Living Words

You Shall Not Covet

Exodus 20:17

by William Klock

It is, I think, providential that we arrive at the tenth word or tenth commandment of the Decalogue on this Sunday before Thanksgiving.  It is always remarkable to me how shallow our thanks and our gratitude can be.  Nothing illustrates it better than that in my own country, the day on which we give national thanksgiving is followed by the biggest shopping day of the year.  People give thanks on Thursday and then, first thing Friday morning, are storming department stores and beating and trampling each other for a killer deal on a big-screen TV or the latest toy or video game for their kids.  It’s crazy.

The contrast may not be so obviously on display in Canada since we don’t have these two days back to back, but we suffer from the same problem nonetheless.  We are one of the richest peoples on earth, but most of us just never seem to be satisfied.  Consumer debt creeps up year after year, because we have to have whatever everyone else has and we don’t have the money to pay for it.  We say we’re thankful, but all too often our actions prove otherwise.

It’s a problem as old as time.  The Lord knows this, and so in Exodus 20:17 he tells the Israelites:

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 is your neighbor’s.

The first thing that stands out here is that it’s not as simple as the other commandments in the second table.  “Don’t steal.”  “Don’t murder.”  “Don’t commit adultery.”  Granted, “Don’t bear false witness against your neighbour” is a bit more complex than the others, too, but not like this.  It doesn’t just say “Don’t covet”.  It gets into specifics and the command itself is repeated a second time.  I think there are two reasons for that.

First, to covet, isn’t necessarily a bad thing.  It’s what you covet that poses the problem.  You see, the Hebrew word here, chamad, means “to desire”.  There are good things to be desired.  There are desires that honour God.  Consider Psalm 19:

The law of the Lord is perfect,

         reviving the soul;

the testimony of the Lord is sure,

         making wise the simple…

More to be desired are they than gold,

         even much fine gold;

sweeter also than honey

         and drippings of the honeycomb.  (Psalm 19:7, 10)

Or consider Proverbs 3:

Blessed is the one who finds wisdom,

         and the one who gets understanding…

She is more precious than jewels,

         and nothing you desire can compare with her.  (Proverbs 3:13, 15)

And, in the New Testament, St. Paul tells us repeatedly to desire the life of the Spirit that we have in Jesus.  Put off the old man and put on the new, he says.  And he contrasts sinful desire with godly desire.  Here’s what he writes in Galatians 5:

I say, walk by the Spirit, and you will not gratify the desires of the flesh.  For the desires of the flesh are against the Spirit, and the desires of the Spirit are against the flesh, for these are opposed to each other, to keep you from doing the things you want to do… But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control; against such things there is no law.  And those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires.  (Galatians 5:16-17, 22-24)

The desires of the unregenerate person are bad, but to desire the fruit of the Spirit, to pursue them with our all—there’s no higher good.  So the problem is all about what we desire.  We’re all going to desire something.  Our hearts will always be fixed on something.  We need to be asking what they’re fixed on.

Second, when this ninth word tells us what not to covet, it repeatedly points to the things that belong to our neighbour: his house, his wife, his servant, his livestock.  The command specifically mentions your neighbour’s house, but by the end, it puts his entire household off limits.  It covers in general terms all the sorts of important things your neighbour has from the perspective of an ancient person: it begins with the house and then lists everyone or everything of importance inside that house.  But the main point here is that these things belong to someone else.

There’s nothing wrong with desiring a wife.  God made us that way.  Husbands and wives are partners.  There’s nothing wrong with desiring an ox or a donkey to help you in your work.  God gave human beings dominion over the animals.  There’s nothing wrong with desiring a roof over your head.  But desiring these things becomes a problem when they belong to your neighbour and, the implication here in particular, points to those times when we already have a house, a wife, a servant, an ox, or a donkey, but our neighbour has a nicer house, a prettier wife, a harder-working servant, or a stronger ox.  Remember the context here: the Lord takes care of his people.  He freed them from slavery.  He fed them with manna in the wilderness.  He defeated their enemies.  He was leading them to a land of milk and honey—a land of plenty.  The Lord will provide for both you and your neighbour.  Be satisfied with his goodness.  Use the means he has given to better your situation—not just for yourself, but that you might also assist the poor.  Be happy for your neighbour that his house is nice, that his wife is beautiful, and that his ox is strong.  And trust in the Lord’s good providence.

The danger of coveting is highlighted in the story of Achan in Joshua 7.  Everyone knows the story of the conquest of Jericho.  The Lord told Joshua to have the people march around the city each day for a week with the ark of the covenant at their head.  On the seventh day they circled the city seven times and when they were finished, the priests blew their trumpets and the people shouted and the Lord brought the walls tumbling down.  It was a great victory that we all learned about in Sunday School.  But the follow-up is less well known.  From Jericho, Joshua led the people into battle at a town called Ai.  It should have been an easy victory.  In fact, Joshua didn’t even send his full army.  But the men of Ai defeated the Israelites and sent them running.  “What happened?” Joshua wondering.  He cried out to the Lord, “Why have you allowed this to happen?  Don’t you know that the Canaanites will mock your name because of this defeat of your people?”

And the Lord responded: “Get up off the ground, Joshua!  You were defeated because Israel sinned!  At Jericho you stole some of the treasure that belonged to me.”  You see, the real problem isn’t God being mocked by the nations because he brought defeat on his people in battle.  The real problem is God being mocked by the nations because of the disobedience and unholiness of his people—because of their lack of faith.  I expect Joshua was perplexed, but not as much as we are—or at least not when we find out what happened.  Israel stole some of the treasure that belonged to God.  It’s not hard to imagine Joshua thinking, “What do you mean, Lord?  I didn’t steal anything.  Someone may have, but why bring defeat on the whole nation because of one person’s sin?”  It’s easy to imagine that, but I don’t think that’s what Joshua was thinking.  When the Lord said that Israel had stolen some of the treasure, Joshua understood: Israel was called to be holy as a people and even one person could ruin that.  Joshua didn’t question that God would punish the nation for the sin of one man.  The army was defeated.  People died.  But the man who was guilty lived.

And so the next day the Lord had Joshua bring the people before him, tribe by tribe.  And the Lord singled out the tribe of Judah.  Then clan by clan, they were presented, then household by household until the Lord brought a man named Achan to Joshua’s attention.  Achan confessed to Joshua:

Truly I have sinned against the Lord God of Israel, and this is what I did: when I saw among the spoil a beautiful cloak from Shinar, and 200 shekels of silver, and a bar of gold weighing 50 shekels, then I coveted them and took them.  And see, they are hidden in the earth inside my tent, with the silver underneath.”

I coveted and took them.  Achan sinned in his heart, but that sin drove him to sin with his hands.  He didn’t just take something that belonged to his neighbour; he stole what belonged to the Lord.  And the repercussions were horrible.  Again, the nation was defeated.  Men died.  And then Achan, his family, and his livestock were stoned to death and burned along with his tent and the treasure he had stolen.  Everything and everyone connected with or in contact with the stolen goods were destroyed so that the wickedness, the unholiness was purged from the community.

Achan highlights the problem with coveting and, I think, his story explains why this last commandment stands were it does at the end of the Decalogue.  It reminds us that sin begins in the heart.  Sin is rooted in our disordered and ungodly desires.  For the vast majority of us, it’s pretty easy to not murder; it’s pretty easy to not commit adultery; it’s pretty easy to not steal; it’s pretty easy to not lie.  If nothing else, we know that the penalties for these things are not something we want to deal with.  Kill your neighbour and go to prison.  Get caught stealing and the same might happen.  Even if you don’t go to prison for stealing, chances are that thing isn’t worth the trouble you’ll be in if caught.  Cheat on your wife or your husband and, even if our society no longer has legal penalties for it, getting caught is also going to bring a world of hurt down on us.  And then there’s lying.  Tell a lie, get caught, and your reputation is gone.  Bear false witness in court, get caught, and you may end up in jail.  We know these things and, if nothing else, the consequences keep us on the straight and narrow.

That’s good as far as it goes, but it’s not enough.  There’s more to sin than our outward actions and this final commandment reminds us of it.  It’s not enough not to murder, not to commit adultery, not to steal, and not to bear false witness.  We need to root the desire for these things from our hearts.  As they say, we need to nip sin in the bud.  We need to squash it when temptation first rears its head.

Achan’s story also reminds us that coveting not only entertains the danger of breaking the second table of the law, but that—all by itself—likely causes us to violate the first table of the law.  What I mean is that while coveting tempts us to violate the “love your neighbour as yourself” part of the Decalogue by stealing his stuff or cheating with his wife or defaming his character, when we entertain the sort of obsessive desire entailed in coveting, we’ve already failed to love God with all of our heart, soul, mind, and strength.  We’ve made the object of our desire an idol.  We’ve forsaken trust in God’s provision.  We’ve doubted God’s goodness.  And we’ve become unthankful for what he has given us.

Brothers and Sisters, you can’t doubt God’s goodness and trust in him at the same time.  And so this last commandment reminds us that membership in the people of God isn’t about dos and don’ts, but ultimately about faith.  Yes, there are plenty of dos and don’ts.  God wants a holy people who represent him to the nations.  God wants a holy people who will be light in the darkness.  And, on our own and because the darkness in this world is so deep, we often struggle to know how to be light.  We often struggle to know how best to represent God to the nations.  And so he speaks, he gives us his word and he gives us his Spirit to teach his people how to live as his people.  He gives us the long lists of dos and don’ts.  And—this is important—it takes both.  The word doesn’t work apart from the Spirit and the Spirit doesn’t work apart from the word.  Our problem today is one that theologians call anti-nomianism—that’s Greek for “anti-law”.  A lot of Christians think that all we need is the Spirit.  They’re wrong.  The Spirit who renews our hearts and gives us a love for a God is the same Spirit who breathed out the Scriptures so that we can know what that love for God should look like and how it should manifest itself in our lives.  Yes, as people of the New Covenant we live by the law of the Spirit, but we’ll never grasp, never understand that law without the word spoken by the Spirit.  That’s why Paul wrote to Timothy, saying:

All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work.  (2 Timothy 3:16-17)

There’s no part of the Bible that we can disregard or live without.  This is the Spirit’s word and without it we will never be complete or fully equipped for the life Jesus gives us through the Spirit.  Hear this: the Spirit renews the desires of our hearts, turning them from self to God.  But the same Spirit has also breathed out God’s word, the Scriptures, so that we can know how to act on and how to fulfil the desire for God he’s placed in our hearts.

So the dos and don’ts are important.  They’re the practical side of being the people of God.  But we’re reminded by this last commandment that faith is at the heart of being God’s people.  Again, remember the preamble in verse 1: “I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery.”  The Lord calls his people to obey his commandments based on his history of faithfulness.  He heard their cries.  He defeated Pharaoh.  He delivered them from slavery.  He parted the sea.  He drowned Pharaoh’s army.  He brought water from the rock.  He fed them with manna in the wilderness.  At every turn the Lord has shown his might, he has shown his love, and he has shown his faithfulness.

It’s always remarkable to me that people refer to faith as a leap into the unknown.  Brothers and Sisters, anyone who thinks that hasn’t read the Bible, hasn’t read the story, the record of the Lord and his people.  The Lord never asks his people to make a blind leap.  He proves his goodness.  He demonstrates his ability.  He shows them his love.  And then he says, “Trust in me.”  And so the Lord tells his people: worship me and me alone.  Worship me as I direct, not as the pagans worship their gods.  Keep my sabbath.  Honour your father and your mother.  Don’t murder.  Don’t commit adultery.  Don’t steal.  Don’t witness falsely against your neighbour.  And, finally, don’t desire what I have, in my goodness, given to your neighbour.  It brings us back full circle to “I am the Lord your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt”.  Trust in me, have faith in me, follow me, be my witness to the nations and do it because I’ve shown you repeatedly that I am worthy of your worship and worthy to be trusted.

And, Brothers and Sisters, if that was true for Israel, consider how much more true it is for us, the Church, the New Israel.  We can look back to the Lord’s deliverance of his people from Egypt and his provision for them in the wilderness, but we can also look back to the continued record of his faithfulness.  He brought them into the land as he promised.  Over and over and over through the centuries he watched over, provided, and cared for his people.  They cried out and he raised up judge after judge.  They cried out and he gave them a king.  We see his faithfulness, too, in his discipline.  The Lord was good to his word when his people were defeated, expelled from the land, and carried off to exile in Babylon.  And he was good to his word, again, when he heard his people as they wept by the waters of Babylon, when he heard their repentant cries and returned them to the land.

But, Friends, most of all we see and know the goodness and faithfulness of God in Jesus.  Right from the beginning of the Israel’s story we see her heart problem.  We’re reminded of it here in the tenth commandment.  And in the Old Testament we see the Lord’s promise to one day address this problem of the heart.  We hear throughout the Old Testament the promise of a redeemer who will, once and for all, set this broken world and its broken peoples to rights.  And in Jesus we see these promises fulfilled.  And we see the costliness of it to God himself, the death of his own Son.  We see in Jesus the supreme witness to God’s faithfulness and we kneel before Jesus and declare that he is Lord.  We submit to his rule.  We enter into his kingdom.  It is no blind leap.  And it is no blind leap because he has proved his worth, he has proved his might, he has proved his love, and he has proved his faithfulness.  He has not only forgiven the sins that arose from our old rebellious hearts that rejected that external law written on stone, but he has also given us new hearts, hearts of flesh on which he’s written his law by his Spirit.  He has finally taken the last and most difficult commandment and made it the first and the easiest.  The Spirit has purged from our hearts a love for self and poured into them a love for the God who first loved us.

Let us pray: Most merciful Father, we humbly thank you for the gifts you have so free given us; for life and health and safety; for the ability to work and for leisure to rest; for all that is beautiful in creation and in the lives of mankind; but above all we give you thanks for our spiritual mercies in Christ Jesus our Lord. Strength our faith as remember your faithfulness, that we always love you with heart, soul, mind, and strength and our neighbours as ourselves.  Through our Lord Jesus we pray.  Amen.

You Shall Not Bear False Witness

Exodus 20:16

by William Klock

About a month into my first semester of seminary I was eating dinner with a group of friends.  It was the day the O. J. Simpson murder trial came to end and the verdict was read.  Most of the group were Canadian.  I was the sole American.  We’d all long since lost any interest in the trial.  Our expectations were low.  We knew how things worked.  But then there was Thomas.  He was from Germany.  He’d just arrived in North America.  He knew a little bit about the case, but hadn’t been following it.  The rest of us were talking about something completely unrelated when Thomas sat down.  And the first thing he said was, “Wow.  O. J. didn’t do it.  How long do you think it’ll take them to find the real killer?”  And we all just sat there looking at him in stunned silence.  Then they looked at me, expecting the American to explain.  It was my country, after all.  And I said something like, “Dude.  They got the killer.  Everyone knows O. J. is guilty.  They’re not going to look for someone else.”  But in his naivety, Thomas said, “But the court found him not guilty.  How can that happen if he’s guilty and everyone knows it.”  And that started a discussion about the corruption of the American justice system.  People with power and people with money all-too-often escape justice, whether it’s through loopholes or through corrupt lawyers who work the system or any number of other ways.  Thomas just sat there looking utterly appalled.  Later, he said something about how shocked he was.  The US was supposed to be better than that.  As an American, I was kind of surprised that he wouldn’t already know this.  It’s not like O. J. was the first rich person or first celebrity to escape justice.  When he was found liable in civil court, I found myself thinking back and wondering what Thomas would have thought of that: not guilty in criminal court, but guilty in a civil suit.  Things like this are a black mark on the justice system.

And this is exactly what the Lord expected his people to avoid.  They were to a be a light in the midst of the nations.  As the prophet Micah proclaimed to Israel, the Lord required of them as his people to love kindness and to do justice.  Her failure to do either of these things eventually led to her exile—her removal from the Lord’s land.  And so this is what the ninth word or ninth commandment is getting at.  Look at Exodus 20:16

You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor.

I always found this one confusing when I was a kid.  As I learned it in Sunday School, it meant simply “Don’t lie”.  What does it mean to “bear false witness” against a neighbour?  It’s a much narrower category than just saying “Don’t lie”.  It’s about what you say in the courtroom.  It’s easier to understand the reason for this narrowing of focus when we remember that the Lord’s concern was for Israel as a people, for Israel as a covenant community, not so much the piety of each individual person.  It’s not that the individual isn’t important.  The community is made up of individuals, after all.  But it was the covenant community as a whole that the Lord established to bear witness to him and so it was the covenant community as a whole on which the Lord’s reputation depended.  That’s why the focus here is on what we might call the reputation of Israel’s system of jurisprudence rather than on the individual.  Israel’s reputation for holy justice could survive the individual here or there who tells a lie, but the reputation of the nation stands or falls on whether or not the nations see a people as a whole who stand for truth and justice.

Think of it this way.  A man can commit a murder and then stand up in court, lie through his teeth, and claim he didn’t do it.  That man is not a threat to the reputation of the nation.  But when that nation’s system of jurisprudence allows truth to be sacrificed on the altar of power, money, and corruption, it calls into question the whole nation’s commitment to truth and justice.  The more often it happens, the more the nation’s reputation is undermined.  And in Israel’s case, because she was called to represent the Lord and his good rule, it wasn’t just Israel’s reputation at stake, but the Lord’s, too.

