Thank you, that didn't hurt a bit. And yet, I think we need to wait for Steve to get the dial. Testing, testing, testing, testing, testing, testing, testing, testing. And yet, is that right?
Is that a right thing to do? What do you as a Canadian think of the Ten Commandments? What do you think in Canada as to how the church and the state should be separated? And perhaps we sort of say we don't want to think about that.
But in the interest of not letting the world press your mind into its mold, that's the JB Phillips translation of Romans 12 2, it behooves you to be up on the Ten Commandments and to be up on the principles of God and how they relate to you as a believer. The question is not simple because after all, you are not a Jew. You are a Christian. You are not under the law.
You are under grace. The aspect of rules is fascinating when you look at human beings around you and you look at human history. It seems that human beings at a God or a level either hate a rule or love a rule, especially when it comes to observing them. On the other hand, everybody loves to argue about the rules.
Everybody loves to argue about what rules should apply, especially what rules should apply to other people. That's human nature. Legalists and tyrants and totalitarianists love to impose rules on their populations. And even in your Bible, you will find under the age or the era of the law, you will find that there is, if you will, a proliferation of rules.
It reminds me of Jesus' principle that it's because of the hardness of your hearts that those things were given, he said, to the Jews. And so our hearts are hard and we need guidance. And often we look for guidance to the rules. But we know, as Christians, as we sang this morning, love so amazing, so divine demands my heart, my life, my all.
And when we take that approach to life, that it is from the heart and that we need to live from the heart before God, things become an awful lot simpler, in fact, and less rule-based. Demands my heart, my life, in all its facets, my all, my energies, my time. And when we think about these aspects of Christian living, in the Lord, we can still get guidance from the old rules, from things like the Decalogue, which I hope to be able to give some exposition upon this morning and perhaps on a second morning if the time runs away. I mentioned J.B.
Phillips in Romans 12, too, and not letting the world press your mind into its mold. What do you see around you? What is the media communicating? What kinds of things do you see in what we might call the design of society or the intended design of society by the Canadian government?
What sorts of things do we see from CBC and so on? Politically, do we see much reference to things like the Ten Commandments? And I think somebody wants to burst out laughing. Are you kidding?
Thus achieving, hopefully, some kind of equalization. So this is where the head of society, what I think anyway, where I think the head of Canadian society is. And it is indeed very far from a biblical perspective. None of the Ten Commandments are actually directed at societal concerns as such.
That should tell you something right there. They are directed at someone. Who is that? Me and you.
They're directed at me and my house. What I do, how I behave as an individual and how my family or house behaves under my head shift. That's what's in the Ten Commandments. The law given to the earthly children of God through Moses.
And there is no talk of it. One book that I obtained, and thank you to Warren for the Tom Watson book that I have by Robertson, is not called the Ten Commandments. It's called the Ten Offenses. And this Robertson is a well-known figure at one time in the American political situation.
And he begins the book by pointing out the very fundamental role of the Judeo-Christian mindset and the Ten Commandments in the founding of the United States. When the President of the United States elect takes the oath of office, he ends it with helping me, helping me, God, helping me, what God. The Judeo-Christian God, the one who gave the Ten Commandments. In multiple public places of law in the United States, the Ten Commandments are on display.
Robertson points out that a court succeeded in having them taken down from a courthouse in Alabama. That's where it's going. And we've been going there big time in Canada. I think we would be the likelihood of ever being allowed to put up the Ten Commandments on a courthouse.
The probability of that being allowed in the government is exactly zero. That would not be permitted. Even though Western civilization is founded on these principles, given, however, to the earthly children of God, with a view to a type of government that does not exist today. And what is the name of that type of government?
We have, I guess you could say, a democracy. What is the type of government under which the Jews were to live from Exodus 20 going on forward? What's it called? It ends in C like democracy, but it ain't democracy.
Theocracy, man under God. Man under God is at theocracy, and that was the design of society that was intended. And so the attitude and mentality of the Christian is, hopefully and historically, emphasizing personal responsibility and personal accountability. And again, these are things today that are shunted to decide.
In favor of top-down actions to try to level the playing field somehow, the Christian doesn't have that mindset. At least I hope it doesn't. The primary mindset is personal me, accountability to God. I'm accountable and I'm responsible.
That's a very out-of-fashioned idea. But perhaps we shouldn't be surprised. God's ways are not man's ways as the Bible teaches. And yet every day you are assaulted with the ideas of the world to press your mind into the mold of the world.
And if it starts to hurt, your Christian brain goes, my Christian brain is hurting. Well, that's because your round Christian brain is being forced by the world into a square Canadian hole. And it doesn't work. And it hurts.
