How to Interpret the Ten Commandments #1

We want to lay out here today how to approach the Ten Commandments so that we will learn them and receive them in the way that God intended. If two people were to read the same exact Bible passage, each of them might come to a very different understanding of what that passage means.

That is, unless they had a proper method to help them accurately interpret what was meant in the text. Hello and welcome to The Truth Pulpit with Don Green, founding pastor of Truth Community Church in Cincinnati, Ohio. I'm Bill Wright. Today, as he continues teaching God's people God's Word, Don will show you just how vital it is to have a clear understanding of the intended meaning behind Scripture. So let's join Don for part one of a message called, How to Interpret the Ten Commandments, here on The Truth Pulpit.

John Calvin says this in his Institutes of the Christian Religion, and I quote, The moral law shows God's righteousness, that is, the righteousness alone that is acceptable to God. It warns, informs, convicts, and condemns every man of his own unrighteousness. Man, blinded and drunk with self-love, must be compelled to know and to confess his own feebleness and impurity.

End quote. I'll be quoting Calvin throughout this series. You see, our sad condition is not just that we are sinners, but that we view the Ten Commandments as something less than what they are. And God's own Word warns us against that lethal mistake. In Psalm 119, the writer says, Your commandment is exceedingly broad. The meaning and the implications of God's law is very broad.

It's very high. It's very deep. And so we need to understand how to interpret the Ten Commandments so that we can draw from them the spiritual instruction that God intends them to have. What is their significance? How do they apply to you and to your heart?

What do they say about you and about me? What are they revealing to us about what is real in our hearts? Even the apostle Paul said that I wouldn't have known about sin except the law warned me and told me that you shall not covet. And he found that as he contemplated that commandment that his heart was full of all kinds of coveting that convinced him of how great his own need for Christ was. Well, if that's true of the apostle, what possible hope do we have of escaping the searching implications of the Ten Commandments and finding out how great our need for the Lord Jesus Christ is? And so that's what we want to lay out here today, to give us an approach on how to approach the Ten Commandments so that we will learn them and receive them in the way that God intended. Now, commentators will list as many as ten rules to interpret the Ten Commandments.

From a preaching standpoint, that's a really attractive model. Ten Commandments, ten rules to interpret them, the parallelism of that is just really wonderful and awesome. But today we're going to content ourselves with six, not because there's any special number in, any special significance to the number of six.

It's just for the sake of ease and to try to get through things today, and then we'll deal with other matters as we go through them one by one in coming months. Here is the first and in some ways the most important overarching principle of how to interpret the Ten Commandments and how we need to understand them, and it is this. It's going to be so brief in how we treat this, and yet this is the foundation of it all.

Point number one, and if you're taking notes, and I encourage you to do so, write this down. The whole Bible is the context of the Ten Commandments. The whole Bible is the context of the Ten Commandments.

We understand what God intended by the Ten Commandments by searching the Bible in its totality. Remember that all of Scripture is given to us by inspiration of God. All of Scripture comes to us by the mind and the moving power of the Holy Spirit upon the human writers, so that there is a divine unity in everything between the covers in the 66 books of your English Bible. There is an intentional divine unity to the revelation, even though we can discern different aspects of the human nature of the writers through which it came. Ultimately, the Spirit of God was directing the writers of Scripture to write down exactly what God intended so that what we have in our hands is the very Word of God. What that means for us is that there is a divine unity to the revelation of Scripture, and the best interpreter of Scripture is the Scripture itself. We rely on the rest of Scripture to help us get our understanding of the Ten Commandments right. And so that is going to be very, very important. We not only look at the four corners of Exodus 20, 1 to 17, or Deuteronomy 5, 6 to 21, we not only look at that, we see how the rest of the Bible teaches us to understand what is contained in the four corners of those texts.

And if you think about it, it could be no other way. All of the insight that is available to us in the rest of the Scripture is astonishing. Just going chronologically here, the prophets, speaking from Isaiah through Malachi, the prophets, and before that in the historical books of the Old Testament, the prophets applied the Ten Commandments to Israel in the Old Testament. You can see how God's spokesman, his servants, the prophets, understood the Ten Commandments by the way that they applied them to Israel. And that gives us insight into what the meaning of the Ten Commandments are. Jesus Christ, in the Sermon on the Mount and in other places, expounded on the spiritual significance of the Ten Commandments.

And we'll look at some of his teaching later in today's message. But the prophets interpreted and applied the Ten Commandments to Israel in the Old Testament. Jesus, to his contemporary audience, took the law and said, this is what it means, this is the spiritual significance of it.

And then the apostles, as we will also see, the twelve apostles applied the Ten Commandments to the church in the New Testament. And so throughout the Bible, we have different people speaking for God, speaking in an inerrant way, and applying the Ten Commandments and what they mean to the hearers of their age, now recorded for us in the scripture for us to understand and apply in our age. And so we can't just quickly run through a quick reading of the Ten Commandments and think we understand what they mean. We need to search the scriptures to find out how the rest of the Bible tells us to understand and apply them.