So that’s one reason why we have this command not to bear false witness against a neighbour instead of a simple command, “You shall not lie”.  But the bit about one’s neighbour is also important.  Every lie is told to someone.  Every lie is told to a neighbour of one kind or another, but as Jesus reminds us, the second table of the law is a reminder to love one’s neighbour as oneself.  And so the focus of this ninth word is placed on the sorts of lies that actively and deliberately do harm to our neighbour, his property, his life, and his reputation.  There are all sorts of lies.  There are lies we tell to make ourselves sound bigger or better than we really are.  There are lies we tell to get ourselves out of trouble.  But when the Lord tells Israel not to lie, he zeroes in on the lies we tell to hurt and to destroy our neighbours.  Again, it’s not just a matter of personal piety.  The big picture here is the witness of the whole people of God.  Is Israel a people who value and place a priority on the truth?  Is Israel a people who value and place a priority on justice?

And, once again, it comes down to faith.  Think back to the preamble in verse 1: “I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery.”  I am the Lord who revealed the truth about Pharaoh’s false claims of divinity.  I am the Lord who brought justice to bear on Egypt and freed my people from their bondage.  As my people you ought to value truth and justice and you ought to trust me enough to live them out for yourselves.

The emphasis here also makes more sense when you remember just how many crimes in Israel were capital crimes and just what they had to rely on in court.  In Canada we have no capital crimes.  Most Western countries limit the death penalty to premeditated murder.  But in Israel there were more capital crimes than we have time to list this morning.  And they didn’t have modern forensic science and DNA testing.  A conviction rested on the testimony of witnesses.  And so in Deuteronomy 17:6 we read:

On the evidence of two witnesses or of three witnesses the one who is to die shall be put to death; a person shall not be put to death on the evidence of one witness.

When someone’s life was on the line, the word of one witness was not sufficient evidence.  There had to be multiple witnesses to corroborate the accusation.  St. Paul brings this same principle to bear in the church.  He writes to Timothy:

Do not admit a charge against an elder except on the evidence of two or three witnesses.  (1 Timothy 5:19)

But the Lord also gave Israel laws meant to discourage false testimony.  In that same passage from Deuteronomy it’s also written:

The hand of the witnesses shall be first against him to put him to death, and afterward the hand of all the people.  (Deuteronomy 17:7a)

Execution was typically by stoning and it was the witness on whose testimony the verdict depended who was commanded to throw the first stone.  It’s one thing to lie and see a neighbour convicted.  It’s a whole other thing to be the executioner.  This drove home the full gravity of one’s testimony in a capital crime.  But that wasn’t all.  Here’s what we read in Deuteronomy 19:16-20,

If a malicious witness arises to accuse a person of wrongdoing, then both parties to the dispute shall appear before the Lord, before the priests and the judges who are in office in those days.  The judges shall inquire diligently, and if the witness is a false witness and has accused his brother falsely, then you shall do to him as he had meant to do to his brother.  So you shall purge the evil from your midst.  And the rest shall hear and fear, and shall never again commit any such evil among you.

The focus here is on the person who witnesses falsely so that a neighbour is punished.  The Lord says that if you’re caught doing that, the punishment that you sought for your neighbour is now your punishment.  If you accused him of a capital offence, you now reap the death penalty yourself.  If you accuse him of stealing your livestock in a malicious scheme to extort livestock from him, your livestock is now are and, if you can’t pay up, you’re the one who gets sold into slavery.  I think this also covers what we would today refer to as “frivolous lawsuits”: trying to scam money from an insurance company, from a doctor, from a neighbour by claiming some sort of phoney or trumped-up injury and things of that nature.  In Israel, you get caught doing that and you’re the one paying up.

The book of Proverbs, in particular, stresses the importance of truth and justice.  Like the torah, Proverbs also stresses truthfulness primarily in the context of the court.  Again, it’s not that individual piety isn’t important, but that the reputation of the whole people of God is most important.

Whoever speaks the truth gives honest evidence,

         but a false witness utters deceit.  (12:17)

A false witness will not go unpunished,

         and he who breathes out lies will not escape. (19:5)

A worthless witness mocks at justice,

         and the mouth of the wicked devours iniquity. (19:28)

A false witness will perish,

         but the word of a man who hears will endure. (21:28)

Be not a witness against your neighbor without cause,

         and do not deceive with your lips. (24:28)

A truthful witness saves lives,

         but one who breathes out lies is deceitful.  (14:25)

What we see as we gather up everything the Old Testament has to say about this subject, is that God’s people ought to value truth and justice as much as he does.  Israel’s faithfulness to truth and to justice reflected the Lord’s faithfulness to truth and to justice.  The Lord established his people in part so that the nations would see him at work in their midst.

As with the last several commandments, this one isn’t hard to transpose into the New Covenant.  The New Israel ought to be just as concerned about truth and justice as the old Israel and for the same reason.  Jesus reiterated this command when he was confronted by many of his own people who played loose with their word.  Here’s what he says in Matthew 5:33-37,

You have heard that it was said to those of old, ‘You shall not swear falsely, but shall perform to the Lord what you have sworn.’  But I say to you, Do not take an oath at all, either by heaven, for it is the throne of God, or by the earth, for it is his footstool, or by Jerusalem, for it is the city of the great King.  And do not take an oath by your head, for you cannot make one hair white or black.  Let what you say be simply ‘Yes’ or ‘No’; anything more than this comes from evil.

Now, Jesus isn’t saying not to take or make oaths.  The problem he saw was one in which people would make oaths and swear by certain things as if what you swore by made the oath more or less binding.  You know, swear to God and you really meant it, but swear by your own head and, well, no big deal if you break it.  Jesus says, ‘No.  Keep you word whether you swear an oath or not.  Let your yes mean yes and your no mean no.  Be so consistently honest that people know they can trust your word.”  Brothers and Sisters, that’s what the Lord has wanted of his people from the beginning.

As I’ve been preaching these sermons through the Decalogue, I’ve been reading through what the confessions and catechisms that came out of the Protestant Reformation have to say about them.  The Heidelberg Catechism caught my attention this week.  It asks, “What is the aim of the ninth commandment?”  And here’s the answer:

“That I never give false testimony against anyone, twist no one’s words, not gossip or slander, nor join in condemning anyone rashly or without a hearing.

Rather, in court and everywhere else, I should avoid lying and deceit of every kind; these are the very devices the devil uses, and they would call down on me God’s intense wrath.  I should love the truth, speak it candidly, and openly acknowledge it.  And I should do what I can to guard and advance my neighbour’s good name.”

First, never give false testimony in court.  Most of us will probably never be faced with that situation, but if we are: speak the truth and further the cause of justice.

Second, twist no one’s words.  Now we’re probably getting closer to home.  We’ve probably all done this.  If we haven’t we’ve all certainly felt the sting of having our words twisted.  More than once someone who wasn’t here on a Sunday has said, “So I heard that you said such-and-such in your sermon.”  Sometimes they’re upset and say something like, “How dare you?  Do you really believe that?  That’s crazy?”  But I never said anything like that.  Usually, I said just the opposite.  But someone’s gone and twisted my words, spread it around, and the damage is done.  Nevermind that the sermon is posted online and what I said is easily verified.  All too often we’d rather believe the worst.

And that leads into the third point the catechism makes about gossip and slander.  Proverbs 18:8 says:

The words of a whisperer are like delicious morsels;

         they go down into the inner parts of the body.

Doesn’t that describe gossip well?  Someone whispers some juicy bit of information to us and it makes us feel so good.  Sometimes it makes us feel good because it’s some bit of insider information and now we’re amongst the privileged few to be let in.  Usually it’s some bit of information that makes us feel oh so superior to the poor shmuck guilty of—well—whatever rumour says he’s gone and done.  Sometimes that bit of information is false.  Sometimes it’s true.  But you’ll probably never know, because that’s the point with gossip.  Gossip doesn’t really care about the truth.  Gossip’s about making us feel good at the expense of someone else.

I understand that there are grey areas.  A lot of gossip masquerades as prayer requests and requests for advice.  “Did you know such-and-such about So-and-so?  Pray for her.”  Friends, stop and think before you share.  Maybe we really do need to pray about the situation.  But is that really the motive in telling others about it?  Or is the real motive the desire to build ourselves up at another’s expense?  Stop and ask yourself if the person you’re talking about would be upset if he or she knew what you were sharing.  If she’d be upset with what you’re doing, there’s a good chance you’re gossiping.  Stop and consider that in Romans 1, St. Paul lists gossips in the same breath as murders.  Gossip murders another person’s reputation.

Then there’s slander.  Paul mentions that right along with gossip and murder.  Slander is when we knowingly and deliberately say something false about another person.  It’s outright character assassination.  Friends, there is no room for slander in the Christian life.  None at all.

Finally, there’s the flip side of gossip and slander.  What if you’re the person on the receiving end?  The catechism says, “That I never…join in condemning anyone rashly or without a hearing.”  What came to mind first as I read these words were the events at this year’s March for Life in Washington.  Do you remember the high-school kids who ended up on the news, condemned for getting in the face of an elderly native man who was playing his drum.  One kid in particular was raked over the coals.  People talked about the smirk he wore and one commentator asked if we’d ever seen a more punchable face.  What these kids did to this poor man was despicable.

But one thing I’ve learned—and it comes from taking the Bible’s advice seriously while watching the media repeatedly trip and fall—is that it’s wise to wait a bit before jumping on the bandwagon of outrage when these things happen.  Proverbs 18:5 says:

The one who states his case first seems right,

         until the other comes and examines him.

And we see this truth played out over and over.  This was a perfect example.  The first videos released were incomplete.  As more footage turned up we discovered that these kids were the ones showing restraint and that it was the man with the drum being confrontational.  The boy wasn’t smirking.  It was a look of awkwardness as he tried not to respond to another’s provocation.  The more information that came out, the more we realised that the initial narrative we were given had pretty much everything backwards.

Brothers and Sisters, if we are committed to truth and to justice, we need to be people with level heads, people who are slow to condemn, people who are patient and who wait for the facts.  Truth demands it of us.

In a similar vein, it also strikes me how easily we can be to break this commandment by repeating or propagating gossip and slander—particularly these days on the Internet and with social media.  For some reason people are prone to thinking that if it’s on the Internet, it must be true.  Often, if it reinforces our thinking about a person—particularly a politician—or about a political or social issue, we click “share” before asking if what we’re seeing is true or not.  Friends, don’t do that.  Slow down.  Take a breath.  As they say, “Google is your friend.”  Do a little research.  And then share it when you’re reasonably certain what your sharing is true.  Again, as Jesus’ people, we are people committed to the truth.

Finally, there’s the pressing issue posed by our culture’s tumble into Postmodernism and relativism.  Our culture is quick to sacrifice truth on the altar of feelings.  We’ve reach a point that only a couple of decades ago most people would have thought absurd.  “Truth” is private and it’s whatever we want it to be.  We remake God in our own image or we deny God and call it “truth”.  We rewrite history and call it truth.  We write out own personal codes of ethics and call it truth.  Today a man can call himself a woman and claim it as truth.  Someone claims that 2+2=5 and if you’ve got the nerve to point out that, no, 2+2=4, social pressure will be applied.  No outrage will be spared.  You’ll be condemned as a hater or who knows what else.  Those of us over thirty or forty probably just roll our eyes, but I fear for our children.  We live in a society where “niceness” is increasingly the single greatest value.  Everyone just wants to be liked and affirmed.  (That’s another social problem, but I won’t get into it this morning.)  And I fear for our children who have been instilled with these Postmodern values.  When our greatest desire is to be accepted and when society’s first value is niceness, imagine the pressure our children face when they take a stand for truth.  We need to be cognisant of these issues and we need to be preparing our children to face them.  In kingdom perspective, there’s more to life than being accepted by a morally and philosophically bankrupt culture.  We are people of the truth.

This was really driven home to me this week.  The New Testament repeatedly speaks of truth.  I was thinking about this and thought I’d use my Bible software for once and do a search for “truth” in the New Testament.  I wanted to see, all in one place, the New Testament’s various uses of this word “truth”.  I knew there would be a lot of hits, but even still I was struck by just how many.  There were dozens of verses that I knew, but hadn’t thought of in this regard.  I was thinking in terms of John’s gospel and epistles especially, but it’s all through the New Testament.

Consider that Jesus says, “I am the way, the truth, and the life” (John 14:6).  Jesus is the truth.  But Jesus also describes the Holy Spirit as the Spirit of truth (John 15:26; 16:13).  John writes that John the Baptist was sent to bear witness to the truth (John 5:33).  And in passages too numerous to list, the good news that in Jesus the Lord has fulfilled his promises and the good news that Jesus, crucified and risen, is Lord—that’s also “the truth”.  And so as Christians we are truly people of the truth.  We are people who know and live the truth that God is faithful and that in his faithfulness he has sent his King.  We know and live the truth that this King is Jesus, and that he has died and risen and given his Spirit to make his people new.  Brothers and Sisters, you and I are stewards of the truth.  We’re stewards of the greatest truth there is, the truth about Jesus.  The Lord has entrusted us with it, not just for our sake, but for the sake of the world.  But we cannot be stewards of that truth, we cannot be faithful witnesses to that great truth, without also being good stewards with the truth in general and with all the little truths that surround us in everyday life.  Whether it’s our neighbours telling lies to get ahead or our whole culture denying the truth about humanity, the truth about God, or the truth about Jesus, we stand must stand for truth.  When everyone else insists that 2+2=5, no matter the pressure, we are the people committed to the truth and who stand firm and declare that 2+2=4.  And we are the people who love our neighbours as Jesus has loved us.  Because we love them we steward the truth.  One day, through our witness, they may know the truth about Jesus, this good news we call the gospel.

Let us pray: Gracious Father, forgive us for our careless and unloving speech.  As we hear your word read this morning and as we come to meet your Word Incarnate at the Table, remind us of your truth.  We have been forgiven and made new by your Son, who is truth and you have poured your Spirit into us, who bears witness to the truth.  You have made us people of the truth.  Give us grace and teach us to really be the people you have made us.  Give us the faith to stand firm on your truth even when doing so has a great cost.  And, we ask, cause our witness to bear fruit in the world around us, that others might know the truth as well.  We ask this through Jesus our Lord.  Amen.

You Shall Not Steal

Exodus 20:15

by William Klock

During the year I took off between university and seminary I spent about a month working in the garden centre and hardware section of a Fred Meyer store.  My second day there they called several of us who were new to a meeting with the store security chief.  She told us about various store “loss prevention” policies.  She introduced us to the plain-clothes security guards in the store so we’d know who they were and wouldn’t blow their cover.  She walked us around the store, the warehouse, and the departmental stock rooms and showed us where all the security cameras were.  Then she took us to the monitoring room and made a special point of showing us how every cash register had a camera on it.  While we stood there she had the guy monitoring the cameras zoom in on an open cash drawer and read off the serial number of a $20 bill.  And that was the point when I clued in: they were far more concerned about employee theft than they were what they called “non-paying customers”.  They wanted us to know that there was nowhere we could go that they couldn’t watch.  They wanted us to know who the security guards were, because those guards were watching us as much as they were watching the customers.  It was kind of insulting.  And then the next day a cashier was arrested for a scam she’d worked out with her roommate.  And a few weeks later my department manager was arrested after he was caught marking down big-ticket items and then selling them to co-conspirators.  A couple of fellow employees got fired for swiping each other’s cards in the timeclock.  There was a camera on that, too.  Years later, a friend who worked in management at that same store would tell me about his new expensive, flat-screen TV that he got for a couple of hundred dollars.  “How’d you manage that?” I asked.  “I just marked it down and had my neighbour come in and buy it,” he said.  “I figure they owe me since I didn’t get a raise this year.” Some people get caught, but I suspect most manage to get away with it.

You probably know what our passage is today.  It’s Exodus 20:15.  The eighth word or the eighth commandment of the Decalogue.  It’s another short one.  Again, just two words in Hebrew.  In English it reads:

You shall not steal.

It’s not complicated.  In fact, it’s a very simple command.  It doesn’t say what not to steal.  It doesn’t say when not to steal.  It just says, “You shall not steal.”  Doesn’t matter what.  Doesn’t matter the circumstances.  Don’t steal.  Period.  I could leave it at that and it’d be my shortest sermon ever, but I actually do think it’s worth looking at how the torah and then the New Testament apply this command.  I also think it’s important that we grasp the underlying spiritual issues as well.

So think about this from the standpoint of faith, from the standpoint of trusting the Lord.  The Israelites are gathered at the foot of Mount Sinai as the Lord speaks these ten words directly to them.  This is the Lord who heard their cries in Egypt.  This is the Lord who defeated Pharaoh.  This is the Lord who worked a series of miracles and then led his people out of Egypt.  This is the Lord who parted the sea.  This is the Lord who drowned the Egyptians.    This is the Lord who provided water from a rock.  This is the Lord who has promised to take them to his land, a land flowing with milk and honey.  This is the Lord who that very morning miraculously provided manna for them to eat.  This is the Lord who now says, “You shall not steal.”

The Lord will provide.  He has proved himself repeatedly in this series of amazing events.  He has given the Israelites every reason to trust that he will provide what they need.  There’s no reason for them to steal.  The Lord will provide.  That’s the context in which the command is given.

The command itself is open-ended and general, as I said before, but it’s also really simple.  Just don’t steal.  Even still, the torah does go on to spell out some specifics.  The first expansion of this command is found in the very next chapter, Exodus 21:16:

Whoever steals a man and sells him, and anyone found in possession of him, shall be put to death.

