Third Sunday of Lent
Third Sunday of Lent:
March 19th, 2006
Exodus 20:1-17
Psalm 19
Mosaic/Sinai Covenant
I approach the creation of this lesson with a deep sense of awe and reverence. Throughout the past 4,000 years of history, the Ten Commandments have held a respected, disputed, and yet continual place in the pantheon of religious and cultural lives of the people of this world. Also known as The Decalogue, the Mosaic Covenant represents new territory in the relationship between God and the human race, fresh ground upon which people can walk in order to connect themselves to their Creator. Moreover, the creation of this bond between God and humanity further extends and develops the covenants already in place (Adam’s, Noah’s, and Abraham’s).
Thus, the task before me (and anyone who might be reading along with me) is to not simply dissect this passage in Exodus down to its component parts and view those parts simply as the “rules” that the Israelites are supposed to follow. My goal is to integrate what we Christians have been taught about the Law and how Jewish people have observed the Law since the time of Moses in order to somehow relate it to the Season of Lent. I will do my best to not make this lesson as dense as it could be, so that the content, ideas, and principles can be presented to children in a fashion that they can comprehend. After all, this series began as an attempt to teach children the lessons, stories, and truths of the Bible.
“20:1-14: The Decalogue. The Decalogue, Heb[rew] ‘caseret hadevarim,’ lit[erally] ‘ten words,’ i.e., ‘statements’ (see 34:28; Deut. 4:13; 10:4) is the initial stipulation of the covenant. (‘Decalogue,’ from the Latin for ‘ten words,’ or ‘ten statements,’ is a more literal rendering of Heb[rew] than ‘Ten Commandments.’) They are addressed directly to the people. No punishments are stated; obedience is motivated not by the fear of punishment by God’s absolute authority and the people’s desire to live in accordance with His will.
The belief that God is the author of the Biblical laws is a distinctive feature of Biblical law. Elsewhere in the ancient Near Was the laws were believed to be the product of human minds, particularly the king. While Mesopotamian kinds claimed to have learned the principles of truth and justice from the gods, they themselves turned those principles into specific laws. Implicit in this Biblical view is that God is Israel’s king, hence its legislator. This elevated the status of law beyond matters of practicality and endowed it with sanctity. Obedience to law – civil no less than moral and ritual law – became a religious duty; obedience made one holy and crimes were sins, a flouting of God’s authority.
The items in the Decalogue are arranged in two groups. Duties to God come first. Each commandment in this group contains the phrase, ‘the Lord your God.’ The second group contains duties toward fellow humans, which are depicted as being of equal concern to God. The first five are accompanied by explanatory comments or exhortations. The remaining five, as widely recognized ethical requirements, need no such support.
Exodus 34:28 and Deuteronomy 4:13 and 10:4 all refer to the ‘Ten Commandments,’ but do not clarify how these should be divided to reach that number, and this issue was debated in antiquity, and continues to be disputed. The translation follows the view of Philo, Josephus, and some Talmudic sources. The Decalogue was repeated in Deuteronomy 5:6-17 with a view variations, especially in the Sabbath commandment.” (Jewish Study Bible: Tanakh Translation, p148)
I begin with those paragraphs of commentary upon The Decalogue from a Jewish source so that I state upfront my belief that any study into the Old Testament must take a Jewish perspective into account. Christians are only allowed into the Story via the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus Christ; before His atonement for the sins of the world, the Jewish people were the sole heirs, the only children in the Kingdom of God. Thus, when we look into the Old Testament, we must realize that it is their Story we are reading; only through grace are we heirs in the Kingdom ourselves. Hence, I feel it is greatly essential to take into account a Jewish point of view as we seek to focus upon the Old Testament on our journey through Lent (which does correspond with the Jewish celebration of Passover).
More than anything else, I feel, these verses display to humanity more than just God’s expectations of the Israelites; they are a deepening and focusing of the covenants that God has already made with Adam, Noah, and Moses. The covenant of Moses outlines a series of statements designed to further connect (or maybe reconnect) the Chosen People back to their God, after a period of 400 years (Joseph to Moses) where it seemed that God had been absent in their lives. God had delivered Israel from the land of Egypt so that they would be able to worship their Creator as God has always intended them to do.
