Exodus - Lesson 21

Dr. Carmen Imes 
Exodus 
OT605-21 
Commandments Three to Ten 
Lesson Transcript

Okay, so we've looked at the first two commands and we've slowed down and spent quite a bit of time on each of them. No other gods represent God well. Now we're going to work our way through the rest of the commands, the rest of the ten commandments.

We'll slow down a bit for the Sabbath command and then do the others a little bit more quickly. It's interesting how often Christians will say to me, now the Sabbath command is the one we don't have to keep, right? Like all the ten commandments are timeless and we should still obey them, but not this one, right? Because the New Testament doesn't say it over again. And what I want to say to them is, why would you not want the Sabbath command? This is the one where God says, you get a day off every week and he wants you to rest.

So let's look at it together and look at why this is a gift. I think sometimes in Christian experience, in modern times, the Sabbath has seemed kind of like a ball and chain instead of freedom. But remember, all of the ten commandments are being given in light of freedom from slavery.

So in that light, let's look at it again. Exodus 20 verses 8 through 11. Remember the Sabbath day by keeping it holy.

Six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is a Sabbath to Yahweh your God. On it you shall not do any work, neither you, nor your son or daughter, nor your male or female servant, nor your animals, nor any foreigner residing in your towns. For in six days Yahweh made the heavens and the earth, the sea and all that is in them, but he rested on the seventh day.

Therefore Yahweh blessed the day and made it holy. There are several things we can see here about the purpose and the scope of the Sabbath. So first of all, what is the purpose of the Sabbath? Apparently, remembering the Sabbath day somehow keeps it holy or we're supposed to keep it holy.

Holy means set apart. This is a day that should be different from other days. On it you shall not do any work, and this is what makes it different.

Sometimes Christians today associate Sabbath with going to church or reading your Bible, and it's true that that the Sunday has become like a Sabbath day for many Christians, and so it is a day that we celebrate by getting together for worship. But this command doesn't actually say to worship on the Sabbath. It says not to work on the Sabbath.

So this is one day in seven in which you stop working. Remember back to chapter five when Moses first comes to Pharaoh and demands that he send away the Israelites to serve God in the desert? And Pharaoh reacts to that and says, why are you Sabbathing the people? Why are you stopping them from their work? He didn't want a Sabbath. He wanted people to work for him seven days a week.

He wanted the machine of progress to always be turning, and God says, that is not the kind of master I am. I want you to have a day in which you're not working, where you can truly rest. Who is it for? We've already talked about how the Ten Commandments are addressed to male heads of household, and that's what makes this especially interesting, this phrase that I have highlighted here.

Neither you, nor your son or daughter, nor your male or female servant, nor your animals, nor any foreigner residing in your towns. This is restraining the power of the male head of household so that he doesn't use his own rest as an occasion to exploit other people. This is not a day for the head of household to kick back, put up his feet and say, wife, bring me more beer.

He's not supposed to be making everybody else serve his needs so he can be king of the castle. No, it's his responsibility to make sure everyone who works for him or with him gets a rest, even the animals. The kind of society that Yahweh wants the people to experience is one unlike what they had in Egypt, where Pharaoh made them slave away all the time.

No, this is a community in which everyone deserves a day of rest, no matter their status in the family, and that I think is a beautiful thing. What is supposed to motivate Sabbath observance? What's the reason for this? It's interesting here that the reason given for Sabbath observance is creation. For in six days, Yahweh made the heavens and the earth, the sea, and all that is in them.

We're seeing there again the three-tiered universe, heavens, earth, and sea, and those are the domains and the residents that populate them, all that is in them. But God rested on the seventh day and therefore God blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy. So humans in the community of faith are supposed to be patterning their lives after the work week of creation.

That God got all the work done in six days and then rested on the seventh becomes a paradigm for our work and rest, the rhythms of work and rest that we're supposed to have. Now you know when God rested on the seventh day, it's not because he was tired. He hadn't been going so hard that he's like, man, I just need to catch my breath a minute.

