Recognize, what the Ten Commandments present to us is a matter of a magnificent revelation of the holiness of God and the implications of His holiness for mankind and for His people.
Hello and welcome back to the Truth Pulpit with Don Green, founding pastor of Truth Community Church in Cincinnati, Ohio. I'm Bill Wright, and today as Don continues teaching God's people God's Word, they'll begin a new series called God's Forgotten Law, with part one of a message called Meet the Ten Commandments. And Don, when God gave Moses the Ten Commandments, those laws came thundering down on the heads of all mankind, quickly revealing that man was infinitely guilty before an infinitely holy God.
So it wasn't looking good, but Jesus Christ changed all of that, didn't He? Bible tells us that the law of God points us to Jesus Christ. We need the law to help us understand that we need Christ, and yet most people are ignorant of the Ten Commandments.
That ignorance causes them to underestimate the holiness of God and also to underestimate the enormity of their own guilt. And so, my friend, as you're listening to the broadcast today, I encourage you to ask God to open your eyes to the glory of His law and what it means for your soul, because, my friend, it should cause you to flee to Christ for mercy. Thanks, Don. And friend, let's open our Bibles now to Exodus chapter 20 and begin today's lesson.
Here's Don Green in the Truth Pulpit. What we're going to do today is we're going to look very quickly at each one of the Ten Commandments. Ten points in this message today just to introduce the Ten Commandments, to meet them as it were, and then once the introductions have been made, we will go back and get to know them better. So the Ten Commandments open with a preface. They start with a historical context that the Lord gives in the opening two verses here in Exodus chapter 20. This is just an introduction. We're just sitting down for a first acquaintance with them here. We're leaving all of the exposition and all of the context and all of the rules of interpretation. We're leaving all of that for the future.
We just want to see them for the first time here today. And so the Ten Commandments contain a preface that you find in the first two verses. Exodus chapter 20 verses 1 and 2. Then God spoke all these words, saying, I am the Lord your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery. God gave this law after Egypt had surrendered the people of Israel, as it were, to his power.
After he had redeemed them, after he had brought them out of slavery, God revealed this law to them through the hand of Moses, through the words of Moses. And so there's this historical context that God says, this is who I am. I am the one who has delivered you from Egypt. I am the covenant keeping Yahweh.
I am God himself. I am the one who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery, and therefore I speak with authority over you, he says to the people of Israel as he reveals his word. Now in like manner, God speaks with no less authority over us, even if we are not biological Jews. Every one of us has been made in our mother's womb by the hand of God, Psalm 139. Those who are in Christ have been purchased by the shed blood of Jesus Christ so that God has an ownership right over you by right of creation and by right of redemption.
He has utter authority over you and he has complete authority to command every aspect of your life, every aspect of your thinking, every aspect of your emotions, every aspect of every affection of your heart, all of it comes under the broad umbrella of God's great authority by the sheer significance of who he is and who we are in response to him. He's the Creator, we're the creature. He's holy, we're sinful. We say we're Christians, then we're under the lordship of Jesus Christ. And as we'll find in some of the early commandments, one of the aspects that we need to come to grips with as we contemplate these things is that those of you who claim to be Christians, those of you who claim to know the Lord Jesus Christ, we all have to come to grips with the fact that Jesus says plainly in Luke chapter 6 verse 46, why do you call me Lord, Lord and do not do what I say? There is this utterly unthinkable hypocrisy of naming him with our lips but ignoring the things that he tells us to do, the kinds of people that he tells us to be. And just kind of rubbing the magic lamp of prayer, looking for a genie to come out and fix our problems, but otherwise living as though there's really not much need to contemplate his lordship. We're not in a good position spiritually, beloved.
We're not all that we think that we are or like that we want to think that we are. And the Ten Commandments expose that. And because the Ten Commandments are an expression of the authority of God and because we are under his authority by right of creation and by right of redemption, it behooves us to come and to study and to learn and to submit and to change in response to what he has revealed to us in his word. This is his moral law. This is his enduring moral law that applies even to the lives of Christians today. We do not obey this law in order to be saved.
We can't. The law condemns us and exposes our sin. The law, for those who are in Christ, the law does not threaten us with its punishment because Christ has endured that punishment on our behalf at the cross.
However, the law is still an expression of the moral will of God and how we are to live, how we are to know him, how we are to please him. And it's from that understanding, we'll address all of that more in future weeks, but it's from that understanding that God speaks with authority to his redeemed people. And we are to hear and we are to heed. We are to listen and we are to obey. And we are to take this seriously deep in our hearts and find in it the way that God would lead us forward from the present point of our spiritual sanctification. So let's look at these ten commandments.
What are these ten? Well, the first four commandments are vertical in nature. That's referred to as the first table of the law. The second table, the last six commandments, are horizontal and deal with our relationships with men and with property and with our inner man. And one thing that we should take a look at, in addition to revealing to us the holiness of God, go back to the book of Matthew chapter 22. Matthew chapter 22. The ten commandments are revealing to us the holiness of God, and you could say this without saying too much, the ten commandments are giving us instruction on how we are to love God and to love our neighbor. Jesus makes this very, very clear.
