as it were. Um, right? So you tell the story in the garden uh that way of coveting. This is kind of how Paul um starts to uh apply and and and use uh uh the tenth commandment in Romans chapter seven, right? So that parallel, that little bookend, um that little bookend of having no other gods before me and desiring God above all things so that you don't wrongly desire other things that are not yours, um, I think shape and frame uh the commands together as a unity. And they keep us from doing they keep us from doing a lot of things. One of one of the things that oftentimes problems with modern readers when it comes to the commandments is they they take a kind of like a hyper sorry, I don't want to bag on the Lutherans, but a hyper-Lutheran or a hyper-Christian read of the commands as, you know, Old Testament, New Testament, hey, we had in the past we had external commands, now it's all internal, so on and so forth. Um it's that r it's that read of the of the of the Sermon on the Mount. Back then it was about external obedience, now it's about internal obedience, and it's like, well, no, the Ten Commandment is not anything anybody can observe, right? You could be a perfectly well-behaved, externally, uh externally well-behaved person who doesn't violate anything publicly, and yet be full of covetousness, full of desires for that which is not yours. That's the one that tells you God's after the heart, God's been after the heart the whole time, right? It's never, you know, ain't Israelite religion was never a matter of mere externals, right? So um that those those two function that way in a fairly significant way.

SPEAKER_02 11:10

Aaron Powell It's also helpful to bear in mind that when Jesus' interlocutor sums up the commandments in terms of these two great commandments, they are commandments concerning the positive act of loving. Looking through the commandments, almost all of them are framed negatively. You shall not. Um, there are two commandments to have a positive form, the fourth and the fifth, um, the remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy, and then the second positive commandment, honour your father and mother. And those are in some ways, once you've removed all these negative things that you don't do, these are in some ways the positive heart of the commandments, which concern worship of the Lord, giving rest to your house and taking rest for yourself and having that day that's set apart. And then the positive relationship between the sexes and between the generations and with um structures of authority as you honor father and mother and those placed over you. That structure, it seems to me, helps us to recognize that the commandments have a negative form, but ultimately they need to be fulfilled positively. And so Deuteronomy chapter five, with its primarily negative um statements, is followed by this treatment of what it means to love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, might, and strength, to meditate upon his law, to have it as something that's on the doors of your house, it's connected to your body, it's something that is constantly in your lips, you're teaching it to your children. That sort of relationship with the Word of God is one that is not merely a recognition of certain um boundaries that you shouldn't cross. There's something about the law that serves meditation. You tarry with this. It's not the way that we tend to treat the rules or the laws in our on our books. We trend tend to we have some knowledge of them, hopefully, but we don't meditate upon them. They're not a source of wisdom. But within scripture, the law of the Lord is perfect, it revives the soul, it's something to meditate upon, it's something to delight in. The Psalms begin with a statement of the blessedness of the man who meditates upon the law of God, the way he's like a tree planted by streams of water. Implicitly the commandments of the Lord being like streams of water, it's like honey, it's uh like honeycomb, it's uh light to your path, it's all these sorts of things that are described in Psalm 19, 119 elsewhere in scripture. This understanding of the law as a really positive, animating thing, is something that I think helps us to understand the positive force of the law as always underlying uh underlying these negative um imperatives. When we move beyond that, it's very clear the law has an agenda to form us in this positive mode of life. And covetousness, as Paul argues within Romans, alerts him to all the sin within himself. He begins to see his desire as exposed. Now you mentioned the Sermon on the Mount, and the Sermon on the Mount is very much about this. It's taking in chapter five the five commandments of the second table of the law shall not murder, shall not commit adultery, shall not steal, shall not bear false witness, um, shall not covet. And it's going through each of those and showing something of the way in which there needs to be an initiative to do it's not radicalizing it to sh say that you cannot keep this, you must trust in Christ instead.

SPEAKER_01 14:59

No.