With Adam and Eve, God was issuing forth punishments and promises related to how they had sinned against God’s one commandment in the Garden. In the case of Noah, God was honoring Noah’s faith and obedience by promising never to destroy the whole of the world with a flood again. And with Abraham and Sarah, God was promising them many things: 1) a child, 2) that through their child, they would be the parents of a great many descendents who would form a great people, and 3) that God would continue to be the God to their many subsequent generations of progeny. Thus, by the time of Moses at Sinai, God was establishing more that just the terms of their relationship, but was beginning a new relationship all the way around. With the prior three covenants, God spoke to a singular man (or couple) specifically, in regards to humanity in general; but with the giving of the Decalogue at Sinai, God was speaking through a singular man (Moses) to Israel specifically, something drastically different in the annals of God-to-man communication.
“And God spoke all these words, saying, ‘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 before me. You shall not make for yourself a carved image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. You shall not bow down to them or serve them, for I the Lord your God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children to the third and the fourth generation of those who hate me, but showing steadfast love to thousands of those who love me and keep my commandments. You shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain, for the Lord will not hold him guiltless who takes his name in vain. Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy. Six days you shall labor, and do all your work, but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord your God. On it you shall not do any work, you, or your son, or your daughter, your male servant, or your female servant, or your livestock, or the sojourner who is within your gates. For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, and rested the seventh day. Therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy.’” (Exodus 20:1-11, ESV)
These initial four statements of the Decalogue refer directly to how Israel is to regard, respect, and worship their Deliverer. The first is rather revolutionary in theology, as it establishes monotheism as a standard of religious belief in a world (now just a region) that practices polytheism (or a pantheon of gods who all report to one “chief” god). Literally, there is no one before God because there are no other gods in the world, a direct foreshadowing of the shema in Deuteronomy 6:4-9. With the second, God states that idol creation, much less idol worship, is forbidden, another blow to the religious practices (those of the Egyptians and Canaanites) with which Israel was quite familiar. In regards to the third commandment, the original intentions were that people wouldn’t employ the name of God loosely in their contracts, agreements, oaths, treaties, and everyday conversations, in contrast to how people had used the names of deities to manipulate those deities to do what they wished. And what makes the fourth so important is that, before it issued from the mouth of God, there was nothing akin to it in world religions – a day set aside solely to worship God (or any other god). (IVP Bible Background Commentary: Old Testament, p95-96)
“Honor your father and mother, that your days may be long in the land that the Lord your God is giving you.” (Exodus 20:12, ESV)
“Ancient Near Eastern legal documents make children’s rights to inherit their parents’ property contingent on honoring them by providing and caring for them. Here God applies this condition on a national scale: the right of future generations of Israelites to inherit the land of Israel for their parents is contingent upon honoring them.” (Jewish Study Bible: Tanakh Translation: p150) “Honoring and respecting parents consists of respecting their instruction in the covenant … If parents are not heeded or their authority is repudiated, the covenant is in jeopardy. In this connection, notice that this commandment comes with covenant promise: living long in the land. In the ancient Near East it is not the religious heritage but the fabric of society that is threatened when these is no respect for parental authority and filial obligations are neglected.” (IVP Bible Background Commentary: Old Testament, p96)
Simply put, I couldn’t say it nearly as well as they could, not without turning these lessons into formal, for-grade, college-type papers, complete with dense footnoting. Perhaps when I get that grant from a publisher, I’ll have the time and resources to place those above quotations into an appendix at the end of the book, as opposed to typing them out verbatim for the reader. Alas…
“You shall not murder. You shall not commit adultery. You shall not steal. You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor. You shall not covet your neighbor’s house; you shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, or his male servant, or his female servant, or his ox, or his donkey, or anything that is your neighbor’s.” (Exodus 20:13-17, ESV)
What I would like to bring up first is that, in the Jewish resources that have been recommended to me by a local rabbi I’m getting to know (or at least starting to do so), Exodus 20:13-16 in the Christian Bible is solely Exodus 20:13 in the Torah. This calls to mind the earlier bit of commentary regarding the discussion on whether or not there were supposed to be actually ten commandments or how readers were supposed to subdivide the commandments so that they could be properly codified. I have yet to find an answer to that question, so we’ll continue with the traditional Ten.
