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Christianity Explained Information Find Christian Unity in Biblical Explanations of the Doctrines That Count! |
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You have a choice to make: You
can either believe the opinions of theologians, atheists, or agnostics,
or you can determine for yourself what the Bible says by studying it.
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Topics What Is Christianity Explained Information?What Is Religion and Where Did It Originate? What Is the Bible, and How Relative Is It to My Life? What Are Messianic Prophecies? Who Was Jesus of Nazareth, Really? Why Are There So Many World Religions? Why Are There So Many Christian Denominations? What Is the Law and How Does It Apply to Me? What's All This About the End of the World and End-time Prophecies? Isn't the Book of Daniel a Closed Book? Revelation: How can anyone understand all that symbolism? Who or What Was Jesus' Mother, Mary? Didn't Darwin Disprove Creation? What's the Truth About Faith and Works? Christian E-mails: the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly Complete Directory of Articles/Studies
Title Abbreviations for Books of the Bible Genesis
- Ge |
You Think You Know the Ten Commandments, but Do You?
The Christian world has suddenly awakened to the significance of the Ten Commandments to their lives. As you drive around you see "Keep the Ten Commandments" bumper stickers. Why? I'm honestly not sure of the basis for this revival. In 1984, when I found out that most of the Christian world worships on the wrong day of the week, I mentioned this fact to my Methodist Church family. They told me "The law was nailed to the Cross with Christ." Now, all of a sudden, the Christian leaders are reversing their course. Now they have come to realize that those who, over the past couple of hundred years, taught the importance of the law in the life of the Christian were right: 1. Keeping the Commandments is not a means of being saved but the result of being saved, and those who have truly accepted salvation love God so much they'd rather die than sin. 2. The Bible tells us where there is no law then there is no sin (Romans 4:15). Logic tells us therefore that those who live after Christ died and the law was "nailed to the cross" can live any way they want. Yet that's not what the Bible says. 3. What the Bible really says is that "the handwriting of ordinances" (Colossians 2:14) was nailed to the cross; that is, the rules and regulations Moses wrote in books, not the Ten Commandments that God wrote in stone with his own finger. 4. Christ himself said, "Think not that I have come to destroy the law . . ." (Matthew 5:17), "If you love me, keep my Commandments" (John 14:15), and " . . . the word which you hear is not Mine but the Father's who sent me." (John 14:24) Since God announced, "I am the Lord, I change not . . ." (Malachi 3:6), I consider these statements ample proof that the "law" and "Commandments" Jesus talked about are the Ten Commandments. 5. Etc. (see What Is the Law and How Does It Relate to Me?, to the left.) But whose Ten Commandments are they suddenly urging their ranks to follow? Bet you didn't think to ask. They're urging Christians to follow what I like to call "the abbreviated version" of the law so as not to make people uncomfortable with the reality of what God expects of us. So, for the edification of those who really care, here is the real thing, direct from God's mouth via the Bible:
You can also click here to see a video presentation, if just reading them is too boring for you. You'll notice that God spoke the words and the people experienced His presence. This wasn't just something between Moses and God. God wants us to fear Him, not in the way that we shake in our shoes as the Israelites did but that we respect Him and how far above us He is and how little we deserve His persistent attempts to win us over to Himself. Christ assured us of God's love for us, of Jesus' own love for us, and all that is required of us is love in return. No priests, no pilgrimages, no indulgences, just love . . . the same kind of love that Mary his mother and Martha's sister, Mary, had for him. One that brings us in awe but without fear to his feet in humility and repentence, with a burning desire to learn from him. The reason Christians should follow the Commandments is because Christ said that He and the Father are one (John 10:30) and if you have seen Christ, you have seen the Father (John 14:9). Jesus himself says that God loved him before the world existed (John 17:24). If Christ and the God who brought the Israelites out of Egypt are the same, they worked in concert to accomplish all that has been accomplished in the name of God Almighty, then Christ would have been there when the Ten Commandments were given. In Exodus 6:2-8 God told Moses that He was known by different names. To Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, he had been God Almighty, the creator and sustainer of all that exists, but to the Israelites, he would be Lord God, a God to be Followed and Obeyed. Jesus, as the Messiah, the Deliverer and King of kings and Lord of lords, was to be followed and obeyed also; even the storms and evil spirits obeyed Him. Why would He expect anything less from all who profess to believe in Him? On the other hand, He knows that in ourselves we have not the power to obey, so he sends us the Holy Spirit to help us. You will notice four things about the unabridged Commandments that only a few ever hear from pastors and priests, etc. Why? Mostly because it interferes with their need to create their own power base from which to obtain funds for their own work (read: their lack of faith that God will sustain their ministries if they preach the whole truth). 1. In Verses 2, 5, and 6, God clearly identifies himself. He is the God who brought the Israelites out of Egypt and who frees all of us from the bondage of sin. He is a God of justice, who allows the results of sin to find those who love sin more than they love God. However, He is also a God of mercy for those who love Him more than they love sin. He desires love and respect from us in return, because those who don't love and respect Him will be miserable in heaven. That's why the wages of sin are death, but that's another study. 2. In Verses 3 through 6 God tells us how to show our respect for Him. We should not have anything in this world that is more important to us than Him. In fact, nothing should be as important as Him. Gods don't have to be cows or dragons or even Satan. They come in many forms: our jobs, our homes or cars or boats or planes, our spouses, our parents, our children, our sports stars or movie stars, our TV shows or movies, our video or computer games, our music, our pastors or priests . . . Anything or anyone we respect and/or love more than the God who led the Israelites out of Egypt is suspect. If it pushes God into a corner of your life or if you set aside God's rules and desires for your life while obtaining, participating in, or enjoying it, it has become your god. 3. In Verses 8-11, God tells us when to join with Him in rest and fellowship. It doesn't say, Remember a Sabbath day each week. It clearly identifies The Sabbath Day. No one who claims to be a "Commandment-keeping Christian" or even just a Christian, can ignore the Lord's Day.