No, the reason that God rests on the seventh day is this is it's analogous to a king resting on his throne. Once the enemies have been vanquished and order is brought to his realm, the king can sit on his throne and preside over an ordered realm, and that's what God does on the seventh day. He has brought order to creation.

He's provided space for flourishing. There's no chaos. There's no insurrection, and now he rests.

And so in a similar way, we are supposed to bring order to our lives, provide space for human flourishings for six days so that we can sit back and enjoy the fruits of our labor on the seventh day. Why wouldn't we want this? Why would we want to say, no, no, I think that's silly. I want to work seven days a week.

I want to keep going on the treadmill. I don't want to let go. The world revolves around the work that I do.

We end up becoming our own slave masters when we work seven days a week, when we refuse to shut it off and sit back and enjoy what God has provided. And this command is an antidote to the kind of workaholism that is actually a form of idolatry. When we're living with the idea that if I stop, things will fall apart, instead of recognizing I am not the one who holds this world together.

It does not depend upon me. Therefore, I can sit back and rest one day a week and trust that God is going to provide. We saw this back in chapter 16 with the provision of manna, where God gives manna six days in a row, but he doesn't provide manna on the seventh because he's already provided on the sixth day twice as much as they need.

So they can gather twice as much on the sixth day and then enjoy that on the seventh. God has already trained them to trust him that he'll provide what they need when they need it, and that his mode of provision does not require them to work on the seventh day. When I was a kid, this seemed easy enough, not to clock in on Sunday.

You just say, I can't work on Sundays. I think it's a lot harder now than it used to be. We have these little computers we carry around in our pockets, and the computers ding at us all of the time, giving us notifications for as emails come in or messages come in.

And I remember the first feeling this shift when day trading became a thing in the stock market. Early in our marriage, my husband decided to invest in the stock market, and so he was watching all weekend long what the stocks were doing. It didn't close on Friday anymore in the same way that it used to.

Now, all weekend long, there might be things happening you need to keep an eye on. That's a kind of creep, a scope creep, if you will, that we need to really watch. Because we have access to this whole digital world where we can work seven days a week, no matter what our field, it's so important for us to say, no, I am not a machine, and I am not a slave.

I am going to stop because God says it's okay for me to rest, and I can enjoy and trust his provision. One thing I haven't mentioned up until now is that this is not the only place we encounter the Ten Commandments in the Bible. They're repeated all over again in Deuteronomy chapter 5, and the reason for that is plain.

We have a new generation that's been born in the wilderness. They're getting ready to enter the land, and so Moses reiterates the law for them. He gives them the Ten Commandments.

He recites what God has done historically so that they know who they are and what they're getting into and how they are to live. And what's really interesting is to put these two collections of the Ten Commandments side by side, and mostly they're the same. But with regard to the Sabbath command, there are some significant differences.

So here I have them side by side from Exodus 20 and Deuteronomy 5. So notice that Moses in Deuteronomy is preaching. It's a prophetic sermon, and so you're going to hear the kinds of things that you might expect to hear in a sermon. For example, in the first verse it says, Observe the Sabbath day by keeping it holy as Yahweh your God has commanded you.

So he's looking back to that previous iteration of the Ten Commandments at Sinai, and he's reminding them that this has been said before. But notice especially the blue section at the bottom where the motivation for the Sabbath command is given. This strikes me every time as so interesting because if I was the one writing the Ten Commandments, I would have swapped these two around.

Exodus 20 grounds the Sabbath command in creation, but listen to the reason that Moses gives the next generation when he tells them to observe the Sabbath. He says, Remember that you were slaves in Egypt and that Yahweh your God brought you out of there with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm. Therefore, Yahweh your God has commanded you to observe the Sabbath day.

What? These were not slaves in Egypt. As I just said, the people listening to Moses in Deuteronomy were born in the wilderness. That's the reason they're on the plains of Moab getting ready to enter the land.

They were not in the generation that lived in Egypt. And yet Moses tells them the reason they should keep the Sabbath is because they were slaves. And this is a feature of that same thing we saw back in chapter 12 when we read the ritual instructions for the Passover celebration.