That will guard us from superficiality. It will guard us from legality and thinking that we can obey them in order to obtain our own salvation. And it will guard us from dismissing them as if they were something that was not relevant to the church today. But that is a very significant matter to understand, is that the moral law revealed and expressed in the Ten Commandments, they have significance for us today, even in the church, and we will address that in coming times. So point number one, the Bible is the context of the Ten Commandments, and we need to search the scriptures to understand what they mean. Now, point number two, the goal of the law is love. The goal of the law is love. Now, we might ask the question, you know, there's Ten Commandments and they're spoken about in different ways throughout all of the course of scripture, through the prophets, through Jesus, through the apostles, and we might ask this question, is there a unifying principle by which we could interpret the Ten Commandments that is revealed for us in scripture?

Is there something that joins these individual commands together in a way that helps us understand them? Well, first of all, we would say most certainly because all ten of the commandments come by the word of God. They all come from God himself, so there's a divine unity there. There is a divine unity in the authority of the commandments because all of the authority of God is behind all of the Ten Commandments.

But beyond that, there is also this unifying principle of love vertically and horizontally that the Ten Commandments are designed to teach us. And this, again, in the coming weeks, I believe that this is just going to be profoundly helpful and instructive for us and do much to clarify our view of what we aim our lives at in our pursuit of sanctification as Christians. Mark chapter 12, and I invite you to turn to Mark chapter 12. Mark chapter 12 in verse 28.

One of the scribes came and heard them arguing. And recognizing that Jesus had answered them well, asked him, What commandment is the foremost of all? And Jesus answered, The foremost is, Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God is one Lord, and you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength. Quoting from Deuteronomy chapter 6, immediately after the speaking of the Ten Commandments, Moses gave that statement that Jesus quotes here in Mark chapter 12.

He goes on and says in verse 31, The second is this, You shall love your neighbor as yourself. There is no other commandment greater than these. And so what Jesus has done, he has given us a divine principle by which to understand the intent of the Ten Commandments. Here is what the Ten Commandments require of you.

The law can be summarized in two summary statements. Number one, love the Lord your God with all of your heart, soul, mind, and strength. And secondly, love your neighbor as yourself. He says the purpose of the law is to guide you and to direct you toward loving God and loving man. And that principle, that summary principle of those two points, love the Lord your God, love your neighbor, that corresponds to the two tables of the law. The first four commandments deal with our love for God and how it is that we are to love God and how he commands us to love him. In light of how holy God is, in light of how he has revealed himself, how is it that we are to respond, the first four commandments instruct us in what that is to look like. We are not free simply to make up our own thing and just go by whatever the sentiments and motions of our own heart is in order to love God as he has revealed that he wants himself to be loved. We are to study and understand the way the first four commandments instruct us in loving him and ultimately in resting in Christ, as we'll see when we study the fourth commandment. The last six commandments, starting with honor your father and mother, ending with do not covet your neighbor's wife, those last six commandments require love for our neighbor, Jesus says. And so this is really formative. I can't overemphasize how important this is for directing us in the way that we receive and understand the Ten Commandments, that they are teaching us not merely negative prohibitions about what we are not to do.

It's easy to think in those terms because they're primarily given to us as negative prohibitions. But rather, what you and I need to understand is that the law is instructing us in our positive duties toward God and toward our fellow man in the way that we are to respond to his revelation. And that primary focus, that defining focus is the principle of love. Loving God through fearing him rightly understood and loving our neighbor as it is rightly understood. And in part that's why the Apostle John in his letters could say, I'm giving you an old commandment, even as I'm giving you a new commandment, it's all wrapped around this principle of love. And so the goal of the law, what it is teaching us is to teach us how to love God and to love our neighbor. Again, John Calvin says this, In the first table, the first four commandments, in the first table, God instructs us in piety and the proper duties of religion by which we are to worship his majesty.

The second table prescribes how in accordance with the fear of his name, we ought to conduct ourselves in human society. Now that unifying principle of love, loving God, loving our neighbors gives us a great sense of direction and it narrows our search for trying to get to the central meaning and the central intent of God in giving us the Ten Commandments. Somehow as we're studying them together, somehow we're looking for that which gives us direction on how to express our love, our devotion, our obedience to God. It's instructing us in that, and also it is instructing us in our relationships with one another and how we conduct ourselves in human society. Now, Scripture makes this point repeatedly.

Let me just take you to a couple of other passages. Turn in your Bible to Romans chapter 13. Romans chapter 13, this unifying principle of love, and in these New Testament texts that we're looking at, they focus preeminently on the second table. Look at Romans chapter 13 verse 8 as the apostle Paul instructs the church for all time. He says, Owe nothing to anyone except to love one another, for he who loves his neighbor has fulfilled the law. For this, you shall not commit adultery, you shall not murder, you shall not steal, you shall not covet. And if there is any other commandment, it is summed up in this saying, you shall love your neighbor as yourself. You see how he ties love as being the fulfillment of the law, love being that which the law requires. And so somehow, in a way that we'll explore down the road, somehow when God commands you not to commit adultery, not to murder, not to steal, not to covet, and everything else that he says in the second table of the law, he is instructing you on what it looks like to love your neighbor so that the man, the woman who commits adultery, the man or woman who is a thief, the man or woman who is a liar and a gossip, and the man or woman who carries about a covetous heart, which I just covered all of us in one way or another, those are indications that we do not love our neighbor as God commands us to do, because the one who loves his neighbor would never sin in adultery, would never murder, would never steal, would never covet.

