10 out of 10

The Ten Commandments. It's the title of a film by Cecille B. de Mille, starring Charlton Heston. The subject is the Law given by God to Moses for the people of Israel, on Mount Sinai. There are many messages that could be preached just on that one-sentence introduction:-

• Who gave the Law (God)
• Who received the Law (Moses, Israel)
• What was given (the Law, engraved on ten stone tablets)
• Where was this gift given (on Mount Sinai)
• etc.

However, I'd like to focus on the laws themselves. There are, apparently, 613 commandments in the Pentateuch (the name given to the first 5 books of the Bible: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy). Of these, the ten that God wrote on stone tablets for Moses and Israel, on Mount Sinai, are the most prominent (though maybe not the most important, considering Christ's statement about the greatest commandment). They appear twice in the Bible: in Exodus and again in Deuteronomy (which means the "second statement" of the Law).

Why did God give this Law to Israel? Derek Prince names four reasons, which I can't exactly remember. Not wishing to steal his thunder, here are my recollections of those four reasons: -

1. To show humankind what God is like,
2. To give Israel, the people, a national identity,
3. To show humankind our weakness and inability to meet God's standards (only Messiah can),
4. To prophesy about the coming of the Messiah (Christ).

But the most important reason for the giving of the Law is found in two verses in the book of Romans: Rom. 3:19 and Rom. 8:4.

Now we know that what things soever the law saith, it saith to them who are under the law, that every mouth may be stopped, and all the world may become guilty before God. (Rom. 3:19)

God sent his own Son... that the righteous requirement of the law might be fulfilled in us, who walk not after the flesh, but after the Spirit. (Rom. 8:3-4)

I quote the King James Version simply in order to avoid breaking any copyright agreement (note the influence of law even in that!). However, it remains one of the best Bible versions for study.

The central event of human history was not - I repeat, not - the giving of the law on Mount Sinai. it was the atoning death of the Son of God, Jesus, on the Mount of Calvary. The law had already, implicitly, arrived on the stage of history in the Garden of Eden. God placed the man and the woman in the Garden to tend and cultivate it. He made only one request: that they refrain from eating of the fruit of the "tree of the knowledge of good and evil" (Gen. 2:16-17). By breaking this command at the Serpent's instigation, Adam and Eve earned God's eternal judgement. "The wages of sin is death" (Rom. 6:23). Therefore, in the Garden, law already had effect. Why, then, did God add the 612 extra commandments beyond the original one? Rom. 7:13 says this was "that it [sin] might appear sin". In other words, God wanted to put beyond any doubt the fact that humans cannot live up to His standard: "that every mouth may be stopped, and all the world may become guilty before God."

Let's go back to Rom. 8:4 and see that Jesus died so "that the righteousness of the law might be fulfilled in us." What a shock this is - the law was not invalidated or abolished by Jesus' advent: on the contrary, the whole point of Jesus' death was to settle the law's demand. This means that - outside of God's grace -we are still under the law. Shock-horror! What are we going to do? 1 Tim. 1:8-10 declares :

But we know that the law is good, if a man use it lawfully; knowing this, that the law is not made for a righteous man, but for the lawless and disobedient, for the ungodly and for sinners, for unholy and profane, for murderers of fathers and murderers of mothers, for manslayers,
for whoremongers, for them that defile themselves with mankind, for menstealers, for liars, for perjured persons, and if there be any other thing that is contrary to sound doctrine...

This is why we have to trust Jesus, Who has paid the law's legal demand. Col. 2:14 says Jesus blotted out "the handwriting of ordinances that was against us, which was contrary to us, and took it out of the way, nailing it to his cross." Let us not gratuitously cast the law of God aside with the cheap comment, "oh, that's Old Testament stuff". On the contrary, just as you can tell what a person is like by the acts they do, so you can tell what Christ's Cross really meant, by working back from the atonement to the law it was destined to fulfil. In other words, we can understand more about the truth of Christ's sacrifice by studying the law of God.