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February 10, 2008
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Lent 1
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Pastor Brian Shimer
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"The 10 Words - Finding Love in Law"
Exodus 20: 1-21
- The worship committee and I sat around a table prayerfully considering an approach to this season of Lent which would invite all of you into the transforming grace of God this year. One of the members had come across a format that approached Lent from the standpoint of what a believer was taught in preparation for Baptism in the early church. It was during this season that those wanting to be baptized were instructed in basic beliefs - each week we will look at one of these and hang the symbol of it on this tree. This symbol is also printed on your bulletin covers.
So you can tell from title and picture, we are going to begin with something familiar to us all by having heard news about them, seen them posted in various places, or bumped into them in life as sin voiced its desire for you to break them - the "Ten Commandments."
When I think of what God offered Israel and all people for all time in the simple summary of behavior found in the 10 Commandments, I think of a rock solid path - a safe place to walk. Indeed, I think of a gravel road I was on a couple weeks ago.
I had taken two nights at the beach for a prayer retreat in order to seek the Lord about future plans for preaching, teaching and our direction in this congregation. I chose a prayer lookout cabin located on the grounds of the Friends Camp at Twin Rocks. It is a small beautiful building situated high on a mountain with two big picture windows that overlook the ocean and the twin rocks after which the place is named. It was a perfect place to seek the Lord.
I had to put chains on the car to get over the Highway 6 to Tillamook that week and then drove up to the retreat center. I got the key, drove to the top of the hill following the little map they had given me and staying on the gravel pathway. As I was turning around to park I pulled onto the grass off of the gravel drive and my front wheel sank into mud.
I worked it back and forth but still it would not free.
- God has given us a place to walk that is solid, that is free from danger of getting stuck in the mud of sin in our lives. And yet you and I do get stuck. We take life in our own hands. We make decisions to take a short cut, to reposition ourselves, to change ourselves, and end up choosing sin and death instead of all God has for us. We get off of God's path and into the mud of life. We get stuck. And then as I did with the car, we seek to manage our own "stuckness", sometimes for months and years before we seek God for help.
That is what I did.
I got out of the car and surveyed the situation. I noted that the grass further off to the right looked firmer and imagined I could just pull more that direction and get out.
But when I tried this, not one but both front wheels sank deeper and deeper into the mud. So, I got inventive. I hiked into the trees and gathered logs to push under the tire and give it traction, I found some pieces of cardboard in the car and stuck them under the drive wheel, then I gathered some pieces of the path, handfuls of gravel and poured them in behind the wheel of the car to help it have traction and get free.
Sometimes we think that we can just not "murder" someone and yet are free to hold onto murderous thoughts against them, and we have not broken a command. Or we consider ourselves free from sin because we have not committed adultery yet know that we have lied.
Jesus said to the Rich Young Ruler who claimed that he had kept all the commands since he was a youth one simple message: "you still lack one". Which one? He lacked the first one, "You shall have no other gods before me." His god was his great wealth. "How hard it is for the rich to enter the Kingdom of God," Jesus tells his disciples as this seeker walked away from him very sad.
Like me gathering pieces of the pathway to help me get unstuck we think we can just keep part of God's law - we can adopt one commandment or another and we will be free. Or we imagine that it is a do-it-yourself kind of religion. We can just work hard enough and long enough and get ourselves free.
That is what I believed. All the while I worked and thought of other options, my nice clothes and shoes getting splattered with mud in the process, I remembered another time when I got stuck. It was several years back. I remembered that in that situation, I was never able to free myself.
The Bible tells us that when we sin we are slaves to sin - we are stuck in sin, there is no freeing ourselves, and no hope for us unless helped to escape by an outside party - by one who has the power, the ability to set us free.
Eventually, I gave up on the car. It was facing downhill toward this drop off but there was a bank of blackberry bushes and a telephone pole if it managed to slide further on its own. But from all I could tell, it was not going anywhere and I was there for retreat. So I packed all my belongings up to the little cabin which would be my home for the next two nights, wrote on my "to do" list to call the office in the morning, changed my clothes, and gave myself to prayer.
- When I think of the Ten Commandments I think of that gravel road on that map to get me to my destination - the commands God gave to Israel were the means for them to not get stuck in sin, they were God's commands to keep them out of the mess they had learned in Egypt, to get them away from the idolatry of the Egyptians, to change the attitudes and beliefs they had adopted while enslaved for those 400 years.
The commands are not given on their own but are a part of a larger tapestry. First there is the connection to them to what has just occurred in the 19th chapter in which the people are to prepare for God's coming to them. In that chapter, God told Moses to remind the people what he had done for them. Look with me at verses 4 through 6 in chapter 19.
You yourselves have seen what I did to Egypt, and how I carried you on eagles' wings and brought you to myself."
In Egypt they were in hopeless bondage to slavery and God by His might had heard of their suffering and come down and delivered them. As a mother eagle carries the eaglet on her back in the process of teaching it to fly, dropping the little one again and again and swooping to its rescue until it flies on its own, so God had carried Israel to their freedom.
God compares Himself then to a parent eagle - to the nurture offered, the care, the desire that His young could learn to fly. And look what He said, "I brought you to Myself". Herein is part of our context for the Ten Commandments - the context of God's love for this people, a people that He had now come to deliver.
Then God says,
Now if you obey me fully and keep my covenant, then out of all nations you will be my treasured possession. Although the whole earth is mine, you will be for me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation."
The Holy God is saying, "I am going to make something of you which you have never previously been. I am going to do this by making covenant with you, making an agreement with you." And did you hear that description - make you MY treasured possession. What a picture of care, intimacy, and love.