Not only does Isaiah define "the Lords Day", he defines another promise that Christians misuse:
Isaiah 58: defines "delight yourself in the Lord". Surprise! It's not about your feelings; its about your actions--the fruit of what's really in your heart! Here's something that may also surprise you: If you don't keep all ten Commandments, you are not Christ's.
But what's worse, if you choose your own Sabbath when God has already proclaimed one, you have placed yourself above God. For more on the Sabbath, go to http://www.sabbathtruth.com/ 4. In Verse
17, God gives what I like
to call "the trick Commandment", you know, like a trick question on a quiz.
My daughter-in-law took a test on which the first instruction was to
read the quiz all the way through before answering the questions. The
last question on the quiz was to disregard all the previous questions
and just fill in your name and pass in the test. She finished in 5
minutes what it took some classmates 20 minutes to do. We can learn in
10 commandments what it has taken mankind millions of laws to try to
teach. It's one thing, if you have a need in your life, to go out and find something that can meet your need. However, if you go out "cruising" and you see something that strikes your fancy so you just have to buy it, are you coveting "anything else that is your neighbor's"? How many of us decide we need what we find, rather than going out and finding (or even better, inventing) what we really need? The Loophole in the LawSince none of us is perfect enough to keep the law, praise God, He sent His Son to reap the wages of our now-ingrained sinfulness!
Born into a world that has been ravaged by the influence of Satan and his evil angels, we are so sinful that we don't really even notice it. And if we don't notice it, we won't repent of it. And if we don't repent of it, we cannot be forgiven for it. That's why God gave us the Ten Commandments: so we can see our sinfulness and repent of it and ask forgiveness. It's not a curse; it's a blessing! When we gaze from Jesus to the Ten Commandments, which He alone kept perfectly, God reveals to us our own sinfulness more and more. And rather than doing away with the Ten Commandments, Jesus elaborated on them:
Reasons for confusionMakes you wonder where the Christian leaders have been all these years, saying the law was nailed to the cross, doesn't it? In all fairness, though, it might have been a simple misinterpretation of scripture: In Colossians, chapter 2, Paul tries to explain to Christians that though we sin and though we are not all Jews ("the uncircumcision of your flesh"), we have been forgiven by a loving Lord who wants to save as many as possible.
Well, someone who wanted to maintain the sinful status quo in his life may have decided that this meant the Ten Commandments, when it really referred to the requirement of circumcision and other ritual laws of the Jews. How do we know this? We see it if we read the context in which the verses appear, which is why I am doing all these Bible studies, but also because it mentions the "handwriting of requirements that was against us", which was the book of the law that God told Moses to write and place alongside the Arc of the Covenant. It is not the Ten Commandment Law, which was written by the finger of God on tablets of stone and placed within the Arc of the Covenant.. Now I need to give the erroneous Christians who came up with this interpretation the benefit of the doubt that they 1. might never have studied the scriptures to see what this passage was all about but only heard it out of context or 2. that this was a simple oversight of the word "handwriting" and therefore an understandable error. I can also see how a protestant leader, zealous for Martin Luther's discovery of salvation by faith alone, 3. might have been trying to use this to counter the Catholic Church's stranglehold on those whom they required to belong to the church and give offerings and confess their sins before a priest and from whom they extracted penances and indulgences (payments) to assure the forgiveness of their sins and a clear path to heaven when all believers already possessed these by virtue of their faith in Christ's substitutionary death for their sins.
So, I leave it up to God to determine the intents of the hearts of those who helped to form and spread the doctrine that has led so many astray over the years. His justice and mercy will determine which of the deceivers and deceived are fit for heaven and which are not. Finally, our obedience to the Ten Commandments also may be a guage of our salvation, for it is the power of the Holy Spirit—Christ within us—that helps us to obey. The extent to which we allow our love for him to surrender ourselves to the Holy Spirit to control us is reflected in how well we obey his commandments. Sometimes we're really surrendered and sometimes we're not!
It is our love for God that makes obedience a joy instead of a chore. Those we love, we wish to please. Those we don't care about, we don't care about pleasing. Thus our willingness to obey the Lord is an indication of whether we truly "believe in the Lord Jesus Christ" and are saved. When my children were small and asked me what I wanted for Mother's Day or my birthday, I most often said, "I just wish you'd do what I tell you so you can stay out of trouble!" Did my children love me? Yes, in a childish, selfish, "warm and fuzzy" way they loved me. But in looking back on their childhood, both agree they should have also trusted me and taken my advice. We have the same relationship with God. We love him in a warm, fuzzy way, but we do not trust him enough to follow him as he wants us to. Yet it is this trust, this obedience that he so admired in Abraham and David, and that he craves from all of us. Can
we quit worshipping ourselves long enough to realize that our ways are
not necessarily the best ways and that Gods ways are? That's what the
Ten Commandments are all about. |
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Scriptures: Within Text:
More Study: Romans 4:15
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Copyright 2005-2008 Lynda Karr
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