SPEAKER_02 15:00

It's not saying that at all. Um Glenn Stassen has a very good piece on this, which talks about the sort of triadic structure. You have heard it said, I say unto you, which presents a sort of impasse or a vicious cycle. So you've heard it said, you shall not murder, but then the person who has hatred in his heart and the way that you can express that in words, but then it begins to yield the fruit of all these things that are related to the breaking of that sixth commandment. And the statement within that, leave your gift at the all to be reconciled with your brother, it's very much the law's conversation with Cain. Why is your face fallen? And recognizing that whole situation, the seeds of murder, which happen later, are germinating at that point. And so, unless he deals with that problem in his heart, the problem is going to express itself in terms of very concrete and violation of that sin. And so Christ's teaching is about these initiatives of grace that overcome that vicious cycle of sin. And so I think it to me, this very positive sense that the law is always working towards this positive mode of life, it's presenting itself in a context ruled by the flesh where it meets with death and resistance and it ends up death dealing rather than life-giving. Um, but the new covenant, of course, is about the writing of the law upon the heart and an animating force of the spirit that enables us to fulfill the commandment to love God and neighbor, and thereby fill the whole commandment through love.

SPEAKER_01 16:41

Yeah. I mean, Paul Paul Sloane's book, the recent one, Jesus and the Law of Moses, handles the the Sermon on the Mount's relation really well. I also think about uh Francis Turitan. Turritan's got this great question where he uh outlines when he before he starts treating East Commandment uh in full, he kind of just has a subject section that uh outlines kind of seven rules uh about reading the rules. And you know, number two is thou shalt basically thou shalt not always means thou shalt as well. Every negative has an affirmative corollary. Um and then, you know, his final one is essentially above all, love. Like the the beginning and end of all precepts is love, and so the fulfilling of of the law is uh summed up in you know the great commandments to love God and love neighbor. So, you know, this has always been this has always been at the heart of Christian readings of the Ten Commandments is not not just a purely negative vision, but a positive one. Same thing, Westminster larger and shorter catechisms, there's always a qu there's a question about what's negatively prohibited in the law, but there's also what's positively enjoined. And the divines will put down this massive paragraph for each one of like, hey, here's like 50 things that were baked into this commandment you didn't realize, but they're all about how to properly enjoy and love and and and care for your neighbor, care for your neighbor's name, care for his his belongings. And it's just, oh, wow, okay, there's a lot in there. But it's it's it's um it's a positive, coherent vision of whole life lived in love of God and neighbor, um that is it's it's it's not just little negative frames. And it's thinking about the context, going back to the context that we received the commands originally in the Old Testament, one thing that's always I always, you know, almost every sermon when I'm teaching my students, because I have a lot of students who just come in with no Christian background, no biblical background. Exodus ch chapter 20 comes after Exodus chapter 19, right? And and after 1 to 19 is the whole story of the narrative of redemption of God liberating slaves, bringing them into relationship with himself, making them his people, saying, Hey, if you if you will keep my covenant, I'll be your God. And and and this is the shape of our positive relationship. These are these are wedding vows at Mount Sinai. These are these are the rules of the relationship between the Lord and the servant, uh, the Lord and his vassal. Like this is the structure of your life of freedom, right? I set you free. I want to keep you free. Here's what freedom looks like. A free life looks like worshiping the God you were made to worship. A free life looks like loving your neighbor as you were made to love your neighbor. That's that's what keeps you out of bondage, right? So after the grace of liberation, there's now a life of kind of liberated freedom. Uh, and this is this is the shape of it. This is a shape of a truly human life in covenant with the Lord, right? So that that whole positive frame, again, was always there. And that's why it's reiterated in Deuteronomy, as they're about to enter the land, you enter here's what here's what life in the land with the Lord looks like. It looks like, again, these commands, which are a positive, beautiful um uh life of love with God and neighbor. So that's that that that has to be the overall frame that we we have. And we have to present it and reprep represent it because just as a contemporary preaching note, um thinking about that the dominant frame of sort of expressive individualism and the the the idea that any kind of rules that don't flow from the inner being of the of the person that everybody's got their own right way to live, everybody's got their own rhyme, their own reason, their their own the thing that makes it work for them. Any external command that seems imposed seems oppressive, seems uh well it yeah, it seems imposed and and and oppressive. And instead, what we're trying to show shows it's the positive shape uh of a life that you were designed to live. Like this is actually your internal world is is confused. This is the structure that will that will actually bring out what was always meant to be there, which is a life lived imitating God. Um so yeah, that that yeah.