Kidnapping falls under the heading of theft.  And in this case, the penalty is death.  Imagine if that sort of penalty had been hanging over the heads of government and church officials in this country when they were kidnapping native children under the auspices of educating them.  But primarily, this command outlawed the sort of thing we practises we saw in the modern slave trade and slavery system that was gradually phased out in the 19th Century—a system that relied on kidnapping.  The torah permitted slavery, but the slavery it permitted and regulated was a very different sort of thing.  Slaves in Israel were typically either prisoners of war or they were debtors.  A native Israelites could wind up a slave because of debt.  The maximum period of his slavery was seven years.  And the person he served was also responsible for his family.  In a lot of ways it was a better system than we have today.  Today, if a thief receives any serious punishment, he might go to prison and his wife and children are left to fend for themselves.  The thief is punished, but the victim receives no restitution, and his family is often destroyed.  Not so in Israel.

And that leads us to Exodus 22.  Look at verses 1 and 4:

If a man steals an ox or a sheep, and kills it or sells it, he shall repay five oxen for an ox, and four sheep for a sheep.  If a thief is found breaking in and is struck so that he dies, there shall be no bloodguilt for him, but if the sun has risen on him, there shall be bloodguilt for him. He shall surely pay. If he has nothing, then he shall be sold for his theft.  If the stolen beast is found alive in his possession, whether it is an ox or a donkey or a sheep, he shall pay double.

So, first, we see the Lord instructs Israel in the principle of restitution.  If a man steals an ox and is caught, he must return the ox.  But he also must give a second ox in restitution.  It’s not enough to reset things to the way they were; the thief must experience the full extent of the damage he caused.  If the animals has been sold or slaughtered, the thief must make restitution of five oxen for an ox and four sheep for a sheep.  Second, if he can’t make restitution this way, he will make restitution by being sold as a slave.  Third, a man is justified in defending his property, even using lethal force.  At the same time, force must be proportional.  If the theft happens in the daylight and the thief is caught, unnecessary lethal force becomes murder.

Under this heading the law also forbade cheating and swindling.  One of the most frequently addressed swindles was the use of dishonest weights and measures.  Today a grocer might put his thumb on the scale to add a bit to the weight so that he can overcharge the customer.  In the ancient world the weights used in commerce were sometimes doctored and merchants would deceive and steal from their customers.  Rulers would debase their coinage, reducing the percentage of actual silver or gold or slightly reducing the size of the coins.  Rome would become notorious for this, but our modern governments and banks with their fiat currencies and fractional reserves have taken it to heights the Caesars could never have dreamed of.  All of this was out of bounds for Israel in the Lord’s land.

Wages and fair treatment of the poor also fall under this heading.  Leviticus 19:13 says,

You shall not oppress your neighbor or rob him.  The wages of a hired worker shall not remain with you all night until the morning.

In a cash and barter economy where many were day-labourers who lived hand-to-mouth, wages were not to be held overnight.  A man would often need that day’s wages to buy dinner and food for the next day for his family.  There are also a number of passages in the torah that ban the charging of interest to fellow Israelites.  This is what Deuteronomy 23:19-20 says:

You shall not charge interest on loans to your brother, interest on money, interest on food, interest on anything that is lent for interest.  You may charge a foreigner interest, but you may not charge your brother interest, that the Lord your God may bless you in all that you undertake in the land that you are entering to take possession of it.

This one’s interesting, because it doesn’t ban interest outright.  You can charge interest to the foreigner, but not to the fellow Israelite.  Why?  Because the Israelites are the Lord’s people, the land is the Lord’s land, and his promise of care and provision extends to all of his people.  If an Israelite is in need, his fellow Israelites have an obligation to help him out of their abundance.  This is a reminder that Israel’s law is not our law, but it’s also an important principle to keep in mind.  It was true of Israel and it’s true of us as Christians: While we have a right to our property, we also need to recognise that what we have is a gift from God and that we ought to be ready to share freely what we have with those who are in need—and especially with our brothers and sisters in Christ.  Yes, when we make a capital investment, we deserve a return on that investment.  But that’s not how we should treat loans made to friends in need—in fact, better just to give than to loan in the first place.

There are more applications, but these are some of the major ones.  But one final Old Testament application comes from the prophet Malachi.  The Lord instructed the people about tithes and offerings.  They were expected to look after the poor in their midst.  They were expected to be generous with what the Lord had given them.  But they were also given specific instructions about supporting the formal ministry of the priesthood and the temple.  Through Malachi, the Lord rebuked his people for stealing from him and explains that this is why their land of plenty has become barren.  Here’s Malachi 3:8-10,

Will man rob God?  Yet you are robbing me. But you say, ‘How have we robbed you?’ In your tithes and contributions.  You are cursed with a curse, for you are robbing me, the whole nation of you.  Bring the full tithe into the storehouse, that there may be food in my house.  And thereby put me to the test, says the Lord of hosts, if I will not open the windows of heaven for you and pour down for you a blessing until there is no more need.

Again, this is the Old Testament.  The tithe is an Old Testament principle, but I think you get the idea here.  Everything they had was from the Lord.  They would have still been slaves in Egypt if it hadn’t been for him.  They were expected to be generous in return out of gratitude.  The torah specified a tithe of ten per cent along with various offerings to support the ministry of the priests.  They were the mediators between the Lord and his people.  While we have no such command as Christians, we still see this obligation to be generous with what the Lord has given—to those in need and to support the church.  Paul writes that “those who proclaim the gospel should get their living by the gospel” (1 Corinthians 9:14).  As Christians we should be, at a minimum, at least as generous as the Israelites.  Giving ten per cent to the formal ministry of the Church should be a starting point, a minimum.  And we should be generous over and above that in giving to the poor and in supporting other ministries and organisations outside the Church.

I know, I’ve already started straying into New Testament ground, but now we’ve seen what this meant for Israel in the Old Testament.  What does it mean for us?  Again, at the core, this is a matter of faith.  It was the God who had led the Israelites out of Egypt, who had parted the sea, who had drowned the Egyptians, who provided water from the rock and manna in the wilderness, it was this God who was leading them to a land of plenty who gave this command “You shall not steal”.  To steal was a sin against the Lord’s providence.  It was to doubt his goodness, his provision, and his care.  Brothers and Sisters, if that was true of the Israelites, how much more true is it of us, the New Israel?  This same God has, for our sake, humbled himself to be born of a virgin, has taken on our flesh, has died the death that his enemies deserved and did so for their sake, has risen from the tomb, and has given his own Spirit to renew our hearts and to meet our most desperate need.  This is the Lord who, as we struggle in faith each week, meets us here and speaks as his word is read and feeds us with his very self in the bread and in the wine.  Here is our manna in the wilderness.  Israel’s law is not our law, but the law of the Spirit written on our hearts demands the same: You shall not steal.  And it demands it as a step of faith in the God who gave his own life that we might live.

So with that in mind, what does the New Testament actually have to say on the subject and then what are some of the practical applications we can draw from it?

I think some of the most important passages in the New Testament are the ones that put this in the context of the converted and renewed heart.  In Ephesians 4, St. Paul writes about putting off the old self and putting on the new.  He says,

[B]e renewed in the spirit of your minds, and to put on the new self, created after the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness.  (Ephesians 4:23-24)

He goes on to list the sorts of behaviours people engaged in before learning about Jesus.  Stealing is in that list:

Let the thief no longer steal, but rather let him labor, doing honest work with his own hands, so that he may have something to share with anyone in need.  (Ephesians 4:28)

The Lord has given you the means to work, so work.  Don’t steal for a living.  Earn an honest living.  And then, maybe the most important part of what Paul says: Do it so that you can share with those who are truly in need.  Just as the Lord provided for his people in Canaan and expected them to help each other, the Lord expects the people of the new Israel to share with each other from the abundance he provides.  I’ve met a lot of Christians who expect some kind of miraculous provision from the Lord.  When I was a kid we had a friend who was unemployed and mooched off a lot of people.  My dad asked, “How’s the job hunt going?”  And he’d say, “Oh, God didn’t tell me to go look yet.  But he’ll provide.”  Brothers and Sisters, that’s not the way it works.  God made us for work and he expects us to work.  In his common grace this is how he ordinarily provides for us.  And out of that provision we can share with the truly needy—with those who really can’t work.”  The other thing this highlights is that our attitude towards our property should not be one of greed.  It’s not about amassing as much as you can and then glorying in your wealth.  Yes, make provision for tomorrow.  Make provision for your children.  But be generous as well, remembering that you are only a steward of what the Lord has graciously provided.

Another key passage is Paul’s word to slaves in Titus 2:9-10

Bondservants are to be submissive to their own masters in everything; they are to be well-pleasing, not argumentative, not pilfering, but showing all good faith, so that in everything they may adorn the doctrine of God our Savior.

I think that addresses the attitude of entitlement we so often hear—like my friend who stole his TV and justified it: “I didn’t get a raise this year.”  I’ve seen and heard that sort of thing from people in every secular job I’ve ever had.  And Paul warns that this sort of thinking, this sort of entitled mindset is ruled out by the cross of Jesus.  If a slave wasn’t to be stealing from his master, surely we shouldn’t be stealing from our employers.  And, Paul tells us why: that we may adorn the doctrine of God our Saviour.  Even when we find ourselves wronged by another, our faith in God’s care and provision is on display.  Brothers and Sisters, we trust in him to provide rather than wrong another.  To quote Paul again, this time 1 Corinthians 6:10:

[N]or thieves, nor the greedy, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God.  And such were some of you. But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God.

I think, too, that Jesus and Paul both gives us some perspective on how we should treat our private property.  The Bible is clear: our property is our own.  No one has a right to it.  But at the same time, we follow a Saviour who gave his life for the sake of his enemies and he calls us to sacrifice for the sake of the gospel that we might have a gospel witness of his kingdom.  Jesus reiterated the command, You shall not steal.  But in the Sermon on the Mount, he also addresses this issue of rights.  Here’s what he says in Matthew 5:39-42.

I say to you, Do not resist the one who is evil.  But if anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also.  And if anyone would sue you and take your tunic, let him have your cloak as well.  And if anyone forces you to go one mile, go with him two miles.  Give to the one who begs from you, and do not refuse the one who would borrow from you.

A Christian has as much right to his or her property as anyone, but the Christian also has higher priorities than putting up a fight for his property.  Just as Jesus gave up his rights for the sake of the world, we are called to give up our rights for the sake of the gospel.  That we are willing to turn the other cheek rather than strike back, that we are willing to give our clothes to a thief rather than use force to keep what’s ours, that we’re willing to freely give and trust God to provide for our needs is a witness to our faith in him.

I think this is in part what Jesus is getting at when he says to render to Caesar what is Caesar’s and when St. Paul writes about paying our taxes and being peaceable citizens.  John the Baptist called on the soldiers who came to him in repentance not to use their position to steal anymore.  Jesus prompted Zacchaeus, the corrupt tax collector, to return what he had stolen and to do business honestly from that point on.  But the New Testament never suggests Christians engage in a tax revolt, even against a government that used those taxes for all sorts of evil and even for the suppression of their fellow believers.  Jesus (and then Paul) understood, again, that there are higher priorities for the Christian than demanding our rights.  The fact was that the Emperor would one day kneel in submission to the Lord Jesus and bring reforms to his government and empire, but that was going to happen not through violence, but through the patient witness of Christian after Christian after Christian who dramatically demonstrated faith in the Lord, even to the point of allowing themselves to be fed to lions, rather than retaliate.  Yes, their property was their property.  Yes, Caesar was corrupt and evil.  But the Lord had a higher calling on their lives and through their witness he brought Caesar and his empire to faith.

It didn’t happen overnight.  It took three centuries.  But it happened.  And if it happened to the Roman Empire, it can certainly happen again.  Now, there was nothing those early Christians could do about the government of Caesar.  The only voice they had was their gospel witness and, for many, their martyrdom.  In contrast, we live in a democracy.  I think this is something to consider as we’re in the midst of another election season and as politicians pander to us by offering us favours paid for with our neighbours’ money.  Are we letting them play to our greed?  Are we casting votes in return for favours paid for by the despoilment of our neighbours?  Brothers and Sisters, we’d better not be.  The opposite ought to be the case.  Christians ought to be using our political voice to stand up for the property rights of others, to stand up against greed, and to stand up against corruption.  Standing up for the rights of others is a part of our witness—we stand for what is right, we stand for justice, we stand in defence of our neighbours.  But that said, even more powerful witness in this regard lies in our holding lightly to our property and our money.  When it is taken unjustly, we let it go.  When we see another in need, we give.  We do that because we trust in the providence of God—in his goodness, in his care, in his generosity.  And, Brothers and Sisters, we trust because we know and have experienced first-hand his covenant faithfulness.  In a world filled with greedy and grasping hands, I can think of few things that better witness our faith than that the Lord’s people should live with our hands generously open.

Let’s pray: Gracious Father, we give you thanks for your good care and provision.  We ask this morning that you would convict us where we have been greedy or wasteful with our property and money and of those ways and times that we have stolen from you and from our neighbours.  Reminds us to look at our worldly goods through the lens of the cross of Jesus, that we might dedicate everything to you and make your kingdom and the good news about Jesus our first and greatest priority.  Each week we say those words, “All things come from you and of your own have we given you.”  May we truly see your gifts in that light.  Amen.

You Shall Not Commit Adultery

Exodus 20:14

by William Klock

If you’ve got your Bibles, turn to Exodus 20:14 as we continue our study of Exodus and the Decalogue—the “Ten Words” or “Ten Commandments”.  The Lord gave the torah—the law—to Moses to deliver to the Israelites, but these ten words he spoke directly to the Israelites themselves from Mt. Sinai.  This is the core of the law.  This is the core of their covenant with the Lord.  These were the conditions under which they were to live in the land—his land—into which he was taking them.

The first four words pertain to the relation of the people to the Lord.  We often call that the “First Table”.  The “Second Table”, the remaining six, pertain to the relation of the people to each other.  And yet both tables are interconnected.  It all stems from the Lord’s call to single-minded and whole-hearted devotion to him and him alone.  And do you remember why?  Because, as the Lord spoke in verse 1: “I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery.”  The Lord had shown his commitment and his love to them.  The law he gave shows how they are to reciprocate his commitment and love in return.  “I will be your God and you will be my people.”  That’s what this is about.

And so today we come to the seventh word or commandment.  Look at Exodus 20:14.  It says:

You shall not commit adultery.

It’s another short one, just like last week’s commandment.  Again, in Hebrew, it’s just two words: “No” and “commit adultery”.  But what did it mean to the Israelite?  We need to know what the Lord was saying to them before we apply it to ourselves.  And, once again, when we look at the language and the historical and cultural context, we’ll see that what this meant to the Israelites was somewhat different than what it may look like to us at face value.  It’s important to remember that what was important to them and the reasons why things were important to them aren’t necessarily the same things that are important to us.  As I’ve said before, we tend to evaluate what is good based on whether or not it makes us happy.  They tended to evaluate what was good based on whether or not it maintained order.  We’re talking about marriage here.  Our highest value in marriage is love—and particularly the warm feelings we personally feel towards another person.  That’s the main reason most people get married in our culture.  Procreation is secondary—or maybe even less important than that for most people.  Even things like compatibility don’t matter much to many.  And family?  Family usually has nothing to do with it.  We make our own choices about whom we marry.  We marry primarily based on our feelings.  And if something gets in the way or someone objects, we ignore them, side-line them, or steam-roll right over them.

Ancient people—and that would include the Israelites—would think we’re all absolutely crazy.  Again, what we focus on in marriage is what makes us happy—which may be why we so often fail at marriage.  The single most important thing for them was order.  They married to maintain the family.  Procreation was one of their highest priorities.  When it came to whom they married, their feelings had little if anything to do with it—feelings developed later as they grew to know each other.  They married to keep property in the clan or to amass property by bringing two families or clans together by marriage.  And it was parents who typically made these arrangements.  Honouring those decisions fell under the heading of the fifth commandment: Honour your father and your mother.

So while marriage is marriage whatever culture you live in, what we value about marriage shapes how we view it and it’s also going to shape how a commandment like this is understood.  In the Ancient Near East, adultery referred to sexual relations between a man and a woman who was either married or betrothed.  Hebrew is no exception.  We see this in the way the Hebrew word for adultery is used in the Old Testament.  For example, Leviticus 20:10 says:

If a man commits adultery with the wife of his neighbor, both the adulterer and the adulteress shall surely be put to death.

It’s not that the Old Testament doesn’t address other sorts of sexual sins.  It does.  But adultery as they defined it—a man having relations with a married woman—was uniquely disruptive to marriage and family in their cultural context.

That this was a capital crime highlights just how significant it was to them and to the Lord.  This wasn’t unique to Israel.  Adultery was a serious crime across the Ancient Near East.  Death was the penalty pretty much universally.  When Abimelech confronted Abraham after he’d passed off Sarah as his sister, Abimelech referred to the adultery that could have resulted as a “Great Sin”.  There are texts from Ugarit and Egypt that use the same language.  Why?  Because adultery strikes at the most basic unit in society: the family.  And the family is essential to maintaining order.  A lot of people today will write that off as old-fashioned and out-dated—again, if your personal happiness is your highest goal it’s hard to understand what’s wrong with adultery—but just look at our society today.  Chaos is fast becoming the order of the day and we can trace almost everything to the disruption of marriage and family.  Our society is increasingly trying to put the State in the place family once occupied, but doing so is proving an utter failure.  I’ll come back to this later.