And so all of these things we can see and understand. The Ten Commandments are individual applications of the greater principle of how we are to love one another. In Galatians chapter 5 verse 14, you don't need to turn there, the Apostle Paul says, the whole law is fulfilled in one word, that is one saying. In the statement, you shall love your neighbor as yourself. And so somehow, in ways that we'll look at in the future, somehow the law is instructing us in the manner by which we are to love God and to love our neighbor.

And that unifying principle will guide us. So the context of the Ten Commandments is the whole Bible. The goal of the law is to instruct us in loving God and loving our neighbor.

And we're starting to get, we're starting to build a framework by which we can approach these commandments and have a sense of confidence that we're understanding them in the proper way. Thirdly, as we continue on, the realm of the law is the heart. The realm of the law is the heart. And again, this directly confronts our superficial approach to thinking about the law of God. This directly confronts and exposes the superficial boasting in self-righteousness that so many men take upon themselves, congratulating themselves on being good enough to go to heaven, being better than their fellow man, all while totally missing the point of the law which would give the lie to all of their self-conceit. You see, a proper understanding of the Ten Commandments searches your inner man in a way that nothing else can do. And for this, let's just go back to the Ten Commandments themselves. Let's go back to Exodus 20, having achieved our purpose of showing the parallel in Deuteronomy 5. And in Exodus 20, verse 17, it's important to see that this principle of the inner man is embedded right in the moral law itself, right from the very beginning.

Exodus 20, verse 17, You shall not covet your neighbor's house, you shall not covet your neighbor's wife, or his male servant, or his female servant, or his ox, or his donkey, or anything that belongs to your neighbor. So it takes it out of the purely agricultural agrarian realm and places it in a realm that applies throughout all of time to all of men. And do you see, my friends, the significance of what it says in terms of what we're talking about here. In our day, let's approach it this way. In our day and age, people can think whatever they want as long as they behave externally. If people are behaving externally, there's not much concern in society, in most realms of the church even, in terms of what's going on in a person's heart, what's going on in your mind, and the things that you are thinking about and desiring and wanting in your heart. Well, when we come to the Ten Commandments, all of a sudden we are exposed to a frightening reality that says that God is commanding not only what we do, but who we are on the inside. God is commanding you to be a particular person in your heart, in the way that you are inside. This just explodes in significance on our minds and thinking. You know, we think about the Ten Commandments and we want to go to those outer things, reduce them to mere prohibitions, adultery, theft, I've got those covered, you're like the rich, wrong ruler. You go and you say, I've kept all of those things from my youth. And Scripture says, no, you don't get it.

You don't get it at all. The law governs the inner man. The Ten Commandments themselves explicitly govern the motions of your heart, what you think about, what you desire, who you are and what you love inside, regardless of what others see externally. This aspect of the law brings us naked, as it were, before a holy God and we realize that there is nothing hidden from him, and that is very convicting. All of our selfishness is laid bare and open before him. All of our lust, open, laid bare before him. All of our grudges and resentment and self-centeredness, all laid open and bare before him, even if there was nothing externally by which a court of human law could convict us of any crime. The Apostle Paul said in Romans 7.14, he said, the law is spiritual. The law applies to the inner man.

We cannot miss that point. And Jesus made this plain. Turn to Matthew 5 here. Jesus made this very, very plain. He explains that the law which forbids murder also forbids hatred. The law that forbids murder also forbids hatred. It is spiritual in its application. Matthew 5.21, you have heard that the ancients were told, you shall not commit murder and whoever commits murder shall be liable to the court.

And when we think about murder, we're thinking about the slaying and taking of a human life, physically taking someone's life away from them without legal justification. But Jesus says, but I say to you, meaning there's something more that you need to consider here about the nature of that commandment. That's Don Green bringing today's study to a close. Next time, Don will conclude his look at how to correctly interpret the meaning behind the Ten Commandments here on The Truth Pulpit, and we hope you'll join us then. Meanwhile, if you'd like a copy of today's lesson in its entirety, or maybe you'd like to find out more about this ministry, we invite you to visit thetruthpulpit.com. Once more, that's thetruthpulpit.com.

Now, just before we go, here again is Don with a closing word. I want to let you know that we have a number of topical series available for download or CD requests at our website, thetruthpulpit.com. Issues like the place of Roman Catholicism, anxiety, transgenderism, homosexuality, and the charismatic movement. You'll find series on those topics and so many more at our free authors link at thetruthpulpit.com.

I invite you to take advantage of them all. God bless you. Thank you, Don. And friend, we'll see you next time on The Truth Pulpit as Don Green continues teaching God's people God's Word.