SPEAKER_02 21:00

And they're very much presented as positive things to delight in. And so the idea that the commandments are primarily designed to make us feel hopeless and to throw us upon Christ maybe misses the final way that we're supposed to relate to them, which is a source of delight and something that is expressed positively in this mode of love. Ultimately, Christians are not freed from the law. We're freed to the law to live it out by the power of the Spirit in a way that is truly liberating. Now we can always experience when we're resisting and out of tune with something, we can always experience these things as obstacles. And I've often given the example, for instance, of the experience that you maybe had as a child learning a musical instrument, where that musical instrument is an obstacle to you. It's a frustration. You have to learn your scales, for instance, if you're practicing on the piano. And it's onerous, you would like to be outside playing with your friends. But this this instrument just demands all this rigor of going through these rituals again and again and again until you've gotten them down. And it's frustrating, it's irritating, it doesn't feel liberating at all. And yet, once you've mastered that and you have a you're in tune with it, that instrument frees you. The very laws that were obstacles to you are the means by which you express yourself with beauty. The expression of the kid who just goes up to the piano and hammers away whatever no uh any keys that they can get their fingers onto. That's not beautiful, it's not expressive, it's not liberating. There's a sort of chaotic liberation, perhaps, that they might experience for a time, but soon they realize it's not actually true freedom. The true freedom is enjoyed by the person who's truly understood and submitted themselves to the law of the instrument, and they delight in the law of the instrument, instrument. And now the instrument is their instrument, and they can express themselves through it. And that's always the vision of Scripture with the law, that the law should be something in which we delight. And so so many of the psalms are meditating upon and delighting in the law of God. You can think about what does it mean to love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, strength, this injunction in Deuteronomy chapter six that the law is fulfilled in. Well, it looks like the Psalms when people are just delighting in and expressing what that means. And then in the New Covenant, the promise of the Spirit enabling us to fulfill the law in love. The other thing to note about the law is the way that the Ten Commandments don't stand alone. The Ten Commandments, if they were just by themselves, could be very abstract and could be taken in all sorts of different ways. But the Ten Commandments come with this other body of material. In chapter 21 to 23 of Exodus, it's the case laws, and then in chapters six to twenty-six of Deuteronomy is another body of case laws. And Deuteronomy chapters six to twenty-six are particularly interesting because they can be divided sequentially along the lines of the Ten Commandments. So the first one being chapters six to eleven, the second, twelve and thirteen, the third, chapter fourteen, verses one to twenty-one, the th the fourth, um, chapter fourteen, verses twenty-two to sixteen, verse seventeen, the fifth, chapter sixteen, verse eighteen to eighteen, verse twenty-two, the sixth, chapter nineteen, verse one to twenty-two, verse eight, the seventh, chapter twenty-two, verse nine to chapter twenty three, verse fourteen, the eighth, chapter twenty three, verse fifteen, to chapter twenty-four, verse seven, the ninth, chapter twenty-four, verse eight, to chapter twenty five, verse three, and the tenth to the end of chapter twenty-six. Now the interesting thing to notice is we have these commandments given in this very condensed form in chapter five, and then they're sort of refracted. It's not a comprehensive body of teaching, but it gives us a sense of what does this look at like fleshed out? Uh, what does it look like to honour um your father and mother, or what does it look like, for instance, to not covet? And the interesting thing is it gives us very unusual material classed under that heading. So, for instance, not coveting is summed up in part in the tithe feasts. And how does that respond to not coveting? Because it teaches you three key things. It teaches you generosity, contentment, and thanksgiving. And that's the way, the positive thing that deals with the problem of coveting. It's the expulsive expulsive power of a new affection, to put it in Thomas Chalmers' terminology. And so the law has this really dense structure, it has this internal structure that we discussed at the beginning, but also has this wider structure within the covenant that brings it into constant relationship with this material that refracts and elaborates its specific um commandments and helps us to see a bigger picture within which it fits.