And if it hurts, that's good. Because it doesn't fit, and it won't fit, and it can't fit, and you shouldn't expect it to fit. I love the part of this, which is right there. Both face tight.
The word, oops, the word is very near you. It refers in that passage to mouth and heart, first of all. Mouth and heart. Mouth and heart.
Do you talk about this with your Christian brothers and sisters, with your kids, with your family, with your relatives? Mouth. Mouth. Heart.
The heart. It's one thing to have text. As external text is that text in your heart. If it's in your heart, you can say that you've memorized it.
Or at least the principles of it are in your heart. In this chapter, we are taught these things. It is in your mouth and in your heart, hopefully. It needs to be, Moses is saying.
So it can be as near as possible, as near as possible. Of course, the practical implications of that, especially for the earthly children of God, one might say in terms of prosperity and in terms of politics, are very, very pronounced to the point that when you compare the blessings to the curses that are promised for the earthly children of God, comparing obedience to disobedience and idolatry, it is white and black. It is a very, very stark, almost frightening difference between the consequences of following and loving God's instructions and God's word, as compared to ignoring it and disobeying it and flagrantly going against it, the consequences are very black, very dire. And when you read them in the book of Deuteronomy, you would say, crazy.
They'd be crazy. They've been given these principles, the prosperity that's promised and the blessings that are promised under the following of these principles are so fantastic, they'll be a testimony to the whole world and they'll enjoy the prosperity themselves. And that's not even considering the joy of worshiping Yahweh. Compared to the awfulness of the disease and the wars and the losing of wars and the losing of battles associated with idolatry, it's a no-brainer.
Why you might ask then, does the human being not say that? Not that because of the sinfulness of the human heart and the failure to take God's word into the heart. Taking God's word into the heart is a meaningful statement coming from this point in time. For the believer, if you don't know the Lord and you are not in a relationship with God, I don't think you really understand what I'm talking about in an existential sense.
I'm talking about the reality of the spiritual life of the Christian who is in love with God. I want to show you a couple of things in the next slide that go beyond mouth and heart. This is great stuff. I enjoyed preparing this.
And for once, I didn't have to give six hours of lectures this week and six hours of tutorials and attend department meetings and have people dropping in my office. None of those things happen. And my wife doesn't work on Fridays at Delph. In about halfway through the morning, she said, would you get out of that bathrobe and get dressed in it?
So I had some more time this week to study and to think about the Word of God, and that was very good. What is the centrality? How does the Bible point to the essentiality and centrality of the Word of God in specific, specifically referring to the Decalogue, to the Ten Commandments? What kind of place do the Ten Commandments hold in the Bible?
And what kind of place should they have held in the heart and mind of the Jew, the earthly child of God? Well, first of all, what you find is that the tablets are told to us twice, both in Exodus 31 and Deuteronomy 9, to have been written with the finger of God. Is that not clear enough for you as to who this is from? And what sort of significance it has written with the finger of God in stone?
Well, that's pretty amazing. That means that these tablets are very, very special. That means that these tablets are very, very significant. But of course, it's not so much the stone as what is written, what is written for us and for them.
And that happened if you go one chapter before, which Exodus 20, and you hear and you see, you read about what they would have heard, and the fire and the lightning and the thunder and the cloud descending and Moses going up, and don't touch the base of the mountain, you could die. And they were absolutely terrified. And if we take a sort of fleshly point of view on this about being terrified, good, you need to be terrified. You need to know that this is God.
You need to know that the giving of this law that's happening right now is serious business. And if you are afraid and if you are told to be here and to here, but don't get too close, it emphasizes the significance of the Decalogue. And then out of this comes the very voice of God. They were quaking in their boots, the lightning, the thunder, the cloud with Moses.
And then the voice of God comes. They must have been quaking in their boots. And again, I say good. Christians sometimes have the tendency to, what shall I say?
I'm treading on dangerous ground when I say that Christians sometimes have this idea of buddy, buddy with God. It is true that as a redeemed child of God, you have a special love relationship with God. But I suggest to you that maybe you don't fear God enough. Maybe you need to have a reverential fear that will enable you to have more respect and reverence for this and what it says.
Later we find that going to, see Exodus 32, there's a long sort of interaction from 19 up to 31. And then Moses goes up for quite an extended time. He comes down and he goes back up. And he goes back up for how many days?
40, 40 days, 40 days. They have seen the lightning. They have heard the voice. They have listened to the rules.
And Moses goes back up. And he stays up there. And they're quite keen to say all these things we will do. Yeah, just wait a little while.
Wait a few weeks. Let's see how you are in a few weeks. Oh my goodness. Isn't that sad?