Now, a lot of people who are critical of the Bible argue that the reason why adultery in the Old Testament is focused on sexual relations between a man and a married woman is that it’s all about women as property.  But there’s very little evidence in the Old Testament that this is what it was about.  Again, the focus was on order and preserving the family—and not just the immediate nuclear family, but the extended family, including future generations.  When it comes to “property” there was more emphasis on inheritance and lineage than on daughters and wives.  Sirach writes of the “woman who leaves her husband and presents him with an heir by another man” and says, “First…she has disobeyed the law of the Most High, second, she has committed an offense against her husband; and third, through her fornication she has…brought forth children by another man….She herself will be brought before the assembly, and her punishment will extend to her children.  Her children will not take root, and her branches will not bear fruit” (Sirach 23:22-26).  The rabbis echo these concerns in their writings.  It wasn’t about violating the husband’s property.  It was, first, a violation of the Lord’s commands and, second, an act of treachery.  In fact, the people put it on par with murder.  Here’s what Job said:

The murderer rises before it is light,

         that he may kill the poor and needy,

         and in the night he is like a thief.

The eye of the adulterer also waits for the twilight,

         saying, ‘No eye will see me’;

         and he veils his face. (Job 24:14-15)

Again, these attitudes were pretty common across the ancient Near East, but one aspect of this that seems to have been unique to Israel was the seriousness of the penalty.  The torah condemned both the man and the woman to death.  That was common.  But in most other cultures, the aggrieved husband had the right to commute the sentence.  He could choose to let his wife and/or the man who had relations with her off the hook.  Not so in Israel.  And the reason for that is that it’s not just the aggrieved husband who has been sinned against.

Think back again to Sirach.  The first thing he said the adulterous woman had done was to disobey the law of the Most High.  Yes, she sinned against her husband, but that’s down the list.  Think of King David in light of this.  He committed adultery with Bathsheba.  Now, David knew the penalty.  He and Bathsheba would be stoned to death—that’s the penalty spelled out in the torah—if they were caught.  That David feared this highlights the fact that in Israel, the King was not above the law.  Even in the depths of his sin, David knew that the Lord was Israel’s true King.  But because he feared being caught, David had Bathsheba’s husband murdered.  He compounded his sin.  Through the prophet Nathan, the Lord confronted David with his sin.  David repented.  Psalm 51 is David’s song of repentance.  And there he cries out:

Against you, you only, have I sinned

         and done what is evil in your sight.  (Psalm 51:4)

Now, David didn’t sin against the Lord and the Lord only.  He sinned against Bathsheba.  He sinned against Uriah, her husband.  He sinned against his own family.  He sinned against the people when he lied to them.  What David says here is a bit of hyperbole.  He knew that he’d sinned against all these people, but he also knew that he had sinned first and foremost against the Lord.

This goes back to the covenant.  The Lord had claimed the land as his own.  He had declared it holy.  And he claimed Israel as his own and declared her to be a holy people.  Only a holy people can live in a holy land in the presence of a holy God.  The Lord reminds the people of this in Leviticus 20.  He gives a long list of abominations—of unholy acts.  In that list he includes adultery in verse 20:

And you shall not lie sexually with your neighbor’s wife and so make yourself unclean with her.

And at the end of that list of abominations the Lord says:

Do not make yourselves unclean by any of these things, for by all these the nations I am driving out before you have become unclean, and the land became unclean, so that I punished its iniquity, and the land vomited out its inhabitants.  But you shall keep my statutes and my rules and do none of these abominations, either the native or the stranger who sojourns among you (for the people of the land, who were before you, did all of these abominations, so that the land became unclean), lest the land vomit you out when you make it unclean, as it vomited out the nation that was before you.  For everyone who does any of these abominations, the persons who do them shall be cut off from among their people.  (Leviticus 20:24-29)

The Lord gives a vivid picture.  I remember being sick as a dog after eating some bad teriyaki at the café where I worked in Portland.  I unwittingly poisoned myself, and in an effort to get rid of the offending substance I vomited it out.  A lot.  Over and over and violently.  That’s the picture the Lord gives here.  He will not tolerate unholiness in his presence.  He will vomit it out in disgust.  What he’s talking about is exile, but the image of vomiting an unholy people from the land is a lot more powerful and memorable than just saying, “Make yourselves unclean by these things and I’ll exile you to Babylon.”

I expect this image was running through David’s mind when he was caught in his sin.  He wasn’t just an ordinary Israelite who had sinned.  He was the King.  He was the corporate representative of his people.  If the sins of ordinary people would get the whole nation in trouble, imagine what the sins of the King might do.  I think this explains the earnestness with which David got on his knees in repentant and pleading prayer.  Adultery was—and still is—serious business.

The Lord uses the image of adultery throughout the prophets to describe Israel’s unfaithfulness to him and to the covenant.  Long before that, all the way back to Exodus the covenant language the Lord uses with Israel is the language of marriage contracts and vows.  The Lord is “jealous” and “impassioned” when it comes to his people.  Israel’s idolatry in worshiping the golden calf is her “Great Sin”.  When the Lord confronts Israel for her worship of other gods he speaks of her “whoring”.

In Hosea, however, the Lord calls on the image of adultery to make a powerful point about Israel’s apostasy and unfaithfulness.  He instructs Hosea to marry a prostitute.  Her name is Gomer.  Hosea loves her, but Gomer doesn’t love Hosea in return.  Repeatedly she abandons him for other men.  And, repeatedly, Hosea goes out into the city, searching for his beloved, and each time her finds her brings her back to his home to lovingly care for her.  It’s a powerful illustration of the Lord’s lovingkindess and his covenant faithfulness.  But it’s also a powerful indictment against Israel and her unfaithfulness.  Jeremiah and Ezekiel use similar imagery.  Jeremiah writes about Israel’s “whoring with may lovers”.  Ezekiel describes Jerusalem as a murderous nymphomaniac.  Her abominations are so horrible that she makes Sodom look righteous in comparison.

And, I think, that’s a good point to make our way into the New Testament.  In the Old Testament, the Lord stresses the seriousness of the sin of adultery and then he uses that sin to illustrate the seriousness of Israel’s unfaithfulness to him and to his covenant.  And the connection made there in the Old Testament begins to get at why marriage and the family are important.  On one level they’re vitally important for a healthy, functioning, and ordered society.  This is what God ordained when he saw that it was not good that Adam was alone and then made Eve as his companion.  This is what God ordained when he brought the man and the woman together and said that “a man shall…hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh” (Genesis 2:24).  But why did God establish things this way?

This relationship between husband and wives, this relationship that maintains old families and creates new ones, this relationship through which new life comes into the world, teaches us about covenant faithfulness.  As we are faithful in marriage, this institution ordained by God, teaches us something about our relation to him.  In Ephesians 5 St. Paul writes:

Wives, submit to your own husbands, as to the Lord.  For the husband is the head of the wife even as Christ is the head of the church, his body, and is himself its Savior.  Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit in everything to their husbands. (Ephesians 5:22-24)

And to husbands he writes:

Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her, that he might sanctify her, having cleansed her by the washing of water with the word, so that he might present the church to himself in splendor, without spot or wrinkle or any such thing, that she might be holy and without blemish.  In the same way husbands should love their wives as their own bodies.  He who loves his wife loves himself.  For no one ever hated his own flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it, just as Christ does the church, because we are members of his body.  “Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.”  This mystery is profound, and I am saying that it refers to Christ and the church.  However, let each one of you love his wife as himself, and let the wife see that she respects her husband.  (Ephesians 5:25-33)

These are some of the most beautiful and encouraging words in all of Scripture.  If there’s anything that inspires me to love my wife beyond her own loveliness and love for me, it’s that my love for her is here compared by Paul to Jesus’ love for the Church—of Jesus love for me.  On the one hand, my natural love for my wife gives me a taste of Jesus’ love for the Church, but on the other, I’m also reminded that Jesus’ love for his Church and for me isn’t dependent on what I do or how perfect I am.  Jesus died for us—died for me—when we were his enemies.  And if that doesn’t inspire us to love each other and to seek reconciliation where our relationships are broken—in marriage and, no less, in every other relationship we have—I don’t know what will.

Have this in mind when you think of Jesus’ teaching on this commandment.  Just as Jesus reminded us last week that murder begins in the heart long before it plays out in the hands, so does adultery.  In the Sermon the Mount he says,

You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall not commit adultery.’  But I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lustful intent has already committed adultery with her in his heart.  (Matthew 5:27-28)

The implications are gut-wrenching, especially when you think of the modern-day proliferation of pornography.  It’s not just the woman we see by chance while going about our business or the neighbour or co-worker we regularly linger on with our gaze.  Men today can instantly call up gigabytes of virtual women to lust after anytime and anywhere.  It’s everywhere, even if you avoid it online.  It’s on TV.  It’s in movies.  It’s on billboards.  Jesus says to love your wife as I have loved you.  Jesus calls us to real love.  Love with commitment and obligations.  Love that’s hard work.  And we’re surrounded by cheap fantasies that require no commitment, no hard work, no sacrifice.  And it’s increasingly around us as real-life women try to compete for our attention by taking on the trappings of the unrealistic fantasies today’s men obsess over.  And it’s killing our marriages, it’s killing our families, it’s killing our society.  Even in the Church.  I know, it’s a problem for women too, but it’s particularly a problem for men.  But Paul’s clear: Men, it starts with us and it ends with us.  Brothers, think on Jesus’ love for you.  Think on the cross and the sacrifice that Jesus made for you there out of love.  And then love your wife the way that Jesus loves you.  Jesus has loved us and we love in return.  And so with our wives.  Paul gives us the reality: Love your wife and she will love you in return.  Again, Husbands, it starts with you.

In closing, let me also say that there is hope when we are fallen and broken as so many are and as some of you may be.  As heavy to bear as Jesus’ word are when he reminds us that we’re guilty, that we’re sinners, even when we haven’t physically done the deed, Jesus also gives us hope.  That’s the Good News.  In John 8 we read about Jesus coming on the scene of a stoning.  The town elders have dragged a woman out of the gate.  She was caught in adultery and was about to die for it.

There was a good measure of hypocrisy there in that scene.  Where was the man?  Why wasn’t he also being stoned as the law demanded?  And we get a sense of glee in these men at the prospect of executing the sinner, rather than mourning.  There was no sense of “But for the grace of God, there go I”.  But the key point of the story for John was that for Jesus, this sinful woman represented Israel.  God’s people had turned their backs on him.  God’s people had worshipped other gods and other agendas.  And they’d done it over and over and over again.  And to those people came Jesus, just as he approached that woman guilty of the “Great Sin”, as it was known in those days.  Jesus confronted the leaders of Israel with their own unfaithfulness as a people and they dropped their stones and walked away in shame.  And to the woman who remained he said, “Neither do I condemn you; go, and from now on sin no more.”

Brothers and Sisters, that’s what Jesus came to do.  He doesn’t wink at sin.  He doesn’t turn a blind eye to sin.  He doesn’t excuse sin.  The sin of his people cost him his life.  The sin and unfaithfulness of his people nailed him to the cross.  But by his death he bought forgiveness for his people.  By his death—and by his resurrection—he has made a new people for God.  He confronts us with the full weight, the full sinfulness of our sin, but if we will take hold of him in faith, he forgives our sin and leads us into new life.  “Neither do I condemn you; go, and from now on sin more.”

Let’s pray: Gracious and loving Father, you have loved us when we did not love you.  You gave your Son as a sacrifice for our sins.  We ask this morning that you would keep us always mindfulness of your grace and of Jesus’ cross, that your love for us would shape every relationship in our lives and, especially, our marriages, that they might be models to the world of your love and of your grace and of your new life.  We ask this through Jesus our Lord.  Amen.

You Shall Not Murder

Exodus 20:13

by William Klock

In 1776 Thomas Jefferson penned the words, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”  These words come from the American Declaration of Independence, but even Canadian are familiar with them.  The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms shares a similar sentiment, albeit with far less inspired prose: “Everyone has the right to life, liberty, and security of the person.”  Libertarian writer Matt Kibbe summed it up even more briefly in the title of his book: “Don’t Hurt People and Don’t Take Their Stuff”.

Thomas Jefferson said that these rights are self-evident.  That may explain why every people on earth seems to understand that murder is wrong.  Some have argued that it’s somehow written on the human heart and that this is proof of a Creator.  That may be true as well, but the Creator nevertheless saw the need to spell it out for us anyway.  And that brings us to the sixth word of the Decalogue in Exodus 20:13:

You shall not murder.

Of all the ten commandments, I think this is the one that everyone can agree on.  There are people who worship false gods and make idols, there are people who commit adultery and who steal and who dishonour their parents, but I bet that all of those people would still agree that it’s wrong to murder.  This one’s a no-brainer.  And yet the “why” of it eludes us.  Jefferson approached this from a rationalistic standpoint.  I think most people approach it from a purely utilitarian standpoint.  I’ve said before that the chief purpose of the law that the Lord gave through Moses was to teach what it looked like to be holy as the Lord is holy and to be a witness to the nations of the goodness of the Lord.  In their culture goodness was equated with order and so much of the torah was about order as we’ve seen.  Murder certainly fits into that.  If there’s anything that’s going to destroy order in a society it’s people running around killing each other.  And yet this commandment goes much deeper than just keeping order.  This is one commandment that’s actually not unique to the torah.  It’s a commandment that goes back to the dawn of history.  But before we go back further into the Bible we need to parse out what this commandment here in Exodus is actually saying.

It’s short.  In Hebrew it’s just two words: lo tirtsach.  Tirtsach is the second person singular verb for murder and lo means “no” or “not”, so “You shall not murder.”  It’s simple, but it’s often misunderstood.  People use this verse to argue against the death penalty.  People use this verse to argue against war.  People use it to argue against self-defence.  I’ve even heard people use this verse to argue against eating animals.  The problem may be that the older translations—everything from the Bishop’s Bible, the King James, the Geneva Bible, and the Douay-Rheims up to the Revised Standard Version translated this verse as “You shall not kill.”  “You shall not kill” is much broader than “You shall not murder”.  And that imprecision in our English Bible has been exploited by a lot of people.

But the Hebrew is very specific.  They had a variety of words that involved killing.  There was tabach, which applied to butchering an animal and zabach, which applied to killing an animal for sacrifice.  Then there was hikka, which described striking or killing somone in battle and hemit, which meant “put to death”.  And they had the word harag, which referring to killing in a general sense.  But the sixth commandment uses the verb ratsah and ratsah refers specifically to the taking of innocent life—to murder when that life is taken intentionally and to manslaughter when the taking is unintentional.  Most of the uses of this word are found in the torah passages about the cities of refuge.  These were the cities in Israel designated as places of refuge for people guilty of manslaughter—of unintentionally killing an innocent.  If the Lord had wanted to prohibit killing in general—capital punishment, war, butchering animals for food or for sacrifice—there was a perfectly good Hebrew word for the general idea of killing.  It’s used hundreds of times in the Old Testament.  But not here.  I’m not sure why English translations up to the 1970s used “kill”.  “Kill” was Tyndale’s choice back in the 1520s and I suspect everyone else just followed his lead and, of course, once it was in the King James, that was as good as setting it in stone.  But, again, the Hebrew word the Lord chose to use is more specific.

The “murder” part of this commandment is pretty straightforward.  Murder is the intentional killing of an innocent person.  But as we read the rest of the torah we learn more.  The protection of innocent life was of the utmost importance to the Lord.  Death of an innocent due to negligence falls under this category, too.  Deuteronomy 22:8 gets at this when it says, “When you build a new house, you shall make a parapet for your roof, that you may not bring the guilt of blood upon your house, if anyone should fall from it.”  In those days, your roof was part of your living space and you’d better build a rail around it.  If you don’t and someone falls off, you bear the guilt.  Another example is the goring ox in the next chapter of Exodus.  If an ox gores a human being, the ox is to be stoned to death.  No guilt falls on the owner of the ox.  However, if the ox has been known to gore in the past and its owner hasn’t done due diligence to keep it penned properly and it gets out and gores a person, both the ox and its owner are to be stoned to death.  The owner knew better and is guilty of ratsah—the unjust killing of an innocent.  (Exodus 21:28-29)

Exodus 22:2-3 is also worth looking at in this context.  We read there:

If a thief is found breaking in and is struck so that he dies, there shall be no bloodguilt for him, but if the sun has risen on him, there shall be bloodguilt for him.

The law makes provision for self-defense.  In the dark it’s hard to evaluate the situation.  If you catch a thief in the night and kill him, there’s no guilt.  But things are different in the light of day.  You don’t get the same pass.  If there was any other way of stopping or subduing the thief, but you killed him anyway, then the guilt for murder falls on you.  Even the not-so-innocent life has value.

Many people have taken a shallow approach to this passage and then claimed that the Lord contradicts himself.  He says “Thou shalt not kill” and then sends his people into war or commands the death penalty.  Some have even gone so far as to condemn him for saying “Thou shalt not kill” and then commanding the sacrifice of animals and giving instructions for which animals his people can and can’t eat.  These are really silly criticisms, but they’re also (sadly) really common.  If we understand the language here there is no contradiction.