A lawyer came up to him in Matthew chapter 22 verse 35, asked him a question because he wanted to test him. He said in verse 36, Matthew 22 verse 36, teacher, which is the great commandment in the law? And Jesus said to him in verse 37, you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great and foremost commandment.
The second is like it. You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments depend the whole law and the prophets. In other words, there is an underlying principle in the ten commandments that are designed to teach us how we are to love God and how we are to love our neighbor. And so they reveal to us the holiness of God and they show us how it is that we are to respond in faith and obedience to the great holiness of this great and majestic God. And in responding to him, we are to love him and to fear him and to trust him and to obey him.
The ten commandments teach us that. In addition to that, the second table, the final six, give us an idea of what it is like, what it means to love our neighbor and how we need the purifying impact of this to cleanse our minds of the sentimental mush by which the word love has come to be associated in our thinking. We need to cleanse our minds of all of these things and the Word of God is going to have that cleansing, sanctifying impact on us as we go through this text together. Now, so let's start with the ten.
This may be the message with the most points that I've preached it certainly in a long time. Ten points today corresponding to ten commandments. The first commandment. The first commandment is no false gods. The first is no false gods.
And that's just, we're just doing little brief summary terms to get the thoughts stimulated in our minds. The first commandment is this found in verse 3. God says, you shall have no other gods before me.
In other words, this commandment has both a negative and a positive implication to us. This commandment requires us, God commands us to forsake and to never go back to any other preeminent object of our affections, to forsake all false gods and, on a positive sense, to know Him as the one true God. The God of the Bible commands us to know Him and to acknowledge Him as the one and only true God and that there is no other. This commandment implicitly condemns and rejects all false religion that is not rooted in the exclusive revelation of God found in the 66 books and no more of the Holy Bible. And every other god and every other system of worship is to be rejected.
Why is that? It's because God is holy and there is no other real God, and so we are to recognize His holy, exalted, separate place in the universe, acknowledge Him as the Creator of heaven and earth, the giver of life in whom we live and move and have our being, and to forsake every other competing truth claim that would be in contradiction with His exclusive place and His exclusive revelation found in Scripture. But even in the Scripture reading that I did from the book of Acts, chapter 4, earlier, this point is made about the Lord Jesus Christ when it says there is salvation in no one else for there is no other name given under heaven among men by which we must be saved.
And so there is this arresting wake-up call right from the start as if God is saying, understand who you're dealing with here. It is the most holy God, the only one true God, and that means that we are to honor Him exclusively and reject everything that lifts itself up as a rival to Him. We are to acknowledge Him alone as our God. You are to love Him and to worship Him and to glorify Him exclusively.
Why? Because He is holy. Because He is separate. Because He is alone in majesty.
Therefore, He is to be alone the object of your supreme affections. Everything else is subordinate to that. Everything that is contrary to that must be forsaken, repented of, and never gone back to again. The first commandment is that there are to be no false gods in your heart. Secondly, the second commandment. No false worship.
No false worship. The second commandment is this. Look at verse 4.
It goes for three verses here. You shall not make for yourself an idol or any likeness of what is in heaven above, or on the earth beneath, or in the water under the earth. You shall not worship them or serve them, for I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children, on the third and the fourth generations of those who hate me, but showing lovingkindness to thousands, to those who love me and keep my commandments. Here we simply want to see this, for today we simply want to acknowledge a most basic principle that God commands us to worship Him in the right way. We must worship the true God in the right way, in the way that He has appointed us to worship Him by. We are not free to simply make up our own rules and regulations of worship in utter disregard of Scripture.
We are not free to just go off into our deer stand in the forest and pretend that we're communing with God and obeying God in worship because we're communing with Him in nature. That is not the kind of worship that God has appointed. We must worship the true God in the right way. Now, in contradiction to everything about Roman Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy and other such kinds of religions, God forbids the use of images in worship in this text. And that is a representative of the fact that God is zealous for the manner in which He is worshiped. Jesus said to the Samaritan woman in John chapter 4 verse 24, God is a spirit and those who worship Him must worship Him in spirit and in truth. We need to give thought to the way that we worship.
You need to give thought to the way and to the approach that you make in your private life towards Scripture and toward prayer because all of those things are brought under the umbrella of the Ten Commandments. God is holy. God is holy and so we are not free to represent Him in other images. Soon after this, soon after this text of Revelation, you'll remember that Israel made a golden calf under the leadership of Aaron and Aaron said, this is your God who led you out of Egypt.
The idea wasn't so much that they actually thought that that golden calf was the thing that had led them out of Egypt. Rather, being a calf, being a strong animal was supposed to be a representation of who God was. And it represented God in visual form to suggest something about the invisible nature of God.
