Archived Daily Manna | Rejoice Fellowship | A mission to release people to rejoice in the world.

Message: What Importance Do the Commandments of Exodus 20 Have? The first four of the ten commandments address the relationship between God and man; the remaining six — beginning with the duty of children to respect their parents — address the relationship of people to one another. This division underlies Christ’s famous summary of the Law into two great commandments, e.g. Matthew 22:37-40. The fifth commandment and the fourth, which we examined yesterday, raise an important issue: As important as Exodus 20 is for understanding God’s will, it is neither complete nor fully original and is, really, a sort of Cliff’s Notes version of God’s law given to the Hebrews. (In fact, there is another difficulty we will explore in the future: Exodus gives us a second version of some of the words on the engraved stones (which we call the “Ten Commandments”) brought down the mountain by Moses.) The first, second and fourth commandments have certainly been given to the Hebrews before. See e.g. Exodus 16:22-30. honor thy father When we think about such issues as “what were the laws of Moses” and “what obligation do they place upon Christians today,” turning to the Ten Commandments of Exodus 20 is too simplistic for a serious student of Christianity. Yet, we are all human and our brain capacity is limited; if we can remember and follow these ten simple rules, we will please God in doing so. We struggle, when reading the Old Testament, to find “rules that still apply after the coming of Christ,” as opposed to, say, laws detailing the burning of goat carcasses as a sacrifice. So one benefit of the “Ten Commandments” is that they clearly have universal application. In this regard, the only specifically “Jewish” commandment is to observe the Sabbath; yet it is easy enough to translate it into non-Jewish practice. Even the aggressively atheistic Soviet Union legislated for a day of rest each week! In summary, there is nothing wrong (and much right) with treating the “Ten Commandments” as a special body of law. Reading and studying the actual text of Exodus, however, will give us a deeper and more accurate understanding of Old Testament law and its application to modern Christians. That Your Days May Be Long Noah altar rainbow The gloss at the end of the commandment — “that your days may be long upon the land . . . ” — might or might not be tied to the specific law about honoring parents. “Your days” apparently does not refer to an individual’s lifespan, but rather, to Israel’s occupation of the promised land under the protection of Yahweh. By inference, a child who honors his parents will learn and follow the precepts of a monotheistic and God-centered life; he will inherit the knowledge needed to please God and, under his parents’ watchful eyes, learn to behave correctly in the eyes of God and thereby insure inheritance of the Promised Land. As a general principle of Biblical interpretation, however, the first mention of a principle informs what is to follow. As J. Edwin Hartell puts it in Principles of Bible Hermeneutics (Zondervan, 1947): “The first time a thing is mentioned in Scripture it carries with it a meaning that will be carried all through the Word of God.” There is, we must remember, only one speaker in the Bible, although there are many mouths. Which put more plainly, means that the reward of living long in the Promised Land presumably applies to all of God’s commandments (or perhaps the final six), not only to the obligation of honoring one’s mother and father. There lies a critical message, not only for a struggling, scruffy Semitic tribe over 3000 years ago, but also for us today. We might extend the passage to a universal message: If a society is to prosper, it needs to pay close attention to God’s moral law.