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CONNIE: Is it possible to condense the wisdom of the ages down to just ten words? If you were going to write something in stone, what would it be? Join us as we begin a new series on the Ten Commandments. Today’s topic: Ten Words to the Wise!
Giving God’s trumpet a Certain Sound for 75 years, this is the Voice of Prophecy.

CONNIE: Hello, I’m Connie Jeffery,

LONNIE: and I’m Lonnie Melashenko.

CONNIE: We’ve all heard it said that “a word to the wise is sufficient,” implying that it only takes a brief word of counsel to help a truly wise person amend their ways, or choose a better path, right?

LONNIE: Sure, I think I’ve used that phrase a few times when giving advice.

CONNIE: OK, then I have a question. If one word to the wise is supposed to be enough to set them straight, what’s with your sermon title for today, Lonnie? Ten Words to the Wise. Are you implying that our listeners are a little slow—they need more than one word?

LONNIE: Well, no, of course not, Connie. And in fact, the last sermon in this series is going to be titled “One, Two, or Ten,” because we’ll be looking at the New Testament idea that the law of God can be summed up in just one or two commandments.

CONNIE: So today’s title is just an introduction to the Ten Commandments, as we find them in the Old Testament.

LONNIE: Right. Our title today simply announces the fact that we’re launching into a new series of messages, based on God’s ten words to the wise. The Ten Commandments have been known as the “Decalogue,” or the “Ten Words” since clear back in Moses’ day. In Deuteronomy 4:13, Moses reminded the people that [God] “ ‘declared to you His covenant which He commanded you to perform, the Ten Commandments; and He wrote them on two tablets of stone’ ” (NKJV). But if you read that text in the Hebrew, you’ll see that it says God declared “‘His covenant which He commanded you to perform, the ten words!’ ”

CONNIE: You mean there were only ten words on those two tables of stone that Moses carried down from the mountain? I’ve always kind of wondered about that—how big were those rocks, and how heavy. If God only needed ten words to express His law, that would make Moses’ load a bit lighter, wouldn’t it?

LONNIE: I don’t suppose we should force too literal a translation on that Hebrew word dabarim even though it does basically mean “words,” it’s a very broad term in Hebrew, just as it is in English. It can refer to a whole concept as well as to a single word. But the idea is that here we have the distilled word—God’s expression of His will for His people.

CONNIE: Well, as we launch into this twelve-part series, let’s take a moment to dig into the background of the Ten Commandments. Our producer, Ken Wade, always has some interesting tidbits from history to help us understand our topic. Lonnie, I think you and he had a little discussion about the Ten Commandments as we began preparing our series.

LONNIE: Indeed we did.

CONNIE: Let’s listen in.

LONNIE: Ken, as we are developing this series on the Ten Commandments; Dr. Laura Slezinger has done a book on the Ten Commandments and there are many Christians the are very excited about the big ten again, but the background of the Ten Commandments, let’s take a look at the general background before we dive into each one specifically.

KEN: Well I think one of the most important things to realize as I’ve studied the world of the Exodus and so forth. It was a very different world from the one that we live in today. Not just that there were cars and airplanes running around, but the peoples whole mind set was very different.

LONNIE: Well, to take something so explicit and specific, the Bible is very clear that these had been slaves under the Pharaoh for 400 years and the Bible says that they were so spiritually deprived and ignorant. They did not know their right hand from their left, I mean they were involved with all kinds of…The lash and the taskmaster. So, they get out here to the wilderness and God is going to try and communicate something totally foreign to them.

KEN: Absolutely! It’s almost as if on the first day of school…You know I’ve heard people say that, well this God that appears on Sinai is different from the God of Abraham who, you know, God would come and sit around the campfire and chat with Abraham and here we have this God very removed, up on top of a mountain…but you have to think in terms of the first day of school. If you’ve ever taught school you know that you don’t dare become the kid’s friend the first day, week, or month. At school you have to establish discipline first.

LONNIE: Ken, one time I had to do a paper for a religion class in college on the Ten commandments, well it was an ethics class. They come across so negative, you know, don’t do this, thou shall not do that, but when you take the context and the background here. It’s kind of like teaching a little puppy dog when you first bring him home, you’ve got to roll up the newspaper and teach that, no, you can’t do this here in this part of the house! That’s the way God is speaking; when you look at them in detail, I think that you’ll find that they come across very positive.

KEN: Well, God is establishing a relationship with them that has to first of all break off some relationships with some other things. You know there is a fellow who is very prominent in the story of Exodus whose name is Herr. If you research you find that it’s actually the name of an Egyptian god Horace. So these people were thoroughly involved in a very different form of worship and there were all sorts of things that the Egyptians worshiped of course. Bulls, Jackals, one of the most intriguing is the Beetle and you find representations of these little scarab beetles all over the place and I always wondered why? Why would the Egyptians worship beetles? Well come to find out, they would observe these beetles, literally dung beetles that make a little ball of dung or mud and roll it across the earth. They actually lay their eggs in that little ball and than the next generation of beetles they just thought spontaneously came out of that little ball and they began to relate that to the sun because dung was also a very important piece of heat and fire to them. They assumed that there was a giant beetle pushing the sun across the sky, so they were worshiping beetles and all kinds of things.