Looking into the sixth commandment, every commentary and study Bible I read through convened the idea that the injunction against murder (“kill” in the KJV) specifically prohibits homicide of any nature, but not in terms of capital punishment, a method of punishment often prescribed throughout the Torah. With regard to the seventh commandment, I found that what was being prescribed was not sexual ethics, but the integrity of the man’s name/honor. Adultery was defined as between a man and a married/betrothed woman only; relations between a man (married or otherwise) and an unattached woman were not considered adultery (though it was frowned upon in Deuteronomy 22:21 & 23:2). The goal was to preserve the man’s character by ensuring that, if he did have an affair with an unmarried woman, he would pay that woman’s father damages (subjecting women to the status of being property) and would often marry her as well, a prevailing practice in polygamous cultures.
Commandments eight and ten are rather closely related, with the eighth hopefully preventing the tenth from ever occurring. The idea is that, if theft is prohibited, than any actions that might transpire in regards to coveting and desiring a neighbor’s possessions will be quickly curtailed. However, as God does know quite best, the fact that covetousness is forbidden after thievery is a testament to humanity’s tendency to be envious and jealous, no matter what God might have said. The ninth commandment is a rather clear one, specifically referring to honorable and accurate speech in a legal setting. “Nevertheless, character assassination in any of its forms, legal or casual, would constitute false witness and would be a violation of this commandment.” (IVP Bible Background Commentary: Old Testament; p96-97)
What are we supposed to read, see, and comprehend here? What are the reasons behind why, once again, there had to be some agreement set forth between God and humanity (or this time, the chosen people of Israel)? I would have to declare that God, through the relationship with Israel, was attempting to show the world what a bond between Deity and humanity was supposed to look like. The people of Israel were leaving Egypt and entering into Canaan, a land rife with small nations of differing gods and strange practices, all divergent from what God wanted things to look like. While God was trying to protect Israel with the Decalogue, the general idea was to display to the world what the love of God actually looked like, apart from how their gods treated them.
Taking Lent into account in this discussion, Jesus came down to fulfill the Law (Matthew 5:17), to see the ideas and concepts proffered forth in the Law to their ultimate conclusion. What Moses began with his conversation with God on Sinai, Jesus completed on earth by His atonement sacrifice, something the Law could only begin to accomplish, by rolling back sins every year. All of the commandments were designed to bring Israel into a blessed covenant with God, one that was created by God and seen to fruition by the priests serving as God’s representatives.
If one follows the commandments fully and completely, there would be no breaking of the bond between God and humanity. However, since humans are rather fallible creatures, the Law was bound to fail; no one can follow all of those rules. But Jesus did; He showed us a new way to live, one immersed in grace, as Jesus took the sins of the entire world on His shoulders and paid the ultimate price for our sins. We read through the Ten Commandments, the Torah, and the whole Tanakh, knowing that somehow, someway, the Messiah would eventually arrive on the earth to show humanity the way back into a restored relationship with their Creator.
The Ten Commandments represented God’s all-encompassing attempt to provide a template for the people of Israel to follow so that they could live faithfully and blamelessly in God’s eyes. But, when it gets down to living out the rules of that template, as wonderful, appropriate, and truthful as they are, humanity has proven its inability to do so with any measure of success. However, the Season of Lent represents the Christian tradition’s attempt to bring Christians into recognition of the fact that Jesus is the vehicle of our redemption and not our own efforts. Thus, Lent is our journey through that path of discovery; we set aside our schedules and preconceived notions about how we think we can best relate to God and put ourselves in a place where God can best speak to us, the fallen, broken, yet beautiful creatures we are.
