HOW TO THINK OF THE TEN COMMANDMENTS

JULY 17, 2009

God led his people out of bondage in Egypt, and then, in time, led Moses up Mount Sinai to ratify his covenant with Israel. There he gave Moses the Ten Commandments -- ten laws by which to live. People who know almost nothing else about the Bible, or about the Jewish or Christian religions, know about the Ten Commandments.

Do they still apply? Should we take them seriously? Should we allow them to guide our moral decisions and actions as individuals, as families, and as a society?

In spite of the fact that the claim is made today that each person should develop his or her own moral code, and that it is each person’s right to do so, and even though there are many quarrels and disagreements over a host of public policy and other questions before the nation that have a moral bearing, almost no one ever argues against or challenges the Ten Commandments. No one ever holds them up as an example of a flawed moral code. In fact, when people seem to have nothing left to refer to as a moral compass for life, they always come back to the Ten Commandments.

They speak with the same power now as they did when God handed them down to Moses, yet there perhaps has been too little effort put into appreciating their real meaning.

To understand them, we should first see that they were not intended as a burden or as restrictions on human freedom, but as necessary for life in community. Without such laws, God was saying, people would not be able to live together in peace and happiness at all. Sooner or later, they would begin to destroy one another.

The Ten Commandments are not just for the people of ancient times, but for people of all times. The moral foundations they lay are for all persons, families, and societies.

When Jesus came, he was accused of doing away with these laws. But he answered: "Do not think that I have come to abolish the law and the prophets. I have come, not to abolish them, but to fulfill them" (Matt 5:17). So, the law remains in effect. Many thinkers throughout the ages have testified to the importance of building our lives on God's commandments. James Madison, often called the Father of the U.S. Constitution, said that we cannot govern without God and the Ten Commandments. President John Adams said "Our Constitution was made only for a religious and moral people. It is wholly inadequate for the government of any other."

The first three of these commandments pertain to our duty toward God. And by giving these commandments, God was telling us we could not survive as a people if we did not place God and God's law at the center of our lives.

Of these three commandments, the first is the most important. It is the most important of all ten commandments: "I, the Lord, am your God. You shall not have other gods besides me. You shall not carve idols for yourselves. You shall not bow down before them"
(Exodus 20:1,3-5).

If this commandment is broken, so will all the others. If this commandment is kept well, so will all the others.

What happens when the first commandment is abandoned? Again, serious thinkers throughout the ages have reflected on this question and proposed their answers. G. K. Chesterton wrote that "when a man ceases to believe in God, he then believes not nothing, but anything." Dostoevsky said, "It is impossible to be human and not bow down; if God is rejected, we bow before an idol."

When people banish God from their lives, something else becomes absolute in their mind and heart. The idol provokes and calls the heart's attention. The heart is seduced into loving what does not love it. It becomes enslaved to an attachment that will only leave it empty, sad, and lifeless. Idols, instead of granting autonomy and freedom, absorb, enslave, and destroy humanity.

In trying to find freedom by breaking away from God, we lose the true image of ourselves, because we were created in God's own image and likeness. When we break with God, we become strangers to ourselves. We lose sight of what it means to be a human being.

God is our origin, destiny, and source of life. His commandments are a path to life, which is to say, to himself. Without the first commandment, we have no ultimate direction or purpose, only a life moving from one banality to the next, one thrill to the next, but without lasting peace, freedom, or happiness.

+Bishop Raymundo J. Peña

last updated 09-Jun-2010 10:44 sitemap