Although God is indeed making covenant with them as a more powerful nation would have made covenant with the weaker nation, still God is doing so out of great love for this people in order that they may be what was promised through Abraham a light to the Gentiles.
You may remember that this is a typical treaty as was then made between nations. The people would have been familiar with this Suzerain-Vassal treaty. They would have understood that Yahwah was coming to them as the more powerful nation and making covenant to be their God, their Sovereign, their protector and was making demands upon them for their benefit in the agreement God was offering them.
So, chapter 20 then is not just the Ten Commandments but the preamble and the conditions of this covenant God is making with them. It is not the full-blown law - that comes in chapter 21. Now it is the description of how they are to live, whom they are to serve. And as you have heard more time than I can count on fingers and toes most likely, these commands describe as Jesus told them how they are to Love the Lord their God with all their heart, mind, soul and Strength (commands 1-4), and how they are to love their neighbor as themselves (commands 5-10).
Or as the Apostle Paul wrote in the book of Romans, "he who loves his fellowman has fulfilled the law. The commandments… are summed up in this one rule: "Love your neighbor as yourself." Love does not harm to its neighbor. Therefore love is the fulfillment of the law" (13:8-10).
- Then, in fulfillment with the promise of God that HE the Suzerain would come to this vassal nation, God came. H
e came powerfully with a symphony of sound and sight: lightning, thunder, fire, cloud and the blast of the trumpet! IT was terrifying! And God spoke to them from heaven - imagine the very voice of the Almighty, like the sound of rushing water, Ezekiel the Prophet and John the Apostle would later write. We read that the people trembled. God wanted them to have a holy fear to inspire them "NOT" to enter into sin.
Then the 20th chapter records the treaty made - the preamble stated the Superpower Nation, this time the God of the Universe, saying in verse 2: "I AM THE LORD YOUR GOD" said it all. I AM! You will not find any God like me, so quit searching.
God followed this with the expected statement of what the Suzerain had already accomplished for the Vassal. We read "I AM THE LORD YOUR GOD who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery".
God begins this great declaration telling them again, "I am your deliverer". I am the One who got you out of the mud and mire of sin, of slavery, of bondage. The bondage of Egypt became a great symbol of the bondage of sin in our lives. They were hopelessly bound and the reality was they could enter back into that slavery if they chose to disobey the covenant God was making with them. They could "get off the path" God was giving them.
Indeed the words given in these Ten Commandments we learn in the New Covenant under Jesus reveal and incite sin. We hear the command to not sin in a certain way, and sin is awakened in us by the command and we begin to chaff toward sin.
Like the goat in the pasture who thinks the grass looks greener outside of the fence and gets himself wrenched through the fence and stuck because of his pursuit of that greener grass, so we are prone to go our own way, make our own messes and seek to clean them up on our own.
- I had tried to clean up my own mess with the car on my own, but had failed. So, the next morning I glanced at my list and saw my note to call the office. I knew that there were only two possibilities - either they would or would not have a means to get me out and then I would have to contact AAA to get me out.
However, before I called I had to pray through some of the feelings I felt about telling them I had gotten stuck. It felt stupid. I did not want to inconvenience them, my hosts, with this problem. I had to deal with my own sense of not wanting to own up to my own responsibilities in the situation.
It was so similar to what it is like when I get stuck in life because of sin. It is the toughest thing in the world to admit "I was wrong". It is tough and yet we all need practice at admitting this. Not only do we need to admit it to others but to God. And then we have to rely on the grace and mercy of God through Jesus to get us out again.
I called Bev in the office, told her my situation and asked if they had any means to help. "Certainly," she said, "I'll call maintenance and they will be right up with a CAT to get you out." Before I had exited the door of the cabin I heard a huge something starting up way down at maintenance. As I walked to the car I could track the sound of this huge diesel CAT making its way up the mountain. I waited at the car only for a few minutes when around the bend came not a CAT but a huge backhoe.
The young man who hopped down I learned later was Joel Thomas, dressed in a blue cap, white shirt, jeans and jacket. He said eyes twinkling, "Wow, that is just what happened to me not long ago. I was driving a pickup and one wheel got off the gravel and I was mired immediately and stuck and had to be pulled free."
"Do you have many people get stuck up here?" I asked.
"Oh yes," he said mouth hardly opening to speak, "about 10 a winter. You are not alone!"
I felt such a sense of relief.
He hooked up a cable to the car and using the shovel wedged the car loose and then changed the hold and pulled it up onto the gravel. It was great.
We shook hands, I thanked him profusely, kept the car on the gravel and went back to carry on with the time of prayer.
The kindness shown to me in this simple and challenging situation, was a huge reminder about how God views our stuck situations. When we get stuck, God is ready and waiting for us to come and be set free. We don't have to continue on in life stuck - in attitudes, in patterns of destructive behavior, in hopeless dead ends.
The law was given because of God's love for the people - the Ten Commandments offer clear behavioral boundaries in order to keep them from "getting stuck" from "getting into sin". When Jesus came he did not abolish but fulfilled the Law - the whole of the law, all of the ceremonial law was finished in Him, and all of the moral law was kept by Jesus. And so when we come to Christ, when we enter him we are set free from the demands of keeping the law in order to "gain" salvation, but the law then becomes part of the expression of our lives as we "walk in" salvation. We stay on the gravel path of God's law, of God's good intent for our lives knowing that every "prohibition" was given in order to protect and guard us not hinder us.
- As John Wesley the great 17th century preacher said, "Love is the goal of all the commandments of God. From the beginning of the world to the consummation of all things, love is the only objective of every dispensation of God. Love will endure when heaven and earth flee away because 'love never ends.'"
(John Wesley, p. 57,On Christian Practice¸ Kenneth Cain Kinghorn).
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