The True Extent of the Ten Commandments

17  And as he was setting out on his journey, a man ran up and knelt before him and asked him, “Good Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?”18 And Jesus said to him, “Why do you call me good? No one is good except God alone. 19 You know the commandments: ‘Do not murder, Do not commit adultery, Do not steal, Do not bear false witness, Do not defraud, Honor your father and mother.’” 20 And he said to him, “Teacher, all these I have kept from my youth.” 21 And Jesus, looking at him, loved him, and said to him, “You lack one thing: go, sell all that you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow me.” 22  Disheartened by the saying, he went away sorrowful, for he had great possessions.

In the second part of this story in Mark 10, Jesus specifically talks about how difficult it is for the rich to enter the kingdom of God, but that is not my focus today. Today, I'd like to delve deep into the Ten Commandments. Normally, one would view them as admonitions against specific actions (Do not murder, do not commit adultery) or as commands to perform specific actions (Honor your father and mother.) Jesus, however, would disagree with that limitation. This is clear from two incidents in His life: this one and the sermon in Matthew 5.

Here, when Jesus encounters the rich man and tells him what the commandments are, He only names six of them. Why, you may ask? Such is the brilliance of our God! It looks like Jesus specifically chose these because they are the ones to which the rich man could more eagerly proclaim, “Yup! Did that!”. But they are not all of the commandments. As a matter of fact, according to the words of Christ himself, they’re not the most important. The four that Jesus declined to mention in this episode were to have no gods before Yahweh, no graven images, no taking the Lord’s name in vain, and the keeping of the Sabbath. In this short exchange, Jesus exposed the rich man’s breakage of the first two. The rich man was sorrowful because his possessions and his money took the place of a functional and rival god in his life. He exposes (here implicitly and in Matthew 5, more explicitly) the mindsets that the commandments also warn/command against. The first and second commandments are against the act and the lifestyle of idolatry, literally “image worship”. If there are things (or people) in our lives that we love more than God, value more than God, or think about more than God, they have taken the place of a god in our lives and we’re guilty of idolatry. Yikes. I have yet to read Tim Keller’s Counterfeit Gods, which I presume is about just that.

  Beyond the mindset of idolatry, we have the specific examples that Jesus brings in Matthew 5: the mindset of murder, the mindset of adultery, and the mindset of false witness. These verses fly in the face of anybody who thinks that Jesus was a “nice guy” in my book. As a matter of fact, it solidifies the fact that we are not only responsible for what we do, but we will also be judged for what we think about! After all, the mindset of murder is anger. The word, “Raca”, was a term (Aramaic and Hebrew) of contempt used by the Jews meaning “empty-headed”. I can’t help but think that this was not only a specific mention of this word but also a larger warning against verbal bashing and insults. It seems here that murder is not just applied to you killing a person’s physical body, but also it applies to the damage that you deal with your tongue…interesting. And difficult. And if we thought that was hard, we’ve got the whole adultery thing to deal with too! Not only is it wrong for me to have sex with anyone who is not my wedded wife, but I can’t even think about it?! What?! This stuff is impossible! Why is Jesus so hard?! Matthew 5:48, one of my favorite and one of the most humbling verses in the Bible, just makes the situation even worse.

And this is the desired effect. Paul spends a majority of the book of Romans as well as parts of Galatians and his other letters, talking about the law, its implications and its purpose. The fact of the matter is no one is righteous. No, not one. The fact is the law just reveals how fallen and sinful we are. And left with only that, we’d be hell-bound and full of despair. But thankfully, that’s not the end. “For God has done what the law, weakened by the flesh, could not do. By sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and for sin, he condemned sin in the flesh, in order that the righteous requirement of the law might be fulfilled in us, who walk not according to the flesh but according to the Spirit.” (Romans 8:3-4) Because of Christ’s death and resurrection and the guidance of the Holy Spirit that He has given to us, we can journey towards perfection. Our words, thoughts, and actions can be reigned in. And by following Christ, we can truly obey his commandments and love him with all of our hearts, souls, minds and strength. Confess your sin, submit to the Lord and walk by His Spirit. It’s the only way.

This will segue nicely into the next post, which will address the infamous “Old Testament God vs. New Testament God” issue that gets on my nerves…mostly because it’s a heretical school of thought dating back to the 1^st century. More later.

Also happy Independence Day (though black people weren’t really free…we’ll leave that for another time…)!