Welcome to Anchored by Truth brought to you by Crystal Sea Books. In John 14:6, Jesus said, “I am the way, the truth, and the life.” The goal of Anchored by Truth is to encourage everyone to grow in the Christian faith by anchoring themselves to the secure truth found in the inspired, inerrant, and infallible word of God.

Script:

I AM LORD JEHOVAH your God who brought you out from the land of Egypt mine …

Exodus, Chapter 20, verse 2, Aramaic Bible in Plain English

VK: Hello! I’m Victoria K. Welcome to Anchored by Truth brought to you by Crystal Sea Books. We’re so happy that you are able to join us today. And we pray that you be blessed as you pursue a closer fellowship with our Lord Christ Jesus. Today on Anchored by Truth we’re going to continue the new series we began last on our last episode. Today in the studio we have RD Fierro who is an author and the founder of Crystal Sea Books. RD, this new series that you launched is on the Ten Commandments which, surely, is one of the most familiar parts of the Bible. Even people who are not Christians have some degree of familiarity with the Ten Commandments. Why did you want to do a series on the best-known parts of the Bible? It seems like that would be a section for which not-much-explanation would be necessary.

RD: I decided we needed to do a series on the Ten Commandments precisely because it is so familiar. The Ten Commandments are so familiar to Christians, and even to our broader culture, that I think most people think that they understand them. I’d almost go so far as to say many people take them for granted even if they agree with them or trust in them. But today there are a lot of people who will dismiss the 10 commandments out of hand because, in their minds, they will say that nothing that was written 3,500 years ago can be relevant to our lives today.

VK: That, of course, is a silly or dangerous attitude because the 10 commandments contain prescriptions that are obviously very important to our daily lives like “you shall not steal” or “you shall not commit murder.” I don’t think very many people want to live in a society where those two commandments don’t apply.

RD: No, they don’t. But they would tell you that we don’t need the Ten Commandments to tell us not to murder or steal because we have civil laws that prohibit them. And it’s true that we do have civil laws that prohibit murder and theft. But what few people ever think about is the basis for our civil law or the basis for any law at all. And from just the standpoint of human existence that’s a question that is very important. And while we don’t think much about what provides the basis for the establishment of human law the people who founded America certainly had no doubts about the foundation for all human government.

VK: You’re thinking about that most-famous of the documents that founded the United States, the Declaration of Independence. And of course probably no part of the declaration is better known than, “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.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men …”

RD: Yes. The Founding Fathers began all of their reasoning about government by going back to the beginning.

VK: And not to the beginning of the settlements in America but to the beginning of everything. That’s why that phrase “endowed by their Creator is so relevant and instructive. They could have just said “endowed by God” but they didn’t. They specifically used the word “Creator.”

RD: Yes. The overwhelming majority of the Founders were devout Christians who understood that God was sovereign. And they understood that God’s sovereignty derived from the fact that He had made everything. God didn’t just create people, though that fact is certainly important when it comes to talking about government. God created everything. The opening verse of the Bible tells us that. “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” If we don’t understand that simple fact it is impossible to build a coherent worldview.

VK: The term “heavens and earth” is what is called a merism. A merism [MARE-ISM] is a figure of speech that combines two opposites as a way of making an all-inclusive reference - such as saying “I searched high and low” for a lost object. When the Bible uses the term “heavens and earth” it is a way of saying God created everything that exists. It was essentially the Hebrew equivalent of what we call the “universe.”

RD: And we see the echo of the first verse of the Bible in the introduction that God makes to the Ten Commandments that we heard about in our opening scripture.

VK: I noticed that you selected the version of Exodus, chapter 20, verse 2 from a version of the Bible we’ve never used before on Anchored by Truth. This version came from the Aramaic Bible in Plain English. You obviously chose that for a reason.

RD: Indeed. Most versions or translations of the Bible like the New International Version or the English Standard Bible translate that verse as “I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of Egypt.” But we do Anchored by Truth as either a radio show or a podcast episode so we don’t have a visual. In the NIV or the ESB the word “Lord” in those versions is in all capital letters which is the way those versions indicate that the Hebrew word they are usually translating is “Yahweh” which is the personal name for God.