I don't know how you compare yourself to them. How you would compare yourself to say that if I was shaking in my boots at the base of that mountain and heard the voice of God and saw my leader come up, go up and come back down and speak to me, the word of God, and tell me the rules. And I'm quaking and I say, I'll do it. I'll do it.
I'll do it. It's almost like I can't handle this anymore. And then a few weeks later, breaking rule number two. What?
What is this? Well, I'll tell you what it is. It's human beings. It's the forgetfulness and the sinfulness of the human being, especially the human being that has not the spirit of God.
But you have Moses then coming down and breaking the tablets, as you would remember. You can imagine the anger of Moses and having delivered the essential rules to find that a matter of weeks later, they have already broken rule number two and he smashes the rules. Now, you should know something about what I say, sousa and vassal relationship. It turns out that scholars who study the ancient Middle East can find other examples of sousa and vassal relationships.
In which there is a covenant treaty between a powerful one and a people. And that that covenant has conditions. Some of them are unilateral and some of them are intended to allow a degree of autonomy in the vassal people. Such sousa and vassal treaty statements typically start with the kind of verse you see in Exodus 21.
I am the Lord your God. In this relationship, I am the boss. I am the upper entity in this sousa and vassal relationship. The second thing that appears in Middle Eastern sousa and vassal relationship is, typically, I have conquered you.
You are now occupying land that I control. Instead of that, instead of that here, what we have is, I brought you out of Egypt. Do you remember? Do you remember?
I brought you out of Egypt. And that sets the stage for the Decalogue. And so Moses went up and that dialogue that Moses has with God regarding the Jews, because God was saying to Moses that, let me start with you, Moses. Remember, I started over with Noah.
Let me start over with you. These people are stiff-necked. And Moses pleads for his people. And God relents.
And it shows to us, I think, the tentative nature, the fact that the earthly children of God, in some sense, are on tenter hooks with God because they are repeatedly disobedient. And how is God going to have a sousa and vassal relationship with such a disobedient vassal, such a disobedient crowd of people in the world and in the flesh? The sousa might come in and say, you aren't keeping the terms. I turn you into slaves, not vassals, slaves.
You don't like being a slave? I kill you. Totally, totally different. The God in the Old Testament that we know as Yahweh agreed to on Moses pleading to continue to deal with the Jews.
And God said, I will write another set of tablets. And we know, as you can see there, from the image of the Ark of the Covenant, that there are two. It turns out, according to the scholars, and it makes sense to me, that I had thought that, OK, there's 10 commandments and there's two tablets and maybe five on this one and five on that one. That's what I was thinking.
No. Stand on this one. Stand on this one. Mr.
Basil, this is your copy. Keep it. Read it. This 10 here stays with me.
Do we understand each other? We both have a copy? That would be the typical Middle Eastern sousa and vassal arrangement. In this case, I see a beautiful picture.
I see a beautiful picture in which the Shakina glory of God is over the Ark of the Covenant, the Ark of the testimony. What covenant? What testimony? Inside.
And the beauty of it is side by side. They're kind of a, is your heart such that the copy that God has put of his principles and his law in your heart is side by side with the Holy Spirit's copy given to you? I hope so. I hope that in your relationship to God, this understanding is side by side under the blood and knowing the glory.
So this decalogue has tremendous significance to these people, tremendous significance. And we read in Exodus chapter 20, verse 1, and in Deuteronomy chapter 5, verse 7, God speak. God speak. All through your Bible, you can find examples of Ezekiel said and that Isaiah said that God said.
But sometimes Isaiah says just straight out, God says. It's coming through Isaiah. God says. But these people stood at the base of this mountain and they heard.
And when it comes, God's fake. It's like real time. God's fake, these words. So I know the problem.
Oh, I know why. Here is the culprit. God's fake, these words. These words were kept in a very special place of reverence and awe, or the high priest could only go into the room where that was located once a year and not without blood.
Very, very significant. It's quarter after 12 and half an hour ago, children went down to Sunday school. Well, guess what? You are now in Sunday school.
I was looking. I did it myself, but then I looked and I wasn't satisfied at all. When I was in high school, one of the questions that I pretty much knew was going to be on the final exam in high school history was, give the reason, the opinions for the fall of the Roman Empire. And having a, probably, the mind of an engineer without really knowing it, I created a mnemonic so that I could remember the 10 reasons.
There's too many. You just learned the 10 reasons. That's too many for me. I need a mnemonic.
And I created a mnemonic so that I could remember the reasons. Now, you might not like my mnemonic. Apologies. The idea of mnemonic is that it's a sentence where the first letter of every word helps remind you of the key word that you need, in this case, for the commandment.
