(Note from Aaron in 2023: this is an old college paper that I haven’t edited, but figured it was still worth sharing.)
Equal parts ubiquitous and ignored, the Decalogue (or as they’re better known, The Ten Commandments) have been a fixture in American life for the past couple of centuries. There’s a reverence and rancor attached to them, depending on how you view them philosophically and spiritually. However, even amongst Christians, there’s a sense of lip service without any deep thought truly preceding their presuppositions. In the mind of many American Christians, it ends up in a category that includes The Star-Spangled Banner and Amazing Grace, traditionalism instead of tradition, words said by memory, but not by heart. Are the Ten Commandments something that actually binds Christians today, or are they something that can be safely set aside as a former standard?
Before we speak on how they affect modern-day followers of Jesus, we need to properly establish their importance in light of the rest of its home within the Pentateuch. Historically, Christianity has divided The Law into three separate categories: the moral law, the civil law, and the ceremonial law. The civil law was just that, civil. It was made with respect to how Israel was to be governed, and sin was punishable by law because sin was literally breaking the law of the land. This part of the law was abolished when Israel as a country was dissolved. The ceremonial law was how priests (as well as the people) were to approach God in worship, including how services were conducted, how sacrifices were made, and how the people were to appear and purify themselves. Without getting too far into the weeds on the subject of the Atonement, we can confidently say that Jesus met every single standard of God’s holiness, and as such, we can approach God as Father. As this veil between God and man was both metaphorically and literally torn, we are no longer required to obey the ceremonial law.
The next question that follows logically is if the ceremonial law is fulfilled and the civil law is abolished, why should we have any sort of credence for the moral law? Frankly, there is nothing in the New Testament that gives us any indication that the moral law that God has handed down to us has any less weight now than it did when Moses first delivered it. The Decalogue is the foundational metric on which the Gospels and the Epistles stand. Without it as a foundation, we lose the strand of redemption that runs through the entire Bible.
The entire point of the moral law is to show man’s deep need for a Savior. Without this terrifyingly holy mirror to reflect our true state, we can’t possibly see the depth of our despair. It’s here that we find the link between the Decalogue and Jesus:
“We cannot understand the Ten Commandments apart from Jesus Christ. If we view them only as a list of “don’ts” from which we may infer a corresponding list of “dos”, we forget the Lord who spoke the words from Sinai and the context in which He spoke them. God’s commandments call His people to acknowledge Him as their Savior and Lord…Paul can point out in Romans that all have sinned: not only the Gentiles whom God abandoned to their own rebellion, but also Israel, who had the law and did not keep it. The law therefore condemns the sin of those who break it. In that negative way the law points us to Christ. It shows what God’s righteousness requires, and therefore shows us that we cannot satisfy God’s just demands. We need Christ to save us from the curse of the law by bearing its penalty for us.” (Clowney, “The Unfolding Mystery”, pgs. 107-108)
So while Jesus does bear our penalty for our breaking of the law, that does not exclude us from continuing to break it. The Decalogue still shows us in stark contrast to God, and while we stand in proper relationship with Him now, He is still the same God that gave Moses those moral laws in all His fearful holiness. It remains a standard as how we relate to Him and to others.
Generally speaking, American Christians place the Ten Commandments in high regard until the point where it gets in the way of what we want to do. We once kept the Sabbath holy, until the point when football was played on Sunday. We once believed in not committing adultery, until we got bored and handwaved away the seriousness of the covenant of marriage. We once kept them in our courthouses because we believed them to be the transcendent standard that even our laws were held to, until the Red Scare was over and we didn’t need to differentiate ourselves from the Communists.
Now, granted, God never made a covenant with the US of A like He did Israel, and as such, we’re not a Christian nation so much as a nation founded on Christian principles. We aren’t held to the promises and curses that related to Israel, nor are we privy to blessings for formulaically quoting 2 Chronicles 7:14. We are not Israel, and no amount of theocratic notions that we attempted to eisegete between World War II and the fall of the Berlin Wall will ever magically turn us into Israel. However, we are starting to see the slow, steady effect of a nation with no transcendent morals. Even though there’s no legal reason why the Ten Commandments should be placed in our courtrooms, it did serve as a reminder of an absolute moral standard, one that even people that claim the title of “Christian” have shied away from with increasing disgust. Why is this?
We don’t know the depth of our depravity without the moral law telling us so. We don’t like being compared to God’s holiness, so we make all haste to usurp His throne. We don’t like the inference that our work isn’t the thing that’s supposed to define us, so we ignore the commandment to rest. We don’t like the idea of God taking charge over what we say, so we silence His words whenever possible. We don’t want following Jesus to cost anything, so we take the more palatable bits of what He said and ignore what God the Father said in the Old Testament.
The Decalogue tears into the presuppositions of both believers and non-believers, and both sides of the coin end up fearing and hating it in equal measure. All of humanity is pointed to a standard, and in our knowledge of our failure to measure, we do all that we can to lessen or eliminate it. In the final analysis, we are the problem, the Ten Commandments show us that, and without the indwelling Holy Spirit working in us toward continual sanctification, we forever fight that knowledge tooth and nail.