LONNIE: SO they really believed that some god must have created everything and that God had to kind of distinguish.

KEN: Everything around is life, even as they got out into the wilderness. The jackal that would kind of sulk around the camp at night and the Egyptians believed that the jackal led people into the nether-world after death and they had a god that had a jackal head. So, God has to get their attention and say, excuse me! You’re not going to worship all of these things anymore!

LONNIE: And the point God was trying to convey is that His laws are a far higher standard because He is a holy God.

KEN: Absolutely! And as we look at the situation, He’s calling them and He’s establishing a treaty with them. Archeologists have found Hittite treaties that are very similar to the way the Ten Commandments are established. When a superior king would descend to a relationship below him, they would say remember how we’ve related in the past and this is exactly how the Ten Commandments start out. So here we have God speaking in terms that the people will be familiar with as far as treaties in those days. God says look, I’ve done this for you, now we’re going to have a very special relationship from here on out, and you call that relationship the what?

LONNIE: Souzerainty treaties…

KEN: Right, and it calls for a holy relationship! That’s the big thing that God is calling us to this relationship of holy closeness with Him.

“Be Ye Holy”, Christian Edition, from Remember Me CD.

CONNIE: Amen! That was Christian Edition reminding us that God’s best thoughts are of us, and that He wants us to become more and more like Him—more holy—each day so that we can enjoy heaven with Him.

LONNIE: Just a quick reminder that if you enjoy the music you hear on our broadcast, you can always find out more about the songs and artists, and where you can purchase their music, by visiting our web page at vop.com and clicking on the “Music on Broadcast” link.

CONNIE: Lonnie, I’m excited about our new series on the Ten Commandments. We’ve spent some time in the office planning just how to get to the heart of God’s words, and how to apply them to life in the 21st century, so please, share your message “Ten Words to the Wise with us right now.

Sermon: Ten Words to the Wise

In a sermon on the law and the gospel, Martin Luther told the story of a well-known hermit who had lived all his life in poverty and austerity, as a servant of the Lord. After more than seventy years of devotion to Christ, as Luther told it: “When the hour of death came [the hermit] began to tremble, and for three days was in a state of agony. His disciples came to comfort him, exhorting him to die in peace since he had led so holy a life. But he replied: ‘Alas, I truly have all my life served Christ and lived austerely; but God's judgment greatly differs from that of men.’ ”

This man, this devoted servant who had tried to live his life exactly as God commanded, still trembled in an agony of fear at the thought of appearing before God’s judgment throne. Drawing a lesson from this experience, Luther said, “Note, this worthy man, despite the holiness of his life, has no acquaintance with any article but that of the divine judgment according to the Law. He knows not the comfort of Christ's Gospel.”

And so, I want to ask you to think about this, as we begin a series of 12 programs in which we will be focusing on the Ten Commandments. Is the law of God really perfect? Is it enough for salvation? We’ve all heard (probably even sung) the text from Psalm 19:7 “The law of the Lord is perfect, converting the soul; the testimony of the Lord is sure, making wise the simple” (NKJV).

An old book called the Biblical Illustrator shares this story about an unnamed “attorney of eminence” who was converted by studying the Ten Commandments. He testified that: “ ‘I have been looking into the nature of that law: I have been trying to see whether I can add anything to it, or take anything from it, so as to make it better. Sir, I cannot; it is perfect. . . . It came down from heaven. I am convinced of the truth of the religion of the Bible.’ ”

So, as we launch into our study of these ancient, all-encompassing commandments, we see that there is controversy surrounding them. Are they enough, or are they not?

You know that Jesus, in the Sermon on the Mount, said this about the law: “‘Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets: I am not come to destroy, but to fulfill. For verily I say unto you, Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one title shall in no wise pass from the law, till all be fulfilled’ ” (Matthew 5:17-18, KJV). But then, having said that, He went on to virtually rewrite portions of the Ten Words with teachings like this: “‘You have heard that it was said to those of old, “You shall not commit adultery.” But I say to you that whoever looks at a woman to lust for her has already committed adultery with her in his heart’ ” (Matthew 5:27-28, NKJV).

What are these things we call the Ten Commandments? Are they an adequate way to understand the will of God in our lives, or not? Do they need something added to them to make them really effective? Luther suggested that yes, they might be perfect, but since nobody seemed to be taking them seriously enough to live by them in his day, they needed something added to them—something coming from the heart—something implanted there by the grace of God. And that, it seems to me, is the same thing that Jesus was saying when He spoke about sin in the heart.

May I suggest an analogy that might help here?

Have you ever driven on an icy turnpike in the midst of a blizzard? As you crawl along at ten or fifteen miles an hour, hoping against hope to somehow make it home in one piece, sometime before midnight, you suddenly become aware of a signpost just off to your right. Stealing a glance in that direction, you see the clearly posted speed limit. Sixty-five miles per hour! “What? I can go 65? Why am I crawling along at this snail’s pace,” you say to your self. And you jam your foot into the accelerator and begin to fly down the road at the full-posted limit.