SPEAKER_01 26:28

One thing to comment there, I was having this conversation with another student the other day who um was asking about the law. And they were working through Leviticus and Numbers in Deuteronomy, and it's just it just all seemed like so much. And, you know, given the frame they had, um, hey, the New Testament doesn't seem to be as law-focused, but the Old Testament does. And like, you know, you might get the impression that this is uh performance-based uh relationship, so on and so forth. Kind of quintessentially, and I don't say this pejoratively, quite kind of quintessentially uh evangelical concerns. It's just interesting to look at the law as such. The the law that we have, we've got you know some some case law, a little bit of law in in Exodus, uh various laws in Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy. When you actually look at the amount of law there is, when you compare it to something like, I don't know, the California Legal Code or the, you know, the U.S. federal uh statutes around, I don't know, uh small, small businesses or something like that, just one small subsector of our legal code, it's actually not that much law. Uh it's you know there's there's it seems a like a lot proportionate to other sections of narrative and and and song and and gospel and and letter, but um there is uh the the expansions are illustrative, but they're still assuming that you're gonna have to do a lot of unpacking yourself. There is actually a lot of room for spirit-guided, um wisdom-driven uh application of these very spare, generalized principles to the shape of the Christian life across centuries, right, and across cont continents and contexts and so forth. So that um when you when you think about it, all the different kinds of situations that come up when it comes to situation ethics and the the average question that a pastor will get faced with in in uh or a session or a you know a group of elders get faced with in concretely in a congregation, um like, well, I got this command, I got this other verse, I got these three verses in Paul, and um and I don't, you know, that's a what AI whatever situation popped up, or or this you you realize that God is not really micromanaging a lot uh when it comes to giving instructions for Christian behavior. Everything is under his eye, and so there's nothing, there's no, there's no situation in which a moral principle or two or 15 aren't in play. But nevertheless, um it it only seems like a lot when when we're seeing it all on paper and we're trying to digest it all at once and it's unfamiliar. When you realize, oh, this is this part for this little section of life and this section, and this it's like actually God is God is very interested in law in giving us a broad shape of Christian virtue and holiness that has to be filled in concretely without a lot of explicit instruction. Um so that's uh an optical illusion thing that I want to dispel. And the other thing is the idea that this is all onerous or burdensome. Um a lot of these things are uh initially, okay, I can't I have to wear this clothes, I can't eat these few few foods, yada yada. Again, when you when you put them in the broad scope of what law has looked like, what it currently looks like, um uh a lot of it is is light. And what's difficult, right? That the difficulty of the law, and I guess we're turning the corner here, the difficulty of the law here in the Bible is almost never presented as uh with the exception of perhaps the discussion in Acts, I want to hear what you have to say about that. It's almost never presented as like this is too technically difficult. It's almost all it's always always presented as it is morally difficult for you because you're a sinner, right? Like that's the challenge with the law, right? The only thing with that setup, I guess what Alistair, I'd love to hear you the the the how would you how would you answer, though, kind of the the the the reading of the discussion in Acts that uh Acts 15, that the you know the law was too onerous, you know, we we couldn't keep it, so why are we gonna impose it on the Gentiles? How does that fit with the picture I kind of just painted and it does it add a corrective or or is it no, it's just addressing a different issue entirely. This is not really the Ten Commandments, but it because the Ten Commandments we always think morally just applies, but um speak to that issue in the picture of the law we've been talking about.

SPEAKER_02 31:19

Aaron Powell Yes, when we're talking about the law, it can refer to several different things. Law in the very broad sense could refer to the whole of the Pentateuch, for instance. Law can refer to the entire body of commandments that includes over 600 different commandments, case law and also the Ten Commandments, or it could refer very narrowly to the Ten Commandments within that wider body of the covenant material. So we've got narrative material that could be included under the law, you've got this broader body of case law that is often reflecting upon the narrative, among other things, and then you've got this very specific body within that of the Ten Commandments. And then the law can be divided in a very loose sense. I think there's a danger of pushing this too far. But the the moral, civil, and ceremonial law that has been a common reformed division of the law, that division um helps us to see the difference, for instance, between the Ten Commandments, which are particularly what some have tended to describe as moral law. The fourth commandment, of course, includes things such as the keeping of the Sabbath and all the feasts that derive from that, which would be more ceremonial law. But the law also includes Leviticus. It includes things like the um the law concerning the red heifer in um Numbers chapter 19. It includes all the sacrifices that need to be made for the feast days that are described in Numbers as well, or it includes the covenant ceremonies that must be performed, mentioned at the end of the book of Deuteronomy, towards the end of the book. So we've got a large amount of material of disparate form that class gets classed under the category of law. So we're not just talking about moral injunctions of loving your neighbor or um the commandments to honor father and mother, these sorts of things. That's law in a more narrow moral law, as some have argued since, the Ten Commandments. But you also have, which I think is more at issue in Acts chapter 15, the ceremonial law. So the laws concerning food, the laws concerning sacrifice, the laws concerning purity, the laws concerning feasts, etc., all these sorts of things that Israel was observing that were indeed onerous. Um, and if you wanted to have access to God's presence, it was difficult. Um doesn't mean you had to be clean all the time. Much of the time it wasn't an issue if you were unclean. But if you wanted to be participating in the cult, the worship of Israel on a regular basis, it was onerous, it was expensive to have the animals prepared and all these sorts of things. So we're dealing with a situation where a specific part of the law is especially in view, those things that marked Jews out from Gentiles, particularly, which was not so much the moral law as the ceremonial law. The civil law is this broader thing, which is often um uh a subset of the of the case law concerning um the more general um ordering of Israelite society, how judges were appointed, the ways in which they'd deal with cases of manslaughter, these sorts that would all fall under the civil law. But we're particularly dealing with the moral ceremonial division here, and I think the ceremonial material is particularly in view in Acts chapter 15.