VK: We learn that “Yahweh” is God’s name from Exodus, chapter 3, verse 14 during the famous encounter of Moses with God at the burning bush. Moses asked God what name he should give when the Hebrews in Egypt asked who had sent him. God said to say “I am who I am.” Tell them “I am” has sent you. The word for “I am” is “Yahweh.” By saying that His name was “I am” God was telling Moses, and us, that God is self-existent. He possesses the power of existence unto and by Himself. God is the only Being that is self-existent. Human, animals, and even angels all derive their existence from Him. No one and nothing but God is self-existent. So, while many of us miss the big point of the name God gave to Moses the Hebrews of Moses’ day would not. “Yahweh” was such a sacred name among the ancient Jews that they wouldn’t speak it. The often just said “the Name.” The Greek version of “Yahweh” is “Jehovah.”

RD: Exactly. So, that’s why I used the Aramaic Bible in Plain English. That translation makes it plain that before God gave the Ten Commandments to Moses he was using the name for Himself that made it very plain why He possessed the authority to issue commandments. God may command human beings, and all creation for that matter, because God made human beings and all creation. Again, we’re back to a basic fact. God gets to tell people and the universe to behave because He made everything.

VK: And, frankly, even Christians tend to gloss over that introductory statement when we read that part of the Bible. But we shouldn’t. In that simple introduction to the commandments God is revealing a great many things – the first of which is “I have every right to issue the commands I’m giving you because I made you. Your very lives and existences are entirely dependent on me.” That’s not something we like to think about in our day and age is it?

RD: No. We are so surrounded by evolutionary and uniformitarianism ideas that even Christians drift away from an inescapable, bedrock fact that God, Yahweh-Jehovah, has complete authority over us and all creation because He made it and us. We understand in earthly affairs that the ability of a “lord” to exercise control over others is limited to only the sphere in which that lord possesses authority.

VK: I need to listen to and obey the orders of my boss but I don’t have to obey the boss of the business next door. State governors govern in their state but the moment they leave their state nobody in the neighboring state is subject to their authority. Even the grandest king or emperor who ever ruled in human history had a limited sphere of authority. No human being, ever, had authority over the whole earth. But God does have authority over the whole earth and every human being that has ever lived because God made the whole earth and every human being that has ever lived. God has control over creation in the same way a painter has control over their painting or a sculptor may create the sculpture as they see fit. I see why you wanted to address this subject before we moved on the substance of the first commandment “you shall have no other gods before me.”

RD: The first commandment is not just reasonable but righteous because of this introduction. God prohibited the worship of other gods because frankly there are no other “gods” that are remotely similar to Yahweh, to the great “I am.” The God of the Bible is unique and distinct. He alone is infinite, omniscient, omnipotent, etc. Human language cannot describe the perfections of the One True God. So, it is reasonable and righteous that we should never accord worship to any lesser person or being. Idolatry is wrong because it takes the respect which rightfully belongs only to the God of the Bible and gives it to something else.

VK: And even in our own experience we know that ascribing credit or glory due to one person to another is wrong. If a team wins their league championship and displays the trophy, that’s right and fitting. But if another team came and stole the trophy and claimed that they should be celebrated because they had the trophy none of us would say that is okay. There is even a prohibition in our laws to stop people from claiming credit for military service or decorations if they didn’t earn them legitimately. We call that “stolen valor.” When a human being worships someone or something other than the God of the Bible it is the ultimate case of “stolen valor.” No one and nothing rightfully deserves the praise and worship that God deserves because no one and nothing has created anything ex nihilo [EX KNEE-HILL-O].

RD: We say that God created ex nihilo which means God created the universe out of nothing. He did not use any pre-existing matter or energy which He just shaped into the creation we see about us. Creation ex nihilo means God created everything that exists by the ineffable power that only He possesses. So, when ascribe worship to any lesser thing we are denying, or attempting to deny, a simple truth. Nothing would exist, or could exist, apart from God. So, if we are going to give praise and thanks we should always give that praise and thanks to the One responsible for our ability to do that. This is such an important point but when we read the commandments or even think about them it’s something we tend to skip or gloss over.

VK: Usually when we think about the Ten Commandments we think about them in terms of being rules or regulations that govern our behavior. We know that we are not to worship other gods and I suspect that most Christians think that this a commandment that they are obeying if they just go to a “Christian church.” But as we have been discussing the force and effect of the first commandment goes beyond just saying that we participate in our worship service in the right kind of building.