But these objections do point us in the right direction if we want to understand the “why” behind this commandment.  “Enlightened” people in our modern age often balk at the idea of capital punishment.  We think it’s barbaric.  Not too long ago I heard someone argue against the death penalty by simply saying that two wrongs don’t make a right.  When you hear that sort of thing you need to stop for a second and ask yourself, “Is something God commanded a ‘wrong’?”  I think it also ought to give us pause when someone describes something God commanded as “barbaric”.  Is our God who is perfectly good ever going to command something that’s wrong?  Or barbaric?  Brothers and Sisters, we need to be careful not to elevate our ethics above God.  We’re on thin ice when we do.

In this case we need to go deeper into the Old Testament to understand what lies behind this commandment.  Yes, it’s part of the torah—of Israel’s covenant contract with the Lord.  But this “You shall not murder” came from the Lord long before there was ever an Israel.  Israel’s law is not our law.  He have a new covenant with the Lord.  But this commandment is bigger than the torah itself.  We need to go back the story of Noah.  When Noah’s family came out of the ark, the Lord made a covenant with them.  The relevant part for us is in Genesis 9:5-6.

For your lifeblood I will require a reckoning: from every beast I will require it and from man. From his fellow man I will require a reckoning for the life of man.

Whoever sheds the blood of man,

                  by man shall his blood be shed,

for God made man in his own image.

If you take a human life unjustly, you forfeit your own life.  And the reason the Lord gives is there in the last line: “For God made man in his own image”.  The Lord highlights just how high a value he places on human life.  He created us, after all, but even more to the point, he created us to bear his image.  I’ve talked about this a few times here in our study of Exodus and spent more time on it back when we studied Genesis.  The idea of an image of a deity draws on the idea of temples in the ancient world.  Temples were built to house an image of a god.  Images were carved in wood or stone or cast in metal and elaborate ceremonies were held as the image was enthroned in the temple and its mouth “opened” so that it could both speak for the god and receive the offerings of the people.  The image was meant to represent the god’s presence and rule over a city or land or people.  And Genesis uses this imagery as it describes the Lord creating.  The cosmos is his temple and in the centre is the holy of holies, the garden.  And in that garden the Lord places his image.  But for the Lord, that image is not a dumb idol made of stone or cast in bronze.  For the Lord that image that represents him in the temple, that image that acts as his steward, is a human being.  And so to murder a human being is to lash out at the Lord himself.

The Lord takes life seriously, so seriously in fact, that the only punishment serious enough for the unjust taking of a human life is to have one’s own life forfeit.  Again, many modern people balk at this.  “It’s more expensive to execute someone than to imprison them for life,” they say.  Or they say, “The death penalty isn’t an effective deterrent.”  And, to the best of my knowledge, they’re right.  But they miss the point.  At least in the case of murder, the penalty was never meant by God to be a deterrent.  It was instituted as a means of retribution and to instil the value of life.  Others argue that our justice system is unfair.  Blacks, for example, rarely escape a death sentence, but whites often do.  Friends, the problem isn’t the Lord’s command.  The problem is a corrupt system that needs to be reformed.  Even when it comes to the death penalty, the Lord shows his concern for innocent life.  The torah stipulates that there must be adequate witnesses to corroborate the accusation lest an innocent life be taken.

Now, what does this mean for us.  I think the basic prohibition is obvious.  And there are very few people who would object to it.  And yet it remains a problem.  Life is cheap in our society.  Of course, we condemn “murder”, but roughly a hundred thousand unborn children die every year in Canada.  But it’s okay, we argue, because those unborn children aren’t actually children.  Their just clumps of cells.  Suicide is horrible.  Everyone knows that.  We have suicide prevention hotlines and suicide awareness weeks in schools.  God forbid anyone commit suicide.  But if you change the name and call it “medical assistance in dying”, you can get a suicide prescription from your doctor, have it filled at any pharmacy, off yourself, and get a tribute in the local newspaper to have brave and dignified you were.

I was taking a sociology class when the first Gulf War began.  We’d been discussing the ways in which societies dehumanise each other during war as a means to justify the killing.  We’d been looking at propaganda, particularly from World War I.  And then the war began and our professor said, “Start listening to people around you.  People are talking about ‘Arabs’ today, but I guarantee that within a week or two you’ll start hearing epithets used instead.  It happens in every war.  We dehumanise the enemy to make it easier to hate and to kill.”  He wasn’t wrong.  In fact, the only thing he was wrong about was that it would take a week or two.  The very next morning at breakfast we were sitting in the cafeteria.  The news was on with non-stop CNN coverage of the invasion and the guys at the next table, at least a couple of whom were reservists expecting to be called up any moment, were talking about killing ‘sand niggers’”.

Scripture is clear.  There is a place for war.  There is a place for self-defense.  The Lord demands justice and sometimes that means the death penalty.  But we need to know what we’re doing in those situations.  We can never minimise or forget the great value that human life bears.  And I think this where we need to move into the New Testament and listen to Jesus.

There were some amongst the Jews who had forgotten the real purpose of the law.  Just as there were those, as I mentioned last week, who thought they could “escape” their duty to care for elderly parents by “devoting” their resources to the Lord, there were those who manipulated the law to justify hatred of their neighbours.  As we see in today’s Gospel: the priest and the Levite avoided the man left for dead.  They were about the Lord’s work and they left him to die.  Now, Jesus didn’t transform the commandment “You shall not murder.”  Jesus merely reminded the people what it was really about.  Here’s what he says in Matthew 5:21-24.

You have heard that it was said to those of old, ‘You shall not murder; and whoever murders will be liable to judgment.’  But I say to you that everyone who is angry with his brother will be liable to judgment; whoever insults his brother will be liable to the council; and whoever says, ‘You fool!’ will be liable to the [Gehenna] of fire.  So if you are offering your gift at the altar and there remember that your brother has something against you, leave your gift there before the altar and go.  First be reconciled to your brother, and then come and offer your gift.

It's easy to fall into that way of thinking that says: as long as I haven’t stuck a knife in my neighbour, I haven’t sinned.  But Jesus reminds us that God is just as interested in our hearts as he is our actions.  When we look at God’s real standard and examine our hearts, we’re all guilty even if we’ve never done anything that would make us criminally liable.  Murder lies in the heart before it ever works its way out in the hands.  If any of us have been sitting here thinking that we don’t have a problem with this commandment, Jesus reminds that, actually, we all do.  I can’t help thinking of David Powlison.  He was the founder of the Christian Counselling and Education Foundation.  He wrote a book a few years ago titled Good and Angry.  Chapter Two is titled “Do you have a serious problem with anger?”  And that chapter is essentially just one word long.  Under the chapter heading it just says, “Yes”.  We all have this problem.  The command given to Noah and the command given to the Israelites curbed the outworking of that problem.  But no law external to the heart could truly fix the root problem.  For that we need the redeeming death of Jesus and the new heart that God promised and that Jesus delivered when we gave us his own Spirit.  Brothers and Sisters, at the cross Jesus was killed by our heart problem: our hate, our anger, our rebellion against God.  Our rotten and rebellious hearts and hands beat him and nailed him to the cross.  Our rotten and rebellious hearts and hands killed him.  Instead of striking his killers down—and he would have been perfectly justified in doing so—the Son of God let himself be overwhelmed by our hate and our anger.  And then he broke the cycle by rising from death and giving his love to the very people who killed him.  And there we see his words in the Sermon on the Mount in action.  There we find the ability to, in the power of the Spirit who renews our hearts and minds, there we find the ability to value life the way God does.  There we find the ability not only to restrain our hands from murder, but we also find our hearts filled with the love of Jesus for others.  While we were yet sinners he died for us.  We deserved death.  And he gave us life and love instead.  And, Dear Friends, if we have truly been shaped by that life and that love, it can’t help but spill out from us like rivers of living water, bringing grace and reconciliation to everyone we encounter.

Let us pray: Heavenly Father, we are confronted by your word this morning.  None of us is guilty of murder with our hands, but we’ve all broken your commandment in our hearts.  We have not loved our neighbours as ourselves.  We are all sinners.  But as we are confronted by your Word, remind us also of Jesus and the cross.  As we look to the cross, remind us that you gave your Son to reconcile us—your enemies—to yourself.  Teach us now to put that same love and grace to work in our own lives and in our relationships.  That we might bring a measure of your healing grace into this dark world and that we might give that world a glimpse of your new creation.  We ask this through Jesus our Saviour.  Amen.

Honour Your Father and Your Mother

Exodus 20:12

by William Klock

This morning, as we continue with our study of the Decalogue, we move into what’s often called the “Second Table” of the law.  Moses, we’re told, came down from Mount Sinai with two tablets and there’s some debate about those two tablets.  In more recent times some have argued that they were identical.  When a covenant was made in the Ancient Near East two copies would be made, one for each party.  So one copy of the Decalogue was the Lord’s and was put in the ark of the covenant and the other was for Israel, maybe displayed somewhere for all to see.  But traditionally Christians have depicted the ten commandments divided between the two tablets, with the first four or “First Table” of the law on one and the “Second Table” on the other.  It used to be common in Anglican churches for the Decalogue to posted in the chancel for everyone to see on large plaques, carved in stone or bronze or painted on wood, along with the Lord’s Prayer and the Apostle’s Creed.  You usually see the Decalogue displayed on two tablets like this, the first table on one and the second on the other.  The first table deals with our relation to God.  The second table deals with our relation to our fellow human beings.  The second flows from the first.  Relating properly to other people flows naturally from relating properly to God.  As St. John writes in his first epistle, “If anyone says, “I love God,” and hates his brother, he is a liar; for he who does not love his brother whom he has seen cannot love God whom he has not seen” (1 John 4:20).  Right relation to others flows from right relation to God.  This fifth word or fifth commandment transitions us from the first to the second table.  Look at Exodus 20:12.  Here’s what the Lord says to his people Israel:

Honor your father and your mother, that your days may be long in the land that the Lord your God is giving you.

What did this mean to the Israelites?  How would they have understood this?  As I’ve said before: We swim in a different cultural river than they did.  When we hear these words, I think the first thing we’re likely to think of is children obeying their parents.  Maybe that’s all we think of.  And I think this has a lot to do with how and when we teach our kids about the Decalogue.  When it comes to young children, this is where the focus ought to be—obeying parents—but I think that in many cases, the only time we learn about the Decalogue is when we’re kids or when we’re in catechism class.  By the time we’re adults, no one talks much about this subject anymore and we may never stop to think about what this commandment means for us as adults.  We ought to, because the main audience when God spoke these words was made up of adults.  So what does it mean to “honour” our parents?  The Hebrew word is kabbed and it has the sense of something being weighty in the sense of importance.  From there it took on the sense of honour or glory.  To “honour” something or someone is to exalt it.  It’s a word used in worship.  In fact, it’s a term usually related to God, which gives us a sense of how important this idea of honouring parents is.  So obeying our parents is part of the idea of honouring them, but it’s much bigger than that.  It’s about valuing parents, acknowledging and respecting their dignity, and treating them with honour—regardless of their shortcomings and regardless of the cost to us.

Our other problem is that we’re prone to approaching this subject from the individualistic mindset that we have as modern Westerners and when we do that we ignore the communal emphasis that ancient peoples had and the importance of the covenant when it came specifically to Israel.

Israel was in covenant with the Lord.  He had made her his people and was bringing her to his land to live in his presence.  As a people, Israel was to be a witness to the world of what it looked like to live in the Lord’s presence.  Part of that was to show the goodness of his rule over creation.  For people in that time and place and culture, goodness was about order.  For us goodness is about what makes us happy.  We’re very focused on ourselves.  They weren’t.  They thought in terms of the community and goodness meant preserving order in the community.

The basic unit of the society or of the community is the family and this commandment is aimed at preserving it.  For them, the well-being of the community was more important than any one individual’s happiness.  In contrast, I’ve noticed that whenever we talk about honouring or obeying our parents, there’s almost always someone who chimes in with an objection or a caveat: “What if your parent tells you to do something that’s wrong?”  Or “What if your dad’s a jerk?”  We always seem to be looking for the way out or for the exception.  No so the people to whom this was written.  First, along with this went the assumption that parents were obligated to raise children who would keep and value the covenant.  But, second, with order and the integrity of the community’s and family’s identity at stake, hurt feelings would have taken a backseat.  Dad might be a jerk, but it was still in the interest of everyone—including the kids—to honour him and Mother.  Dad might have had a bad temper or might be lacking in some other thing we value in our fathers, but he honoured his own parents, he honoured the family and its traditions, he provided for the family and took care of the family lands, he was wise in the ways of the world or of business or of agriculture, and he instilled a value for tradition, for the Lord, and for the covenant in his children.  All of these things preserved order and that was good.  If nothing else, the father’s status as father was deserving of honour.  Even if he was a poor father, he was still the head of the family under God and the one who gave life and that was worthy of honour itself.  Think of the way we give honour to a judge or a prime minister or a president even if we don’t like their ideas, their politics, or their performance.  The office itself commands respect.

In contrast, our culture elevates youth.  We place little value on age and even less on the wisdom that comes with age.  Tradition is bad, whether we’re talking about pop culture, philosophy, or politics.  Everything wrong in the world is blamed on the previous generation, its mistakes, and its antiquated values.  It seems that we value our elders so long as they dote on us, but if they don’t or when they’re no longer able—when they become a “burden”—we too often abandon them to nursing homes and then squabble over the inheritance when they’re gone.  Of course, there are also older folks who seem to have abandoned their children, summed up in that bumper sticker: “We’re spending our kids’ inheritance”.

It happens in the Church as well.  Church over the last forty to fifty years has absorbed this obsession with youth.  Churches are driven by pop-culture fads.  The music is the music of the young.  The wisdom of past generations is scoffed at as old-fashioned and irrelevant.  Older people who complain about it are told to shut up: the future is with the youth.  We even split up our churches by ages.  One of the latest trends is having a church within a church aimed just at the youth.  It’s hip and exciting and young and you don’t have mix with your boring parents or grandparents.  This exactly the opposite of what the Church is by its very nature.  Churches looking for a new pastor used to look for someone with experience, with education, with a track-record of wise pastoral leadership.  Now it’s about finding a young rockstar, someone hip, someone who will help us do big and loud and new, because new is where is where it’s at.  And this philosophy perpetuates itself.  And it brings disorder.  It undermines the foundation of both society and the Church.  With no roots, people are—as St. Paul wrote—“carried about by every wind of doctrine, by human cunning, by craftiness in deceitful schemes”.  And we become poor witnesses of the Lord Jesus and of his kingdom.

But this kind of attitude was not part of the cultural matrix of the Israelites—or of the Ancient Near East in general.  The ancient Israelites took this idea of honouring parents as seriously as we take it lightly.  Consider the penalty for dishonouring one’s parents.  Deuteronomy 21:18-21 is just one of several similar passages in the torah.

If a man has a stubborn and rebellious son who will not obey the voice of his father or the voice of his mother, and, though they discipline him, will not listen to them, then his father and his mother shall take hold of him and bring him out to the elders of his city at the gate of the place where he lives, and they shall say to the elders of his city, ‘This our son is stubborn and rebellious; he will not obey our voice; he is a glutton and a drunkard.’  Then all the men of the city shall stone him to death with stones.  So you shall purge the evil from your midst, and all Israel shall hear, and fear.

They weren’t fooling around with this.  Remember the second part of the commandment: Honour your father and your mother, that your days may be long in the land that the Lord your God is giving you.  This promise extends to the whole of the Decalogue and the torah as well, but it’s placed here in the middle as a reminder.  God is bringing these people to his land.  He is holy, his land is holy, and if they want to continue to live there, they too must be holy.  The penalty for not being holy is—will be—exile from the land, and so the penalty for disobedience at the individual level is severe.  Again, this affects the whole community.

This might help you understand the scandal of Jesus’ parable about the prodigal son.  This young man demanded his inheritance before his father was even dead, he abandoned his family, and he spent the money in a far country on parties and prostitutes.  His father would have been justified in dragging him to the city gate to be stoned to death—that’s what the law said to do to a young, disrespectful ingrate like this boy—but instead the father was waiting for his return and embraced and honoured him.  The boy was deserving of death, but his loving father forgave him and welcomed him home instead.

Of course, the flip side of this is that the covenant also expected parents to be raising faithful covenant children.  This is what Moses tells the people in Deuteronomy 6:

Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one.  You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might.  And these words that I command you today shall be on your heart.  You shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise.  You shall bind them as a sign on your hand, and they shall be as frontlets between your eyes.  You shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates.  (Deuteronomy 6:4-9)

Parents are due honour by virtue of their being the ones who gave life to their children, but honour is also something that has to be cultivated.  God’s covenant people were expected to raise godly covenant children: to teach his law to their children, teaching them when they were in the house, when they were out on the way, when they put them to bed, and when they got them up in the morning.  Consider Proverbs 22:15:

Folly is bound up in the heart of a child,

         but the rod of discipline drives it far from him.

Covenant parents were expected to drive that folly far, far away from their children.  And for that parents are due a great measure of honour.  Consider also Proverbs 1:8-9:

Hear, my son, your father’s instruction,

         and forsake not your mother’s teaching,

for they are a graceful garland for your head

         and pendants for your neck.