SPEAKER_01 34:59

Okay. That's helpful. I I I do wonder if, you know, there are things that are onerous and there's things that like, hey, if you're just used to it, it's it sounds wild to, you know, twentieth uh twenty-first century uh Americans and and Brits and whatever, but you know, if that's just kind of the things that your culture and society avoids, even then the relative onerousness is is compared to I don't know, the the amount of bureaucracy that that your average modern person deals with in a single day, um even then uh God's God's law is light and easy uh comparatively.

SPEAKER_02 35:39

Uh worth remembering that you have lots of people to guide you through it. Yeah. So if you're performing a sacrifice, you don't need to understand um the specifics. You'll have a priest or a Levite to help you with that. They'll talk you through the process and assist you. So you don't need to um understand exactly what needs to be done. They will assist you.

SPEAKER_01 36:01

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SPEAKER_00 37:04

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SPEAKER_01 38:01

Coming back around then, though, to the Ten Commandments, thinking about these things, um thinking about them, well one of one of one of the things that is my favorite part of any sermon was I've been working through them with my students, is just showing the way that they they testify to the truly human life. They show us um, they give us the outlines for a truly human community, right? Because these are these commands, for the most part, are enacted communally, right? You don't murder your neighbor, you don't you don't steal his wife. These are these are communal. But they're also um a beautiful testimony to the person, work, and ministry of Jesus, right? The c the law reveals uh the Savior because of several things. One, he exemplifies the law in his whole life. There's not a single law that Jesus violates, and there's not a single law that he doesn't uh instantiate in his obedience, in his ministry in the gospels, in the way that he is faithful to his bride, and the way that he exalts the name of the Father, in the way that he has one, you know, only God alone as as as his God, in the way that he honors his father and mother, he honors his heavenly father, and he even honors his earthly parents uh in difficult and trying situations when they don't uh when he actually knows more than them, right? He submits himself to them. He he um he doesn't covet, he's he's content, he's content with only what the Father so you start to see the shape of what Jesus has um lived for us in our place, right? Those things that we have found onerous because of our sin. And then you start to see his work, then how it how it kind of plays out. And when you really start to think about it, the way all of the commandments are violated in his um in his accusation and in his death on our his substitutionary death on our behalf. I was preaching through the Ninth Commandment violation um the other night, and uh Jesus, you think about the way Jesus uh Jesus is falsely accused, he's slandered, right? He's put to death because he's falsely accused and slandered. But then um he he actually suffers the judgment that slanderers and false accusers ought to suffer, right? Because in the law, you know, whatever, whatever, whatever law, you know, if you're if you're if you're uh if you're bringing if you're participating as a false witness against somebody, you know, whatever the and and you're found out, whatever the negative consequence that would have accrued to that person is applied to you, right? And so there's a sense where Jesus suffers the death that accrues to false accusers in a death penalty case, right? And as part of how he liberates and saves and pays the penalty for their sin, and then goes into what the the kind of life that he liberates you into by, you know, the vindication of the resurrection and the gift of the truth, the spirit of truth. And so you you see the law, the law really does, right? We the law points to the truly Christian life, but the law also points to the true Christ, right? The true mediator who is uh fulfills the law in his life of love. And so that is one of my favorite uses of the law of, you know, without without studying the Ten Commandments, you don't really get a good picture of Jesus and and and and his life for us.