Why interrupt this epic narrative with instructions for a dinner party? Because there's no such thing as a second generation covenant member. Every generation is the generation God brought out of slavery in Egypt and brought into relationship with him. The purpose of the Passover ritual is to reactivate the covenant every year for every generation so that they understand God set me free.

I was a slave and I have been rescued. It never becomes something stale. Well, my great great grandparents were slaves in Egypt and God brought them out.

No, I was a slave in Egypt and God brought me out. He wants them to own this story as their story. And so Moses says to the next generation, observe the Sabbath.

What are you trying to do? Enslave yourselves again? God set you free from that life. He brought you out so that you could live a life of a rhythm that allows for human flourishing. Six days of work and then a day of rest, not just for you, but for everyone in your household.

It is such a beautiful promise. So now we turn to the shorter commands that finish up the 10 commandments, beginning with the command to honor your father and mother so that you may live long in the land Yahweh your God is giving you. Now, typically we think of this as the one command that's geared for children.

Okay, kids, listen up. This one's for you. Honor your father and mother.

That's me. Parents love to pull this one out whenever their children are disrespectful, that this is what God commanded them to do. But what if this command is not different than the other commands? What if, like the other commands, this is addressed to male heads of household? What would it mean for an adult male who has a household of his own to honor his father and his mother? Why would God talk to adults about honoring their parents? And what's up with the long life that God promises? This is, as the New Testament tells us, the first command with a promise, so that you may live long.

We all know people who have died young and many of them have been the kind of people who honored their parents. So this doesn't seem like the sort of promise that we can count on. What's going on here? Well, we'll work our way backwards to the question of adults by considering first the living long.

So that you may, it doesn't just say so that you may live long to a ripe old age. It says, so that you may live long in the land Yahweh your God is giving you. The people are about to enter the promised land and receive the gift that God promised to Abraham.

And the promise to Abraham was many descendants and it was a covenant relationship. God is going to be their God and they're going to be his people. They're going to carry on the worship of generation after generation and through them, through this family, all nations will be blessed.

What happens if the people disregard the covenant? They don't honor God. They don't, they worship other gods. They don't keep the Sabbath.

What happens if they disregard his commands from Mount Sinai? They go into exile. That is, they get kicked out of the land. It no longer belongs to them.

It reverts back to being gods in which they don't get to be tenants of the land and they lose their place in it. I think what's happening here is not a promise that you're going to live to a ripe old age, but a promise that if you want to live long in this land, if you want to possess the fruits of the promise God made to Abraham, then you have to live as a member of the covenant that God made with Abraham. And that includes living by all of these instructions.

You have to safeguard the covenant that you've received from your parents, or you're going to lose possession of the land that God promised to you. So why would a command about parents be addressed to the male heads of household? And if they're head of household, are their parents even still alive? Probably not. This has to do with, although it's wonderful to honor your living parents, and it's great when kids do so, the point of this command seems more to be about honoring the faith that was passed on to you, keeping alive the covenant relationship from generation to generation so that you don't lose the land God promised.

This is the key. We've all seen examples of parents who were not worthy of honor, parents who were abusive, who were mean-spirited towards their children, and often people will come to this command and say, do we have to honor our parents? What does it mean to honor parents who are not worthy of honor? What happens when a parent dies and they've been awful, and now it's time to say something at their funeral? Does this command mean you have to promise to only say nice things about them? Do you have to lie about what they were like as parents? I don't think so. Yes, we should be honoring as much as possible towards those who gave us life, but this doesn't mean that we have to keep putting ourselves in situations that are abusive or that we need to lie about the way that they've been treating us.

This command has more to do with honoring the faith that's been passed down and keeping it alive for the next generation so that we can experience the promises of God. The other commands in this list are ones we might see in any ancient Near Eastern culture. Not murdering is, of course, a good idea, but here they've been brought, as we talked about in a previous session, they've been brought into a covenant context in which every other member of this community is a covenant member.