You see, there was nothing more important than the Lord’s covenant with his people and parents were to be the first mediators of that covenant to their children.  It wasn’t to be left to Sunday School teachers—as wonderful as they may be—or to Veggie Tales videos.  Fathers and mothers were to take charge of instilling covenant loyalty and love for God in their children.  That was their first and greatest responsibility.  And, Brothers and Sisters, there is no one in this world worthy of more honour than the father and mother who are committed to and do their best to raise godly children.

Now, what does this mean for us?  Again, and as we’re reminded by the second half of the verse, this commandment was part of Israel’s covenant with the Lord.  Israel was called to model the Lord’s goodness in a well-ordered society and the family was at the centre of that.  As much as culture changes and there are many ways in which they would have shown honour to parents that are no longer part of our cultural matrix, this value for parents and family remains essentially in place in the New Covenant.  We are God’s new creation and the Church is called to model that new creation, its order and its values to the watching world so that it, too, can know God’s goodness.

We don’t have to look very far around us to realise that the world needs this witness.  Even back in the First Century, Paul listed disobedience to parents as one of the hallmarks of fallen human society’s rejection of God (Romans 1:30, 2 Timothy 3:2).  And God’s own people aren’t immune to this failing.  In Matthew 15, Jesus confronted some of the Pharisees.  They actually had the gall to dishonour their parents and justify it by claiming they were serving the Lord.  These people would devote their money and resources to God and then, when their elderly parents came to them in need, they’d say, “Oh, sorry!  Can’t help you.  I’ve committed my resources to the Lord.”  Jesus had strong words of condemnation for these people and stressed God’s requirement that we honour our parents.

I don’t think it’s possible to cover all the specifics of how we’re called to do this in a single sermon.  You don’t want to be here that long.  The fact is, I think a lot of you, being older and more experienced than me, could probably come up with more specifics and examples than I can.  But I think there are some basic principles that start with caring for our elderly parents.  Brothers and Sisters, we Christians should be counter-cultural in this area of life.  Our society sees less and less value in the elderly.  In Canada euthanasia is now legal and one of the fears many have expressed is the pressure children will put on parents to off themselves rather than be a burden or consume the inheritance.  Even with euthanasia aside, our society too often dumps the care of parents on others.  We’d often rather see Mom and Dad eking out a lonely and meagre existence on Canada Pension or Social Security than invite them to live with us as previous generations did.  We dump responsibility on the government rather than take it ourselves.  I realise this isn’t simple.  It was our parents and grandparents who supported these government programmes in the first place.  They bear some of the responsibility for this breakdown in our society.  But Scripture doesn’t call us to honour our perfect parents who never made any mistakes.  It calls us to honour our parents despite their imperfections.  As Christians, we ought to be the first to recognise our own failures rather than rejecting others for theirs.

So take care of your parents to the best of your ability.  Keep them a part of your family.  Show them honour.  Respect their dignity.  They gave you life.  For many of us, they’re the ones who brought us to the font as children and raised us to know God’s goodness and to love him.  They deserve our honour despite their imperfections.

Second, the flip side of this is that parents need to take their God-given role seriously.  It should go without saying that abusing our children is to abuse the role God has given us as parents.  But I think the bigger problem today is that parents avoid the role they’ve been given.  Rather than being parents to our children, we try to be their friends.  Parents are afraid their children won’t like them and so they abandon their God-given duty to discipline their children.  This backfires in a host of ways, most commonly in that it fails to instil in our children a respect for authority and especially God’s own authority.  And take responsibility for raising godly children yourself.  Sunday School teachers are great, but they aren’t a substitute for the role God has given you.  They have your kids for less than an hour a week.  You have the all the time.  Teach them, as Moses said, in the house, on the way, when they got to bed and when they wake up in the morning.  Disciplining and training aren’t easy, but they are our God-given duty as parents.  Scripture is clear on this over and over and over and we are disobedient to God if we fail to take it seriously.

Finally, what about the exceptions?  We read, for example, St. Paul’s teaching in Ephesians: Children, obey your parents.  And someone always says, “Yeah, but what if my parents want me to do something that’s wrong?”  We can be shamefully quick to run to the exceptions, but the fact is that there sometime will be exceptions.  There are parents who are sinful.  There are parents who are abusive.  There are parents who neglect their children.  How do we respond to those parents?  Brothers and Sisters, the first thing I think that needs to be said is this: Don’t respond in anger or without due deliberation.  The failure of a parent to uphold the Lord’s commands and expectations on their part doesn’t give a child an automatic pass when it comes to honouring them.  The Gospel paradigm simply doesn’t let us escape it.  If Jesus calls us to love our enemies, he also calls us to love our parents even in their failures.  In all things we’re called to seek for reconciliation to the best of our abilities.  The cross reminds us of this.  God didn’t love us when we were righteous.  He loved us when we were sinners and gave his Son in order to reconcile us to himself.  That needs to be the lens through which we look at every relationship in life.  Yes, Jesus calls us to make him our priority:

Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me, and whoever loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me.  And whoever does not take his cross and follow me is not worthy of me.  Whoever finds his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.  (Matthew 10:37-39)

But, Friends, if we love Jesus above all else, it means we’ve been shaped by his cross.  It means we’ve been filled with God’s own Spirit and the law is no longer written on tablet of stone.  If we are in Christ, the law of the Spirit is written on our hearts.  The law of the Spirit, the love of God written on our hearts ought to shape us as parents, giving us a desire to raise godly children, but that love of God written on our hearts and the experience of his grace and mercy in our own sinful and imperfect lives out to shape our relationship with everyone—and first and foremost our parents.  When we honour the we honour the one who has given them to us.  When we honour them we honour the Creator who has blessed us with our families.  When we honour them despite their failures we model for the world the grace of the God who loves us despite our own failures.

Let us pray: Heavenly Father, thank you for our parents.  Teach us to honour them and, particularly, to honour them in your name.  Teach us to value them as the people who gave us life, the people who cared for us and raised us, and the people who brought us to you and taught us the gospel.  If we have been remiss in our duties to our parents, shine your bright light on our failures and move our hearts to repentance.  May your goodness and the goodness of your kingdom be on display in our families.  We ask this through Jesus our Lord.  Amen.

Remember the Sabbath

Exodus 20:8-11

by William Klock

Last Sunday afternoon I dove into the ocean at Qualicum, along with about sixty other people, and swam a mile in the cold and very choppy waters there.  The Ocean Mile Swim has been going on there for sixty-one years.  My fellow swimmers at the Aquatic Centre have been bugging me to join them in that swim for about ten of those sixty-one years.  I finally decided to join them this year.  (I came in second place in my age group.)  It was my first time swimming in the open ocean and it wasn’t nearly as bad as I thought it would be.  The best part, though, was when it was over.  But was it okay for me to do that on a Sunday?  Was it okay for Veronica and I to drive down to Qualicum on the Lord’s Day?  Was it bad that we stopped to get hamburgers on the way?  Some Christians would say “Yes”.  In fact, two Christian friends of mine did just that this week.

I didn’t grow up in a home with strict rules for Sundays.  The focus of Sunday mornings was going to church and worshipping with our brothers and sisters.  My parents were strict about that—“religious” so speak.  Even when we were on holiday, we did the best we could to attend a church service somewhere.  But once we got home from church, about the only rule we had was that we weren’t supposed to do homework, but even then, my parents weren’t super strict about that rule.

In contrast, I had a friend whose parents were very strict.  Sunday afternoons meant no TV, no riding bikes, no going out to play—he wasn’t even allowed to read secular books on Sunday.  The whole family took a three-hour nap after lunch.  After that he could do whatever he wanted as long as it involved reading the Bible or some kind of Christian book.  Even his mom was spared work on Sunday.  Sunday lunch was always put in the Crock Pot before bed on Saturday and for dinner on Sundays they ate leftovers.  All of this—his family, my family, my friends who don’t like the idea of swimming a mile in the ocean on Sunday—is in the name of the Fourth Commandment.

So what does the Fourth Commandment mean for us today as Christians?  Let’s begin with the text itself.  Exodus 20:8-11.

Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy.  Six days you shall labor, and do all your work, but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord your God. On it you shall not do any work, you, or your son, or your daughter, your male servant, or your female servant, or your livestock, or the sojourner who is within your gates.  For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, and rested on the seventh day.  Therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy.

On the surface the commandment is pretty simple and straightforward: work six days; don’t work on the seventh.  And don’t just dump that work onto your kids or your slaves.  In fact, even your animals get a rest on the seventh day.  Despite the gallons of ink that have flowed in Judaism in efforts to define exactly what is meant by “work” here, the point of the commandment is very simple.  Again, work six days; don’t work on the Sabbath.

We’re not sure about the derivation of the word “sabbath”—whether the noun evolved from the verb or the other way around.  Most seem to think the verb came from the noun.  The noun “Sabbath” has the sense of “holiday”, but the verb derived from it means to “cease” or to “come to an end”.  Because that’s what people did on the Sabbath: they ceased from their work.  But what did this look like in ancient Israel?  I think a lot of people are under the impression that the Israelites treated the Sabbath much as we treat Sunday: they went to church and then they rested.  But there were no churches in Israel.  There were feast days during the year when people would go to the temple in Jerusalem, but there was only one temple.  Most people couldn’t go there every week and even if they did, it wasn’t like coming to church.  Later, during the Babylonian Exile, the synagogue would arise as an alternative to the temple.  That did involve a weekly service of praise and prayer and Scripture.  In fact, the synagogue service played a big part in shaping the Sunday services of the early Christians.  But the synagogue came late in Israel’s history.  There are a few passages in the Old Testament that allude to worship on the Sabbath, but it wouldn’t have been worship as we know it in the Church.  There was simply nothing like that in their world.  The Sabbath was primarily about a rest from work.

Now, that rest itself did take on an aspect of worship.  Notice that verse 8 says to “remember” the Sabbath.  This act of remembering “kept it holy”.  We do the same kind of remembering when we celebrate the Lord’s Supper and “remember” Jesus’ death on the cross.  This kind of remembering isn’t just going through the motions.  I know that it happens sometimes.  We’re here for the Lord’s Supper.  We sing the songs, we pray the prayers, we eat the bread and drink the wine, but our minds are elsewhere—maybe on our plans for Sunday afternoon.  And so we go through the motions, but we don’t really remember what Jesus did at the cross, we aren’t thinking about what it means, we aren’t reflecting on the love and grace and mercy of God poured out for us there, and so the act of the Lord’s Supper doesn’t really shape us as it should and it doesn’t really honour God as it should.

The same thing often happened with the Sabbath.  The prophets repeatedly condemned the people for failing to remember the Sabbath.  In many cases people didn’t remember it all and just went on with their business.  In other cases, they went through the motions, but their hearts weren’t in it.  They were just waiting for the sun to go down so that they could get back to their work.

But what were they remembering when they did remember the Sabbath?  What was it about the Sabbath that made it holy and worthy of rest?  That’s what verse 11 is getting at: “For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, and rested on the seventh day.  Therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy.”  This is the bit that’s not quite so straightforward—although I think that’s just for us because we no longer swim in the same cultural river as the Ancient Israelites.  But the Lord explains this ceasing from work as a way of “remembering” his own ceasing from work.

Now, before we move on we need to be clear.  Israel’s ceasing from work on the Sabbath is not an imitation of the Lord’s ceasing from work after he had created the cosmos.  Remembering isn’t about imitation; it’s about recalling and living in light of something.  In the Lord’s Supper, when we “do this in remembrance” of Jesus, we don’t imitate his death.  No, we recall his death in such a way that its reality, its benefits, and the love and grace and mercy of God shown in his death are driven deep into our hearts and minds so that they shape our whole lives and who we are and how we think and approach the world and other people—and how we think about and relate to God himself.  The cross changes everything and our participation in Lord’s Supper reminds us of that.

Remembering the Sabbath did something similar for Israel.  It was a reminder that the Lord was the Creator of the cosmos and, most important in this case, that he is sovereign and in control.  This is where we need to get back into the thought world of Israel and the ancient world.  Being modern, post-Enlightenment people, we think of creation in scientific terms.  We want to know how it happened.  What were the mechanisms involved and that kind of thing.  But that’s not where the focus was in ancient peoples’ thinking.  They thought mostly in terms of “why”.  We think in materialistic terms.  They thought in terms of function.  And so in creation stories across the Ancient Near East, we see the emphasis on gods bringing order out of chaos.  We see this in Genesis.  It doesn’t start with nothing and then God creates something—that’s what’s important to people with a material way of thinking, like us.  No, Genesis starts with a world that is formless and void.  It has no purpose.  It’s not suitable for life.  It’s chaos.  And then the Lord speaks and shapes what was formless and fills what was void and makes it good.  Creation, for the ancient Israelites, was about order.  Chaos was bad; order was good.  And when order had been established, the Lord rested.

You might remember back when I preached on Genesis, that for the Lord to rest isn’t what we usually think of as rest.  It’s not about disengaging the way you or I might disengage after a week of work by taking a nap or zoning out in front of the TV.  For the Lord to “rest” was for him to take up his rule over the world he had ordered.  The Lord has been out creating and now we see him moving into his throne room to supervise and to maintain that order.  I think the best way of thinking of the Lord’s rest is to think of his rule.  He created and now he’s sovereign over his creation.  He doesn’t disengage like the divine clockmaker of the Deists; he’s always and everywhere engaged, plugged in, holding it in his hands, and caring for it.

And that means—back to the Sabbath—that for the Israelites to work six days and then to observe a day of rest was to remember that the Lord is sovereign, that he reigns over his creation and is specifically King in Israel, and that he cares for his creation and his people.  To rest from work on the Sabbath drove home this point.  Other peoples worked seven days a week to survive, but the Lord’s people took off one day in seven as a testimony to themselves and to the world that the Lord rules his Creation and cares for his people.

It also drove home the point that they as a people and the land they lived in were not their own.  When Moses reiterated the Decalogue to the people in Deuteronomy 5, just before the next generation entered the promised land, he gave this reason:

You shall remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt, and the Lord your God brought you out from there with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm.  (Deuteronomy 5:15)

The Sabbath also reminded the people that they had been freed from bondage in Egypt.  The Sabbath was a reminder of the Lord’s claim on Israel: “I will be your God and you will be my people”.  The Sabbath was a reminder of the Lord’s salvation.

This goes deeper when we consider that the Sabbath principle was bigger than just one day in seven.  Later in Exodus and when we get into Leviticus we see that every seventh year was to be a “sabbath” year.  The land, itself, was to have a rest.  Whatever it produced that year, uncultivated, was freely available to everyone.  Now, as much as it’s good farming practise to allow land to lie fallow on a regular basis, this wasn’t the point.  The sabbath year reminded the Israelites that the land belonged to the Lord.  It was his.  The people had merely what the civil law tradition calls “usufructuary rights”—the right to enjoy the fruits or profits of someone else’s land without having real ownership of it.  Every seven years the Lord called in his land as a reminder.  To drive the point home even further, after every forty-ninth year (seven sevens) there was a jubilee year in which any property that had been sold or traded away was returned to its original family or clan.

We see this principle at work with the people as well.  In Deuteronomy 15, for example, the Lord commanded that all debts were to be cancelled in the seventh year.  So with slaves, if you bought a fellow Hebrew as a slave, he was to be set free in the seventh year.  Just as the land belonged to the Lord, so did the people themselves.  If Pharaoh could not claim the Lord’s people as his slaves, neither could they claim each other.  Yes, provision was made for the payment of debts, but not to the point that a fellow Israelite became permanently indebted or enslaved.  All of these things reminded the people of the Lord’s rule over them and of the Lord’s redemption of them.

This all highlights, once again, that these commandments were specifically part of Israel’s covenant with the Lord.  The Decalogue and the rest of the torah are relevant to us as God’s revelation within the context of his covenant with Israel, but it’s not normative for us.  These aren’t rules that we can apply directly to ourselves.

So what does this mean for us?  Christians have disagreed on this.  On the one hand you have the Westminster Confession—the Presbyterian tradition in which my childhood friend was raised—which takes a very hard line, taking Sunday as a “Christian Sabbath” and insisting it be set aside from all “worldly employments and recreations”.  (No Ocean Mile Swims or drive-thru hamburgers!).  Then you’ve got the Heidelberg Catechism, which calls it a festive day of rest, but puts the emphasis on honouring the Lord every day.  Or the Second Helvitic Confession, which says, “We do not account one day to be holier than another, nor think that mere rest is of itself acceptable to God.  Besides, we do celebrate and keep the Lord’s Day, and not the Jewish Sabbath, and that with a free observation.”   And then there’s our own Anglican tradition which doesn’t address this at all except in the second book of homilies, which is out of print and that almost no one reads.  If you do read it, it says to go to church on Sunday and to rest from your weekly and workday labour.  In doing that we “declare ourselves to be loving children”.

But the thing to note is that differences in all of these doctrinal confessions lie in the understanding of what it means to rest.  (It seems this has always been a problem.  It was for the Jews and now it is for us.)  I stressed the differences, but what they all universally agree on is that Sunday is the Lord’s Day and that it’s a day on which God’s people are to gather together for corporate worship.