SPEAKER_02 41:25

Aaron Ross Powell We can think about the law as it's very much expressed in this negative form. It's distinguishing what is good from what is wrong and evil, and you might think about it almost as giving us a silhouette within which when Christ appears, we can see the sharpness of how he's set off against all these other forms of life that fall short. The other thing to note is just how even just the ordering of the commandments can be behind the text at various points in the New Testament. It is a structuring principle. Even if we think about something like the opening lines of the of the Lord's Prayer, um, our Father in heaven, there's the uniqueness of God, our Father in heaven, the um the way in which God's presence in heaven, as opposed to the graven image on earth, we're recognizing that we can't rent represent him with anything on earth in the same way. Hallowed be your name, and then your kingdom come, the promise of the great Sabbath. It's implicit within the structure, but then you'll have m far more developed ones, like when Paul talks about the goodness of the law when abused lawfully, says the law is not laid down for the just, but for the lawless and disobedient, for the ungodly and sinners, for the unholy and profane, for those who strike their fathers and mothers, for murderers, the sexually immoral, men who practice homosexuality, enslavers, liars, perjurers, and whatever else is counter contrary to sound doctrine. And if you're paying attention, you see he's going through the Ten Commandments in various ways here. Right. So ungodly is the first commandment, and sinners, again, the unholy and profane, the second part commandment and the third commandment. For those who strike their fathers and mothers, um the profane also, the fourth commandment, um, not keeping something holy. Sabbath. Um the ones who strike fathers and mothers, the fifth, the murderers, sixth, sexually immoral, and men who practice homosexuality, the seventh, um stealing man stealing slavers. And then liars would be um bearing false witness, the ninth, perjurers likewise. And so you've got essentially the structure of the Ten Commandments that just comes out very naturally as Paul's listing these sins. And so it's part of the structure of thought that's expressed, whether in positive forms or negative forms, you have the same thing. thing in Jesus' teaching concerning the five commandments of the second table of the law in the um start of the in the earlier part of the Sermon on the Mount the second half of chapter five of Matthew so this structuring even carries into the New Testament and so when the law is um expressed it's expressed maybe in a different it's transposed into a more positive form sometimes sometimes is expressed in the form of prayer and sometimes it's expressed in a list of vices whatever it is there is this deep appreciation of the law as a source of wisdom into the the shape of sin but also the shape of righteousness particularly as we see it in Christ and it's one of the reasons why when we talk about the law being written upon the heart that this is the sort of thing we have in mind a a deep apprehension and appreciation of the law as a structuring principle for what it means to serve God as he would have us serve him.

SPEAKER_01 45:17

And I think about the presentation in Leviticus 19, right? Leviticus nineteen is also another very short um kind of catechism within the law that m most scholars would say the Ten Commandments are again represented in there along with moral civil civil ceremonial it's kind of like a summary of all aspects of the law within the law. But the thing that's reiterated over and over again is the justification for it. You shall be holy for I am holy and the the the understanding is that every over and over again throughout that that that that chapter is punctuated. I am the Lord, I am the Lord and as as a as a summary and one scholar scholars would say it each time he says I am the Lord, it's reiterating I am the Lord who is holy and therefore you shall be holy. Holiness is pictured in this so the holiness of God is the motivating logic of the obedience of the Israelites but it's also the imitative logic of why why does your life look this way? Because your life is supposed to look like God's. So I said that the commands testify to the life and the the the the life of Christ and the mediatorial work of Christ, but ultimately they testify unsurprisingly because Christ is God come to save us in the flesh they testify to the nature of God, right? So when Jesus says be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect, that's a gloss or a a representation of the command of Leviticus nineteen be holy for I am holy.

SPEAKER_02 46:43

And that's what my holy third commandment bear the name of the Lord the holy to the Lord name as it were in vain.

