A different way of looking at the 10 Commandments, and why it matters

I’ve long had a love-hate relationship with the 10 Commandments.

Lately, though, it’s been all love. More on that momentarily.

From the Sunday schools of my boyhood on, the commandments were presented as inviolable rules written —literally — in stone. If you didn’t obey them, a vindictive God would — figuratively — beat you to a pulp with those concrete tablets.

A hard God made hard rules and inflicted hard penalties.

As a religion reporter in the 1990s, I wrote about the commandments, because they were much in the news, three millennia after Moses received them on Mt. Sinai.

A hot-button political issue was that conservatives demanded the commandments be posted in public schools. Liberals opposed that. Both sides stayed ginned up about this, until they found something else to get ginned up about.

I remember Steven Beshear, then an ex-lieutenant governor of Kentucky, telling me the 10 Commandments had partly cost him the Commonwealth’s governorship in 1987.

During his term as the state’s attorney general from 1979 to 1983, he’d issued an opinion removing the commandments from Kentucky schools. That ruling was still so volatile in 1987 churches angrily attacked his gubernatorial ambitions. (He did become governor in 2007.)

I liked Beshear, and the political battles over the commandments left a bad taste in my mouth. I’m a preacher, but I don’t approve of haranguing others in the public square with biblical diatribes.

Yet I also ran into various citizens for whom the 10 Commandments weren’t a cudgel for assaulting opponents, but a motivation for doing good.

Now, I’ve become an actual fan of the commandments, even though I still wouldn’t post them in public schools.

A few months ago, I experienced an epiphany—no angels or whirlwinds, just one of those aha moments we all have in various arenas of life, from auto repairs to cooking to Bible studies.

In the Old Testament, the 10 Commandments appear in Exodus 20 and Deuteronomy 5. I happened to be looking at the Deuteronomy version, for reasons I can’t remember. I rarely venture into the Old Testament. I’m a New Testament guy through and through.

Anyway, the first commandment, which I must have heard or read a thousand times before, popped right off the page at me.

There, God says: “I am the Lord your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery. You shall have no other gods besides me.”

And I had this thought: Wait! This isn’t about rules and regulations—it’s about slavery versus freedom.

I read on, down through the prohibitions against idolatry and all the other commandments. I read the preceding chapter and the following texts. I realized the Lord was coming from a very different place than I’d previously imagined.

God was speaking to a nation of people who’d been cruelly enslaved in a foreign land for 400 years. God had recently delivered them from the despot Pharaoh, displaying multiple signs and wonders.

He’d done this, he said, because he loved them and was honoring the covenant he’d made with their ancestors.

The Israelites’ new freedom provides the framework for all the commandments. God wasn’t saying, “I’m going to give you some rules and if you don’t obey them I’ll bludgeon you senseless.”

In context, God was saying something like, “Look, you’ve just spent four centuries being abused by foreign slave masters. I’ve freed you. I’m the only one with the power to do that. I very much want you to remain free. Follow these rules and you’ll create healthy lives and a healthy society that’s strong enough to resist other would-be conquerors.”

Then he walked them step-by-step through the process of staying free.

Don’t worship idols you’ve created with your own hands, he said. They’re lifeless trinkets; I’m alive and unimaginably powerful.

Don’t hypocritically attach my name to actions I haven’t endorsed.

Certainly you should work hard, but you also should rest regularly and trust me to take care of the slack. Don’t try to do everything on your own. Don’t overwork others, either, even your servants. Be reasonable toward everybody.

And on and on the commandments went.

With each one God was pleading, let me show you what it means to be free. I got you out of slavery; now I want to get slavery out of you. If you’ll listen, you’ll prosper. If you ignore me, you’ll fail. After all, I know how my creation works. I also know how it doesn’t.

These commandments were motivated by love and grace, not fury and legalism.

Reading them through this lens casts a whole different hue.

Immediately after issuing the rules, God sadly said to Moses: I wish the people would understand what I’m telling them and act accordingly. If so, things would go well for them and their children. But they don’t have that temperament. They’ll misunderstand or ignore what I’ve said. Inevitably, they’ll end up enslaved again.

Which is what we people have been doing pretty much ever since, Jews and Christians and everybody else. Thank God, his love still overshadows our stupidity.

Paul Prather is pastor of Bethesda Church near Mount Sterling. You can email him at pratpd@yahoo.com.