Benjamin Breckenridge Warfield, the great Presbyterian scholar put it well when he said, “Christ took the Sabbath into the grave with him and brought the Lord’s Day out…on the resurrection morn.”   Jesus has change everything.  Yes, the first Christians continued to observe the Sabbath and to worship in the synagogues, but they were Jews.  The New Testament witness tells us that they also gathered on Sundays to celebrate the resurrection of Jesus and to share the Lord’s Supper.  As the Church became increasingly made up of Gentiles, Sabbath observance and synagogue worship became less common, although it was a sticking point for many.  Paul wrote to the Colossians:

Therefore let no one pass judgment on you in questions of food and drink, or with regard to a festival or a new moon or a Sabbath.  These are a shadow of the things to come, but the substance belongs to Christ.  (Colossians 2:16-17)

Jewish believers were welcome to continue their observation of torah—including the Sabbath—but there was no obligation to do so and, certainly, no one was to impose such an observance on anyone else, because Jesus has inaugurated the reality of which the torah was a shadow.

I think this is where we need to begin in understanding what the Sabbath means for Christians.  The Old Covenant was taken into the tomb with Jesus and something new came out with him.  There’s continuity, but it’s also new.  Jesus has transformed Passover into the Lord’s Supper.  Jesus has transformed circumcision into baptism.  But these aren’t the only covenant signs that he’s transformed.  He took the seventh day of the week into the grave with him and burst forth alive on what the early Church called the “Eighth Day”.  The Sabbath commemorated the Lord’s creative work in the beginning and the Lord’s Day now commemorates his work of new creation in Jesus.  When we gather on the Lord’s Day we’re reminded that we worship the God who has fulfilled his promises, who has inaugurated new creation, and in that we have reason to hope in him, trusting that he will make all things new.  Our worship on Sunday declares that Jesus is Lord.

And that gets at how, I think, we ought to approach this issue.  As Israel was the people who knew that the Lord was the creator and sustainer of the cosmos and the people called to live in such a way that his good rule was on display to the nations, so we Christians are the people who know that Jesus is the world’s true Lord, that his kingdom has come, and that his new creation is breaking into the world.  And so we set aside one day each week in which we remember and celebrate his rule and his redemption.  On that day we gather together to praise, to pray, to hear his word, and to meet him at his Table.  But it’s also a day when, like the Israelites, we acknowledge his loving care by taking a break from our weekly and workaday routine as much as we are able.  Just as in the Old Covenant, sometimes there’s work that must be done.  Emergencies happen.  Children and the sick need care.  But if we are so committed to our work that we refuse to take off a day for the sake of the Lord, we really need to evaluate what we’re worshipping and where our hearts are.  As Christians we worship the God who has ordered and sustains the cosmos and who has redeemed us from our bondage to sin and death.  Can we not trust him enough to witness his sustaining care and his good rule to the world by devoting a day to him and to his kingdom?  If we can’t, we need to look into our souls and ask some serious questions.

Now, that said, I’m not sure that our struggle is with rest.  In the ancient world, most people laboured sunup to sundown seven days a week.  You had to in order to survive.  Today the government mandates our employers give us two days a week of rest.  Leisure time isn’t the problem for most of us.  And yet, with leisure time at our disposal like no other people in history, what do we do with it?  Brothers and Sisters, does your leisure distract you from remembering the Lord’s Day?  This may be a greater problem than the refusal to take a break from our work.  It’s one thing to be absent from the corporate gathering of the saints because you’re struggling to make ends meet.  But in our modern, wealthy society it’s not the “necessities” that take us away, but our leisures.  That’s an even greater problem and it’s one you need to seriously think on if your leisure activities cause you to be regularly absent from the church.  Again, where are your priorities?  Who or what do you worship?

Friends, it’s about hallowing the name of the God who has created us, who sustains us, and who has redeemed us.  And it’s about living out the role he has given us to proclaim and to spread his rule and his kingdom.  In one sense, this ought to translate into every aspect of our lives everyday.  But the witness of Scripture is that God’s people also set apart one day each week on which to honour him.  It ought to be motivated by our love for the one who creates, sustains, and redeems us.  If it isn’t, we need to reflect more on the love and the grace he has poured out on us.  We ought to reflect on the redemption he has brought us through the death of his son on the cross.  And we ought to think on the fact that in that redemption he has bought us.  We belong to him.  Through Jesus, we have been adopted.  The loving Father has made us his sons and daughters.  As that old Anglican homily says, by our observance of the Lord’s Day we show that we love our Father.  But that day is also a witness to those around us.  Parents, first and foremost, that’s your kids.  What priorities are you instilling in them?  If you are regularly absent from the weekly gather of the saints, you’re instilling in them a greater love for work or for leisure than you are a love for God and for their brothers and sisters in Christ.

But the world watches as well.  Our families, our friends, our neighbours, our coworkers.  By taking a break and trusting in God’s provision for our needs, by taking a break from the things we love because we love God more than everything else, and by taking a break to gather with this motley and diverse group of people with whom we may have nothing else in common, we proclaim the good news that Jesus is Lord.  Jesus says to the world, “Come to me, all who labour and our heavy laden, and I will give you rest.”  Brothers and Sisters, when we remember the Lord’s Day we remember the rest that Jesus has given.  We live it out.  We drive the reality of it deep into our hearts and minds.  And we witness to the world the joy and the hope and the peace of God’s new creation.

Let us pray: Loving Father, in Collect we asked for a measure of your grace that we might keep your commandments.  In the death of Jesus you have delivered us from our bondage to sin and you have poured your Spirit into us, writing your law on our hearts.  You have made us new.  You have renewed our hearts and minds.  And yet we still struggle to obey the law of the Spirit.  Make each Lord’s Day, we ask, a reminder of your salvation, a reminder that we are your children, a time to reflect on your goodness, grace, mercy, and love that we might always respond to you as loving children.  We ask this through Jesus Christ our Lord.  Amen.

Chapter XXIV

“An Homily of the Place and Time of Prayer”

“The Foundations of the Sabbath in the Word of God” (https://www.the-highway.com /Sabbath_Warfield.html)

The Name of the Lord Your God

Exodus 20:7

by William Klock

Some years ago our family was on an airplane.  Two men and a woman sat down in the row behind us.  They’d been together at some kind of conference or trade show and were talking about what happened there.  But what got me was their language.  They were loud.  They may have been a little intoxicated.  And they were talking loudly about sex.  And the conversation was peppered—actually, it wasn’t peppered, because you’d never put that much pepper on anything—it was loaded with loud explosions of “God” and “Jesus” and a bunch of other things.  After a couple of minutes, I stood up, looked over the seat, and told them that my wife and I didn’t want to hear their sordid stories and that they were especially inappropriate for our pre-school-aged daughter.  They shut up, embarrassed.  But at the time I was wishing I had my clerical collar on, because I was tempted to stand up and ask, “Are you guys in ministry?  I ask because you’ve been talking about ‘God’ and ‘Jesus’ and ‘hell’ more in two minutes than I do in a typical thirty-minute sermon.”

With that as an introduction, you can probably guess that our text today is the Third Commandment.  It’s found in Exodus 20:7.  Let’s read it:

“You shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain, for the Lord will not hold him guiltless who takes his name in vain.

Before we start answering the question of what this means for us, we need to ask—as always—what it meant for the Israelites.  God’s word was written for us, but it wasn’t written to us.  It was written to a people in a specific context.  The second half of the verse is a reminder of that.  “The Lord will not him guiltless who takes his name in vain.”  The Decalogue—with the rest of the torah—was Israel’s end of her covenant with the Lord.  It doesn’t apply directly to us, because we don’t live under that covenant.  But we can learn something from it and transpose it into our life in Christ after we’re aware of what the Lord’s point was when he spoke these words to Israel.

So what did this Third Word mean to the Israelites?  This is probably the broadest of all the commandments in the Decalogue.  First, the Hebrew word that the ESV simply translates as “take” has the sense of bearing something up.  So it’s saying something like, “You shall not take up the name…” or “You shall not bear the name…”  It’s more than just merely speaking the name of the Lord.  It could be that, but it can also be more than that.  And then the word “vain”.  The Hebrew word can take the sense of “worthless” or “empty” or “purposeless”, but it’s also associated with magic and the taking of oaths.

So the sense here is that God’s people are never to use or to bear his name in a way that takes it lightly or that abuses it.  That’s really broad, but the covenantal context of the Decalogue really helps us grasp what’s going on here.  Remember, God called Israel to be his people.  In claiming them as his own, he declared them holy.  He commissioned them or gave them the vocation of representing him in the midst of the nations.  It was a call to pick back up the vocation that Adam rejected: to bear God’s image.  And so, if the nations were to know God through the people who bear his name, they’d better represent him well.

You sew a Canadian flag on your jacket or your backpack so that everyone knows you’re a Canadian.  And hopefully you represent your country well and leave its reputation intact.  But what if you didn’t?  What if you went to another country and got drunk, got into fights, stole stuff, and generally made trouble?  What would that do to your country’s reputation in that foreign land?  That’s something of what this commandment is getting at, but it’s not the land of Israel that Israel is representing; it’s Israel’s God, which makes it a matter of dire seriousness.

That’s what’s at the root of this and that’s why it’s so broad.  Many centuries later the Jews prohibited the speaking of God’s name lest they abuse it by mispronouncing it.  That’s how we got the tradition of reading “Lord” wherever the Hebrew text has the letters YHWH, which we’re pretty sure was pronounced “Yahweh”.  But speaking God’s name is not what the commandment is prohibiting.  God caused his name to be written in the Scriptures about seven thousand times.  He likes us to call him by name.

So here are some of the things the command actually was prohibiting.  Again, pay attention to how these things might misrepresent the Lord to the nations when done by his people.

First—and this is typically where Rabbinic and Christian interpreters have put the emphasis—it prohibits false oaths.  Making a false oath was a serious crime in the ancient world.  A false oath would discredit the name of the Lord.  We see this addressed specifically later in the torah.  Leviticus 19:12, for example, warns:

You shall not swear by my name falsely, and so profane the name of your God: I am the Lord.

And this is just one of the many things that got the people into trouble.  Through Hosea the Lord speaks:

They utter mere words;

         with empty oaths they make covenants;

         so judgment springs up like poisonous weeds… (Hosea 10:4

You see, to swear an oath on the Lord’s name is to call on him as a witness to that oath.  To make an oath you don’t intend to keep is to treat the Lord as if he isn’t watching, that he won’t hold you accountable, or maybe that he isn’t really there.  It’s to make light of his name and his presence.  But, worse, it’s to make use of his name to further your own ends, rather than his.  God’s people must never do that.

The other focus that Christian interpreters have seen here is blasphemy.  Augustine, for example stressed blasphemy as the point of the Third Commandment.  Blasphemy is pretty broad, but it, too, is prohibited specifically in Leviticus.

Whoever blasphemes the name of the Lord shall surely be put to death. All the congregation shall stone him. The sojourner as well as the native, when he blasphemes the Name, shall be put to death. (Leviticus 24:16)

The Lord’s name was serious business.  Blasphemy was no small thing.  It was the Lord’s land.  It was holy.  And holiness was a requirement if the people wanted to remain in the Lord’s land—whether native Israelite or sojourning foreigner.

Another serious offense for which execution was the penalty was false prophecy.  Again, remember that Israel was called to represent the Lord to the nations.  To prophesy was to speak for the Lord—in his name.  To prophesy falsely was to use his name to further your own lies or your own agenda.  It was to speak for yourself while claiming to speak for the Lord.  It’s hard to imagine a worse way to misrepresent him.  This is what Jeremiah 23:25 is getting at when it speaks of “prophets…who prophesy lies in my name, saying, ‘I have dreamed, I have dreamed!’”  And false prophesy, like blasphemy, was no small thing.  It is remarkable to me how casually and frivolously people in some Christian circles claim to prophesy in the name of the Lord and say all sorts of kooky and obviously false things.  The penalty for doing that sort of thing in Israel was serious.  Here’s what Deuteronomy 13 says about false prophets:

If a prophet or a dreamer of dreams arises among you and…if he says, ‘Let us go after other gods,’…you shall not listen to the words of that prophet or that dreamer of dreams. (Deuteronomy 13:1-3)

It also acknowledges that this false prophet may perform real signs and wonders, but the signs and wonders aren’t what mark out a real prophet.  It’s the message accompanying them.  If the prophet teaches falsely, if he teaches doctrine that leads people astray, he is a false prophet.  Today we’ve flipped this around.  In many Christians circles everything is about the signs and wonders.  As long as the supposed signs and wonders are there, undiscerning people lap up whatever false teachings are being spewed by these false prophets.  So, don’t listen to false prophets.  But what about the false prophet himself?  Deuteronomy 13:5 says:

But that prophet or that dreamer of dreams shall be put to death.

Claiming to speak for the Lord while spewing lies and false teaching not only has the potential to lead the Lord’s people astray, but it also misrepresents the Lord—the precise opposite of what God’s people were called to do.

These are things that, if we were to think through what it means to take the name of the Lord in vain, we’d probably come up with pretty easily.  But there are other things in the torah that fit this category that we might not think of.  Take Leviticus 18:21:

You shall not give any of your children to offer them to Molech, and so profane the name of your God.

Yes, child sacrifice was a real thing in the Ancient Near East.  It was pretty common.  And even the Israelites were guilty of it from time to time.  But to do as the pagans did was to profane the name of the Lord.  The Lord’s people had a duty to be different so that the nations would take notice.

Also related to worship, the abuse of the holy things that belonged to God profaned his name.  Here’s what Leviticus 22:2 says:

Speak to Aaron and his sons so that they abstain from the holy things of the people of Israel, which they dedicate to me, so that they do not profane my holy name.

This gets back to the idea that whatever was holy belonged to the Lord and, vice versa, whatever belong to the Lord was holy—was set apart for his use alone.  This went for Israel as a people.  But it also went for the temple, the altars, the implements used at the altars, even the incense, and the offerings brought by the people to the Lord.  To abuse or to misuse the things that belonged to the Lord was to profane his name.

Finally, one last thing that we might not think of in relation to all this is magic and sorcery.  The Hebrew word we translate “vain” here is connected with magic.  The idea was that a god’s name had power and could be invoked to work magic.  To speak the name was to summon the god and to command his power.  One of the best examples of this in the Bible is actually in the New Testament, in Acts 19:11-20.  Some sons of the high priest saw the miracles that the apostles were doing in the name of Jesus and decided to treat the name of Jesus as if it were a magic talisman.  They tried casting out demons merely by invoking Jesus’ name and ended up, instead, overwhelmed by the demons themselves and ran away beat up and in terror.  The problem with this sort of thing is that it assumes either that our agenda is God’s agenda—which may not be the case—or that we can gain control over God by using his name and that we can then force him to do what we want.  Either way, his name is being profaned and he’s being misrepresented.

And, again, that’s the key point here.  Israel was called by God to represent him in the midst of the nations.  They were the people who knew him.  They were the people who lived with him in their midst.  They were holy.  For the nations to look at Israel should have been something of an introduction to the Lord himself.  And so the third commandment, at its root, comes down to Israel’s duty to represent the Lord.  Anything that misrepresented him, that made him look bad, or that made Israel look anything other than holy, profaned the Lord’s name.

Now, how do we transpose this into the New Covenant?  Israel’s law is not our law.  We are not part under that Old Covenant.  And yet the application for us of these first three commandments isn’t that challenging to see.  We worship the same God.  And even if the covenant stipulations are different, our calling or vocation as God’s people in Christ is an expansion of Israel’s calling and vocation.  If Israel was called to be the people who represented the Lord to the nations, it is also our calling as the people in whom God’s own Spirit dwells.  We are his temple.

So, first, we should never enlist God’s name to promote what is false.  When we swear an oath and enlist God as a witness, we’d better tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth knowing that he really is there and that he really does care about our truthfulness and our witness.

Second, we should never enlist God’s name to further our own agenda or ideas.  We’re often guilty of appealing to God to give our own ideas more authority than they might have on their own.  I think we see this particularly in the political realm.  There are some things in the political realm that Christians can take a stand on, saying, “Thus saith the Lord”.  Abortion, for example, is everywhere and always wrong.  Marriage is between a man and a woman.  Deliberately killing innocent non-combatants in war is immoral.  But not everything is that clear.  I’m one of those “Taxation is theft” guys and I believe very firmly that my position on economics and taxation and government are rooted in biblical principles.  But I have an English friend who is an ardent Socialist who, on economic issues, is left of Lenin.  And he’s a Christian and can give you biblical arguments for his views—and he will.  I think he’d dead wrong, but I also grant that these are issues on which faithful Christians can come to different conclusions.  We can appeal to the Bible—and we should—when arguing these issues, but where we get into trouble is when we start declaring “Thus saith the Lord” (which my friend does quite often).  Brothers and Sisters, we need to be circumspect about claiming authority for our ideas by invoking God’s good name.

A third application sort of brings these two points together—using God’s name to promote falsehood and to promote our own agenda—is false prophecy.  Now, this kind of shakes out in two ways.  First, there are the people who actually claim to be prophets and to speak the word of the Lord, but speak falsely.  This might be the more serious of the two and it is remarkable to me how lightly many in the church take these things, whether it’s the well-known people with big ministries who repeatedly make false predictions or teach false doctrine while money continues to pour in from supporters, or ordinary pastors and churchpeople who claim to speak for the Lord and do the same thing, prophesying things that don’t come to pass or teaching false doctrine.  A friend of mine left a local church a few years ago and when I asked him why, this was the reason.  People were claiming to be speaking prophecies from the Lord on a regular basis, but none of it was ever true and the church never addressed it.  Brothers and Sisters, that sort of thing profanes the name of the Lord.  It destroyed my friend’s faith.  This sort of Christianity was the only Christianity he ever knew and, when the prophecies never panned out, it didn’t occur to him that that people were false; he concluded that God either isn’t real or doesn’t care.