SPEAKER_01 46:52

Yes and so the whole thing is about imit you know the imitation of Christ and the imitation of God looks like the obedience to the law. And I think I think this is actually part of the premise of uh James had a recent article at TGC that the essentially the the the the law shaped the the law-shaped um you know uh end of of spiritual formation but but the Ten Commandments give us a picture of God, give us a picture of Christ they give us a picture of the Christian life. And so just to just to kind of bring things uh to to a little bit of a close here they're eminently worth reflecting on and delighting this is this is why David delights in the law of the Lord, because the law of the Lord is a gift from the Lord that reflects the Lord, right? So when you reflect on the law, you're reflecting on his heart, on his mind, on his will, on his character, on his, on his mercy towards us and giving us this life that imitates and in a sense participates in his own life in that way. And so the law is of the essence and I'll just say you know if you're a pastor who hadn't hadn't preached through it in a while or if you're a Bible study leader who's looking for their next season's Bible studies or whatever it is, um take your people through the law. Take your people through the commands. This is not dry, this is not dusty. If it's dry and dusty when you do it, that's probably a skill issue but the the reality is that the law is the law is exciting. The Ten Commandments are life giving uh in the power of the Spirit, right? Obviously this is always in the power of the Spirit. Without the Spirit the law brings death but in the spirit in the Christian life um it it's the shape of the Christian life. And so that's our encouragement is just take them, read them, meditate on them, let digest them inwardly and uh and and and see how the Lord uh begins to work them in your soul and you start to look more like Jesus because of it.

SPEAKER_02 48:47

I'm thinking about the way in this context that the feast of the law is Pentecost. It's the feast that commemorates the gift of the law at Sarnia. And then you have in the New Testament the gift of the Spirit on that day because the Spirit is the gift of the law the law written upon the heart and so if we have the law of God written upon the heart the law of God is something we delight in. It's something that I mean where do we see the law written on the heart in the Old Testament in the book of Psalms as we've noted and if you go to something like Psalm 40 the description that's picked up within Hebrews where it says in sacrifice an offering you have not delighted, but you have given me an open year burnt offering and sin offering you have not required. Then I said Behold I have come in the scroll of the book it is written of me. I delight to do your will O my God that is picked up within Hebrews and the author of Hebrews misses out the final line he knows that the readers if they're biblically informed know the next line which is your law is within my heart and so he doesn't say that line but then immediately goes into Jeremiah chapter 31 the promise of the new covenant that I will write my law on their hearts and if we're truly people who delight in the law of God who do not experience it primarily as something that gives us a sense of unworthiness and sin but something that is a cause of our delight as forgiven and justified people of God who delight to do God's will, then we will meditate upon it. We will think about how we can live in terms of it. And you might find it helpful to think about the broader ways in which these things can be fulfilled not just in these negative forms. But it is helpful to think about the array of negative things that are covered and then some of the positive forms of practice that follow from that. Maybe a good place to start for those who want to think about this I can't believe I'm saying this, but you should start off with the Westminster larger catechism. It has great treatment of the law within it and it just details specific sins and specific virtues that can be pursued. And if you want to think through the commandments one by one, I would recommend starting there. But sing about them as well. Sing the Psalms the Psalms have large bodies of material most notably Psalm 119 but also things like Psalm 19 or the opening psalm concerning meditating upon the law of God day and night this is Christian material and it should be filling our hearts with the love of the Lord. And you might think also of just the vision of God's law in the heart of his people the law is hidden within the treasure chest of the temple, within the Ark of the covenant in the very central part which corresponds to the heart and the mind in the human body and then the law is also represented in the tenfold character of the lampstands, the light to the eyes and then the tables of showbread within the temple there are ten of each, five on each side and then the ten water chariots that go out from Solomon's temple. It's life that flows out into the world. So meditate upon the law delight in it sing about it and live in terms of it recognizing that the law has been made flesh in Christ and that as we live out of his life by his spirit it will be law shaped.

SPEAKER_01 52:23

Alistair that's a great note to end on I will say I was ending and then I was almost mad that you continued but then you saved it by rec by recommending Westminster larger catechism so so uh that's exactly the right note. If you take away nothing else just read read the Westminster larger catechism and uh get to know the law and get to know the Lord better through it. Uh with all that said thanks for listening if you've if you've listened thus far uh ask you uh consider rating and reviewing this on iTunes joining the Patreon becoming a mere orthodoxy member that sort of thing uh but for now this has been Mere Fidelity