God says, I'm having none of that. Anything created by human hands cannot possibly be a true representation of who God is. Pictures of Jesus cannot possibly be an appropriate thing for Christians to use and have hanging in their homes. A human artist, a sinful human artist cannot possibly rightly convey what the holiness of Christ looked like. There is nothing in a physical representation of God that can possibly rightly represent His invisible spiritual nature.
It can only mislead. And so God says, there must not be any of that stuff because it will only mislead you about what my character is. And God has the right, God has the absolute prerogative to insist upon this from His people because He is God and He is entitled to tell us how it is that He must be worshipped. And we must worship the right God in the right way.
Why? Because God is holy. God is set apart and therefore our worship must be set apart and done in a manner that is in accordance with what He has revealed. Now look, it's inevitable that all of our toes are going to get stepped on here by the Word of God. It is inevitable that there is going to be conviction that is brought to us as a result of these things. That is not indicating that there is a problem with the Word of God if it makes us uncomfortable, if it exposes things that we've wrongly thought or wrongly done or wrongly had over the years. It's not a problem with the Word of God.
It couldn't possibly be that because the Word of God is perfect, it is living, it is active, it is inerrant, it is infallible. If there's a conflict between us and the Ten Commandments, it's because there's a problem in us, not in the Word of God. And we must approach it with that spirit of humility and prior submission and not pretend to reserve our private judgment on whether these things are going to be right and true or not. You must worship the true God in the right way. Now thirdly, the Third Commandment, do not take God's name in vain or to state it more simply, honor the name. Honor the name of God. The Third Commandment is this, look at verse 7, you shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain, for the Lord will not leave him unpunished who takes his name in vain. The trivial use of the name of God, this is a true pandemic of great disease.
This is something truly, truly deadly. Whatever the command means, look at how seriously the Lord takes it. He says there at the end of verse 7, the Lord will not leave him unpunished who takes his name in vain, who uses the name of God in an empty way without regard for the reverence that he deserves.
And the implications of this command are vast. The name of God is holy because the name of God is the sum of all that he is. And so when we speak the name of God, we have no liberty whatsoever to use it in a casual flippant manner. For you teenage girls that like to text out OMG and just say, oh my God and all of that, you need to understand that is a profoundly sinful use of the name of God. This is not how the name of God is to be treated at all. And for those of you who are of, you know, where your word isn't necessarily true to say, oh, I swear to God that what I'm about to say is true, that is a profound sin against God. It is a flippant use, a flippant taking of an oath when Jesus said your yes should be enough to be yes and your no should be enough to be no. The name of God is holy and therefore it should not be lightly or flippantly or flippantly on our tongues. The name of God is holy and therefore when we pray to him it requires the full engagement of our faculties, not a rote memorization or a rote recitation of some prayer that we've heard or praying with our lips when our minds are distracted in a thousand different places. You say, well, if that's true then we're all really guilty before God.
Yeah, that's the point. That's how holy God's name is and we are to recognize the holiness of God, recognize the holiness of his name, and watch this, and therefore respond to him with reverent fear, with sanctified thoughts, with sanctified prayers, with a sanctified sense of who he is. And in light of this third commandment, there is no measuring, there is no measuring the greatness of the guilt of the entire world on this commandment alone. The name of Jesus Christ is used as a cuss word. It's used to condemn people when they cross someone. I don't watch any television anymore except for an occasional sports event, I suppose.
Even when I stopped watching, you couldn't watch. You couldn't watch 15 minutes of regular secular programming without this commandment being violated, as if the holy exalted name of God was no better than the refuse found in the ditch of a messy farm and entitled to no more respect than the refuse on the street. Now how is God not going to vindicate his name against all of its violations that are just saturated in the culture around us?
Do you see the problem? God says, don't do that. No one who does that will go unpunished.
I will not leave him unpunished. We should understand that the pulsating wrath of God must be great on this third commandment alone. We are to use his name and to use his word with respect in our hearts and with the purity of lips that is fitting for the great holiness of his name. And beloved, the fact that this sin is so common and so acceptable even within the walls of a Christian church does not mitigate the black nature of its sin by a single stroke. We are to take God's name, use it with respect because he is holy.
Amen. May the name of God remain ever holy upon our lips. Well friend, next time Don will bring us the balance of his overview of the Ten Commandments here on the Truth Pulpit, and we do hope you'll join us then. Meanwhile, if you'd like to know more about Don and this Bible teaching ministry, we invite you to visit the truthpulpit.com.
Once again, that's the truthpulpit.com. Now, just before we end our time today, here again is Don with a closing word of encouragement. Are your sins forgiven? Have you taken your sins to the cross of Jesus Christ and asked him to cleanse you with his shed blood? And if you don't know Christ in the way of which I'm speaking here today, Jesus said, I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. Jesus Christ offers you free forgiveness of all your sins if you will come to him in a humble, repentant faith. You can receive him as your Lord and Savior and rest in him to be the one to carry you safely to heaven. Thanks, Don. And friend, do join us next time as Don Green continues teaching God's people God's word here on the Truthpulpit.
Whisper: medium.en / 2023-05-10 23:18:40 / 2023-05-10 23:27:16 / 9