If you travel in Europe, especially around the countries of the Mediterranean, and you are on busy subway and train stations, everybody warns you about the pickpockets. So if you're walking, do you just keep your distance from people and you're glad to get out of the subway or the train station? I don't think I've ever had anything taken in that manner, although I know people who have had in countries who are in the Mediterranean. So you have 10 commandants and you have 10 letters.
And the letters are W-I-V-S-P, M-A-T-L-E. When in Venice State put most all thieves leave eventually. I think of Zemark Square, if you have a big square with a cathedral at the far end of it, bustling with people bumping into each other, and you sort of feel, should I stay? Should I go?
That's kind of interesting. I think I'll stay just to keep my distance from people. Venice is a very interesting city with all those canals. Stick around.
Take a gondola ride. I'm helping you to remember my sentence. When in Venice, say put, most all thieves leave eventually. How does that help you?
This way, the first commandment teaches you to worship only one God. It deals with worship. The second commandment tells you not to engage in idolatry, such as the golden calf that would be built within the coming weeks by the very people who listen to this. The third commandment I've put in single quotes is vanity.
Do not take the name of the Lord God in vain. And I will explain more about the meaning of that. The fourth commandment pertains to observing the Sabbath. And the fifth commandment pertains to honoring your parents.
The sixth commandment, thou shalt not kill. The seventh commandment, thou shalt not commit adultery. And the eighth word in my mnemonic and the eighth word in the ten commandments pertains to stealing. Don't steal other people's stuff.
Don't be a thief. The ninth commandment, don't bear false witness, don't tell lies. And the tenth commandment, envy. In Deuteronomy it has the word desire, as well as the word envy.
It includes property since they were about to enter the land. Worship, idolatry, vanity, Sabbath, parents, murder, adultery, theft, lying, and envy. And so on a future day, we will discuss these commandments in detail, one by one, in the English language in your Bible. And the diagram that I want to leave you with this morning before I close in prayer is one of the many valuable things that the ten commandments give you.
One might say, without looking at the details too closely, one of the things that they give you that you can take with you this morning is the fact that it has three perspectives. It doesn't tell you what government you elect. It doesn't tell you about inclusiveness or a host of other things or how society should be organized. It's directed at me.
And me in the middle, if I imagine that, it's kind of narcissistic, but these commandments are directed at me after all, that there are three realms where I should be aware of how I am doing and how I am behaving and how I am spending my time and how I'm allowing my attention to be taken up. And those three realms are the realm of my relationship to God. The realm of my relationship to my family. So you have three realms.
Your upward realm, the most important realm is your relationship upwards and downwards with God. That then affects how you behave in the other two realms. One could argue, I think very clearly, that if, in fact, you obey the first commandment and you worship God and you love God, the rest of these things pretty much take care of themselves, right? A person who worships God and loves God is not going to be doing those bad things.
So the other realm there that we should be very conscious of is our family, such as honoring our parents. And of course, we can find in our Bibles the importance of leading our families spiritually and of providing for our families. This is a natural outgrowth of a nuclear family which also honors the parents. So the realm of the family, the immediate family.
And then the third realm is harder to define but it is the in single quotes, the neighbors. Who is your neighbor? What New Testament parable dealt with this question? A man came up to Jesus and said, who's my neighbor?
Gotcha, gotcha, gotcha, gotcha. I bet you can't tell me who my neighbor is. And what parable was that? A good Samaritan.
In other words, Jesus said, the definition of neighbor is big. For these people, the definition of neighbor included two groups of people, fellow Jews, but what you will find is frequent mention of the foreigner who is with you. You see, here's a question. There is a society.
And in this society, there's no crime. People are good for their word. People are trustworthy. There is no stealing.
Law and order with known punishments that are severe. And this society is really prosperous. Want to join? A lot of people go, yeah, I'm getting my stuff stolen and I'm being assaulted.
And I can't trust anybody. And as a result, my entire country is a basket case of poverty. Where is this country? When can I get a plane ticket to go there?
Because I want to be there. That's a good place to be. So there would be those who know the testimony, the intended place that the people of God were supposed to achieve. And that testimony was to draw in the foreigner.
So the foreigner is frequently mentioned in the law of God, in the Torah. And so neighbors includes those who are in fact not Jews, but who are around you. And you are to treat them every bit as well as your blood brother Jew. That is in the Torah.
So with that this morning, I would like to close in prayer and we will continue the 10 commandments at a future date. Heavenly Father, we thank you that you have revealed your word to us. May the law of God be in our hearts. And may we be children of God who honor you in all the realms of our lives.
We pray that you would go with us this morning and in the coming week to give us strength and guidance. We pray in Jesus' name. Amen.