Teachers: Read through Psalm 19 and then through Exodus 20:1-17. More than anything, we should talk to the kids in our class about why the Ten Commandments were and are so important in the lives of God’s people. They are good rules, good concepts, good ideas that we should (and hopefully do) incorporate into our lives; they should not be overlooked as outdated or outmoded, in terms of the truth they represent. However, without Jesus coming to earth, we would be bound to those rules and not God’s grace as the prevailing motivators in our lives. Yes, Jewish people for time immemorial have lived out their lives in obedience to the Law out of love for God, but Jesus’ arrival on the earth as the world’s Saviour and Messiah. We have a new way to live and the kids must understand that. The blameless and faithful life led by Jesus is our example, both to see the Law truly fulfilled and to see grace in action.
Psalm 19
Psalm 19: This psalm praises the Lord for two of his great gifts to humankind: the creation and the law. Using theological terminology, it speaks of God’s general revelation in nature and his special revelation in the Scriptures. At the conclusion, David turned to his private life, praying that God would keep him on the true and right path. (Spirit of the Reformation Study Bible: NIV; p821)
Psalm 19: After exhibiting the harmonious revelation of God’s perfections made by His works and His word, the Psalmist prays for conformity to the divine teaching. (Jamieson, Fausset, & Brown’s Commentary; p414)
Psalm 19: In this hymn of praise, David reflects on the glory of God in natural revelation and the glory of the law as God’s special revelation, which alone meets man’s spiritual needs. (Ryrie Study Bible: NASB; p846)
Psalm 19: This psalm is recited as part of the preliminary morning service on Saturday and at festivals. It divides neatly into three sections: Vv 2-7 (1-6) are a hymn, focusing on creation, specifically on the sun; vv 8-11 (7-10) are a hymn focused upon torah; and vv 12-15 (11-14), which are connected to the immediately preceding section, are a petition to be saved from sin, and for prayers to be heard. … Some modern scholars have understood the poem as a whole as focused on God’s revelation in heaven and on earth, while others have noted that torah is associated with light, allowing the two sections to function together.” (Jewish Study Bible: Tanakh Translation; p1302)
March 19th, 2006
Exodus 20:1-17
Psalm 19
Mosaic/Sinai Covenant
I approach the creation of this lesson with a deep sense of awe and reverence. Throughout the past 4,000 years of history, the Ten Commandments have held a respected, disputed, and yet continual place in the pantheon of religious and cultural lives of the people of this world. Also known as The Decalogue, the Mosaic Covenant represents new territory in the relationship between God and the human race, fresh ground upon which people can walk in order to connect themselves to their Creator. Moreover, the creation of this bond between God and humanity further extends and develops the covenants already in place (Adam’s, Noah’s, and Abraham’s).
Thus, the task before me (and anyone who might be reading along with me) is to not simply dissect this passage in Exodus down to its component parts and view those parts simply as the “rules” that the Israelites are supposed to follow. My goal is to integrate what we Christians have been taught about the Law and how Jewish people have observed the Law since the time of Moses in order to somehow relate it to the Season of Lent. I will do my best to not make this lesson as dense as it could be, so that the content, ideas, and principles can be presented to children in a fashion that they can comprehend. After all, this series began as an attempt to teach children the lessons, stories, and truths of the Bible.
“20:1-14: The Decalogue. The Decalogue, Heb[rew] ‘caseret hadevarim,’ lit[erally] ‘ten words,’ i.e., ‘statements’ (see 34:28; Deut. 4:13; 10:4) is the initial stipulation of the covenant. (‘Decalogue,’ from the Latin for ‘ten words,’ or ‘ten statements,’ is a more literal rendering of Heb[rew] than ‘Ten Commandments.’) They are addressed directly to the people. No punishments are stated; obedience is motivated not by the fear of punishment by God’s absolute authority and the people’s desire to live in accordance with His will.