RD: Yes. All true and acceptable worship must begin with a correct apprehension of God. We must start out with a solid understanding of God as He reveals Himself in the Bible because it is so easy as limited creatures to drift into worshipping a god of our own choosing or making. Especially in our day and time we have a tendency to diminish God’s holiness and righteousness in our conception of Him. We are uncomfortable by the way that God has expressed that holiness and righteousness in His commandments and we are uncomfortable in the uncompromising nature of His sovereignty. Especially in the modern west where we prize civil democracy and free choice we have begun to think that God somehow has an obligation to accommodate our ideas and concepts of how He should structure the world. Nothing could be more foolish or dangerous.

VK: You have often said that “God is not a scared teenager.” By that you mean that God is not sitting around on a sort of wispy cloud wishing desperately that we human beings will accept Him, think well of Him, and worship Him. To the contrary, every single encounter any human being had with even the barest glimpse of God in the Bible shows that the human was struck with awe and amazement with even the teeny bit of God they could apprehend. The encounter described in Isaiah, chapter 6 is a perfect example. Verses 1 through 5 say, “In the year that Uzziah [UH-ZAI-UH] the King died I saw LORD JEHOVAH sitting on a throne, high and exalted, whose robe filled his temple. And Seraphim … were calling, … “Holy, holy, holy, LORD JEHOVAH of Hosts, for all of the Earth is filled with his praises!” And the doorposts of the door moved … and the house was filled with smoke … And I said “Woe to me, for I am overcome with astonishment, because I am a man of defiled lips and I dwell among a people whose lips are defiled, and my eyes have seen The King, LORD JEHOVAH of Hosts!” This quote is also from the Aramaic Bible in Plain English.

RD: Isaiah was a priest from a very important family. He was an honorable man from the highest ranks of Hebrew society. Yet, he was so overcome with the recognition of his own sinfulness when confronted with the immediate presence of God’s majesty that he pronounced “woe” on himself. Isaiah probably guarded his worship carefully and he was probably as faithful to upholding the first commandment as any human being who ever lived, apart from Jesus, but he was devastated when he came into contact with the Lord. Can you imagine how he would have felt if he had ever worshipped any of the false gods that were commonly worshipped in the nations that surrounded Judah? Isaiah’s experience brings the necessity of the first commandment as a commandment and to be the first commandment into sharp focus.

VK: As people and as Christians we routinely ask God for things we need – healing, jobs, help for kids or grandkids, meeting financial needs, etc. And we should do that because 1 Peter, chapter 5, verse 7 tells us to, “cast all your cares on God, for he takes care of you.” And you spent some time in your book Purposeful Prayers thinking about how important it is for us to understand the relationship between God’s nature and our needs. This quote is from Purposeful Prayers. “Many people spend too little time considering the nature of the object of their prayers. This is unfortunate because even the most beautiful prayer prayed by the sincerest person to an unworthy object would be a futile prayer. An inanimate or non-existent object cannot hear a prayer, much less respond to it. The Bible, particularly the Old Testament, is filled with admonitions about the futility of praying to inanimate objects that have neither eyes to see, ears to hear, nor the power to move. But beyond the futility of praying to an unworthy object is a more serious problem. Because prayer is communion with God, and therefore part of worship, it would be an act of idolatry to direct prayer to an unworthy object. The first of the Ten Commandments … is number one for a reason.”

RD: Yes. God put the command not to worship anything or anyone other than him first because to do so would not only be offensive to Him but also because it is detrimental to us. God alone is sovereign and our observations of the universe tell us this. The alternative to God having created the universe is that everything and everybody came from nobody and nothing. The alternative to God creating mankind is that some random atoms collided one day to produce molecules and began a process that generated a being with 30 trillion cells each of which contains an information storage system more sophisticated than any information system ever created by that 30-trillion cell being.

VK: In other words, the system that created the being reflects more intelligence than the being it created possesses. But the system doing the creation is itself unintelligent. Hmmmm … seems like there’s a problem there.

RD: Indeed. And the first commandment encapsulates all of those thoughts even though it does not go to the point of elaborating on them. The first commandment is a model of brevity. From an informational standpoint the first commandment is an information scientist’s dream. It conveys hundreds of instructions that benefit its intended recipient in just 8 or 9 English words. In doing so, it gives evidence that it was framed by an omniscient mind. Anyone who is familiar with the civil laws that are common today in most “developed countries” knows that we will spend hundreds, and sometimes thousands, of words conveying even simple concepts. States have hundreds of pages that essentially cover nothing more than ideas like “you shall not steal.” Today, we have to define the terms “theft” and “steal.” Then we have to list all of the kinds of activities that might be considered theft. And we have to differentiate between loaning and borrowing and theft which gets into the idea of whether the thief intended to deprive someone of their property permanently.