That is, they're under the protection of Yahweh, and so if I violate my neighbor's rights, if I violate their right to life or marriage or property or good reputation, and I take what belongs to them in these ways, then I'm actually opening myself up for the wrath of God, and he's promised to protect my neighbor, and this is not something that I don't want to be on the bad side of God. And so let's slow down and look at what do each one of these contribute to our understanding of the kind of society that God wants. Well, the first is you shall not murder.

Sometimes people understand this in a really broad sense as a prohibition of any and all killing, and they would make this the basis for pacifism or against capital punishment, but I don't think that's what's happening here. The word in Hebrew specifically has to do with murder, where I am personally taking revenge on someone or I am personally taking out their life, the way Cain does with Abel. He's disgruntled with Abel, so he kills him.

That kind of killing, a personal vendetta or personal revenge, is what's completely off limits. If we read on in the law at Sinai, we'll find that there are other laws that merit capital punishment, where God says someone who does this must be put to death. So it's not any and all killing that is problematic.

It's when I take upon myself the duty of getting rid of someone else or the desire to get rid of someone else. That's outside of what is a socially constrained and just exercise of violence. The next command is the command not to commit adultery.

If I violate someone else's marriage covenant, it disrupts the vows of loyalty that they've made to each other. It destabilizes society, and it violates what belongs to one of Yahweh's vassals. God takes covenants seriously, and marriage is a covenant between a man and a woman for life.

It's a commitment, a loyal commitment for life. It's the closest analogy we have to the covenant that we have with Yahweh, a lifelong commitment of loyalty to each other. So if I can't take interpersonal lifelong commitments of loyalty seriously, how am I going to take this ultimate commitment to God seriously? It shows our commitment to the promises that we've made, and that's really important.

The next command is you shall not steal. Violating someone else's property violates what belongs to one of Yahweh's vassals, and it unravels mutual trust. I can't just take what I want when it belongs to someone else.

My neighbor has a right to property. Fundamentally, if I'm taking what belongs to my neighbor, it expresses a dissatisfaction with what God has provided for me, a kind of coveting inaction. I need to instead make myself content with what God has provided and not take what he hasn't.

The next command says you shall not give false testimony against your neighbor. Sometimes people summarize this law as you shall not lie, but this is not a prohibition of all lying. There are some forms of lying that seem to actually be sanctioned by the biblical text.

That gets us into the weeds, but you'll notice, for example, in the David narratives, there are a number of places where someone conceals the truth or even outright lies about something in order to protect someone else from someone who's being exploitative. So there's no sanctioned lying in the Bible where someone tries to get out of the consequences of their behavior, the just consequences. But when someone with power is abusing that power and a lie is told to protect the vulnerable from that abuse of power, that seems to be okay.

The narrator does not pass judgment on that in, for example, in the David narratives. This command is much more specific. It says you shall not give false testimony against your neighbor.

That is, you may not damage the reputation of your neighbor by saying things that are not true about them. This is important today, but you can imagine how much more important it even was in a time when there were no lie detector tests, no DNA testing, no security cameras, surveillance, where if you said someone did something, all they had was your word. In that time period, it was so important to uphold the trust, mutual trust, in the community.

And when that was violated, things would start to disintegrate. It's still important today. The next command is, or what I would say is the next two commands, the commands against coveting, are the last in this series.

You shall not covet your neighbor's house. You shall not covet your neighbor's wife or his male or female servant, his ox or donkey, or anything that belongs to your neighbor. This is another command that has an interesting variation in Deuteronomy.

In Deuteronomy 5, the wife gets moved up the list and she gets her own line item, as Dan Block likes to say. You shall not covet your neighbor's wife. You shall not set your desire on your neighbor's house or land, male or female servant, ox or donkey.

It's as if in the intervening 40 years, Moses has realized that by putting wife along with the property, it could lead to the abuse of women or the treatment of the wife as a piece of property. And so she gets promoted and gets her own line item in the next set of 10 commandments. But here we have a clear picture that coveting, which is not something that you can legislate or that you can even find in a court context, that coveting is off limits.