The belief that God is the author of the Biblical laws is a distinctive feature of Biblical law. Elsewhere in the ancient Near Was the laws were believed to be the product of human minds, particularly the king. While Mesopotamian kinds claimed to have learned the principles of truth and justice from the gods, they themselves turned those principles into specific laws. Implicit in this Biblical view is that God is Israel’s king, hence its legislator. This elevated the status of law beyond matters of practicality and endowed it with sanctity. Obedience to law – civil no less than moral and ritual law – became a religious duty; obedience made one holy and crimes were sins, a flouting of God’s authority.
The items in the Decalogue are arranged in two groups. Duties to God come first. Each commandment in this group contains the phrase, ‘the Lord your God.’ The second group contains duties toward fellow humans, which are depicted as being of equal concern to God. The first five are accompanied by explanatory comments or exhortations. The remaining five, as widely recognized ethical requirements, need no such support.
Exodus 34:28 and Deuteronomy 4:13 and 10:4 all refer to the ‘Ten Commandments,’ but do not clarify how these should be divided to reach that number, and this issue was debated in antiquity, and continues to be disputed. The translation follows the view of Philo, Josephus, and some Talmudic sources. The Decalogue was repeated in Deuteronomy 5:6-17 with a view variations, especially in the Sabbath commandment.” (Jewish Study Bible: Tanakh Translation, p148)
I begin with those paragraphs of commentary upon The Decalogue from a Jewish source so that I state upfront my belief that any study into the Old Testament must take a Jewish perspective into account. Christians are only allowed into the Story via the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus Christ; before His atonement for the sins of the world, the Jewish people were the sole heirs, the only children in the Kingdom of God. Thus, when we look into the Old Testament, we must realize that it is their Story we are reading; only through grace are we heirs in the Kingdom ourselves. Hence, I feel it is greatly essential to take into account a Jewish point of view as we seek to focus upon the Old Testament on our journey through Lent (which does correspond with the Jewish celebration of Passover).
More than anything else, I feel, these verses display to humanity more than just God’s expectations of the Israelites; they are a deepening and focusing of the covenants that God has already made with Adam, Noah, and Moses. The covenant of Moses outlines a series of statements designed to further connect (or maybe reconnect) the Chosen People back to their God, after a period of 400 years (Joseph to Moses) where it seemed that God had been absent in their lives. God had delivered Israel from the land of Egypt so that they would be able to worship their Creator as God has always intended them to do.
With Adam and Eve, God was issuing forth punishments and promises related to how they had sinned against God’s one commandment in the Garden. In the case of Noah, God was honoring Noah’s faith and obedience by promising never to destroy the whole of the world with a flood again. And with Abraham and Sarah, God was promising them many things: 1) a child, 2) that through their child, they would be the parents of a great many descendents who would form a great people, and 3) that God would continue to be the God to their many subsequent generations of progeny. Thus, by the time of Moses at Sinai, God was establishing more that just the terms of their relationship, but was beginning a new relationship all the way around. With the prior three covenants, God spoke to a singular man (or couple) specifically, in regards to humanity in general; but with the giving of the Decalogue at Sinai, God was speaking through a singular man (Moses) to Israel specifically, something drastically different in the annals of God-to-man communication.