But this often happens in more subtle ways.  It happens when we say things like, “God told me…”  “God told me to marry this person” or “God told me to buy this house” or “God told me go on this mission trip”.  I’ve heard church leaders do this: “God has told us to build a new building” or “God has told us to make such-and-such change to our bylaws”.  Now, the Holy Spirit may sometimes give us a nudge, but we need to be careful how we use God’s name in this way.  We may have thought something through, weighed as best we can what the Bible says or how godly principles apply to the situation—and we should always do that—but saying “God told me” in order to add weight or authority to our plans is to profane the name of the Lord.

But it’s not just the outright “God told me” that’s a problem.  We can profane the name of the Lord when we claim to quickly to speak for him.  This weighs on me heavily as a pastor.  I have an obligation to teach you the Lord’s word and that means that whatever I say must, to the best of my ability, accurately represent his word.  I do my best.  I study a lot.  But I’m not perfect.  Maybe twenty or thirty percent of what I tell on a controversial subject might be wrong.  (The problem is that I don’t know which twenty or third percent.)  I have an obligation to do my best when it comes to teaching God’s word and to be grounded in serious study and real scholarship.  But it’s not just me, every Christian has a duty to be sober about God’s word that we not bring ridicule on it.

When I visiting my parents, my dad took me out to breakfast with some men from his church.  I sat next to a guy who spent most of the time telling me in great earnestness about his belief in aliens and alien abductions based on certain passages from Genesis.  There’s a guy I run into in town periodically who, every time I see him, insists on telling in great earnest about what he calls “The Bible Code”.  It’s kooky conspiracy theory stuff.  And there’s another guy who, every time I see him, is holding onto someone’s arm and pontificating on his bizarre “end times” theories.  Brothers and Sisters, these sorts of things discredit God’s people, they discredit his word, and they indirectly profane his name.  We need to be serious and sober about God’s word, not infants tossed to and fro and chasing after every wave of faddish or sensational teaching.

Now, lastly, the Third Commandment prohibit invoking God’s name for magical purposes.  Surely that’s not a problem for us?  Is it?  Well, it is.  Not that long ago I was at a meeting and we were praying.  When the prayer time was over, one man walked across the room to another man and said, “You didn’t say, ‘In Jesus’ name’.  Your prayer wont’ come true.”  Brothers and Sister, prayers aren’t wishes and we don’t pray “in Jesus name” as a way to invoke his power or authority to make things happen.  We pray through Jesus.  Notice that that’s how our collects put it.  Christian prayer is addressed to the Father and we make that address through Jesus the Son who is our reconciling intermediary.  Adding that last bit to our prayers doesn’t make them any more effective than adding “O Father” at the beginning.  Whether or not we add that reminder at the end of our prayers, all Christian prayer is to the Father and through Jesus.  Adding Jesus to the end of our prayers is a reminder that he is our mediator.  To use it as an invocation of his power or authority is profane his name by using it as a sort of magical talisman.  It’s to summon Jesus to our agenda rather than submitting to his good and sovereign will.

So, while we may tell God our wants and desires, our prayers ought to acknowledge God’s will in the belief that his knowledge goes for beyond ours and that his, and only his plans are perfect.  We must never invoke his name as if we can command him to fulfil our own agenda or obey our commands.  This is a key component of the Word of Faith heresy and its teaching about “positive confession”.  If you have faith, it teaches, your words create reality.  This isn’t Christianity.  This is just a baptised version of the old New Thought movement which is itself a modern version of the magic ancient people thought they could perform by saying the right words or invoking the name of a god.  Brothers and Sisters, we cannot control or command the Lord.  Instead we come to him in faith with our petitions and trust in his perfect wisdom and goodness, submitting to his will and his agenda.

Again, we are his people.  Our calling and vocation is to make known the Lord to the nations.  We honour God’s name when we honour him and we do so especially when we show him honour before the watching eyes of the world.  It ought to be our priority.  The first petition in the Lord’s Prayer is “hallowed be thy name”. This is how we hallow his name.  I’ll just close with what Martin Luther wrote in his Small Catechism.  It may just be the best short summary of our Christian duty in light of this commandment.

“Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord, thy God, in vain.

What does this mean?  We should fear and love God that we may not curse, swear, use witchcraft, lie, or deceive by his name, but call upon it in every trouble, pray, praise, and give thanks.”

Let us pray: Gracious Father, through Jesus and the Spirit you have made us your people.  You indwell us.  You make us your temple.  When the world looks to us, it ought to see you present in our midst.  We confess and ask forgiveness for all the times when we fail to take this calling seriously.  We confess the times when we profane your name by representing you poorly before the watching world.  Forgive us we ask.  Renew us with your grace.  Focus our hearts and minds on you.  As we think of your goodness and wisdom and as we reflect on your great love seen so dramatically in the life and death and resurrection of Jesus, by your grace, may love for you well up and overflow from our hearts.  And may that love manifest itself as we hallow your name in all that we say and in all that we do.  We ask this through Jesus Christ our Saviour and Lord.  Amen.

Examples for Us

1 Corinthians 10:1-13

by William Klock

Jesus has given us new life and he expects us to live it.  It’s easy to fall back into old ways; it’s easy to forget when the world, the flesh, and devil call us back to the very bondage from which Jesus freed us.  But we need to live the new life we’ve been given and the Holy Spirit will help us do it, even when it seems impossible.  Look at the cross, look at the empty tomb, look how the Holy Spirit has been poured out on us at Pentecost…consider it, reckon it, do the math and you have to conclude that the life Jesus gives is ours.  We’ve been transformed.  And knowing that reality makes all the difference in living that reality.  And we need to be reminded of this—sometimes daily, maybe even hourly!  And what we have in our Epistle today is another reminder.  In fact, it’s a reminder with a story.  In the Bible I use for everyday reading Chapter 10 of First Corinthians begins with the heading: “Warnings from Israel’s History”.

We all know the old saying that people who are ignorant of history are doomed to repeat it.  I was a history major and heard over and over again that those who do know history are doomed to watch those who don’t, repeat it.  But Paul wants to make sure neither happens.  One of the problems at Corinth seems to have been that the people took their freedom in Christ and abused it as license to live in sin.  Quite a bit of First Corinthians is aimed at correcting this problem and that’s where today’s lesson comes from.  And so Paul takes them back to the history of Israel, much as we’ve seen him do in our study of Romans.  He reminds them of the great story of redemption.  And part of doing this is so that he can remind them where they stand in that story—he wants to give them their spiritual bearings.

Paul once again takes them back to Israel’s exodus from Egypt.  This was the event that gave Israel her identity and forged her as a people.  And his point to the Christians in Corinth is that they’re now in a very similar position.  Earlier in the book he talked about Jesus as the Passover Lamb.  The Passover lambs sacrificed in Israel pointed to the final and once-for-all sacrifice of Jesus that would bring the true exodus for all humanity from our bondage to sin and death.  And the point Paul makes now is that if Jesus is the true Passover lamb, then that makes us—all of us who are in him by faith—that makes us the true Passover people.  Think about that as we look again at 1 Corinthians 10:1-5.

For I do not want you to be unaware, brothers, that our fathers were all under the cloud, and all passed through the sea, and all were baptized into Moses in the cloud and in the sea, and all ate the same spiritual food, and all drank the same spiritual drink. For they drank from the spiritual Rock that followed them, and the Rock was Christ.  Nevertheless, with most of them God was not pleased, for they were overthrown in the wilderness.

The story of Israel’s exodus should be pretty fresh in our minds as it’s been part of the lessons from Romans we’ve looked at the last several weeks.  The people Paul was writing to in Corinth knew the story well too.  Many of them were Jews.  But he puts our attention on two things in particular that happened during the exodus and during Israel’s time in the wilderness.  The first is the cloud and the sea, the second is the spiritual food and drink.

First the cloud and the sea.  When the Israelites left Egypt they didn’t choose their own route.  The fastest way out of Egypt was the road along the coast, but the Lord manifested himself in a pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night and he led them straight into the swamps and marshes and lakes further south—the area where the Suez Canal is today.  As a place to hide this might have made some sense, but not as an escape route.  The people could look up and see that cloud or that flame and they knew—just as Moses knew when he saw the burning bush and took off his shoes in fearful awe—they knew that the Lord was with them.  They could look at the cloud or the flame and know that God was present, that he had spoken, that he had freed them, and that he was leading and caring for them.  The cloud and the flame led them to the sea, it led them miraculously through the water and had just as miraculously drowned the Egyptian army.  They owed their freedom and deliverance to the God manifest in the cloud and they had every reason to trust in faith that he would continue to be with them, guide them, and protect them in the wilderness.  And as he met them at Sinai and gave them his law, as he called them to be a holy people and his witness to call the nations back to him, the Lord’s lovingkindess gave Israel the motivation to serve and to be the people he had freed them to be.

And Paul describes it this way.  He says that by the leading of the cloud and in the waters of the Red Sea the Israelites were baptised into Moses.  Jews didn’t usually think of the crossing of the Red Sea in terms of baptism, or at least they hadn’t until John the Baptist and Jesus came along.  They used this imagery of the exodus too and made the connection with baptism.  In John’s Gospel Jesus talks about being born of water and the Spirit, for example, just as Israel was born there in the exodus by the leading of the cloud and passing through the sea. Paul is telling the Corinthians that the cloud and the sea were for Israel something like what the Holy Spirit and baptism are for us as Christians.  Israel’s story points to our story.  As Israel was born in the exodus led by Moses, so we are born as the New Israel in the exodus led by Jesus.

And, Paul stresses, there’s a reason for this.  Remember that it’s all part of one big story.  That first exodus from Egypt established Israel—those descendants of Abraham and probably a host of other peoples leaving Egypt with them—it established them as the Lord’s people and in a miraculous and amazing way that we can still look back to with awe and wonder it demonstrates and proves the faithfulness of the Lord in keeping his promises.  Israel’s story through the exodus and the conquest of Canaan, through the time of the judges and the kings, through her exile and her return, all of that story of Israel as the Lord’s people and of the Lord proving his faithfulness then leads us to the culmination of Israel’s history in the coming of Jesus as the Messiah.  Jesus is the great demonstration of the Lord’s faithfulness and Jesus himself fulfils Israel’s story in his person and in his death and resurrection.  And this is how we—most of us gentiles—can through faith in Jesus be grafted into the living tree.  It’s how we can be as much a part of Israel as those people who were led through the Red Sea and the wilderness to the promised land.  Israel’s story and God’s promises are now being worked out through us.  This is what Paul is stressing to the Corinthians.  Their problem, though, was that they’d forgotten their part in the story.

So as the Israelites were—as Paul puts it to make his point—as they were “baptised into Moses”—so Christians are baptised into Jesus.  The cloud and the sea made the Israelites Moses’ people—people of the old covenant—as the Holy Spirit and baptism now make us Jesus’ people—people of the new covenant.  And now Paul brings in the third and fourth elements of the exodus story.  In the wilderness they all ate the same spiritual food and drank the same spiritual drink.  When Paul calls them “spiritual” food and drink what he’s referring to is the way they were supernaturally provided by the Holy Spirit.  There was nothing but sand and rocks and scrub in the wilderness—nothing to eat and in many places no water to drink, but the Lord provided manna for the people to eat.  They didn’t know what it was—“manna” literally translates as “What is it?”—but it miraculously appeared every morning.  Just enough for the day would keep without spoiling, and somehow a double portion would miraculously keep over the Sabbath so that they could rest that day instead of gathering it.  And, at least twice, the Lord miraculously provided water from a rock when there was no water.  Paul’s point is that the Lord did not lead his people into the wilderness without providing sustenance.

And, Brothers and Sisters, the same goes for us.  Like Israel, we have a long way to travel in the wilderness before we arrive at the inheritance we have in Jesus, but he has provided for our sustenance.  He gives us spiritual food and spiritual drink in the Lord’s Supper.  There’s no reason to give up and there’s no reason to go back to our old life of bondage just because life in the wilderness is hard or because it seems like we’ll never reach the promised land.  The Lord is with us.  Jesus sustains us.

And this is why Paul warns them, again going back to the Israelites.  The Lord sustained Israel in the wilderness and that’s why he was so displeased with most of them.  The Israelites presumed on the Lord’s grace and so had many of the Corinthians.  Life in the wilderness was hard.  When they got to the promised land they saw the armed giants guarding it and they were afraid.  In between they grumbled against Moses and they grumbled against the Lord.  They whined about what they’d left behind in Egypt and more than once they fell into idolatry.  And a lot of this was a picture of what was happening in Corinth.  Members of the Church were living in sexual sin and some were taking part in the pagan festivals in the temples—and they thought it was all fine because they had been baptised into Jesus, the Holy Spirit had been poured into them, and because they ate the bread and drank the wine in the Lord’s Supper. They thought they’d reached the pinnacle of Christian maturity.  They even called themselves the “spiritual” people.  But they had stopped pressing on, they had stopped striving for holiness and for growth in Jesus.  The wilderness pressured them.  The world, the flesh, and the devil called them back to their old lives…and they gave in.

Now, Paul really is saying that baptism does in fact transfer you from one kingdom into another—it really does incorporate you into Jesus and into the Lord’s covenant and into the New Israel.  And the Lord’s Supper really does mean that we participate in the life of Jesus who died and was raised.  But the sacraments Jesus gave us don’t work like magic.  They don’t automatically confer redemption.  Faith is required and real faith transforms our character and our way of living.  Baptism and the Lord’s Supper bring us into the Lord’s covenant and covenants have obligations.  Yes, it’s a privilege to be part of that covenant.  This is why we ask, in the baptism liturgy, for God to grant what the candidate cannot have by nature.  We are enemies of God by nature.  It is only by grace that we can be restored to God’s fellowship.  It is only through the sacrificial death of God himself in Jesus and by his resurrection that we can be forgiven and made alive again in God’s presence.  But this is precisely why St. Paul urges the Corinthians and urges us that there is a responsibility in all of this.  We have been crucified with Christ.  Our old selves are dead and we have risen with him to new life.  And so having been set free we cannot use our freedom for license or for sin—the very things from which we have been freed—any more than the Israelites freed from their Egyptian slavery could go back to bondage.

We can live in assurance that the Lord will never let us be snatched from his hand, but that doesn’t mean we can’t turn from him and be lost.  Most of the Israelites lost out on their promised inheritance because they refused to live out their end of the covenant in faith. They died in the wilderness.  And so those Christians who turn from the renewing and regenerating grace of God in the name of “rights” or “freedom” may fall back into their pagan or pre-Christians ways and forfeit their inheritance in Jesus.  In the previous chapter Paul talks about pummeling himself as if he were a boxer fighting a round against his old, unredeemed self, lest he fall away and be disqualified.  If that was true of Paul, the great apostle who spread the Good News of Jesus and his kingdom across the Roman Empire, how much more was it true of the Corinthians and how much more true is it for us.  This is why Paul says in verse 7:

Now these things took place as examples for us, that we might not desire evil as they did.

In the verses that follow he goes on to list the ways in which Israel failed in the wilderness: idolatry, sexual immorality, grumbling against God and putting him to the test.  We can add to the list the sins we struggle with ourselves.  We can add all the ways in which we trust in things and people instead of trusting in Jesus.  And when we think of the ways we cave in to sin and the ways we fail to trust Jesus we can feel the weight pressing down.  In last week’s lesson from Romans Paul talked about being debtors and sometimes we feel that weight in a negative way, but Paul’s point is that we are not debtors to the flesh, we are not debtors to sin.  We are debtors to Jesus who died for us and has raised us with himself to new life.  He has freed us and he has laid on us an obligation to holiness.  And the good news is that he has equipped us to lead this new life.  Paul goes on, saying:

No temptation has overtaken you that is not common to man. God is faithful, and he will not let you be tempted beyond your ability, but with the temptation he will also provide the way of escape, that you may be able to endure it.  (1 Corinthians 10:13)

We’ve all heard the old cliché that God won’t give you anything you can’t handle.  Brothers and Sisters, that’s not true.  God gives us all sorts of things we can’t handle.  The point is that Jesus has poured his Holy Spirit into us to transforms our hearts and minds.  He’s filled us with his grace to strengthen us to make us holy and in his—not our own power—in his power we can face the world, the flesh, and the devil and endure, overcome, and escape their temptation.  We can’t.  But he can and he never ceases to be with us.

Brothers and Sisters, think on that as we come to his Table this morning.  That’s what the bread and wine here are for.  They remind us that Jesus has given his body and blood for us as the true Passover lamb and here at his Table he calls us to be and reminds us that we are the true Passover people, freed from the bondage of sin and death to walk in holiness and to bear the fruit of the Spirit—to be light to a dark world.  Here at the Table Jesus reminds us that he is Lord and he sends us out to proclaim his lordship and his kingdom.  But here he also reminds us that he does not send us out unequipped.  He sends us out full of grace having fed us with the spiritual food of his body and blood.

Let us pray: Heavenly Father, as we acknowledged in today’s Collect, we can do nothing good without you.  We ask you to fill us each day with your Spirit that we might live according to your will and remind us especially as we come to your Table this morning, that it is only through your Son, Jesus, that we have forgiveness and life.  Let us take the strength and sustenance you give us here into the world that we might bring light and life to the darkness.  We ask this through Jesus Christ our Lord.  Amen.