This is something that is only known to God. Our heart attitude, when we want something that belongs to someone else, but we haven't acted on it, that's something only God can see. But it matters to God and it affects the community that we live in.

And God says, your heart posture matters. You need to become so content with what I've provided that not only are you not taking what belongs to you, you're not thinking about taking what doesn't belong to you. We see this principle echoed in Jesus' Sermon on the Mount.

Sometimes people talk about Jesus' words in the Sermon on the Mount as if he's raising the bar. You've heard that it was said, do not murder, but I say to you, if you even call your brother, you fool, you're in danger of the fires of hell. I would argue that Jesus is not raising the bar, but rather he's reading all of God's commands through the lens of the coveting command.

Because the command against coveting, or the commands against coveting, take aim at our heart and they show that our heart attitude matters to God. And Jesus recognizes this and he says, it's not just about murder, it's about the heart attitude that leads to murder. It's not just about adultery, it's about the heart attitude that leads to adultery.

And so I think Jesus sees clearly here that it's always been about the heart. That when God calls his community, his people, into obedience, that he's calling us into a radical obedience that's not just external but internal as well. The Ten Commandments are the first of what we're going to see at several law collections in the Torah.

We'll spend some time in the Book of the Covenant that runs from the end of this chapter through chapter 23, but there are other collections in Leviticus and in Deuteronomy as well. Dan Block came up with this chart that I think is a really helpful one to show the relationship of these law collections. Sometimes people talk about the Ten Commandments as a summary of the law.

I don't think it works to call them a summary because there are things we're going to find later that don't seem to fit neatly back into this or that aren't included here. But I do think it's appropriate to think of the Ten Commandments as the seed or source of the rest of the laws. We'll see even in the Covenant Code the principles that are derived from these commands generate more reflection on what does it look like to live faithfully with Yahweh.

How can we live wisely and well in the communities that he has made us part of? Questions? Three quick clarifying. So with your count there's nine commandments? No, with my count there's ten because I split coveting into two. Oh you do split? I do split.

I included it on the slide as one because they're really both getting at the same thing. But here it's do not covet your neighbor's house and then do not cover anything else that belongs to your neighbor. And then in Deuteronomy it's wife and household.

Okay, so you're using Deuteronomy to number these basically? Deuteronomy influences the way I see it, but in both places there are actually two verbs given. Do not covet is stated twice, so it easily is two commands. Secondly, on the giving false testimony, so you don't see this as a law court issue, but for example this would be a prohibition against gossip and slander.

I think you're right about that. I think definitely it applies in a court of law, but part of the problem is we don't have a really well-developed picture of how law courts even worked or if a law court is even the right word for what happened in ancient Israel. We have elders at city gates who make decisions.

We have in some cases judges who make decisions deciding between two claimants, but there doesn't seem to be a fully developed court system. So I think whatever they had it would apply there, but it would apply more broadly to taking aim at your neighbor's reputation and undermining that. All right, and finally I'm going to go back to the honoring.

I could imagine someone saying, well God's not giving me any land. I don't have any land, so what's the motivation? So what do you do with the land if it's the faith of your fathers? Yes, such a good question. So the way I understand the land, this ties in with the way Greg Beal talks about sacred space.

In his book, The Temple and the Church's Mission, he argues that the Garden of Eden was meant to expand its boundaries until it encompassed all creation, and I see things the same way. So the land of Israel is like a Garden of Eden. It's like a model place for God's people to live, but the idea is to have ever-expanding boundaries as the nations come into covenant with Yahweh and as they're brought into right relationship with him.

Eventually all the earth becomes the inheritance of the people of God. So you might not personally have land, and my family owns a home, so I suppose that means we own the land it's on, but I don't see that as a covenant blessing or a right in the same way that Israel's land was, but the land then becomes symbolic of all the covenant blessings of prosperity that God offers his people. So I would see it more broadly now that we're past the New Testament.

So it would be, to use New Testament language, the land is the expansion of the kingdom of God. Yes, or the kingdom of God is the expansion of the land. Yeah, I like that.