“And God spoke all these words, saying, ‘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 before me. You shall not make for yourself a carved image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. You shall not bow down to them or serve them, for I the Lord your God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children to the third and the fourth generation of those who hate me, but showing steadfast love to thousands of those who love me and keep my commandments. You shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain, for the Lord will not hold him guiltless who takes his name in vain. Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy. Six days you shall labor, and do all your work, but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord your God. On it you shall not do any work, you, or your son, or your daughter, your male servant, or your female servant, or your livestock, or the sojourner who is within your gates. For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, and rested the seventh day. Therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy.’” (Exodus 20:1-11, ESV)
These initial four statements of the Decalogue refer directly to how Israel is to regard, respect, and worship their Deliverer. The first is rather revolutionary in theology, as it establishes monotheism as a standard of religious belief in a world (now just a region) that practices polytheism (or a pantheon of gods who all report to one “chief” god). Literally, there is no one before God because there are no other gods in the world, a direct foreshadowing of the shema in Deuteronomy 6:4-9. With the second, God states that idol creation, much less idol worship, is forbidden, another blow to the religious practices (those of the Egyptians and Canaanites) with which Israel was quite familiar. In regards to the third commandment, the original intentions were that people wouldn’t employ the name of God loosely in their contracts, agreements, oaths, treaties, and everyday conversations, in contrast to how people had used the names of deities to manipulate those deities to do what they wished. And what makes the fourth so important is that, before it issued from the mouth of God, there was nothing akin to it in world religions – a day set aside solely to worship God (or any other god). (IVP Bible Background Commentary: Old Testament, p95-96)
“Honor your father and mother, that your days may be long in the land that the Lord your God is giving you.” (Exodus 20:12, ESV)
“Ancient Near Eastern legal documents make children’s rights to inherit their parents’ property contingent on honoring them by providing and caring for them. Here God applies this condition on a national scale: the right of future generations of Israelites to inherit the land of Israel for their parents is contingent upon honoring them.” (Jewish Study Bible: Tanakh Translation: p150) “Honoring and respecting parents consists of respecting their instruction in the covenant … If parents are not heeded or their authority is repudiated, the covenant is in jeopardy. In this connection, notice that this commandment comes with covenant promise: living long in the land. In the ancient Near East it is not the religious heritage but the fabric of society that is threatened when these is no respect for parental authority and filial obligations are neglected.” (IVP Bible Background Commentary: Old Testament, p96)
Simply put, I couldn’t say it nearly as well as they could, not without turning these lessons into formal, for-grade, college-type papers, complete with dense footnoting. Perhaps when I get that grant from a publisher, I’ll have the time and resources to place those above quotations into an appendix at the end of the book, as opposed to typing them out verbatim for the reader. Alas…
“You shall not murder. You shall not commit adultery. You shall not steal. You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor. You shall not covet your neighbor’s house; you shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, or his male servant, or his female servant, or his ox, or his donkey, or anything that is your neighbor’s.” (Exodus 20:13-17, ESV)
What I would like to bring up first is that, in the Jewish resources that have been recommended to me by a local rabbi I’m getting to know (or at least starting to do so), Exodus 20:13-16 in the Christian Bible is solely Exodus 20:13 in the Torah. This calls to mind the earlier bit of commentary regarding the discussion on whether or not there were supposed to be actually ten commandments or how readers were supposed to subdivide the commandments so that they could be properly codified. I have yet to find an answer to that question, so we’ll continue with the traditional Ten.
Looking into the sixth commandment, every commentary and study Bible I read through convened the idea that the injunction against murder (“kill” in the KJV) specifically prohibits homicide of any nature, but not in terms of capital punishment, a method of punishment often prescribed throughout the Torah. With regard to the seventh commandment, I found that what was being prescribed was not sexual ethics, but the integrity of the man’s name/honor. Adultery was defined as between a man and a married/betrothed woman only; relations between a man (married or otherwise) and an unattached woman were not considered adultery (though it was frowned upon in Deuteronomy 22:21 & 23:2). The goal was to preserve the man’s character by ensuring that, if he did have an affair with an unmarried woman, he would pay that woman’s father damages (subjecting women to the status of being property) and would often marry her as well, a prevailing practice in polygamous cultures.
Commandments eight and ten are rather closely related, with the eighth hopefully preventing the tenth from ever occurring. The idea is that, if theft is prohibited, than any actions that might transpire in regards to coveting and desiring a neighbor’s possessions will be quickly curtailed. However, as God does know quite best, the fact that covetousness is forbidden after thievery is a testament to humanity’s tendency to be envious and jealous, no matter what God might have said. The ninth commandment is a rather clear one, specifically referring to honorable and accurate speech in a legal setting. “Nevertheless, character assassination in any of its forms, legal or casual, would constitute false witness and would be a violation of this commandment.” (IVP Bible Background Commentary: Old Testament; p96-97)
What are we supposed to read, see, and comprehend here? What are the reasons behind why, once again, there had to be some agreement set forth between God and humanity (or this time, the chosen people of Israel)? I would have to declare that God, through the relationship with Israel, was attempting to show the world what a bond between Deity and humanity was supposed to look like. The people of Israel were leaving Egypt and entering into Canaan, a land rife with small nations of differing gods and strange practices, all divergent from what God wanted things to look like. While God was trying to protect Israel with the Decalogue, the general idea was to display to the world what the love of God actually looked like, apart from how their gods treated them.