VK: You’re giving me a headache but we take the point. But, of course, there were other legal codes in Moses’ day that didn’t exhibit the bureaucratic complexity of the legal codes of our day. For instance, the Mosaic law has often been compared to the law collection of Hammurabi, an Ammonite/Babylonian king who ruled between Abraham and Moses.

RD: Yes, they have been. And that helps confirm the historicity of the Ten Commandments. But there are significant differences between the Mosaic law and those of Hammurabi: The laws of Hammurabi address at least nine gods. Moses worships only one. The exalted reputation and wisdom of Hammurabi is in focus, whereas Moses received no credit for the laws of God. Hammurabi is the author of his laws. Moses received his as a revelation from God. The laws of Hammurabi have no reference to the moral qualities of the gods. The Mosaic laws are a reflection of the holiness of God. There are clear rules for the punishment of crimes in the laws of Hammurabi, but there is no provision of forgiveness, since the gods have little interest in morality. In the Mosaic laws, sin is primarily an affront to the character of God, but repentance and sacrifices for forgiveness and reconciliation are inseparable from the law.

VK: And the laws revealed through Moses clearly have an Egyptian background, especially with the first commandment. The Egyptians worshipped over 2,000 gods. So, it makes sense that God told Moses that the Israelites were to have “no other gods before me.” But the fact that there are some similarities with other legal codes of that time but that the Ten Commandments were clearly distinct from the surrounding cultures means that the most reasonable conclusion is that the laws and religion of Israel were uniquely revealed to Moses by God and reflect his plan for salvation that began in the garden immediately after the fall of Adam and Eve.

RD: The nature and structure of the Ten Commandments is consistent with the state of human history and governments at the time Moses received them from God – not quite 1,500 years before Jesus was born. But the distinctiveness of the commandments also reveals that they were given to a people that was in the process of transition. When the Hebrews went into Egypt to escape the famine there was only about 80 or so of them. When they left Egypt they had grown into a true national people of approximately 2 million. It was time for them to receive a formal legal code to govern their society with its new attributes.

VK: God had clearly given the substance of much of the commandments even to the first family. Cain and Abel knew they had to worship God and bring sacrifices to Him to atone for their sins. That’s what led to the first murder. But in the many centuries between Cain and Abel and Moses oral transmission of God’s requirements for them was sufficient. But had been sufficient for a small group of related tribesmen was not sufficient for the nation that God intended to build in the Promised Land. So, the delivery of the Ten Commandments makes sense in light of the people, the culture, the prevailing state of the nations at that time, and with God’s characteristic concern that His people know how to live productive and joyful lives.

RD: Absolutely. Next week we will move on to the 2nd commandment and we’ll see that it makes as much sense for that commandment to be number 2 as it makes for number one is to be number 1. And we will also see that the 2nd commandment makes sense culturally, morally, and historically. And as we said last week and want to continue to emphasize the reason God gave the commandments to His people was to improve their lives not just because He was sitting on a cloud one day and decided it was time to issue regulations to His people.

VK: Sitting on a cloud, really?

RD: Really.

VK: At any rate, the big idea that we wanted to introduce today is that God gave us the 1st commandment to remind us of some very important truths. God is the Creator. He made everything that we see and He upholds it through His own power. Because He made everyone and everything He is the righteous sovereign and we must guard against giving praise or glory to any imitators or lesser things. By doing that we will not only please Him but we will make our own lives better because when we turn to Him we turn to the One who can actually help in times of need. This sounds like a great time for a prayer so today let’s listen to a prayer for the celebration of Easter – the day our Lord rose from the grave proving the Father’s complete satisfaction with the sacrifice that makes our salvation possible.

---- PRAYER FOR EASTER

VK: We’d like to remind our audience that a lot of our radio episodes are linked together in series of topics so if they missed any episodes or if they just want to hear one again, all of these episodes are available on your favorite podcast app. To find them just search on “Anchored by Truth by Crystal Sea Books.”

If you’d like to hear more, try out crystalseabooks.com where “We’re not perfect but our Boss is!”

(Opening Bible Quote from the Aramaic Bible in Plain English)

Exodus, Chapter 20, verse 2, Aramaic Bible in Plain English