Not a chance, you say?

Of course not.

Why not?

“Because I want to make it home tonight—not to my heavenly home, but to my earthly one!”

What you’re saying is that there’s a law written on your heart—a law that says you don’t want to be involved in a serious accident in the middle of a blizzard! And it doesn’t countermand the law written on the signboard. But it’s necessary to have that heart law, along with the signboard law.

And I think that’s what Martin Luther was saying about the Ten Commandments law of God. There’s nothing missing in it; it’s just that it needs something in our hearts that takes it and applies it to daily living in a practical way.

And isn’t that actually what Jesus was saying as He went through the commandments and deepened their significance by saying “You have heard that it was said . . . but I tell you”? The signboard law, written by the hand of God on two tablets of stone, is good law. It ought to be kept. But what it needs added to it is a willing, converted heart that is motivated to obey.

Too often we find ourselves trying to live by the letter of the law, and hiring lawyers to find loopholes we can sneak through. That wasn’t God’s intention when He gave us His law.

No, the law establishes the basic principles by which we should live. And when it takes root in a willing heart, it goes beneath the surface meaning. It motivates us to behave in lawful ways with genuine understanding and willingness instead of reluctance and a desire to barely squeak by, doing as little as possible.

That’s the positive, heart-based tack we’ll be taking for the next ten weeks as we consider the commandments one by one. And then at the end, we’ll take a look back, from a New Testament perspective, asking the question: Do we need just one law (Love), two laws (Love God and you Neighbor), or ten laws?

But today, let’s take a quick run through all ten commandments—just as a refresher course—and consider what they mean to us, living more than three millennia after God wrote them in stone.

Quick! What’s the First Commandment? If you were on Jeopardy, what would your answer be? “What is, Thou shalt have no other gods before Me”? Well, if so, you had better hope that the judges are all from a Christian background, because if they were Jewish—you just lost $200! In Jewish lists, the first commandment reads like this: “I am the Lord thy god, who brought thee out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage.”

I point this out because it’s really very significant. Many people think the commandments begin in Exodus 20, verse 3. But notice carefully what God said when He first began to speak the commandments to Moses. I’m reading Exodus 20:1-3:

“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 bondage. You shall have no other gods before Me’ ” (NKJV).

You see, God didn’t just drop in one day, out of the clear blue, and start giving orders. There was a relationship already established between Him and the Israelite people. He had given them their freedom. He had delivered them. And now He had a simple set of rules for them to live by. The first one asked them to remember where they’d come from and Who had delivered them, and not to let anything come between them and their Deliverer. Keep that friendship with God on the front burner!

In the Second Commandment, God asks us to relate to Him as a living, active, personal God. Often we focus on the idea of staying away from idols, and wars have been fought over whether it’s proper to have statues in church or not. But let’s go behind the stony faces and ask why God doesn’t want us to make statues that represent Him. Friend, I believe it’s because He wants us to relate to Him as a person, not as a picture. He wants us to come to Him daily, to learn from Him, and never to set that relationship in stone in such a way that He isn’t allowed to interact with us in a truly living way.

In the Third Commandment, God takes up the matter of what religion is all about. Some would take His name and claim to be His followers for their own vain purposes. That’s not allowed here. He is God, we are His creation. We are to live for His glory, not appropriate His name and glory for our own profit.

The Fourth Commandment is one of my favorites, because it demonstrates God’s care for His children. In ancient Mesopotamia, the people thought of themselves as slaves of the gods, destined to unceasing toil for the gods. But the Lord doesn’t see it that way. If you give yourself to Him, He’ll insist that you take one day completely off from work each week for rest! Loving consideration of our needs is the hallmark of God’s relationship to His created children.

God is also concerned about proper relationships within the family, and with the world around us. Honoring our parents is required by the Fifth Commandment, and proper respect for the lives of others is guaranteed by the commandment against murder. Respect for others’ rights comes up in the remaining commandments.

The commandment about adultery assures us of the right to have solid family relationships that aren’t’ constantly being threatened by outside influences. And the commandment against stealing offers us the right to hold property without fear of it being taken away arbitrarily, or by someone bigger and stronger.

Honesty in what other say about us ought to be a basic human right, don’t you think? Apparently God thinks so, because He included a commandment against bearing false witness against our neighbor’s right there in the Ten Words to the Wise. We’ll be looking at that commandment under the title “God’s Witness Protection Plan.”

And the Tenth Commandment—the one that forbids coveting. Now, I have to admit that I wouldn’t have thought of that as something to include in my list of the ten most important things a person should or shouldn’t do. But God understands human nature, and He knows that most of the problems in the world spring from covetousness. So He stops us cold before we fall into that trap. “Don’t go there!” He commands. And how much better our lives are when we take His words to heart.

Yes, that’s what I think God intended when He first spoke and wrote out these commandments—that we would take them to heart. That they would become a part of our lives. Because really, He is our Deliverer. He is our God. And things really do go better when we put our trust in Him.

: “Tis So Sweet to Trust in Jesus ”, Christian Edition