Taking Lent into account in this discussion, Jesus came down to fulfill the Law (Matthew 5:17), to see the ideas and concepts proffered forth in the Law to their ultimate conclusion. What Moses began with his conversation with God on Sinai, Jesus completed on earth by His atonement sacrifice, something the Law could only begin to accomplish, by rolling back sins every year. All of the commandments were designed to bring Israel into a blessed covenant with God, one that was created by God and seen to fruition by the priests serving as God’s representatives.
If one follows the commandments fully and completely, there would be no breaking of the bond between God and humanity. However, since humans are rather fallible creatures, the Law was bound to fail; no one can follow all of those rules. But Jesus did; He showed us a new way to live, one immersed in grace, as Jesus took the sins of the entire world on His shoulders and paid the ultimate price for our sins. We read through the Ten Commandments, the Torah, and the whole Tanakh, knowing that somehow, someway, the Messiah would eventually arrive on the earth to show humanity the way back into a restored relationship with their Creator.
The Ten Commandments represented God’s all-encompassing attempt to provide a template for the people of Israel to follow so that they could live faithfully and blamelessly in God’s eyes. But, when it gets down to living out the rules of that template, as wonderful, appropriate, and truthful as they are, humanity has proven its inability to do so with any measure of success. However, the Season of Lent represents the Christian tradition’s attempt to bring Christians into recognition of the fact that Jesus is the vehicle of our redemption and not our own efforts. Thus, Lent is our journey through that path of discovery; we set aside our schedules and preconceived notions about how we think we can best relate to God and put ourselves in a place where God can best speak to us, the fallen, broken, yet beautiful creatures we are.
Teachers: Read through Psalm 19 and then through Exodus 20:1-17. More than anything, we should talk to the kids in our class about why the Ten Commandments were and are so important in the lives of God’s people. They are good rules, good concepts, good ideas that we should (and hopefully do) incorporate into our lives; they should not be overlooked as outdated or outmoded, in terms of the truth they represent. However, without Jesus coming to earth, we would be bound to those rules and not God’s grace as the prevailing motivators in our lives. Yes, Jewish people for time immemorial have lived out their lives in obedience to the Law out of love for God, but Jesus’ arrival on the earth as the world’s Saviour and Messiah. We have a new way to live and the kids must understand that. The blameless and faithful life led by Jesus is our example, both to see the Law truly fulfilled and to see grace in action.
Psalm 19
Psalm 19: This psalm praises the Lord for two of his great gifts to humankind: the creation and the law. Using theological terminology, it speaks of God’s general revelation in nature and his special revelation in the Scriptures. At the conclusion, David turned to his private life, praying that God would keep him on the true and right path. (Spirit of the Reformation Study Bible: NIV; p821)
Psalm 19: After exhibiting the harmonious revelation of God’s perfections made by His works and His word, the Psalmist prays for conformity to the divine teaching. (Jamieson, Fausset, & Brown’s Commentary; p414)
Psalm 19: In this hymn of praise, David reflects on the glory of God in natural revelation and the glory of the law as God’s special revelation, which alone meets man’s spiritual needs. (Ryrie Study Bible: NASB; p846)
Psalm 19: This psalm is recited as part of the preliminary morning service on Saturday and at festivals. It divides neatly into three sections: Vv 2-7 (1-6) are a hymn, focusing on creation, specifically on the sun; vv 8-11 (7-10) are a hymn focused upon torah; and vv 12-15 (11-14), which are connected to the immediately preceding section, are a petition to be saved from sin, and for prayers to be heard. … Some modern scholars have understood the poem as a whole as focused on God’s revelation in heaven and on earth, while others have noted that torah is associated with light, allowing the two sections to function together.” (Jewish Study Bible: Tanakh Translation; p1302)
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