Sermon by Rev. Frank Rose

Lessons: Deuteronomy 4.1, Matthew 5.17, Conjugial Love 528 and 529

Sermon: How important are the Ten Commandments? How serious is it to break one of the commandments? How relevant are the commandments in this day and age?

As we read through the Ten Commandments we notice a combination of something that seems very important to our day, and a text that involves many things that clearly go way back in time, and parts that no longer apply. As you read through the Old Testament you find that the Ten Commandments have a unique and very important part. The beginning of the nation was the giving of the Ten Commandments at Mount Sinai. Prior to that they were just a people without any particular god or any form of worship. The Ten Commandments were a Divine covenant or agreement, and implied in the agreement is the promise that if you keep these commandments you will prosper, the Lord will lead you into the Promised Land, and things will go well with you. And if you break the commandments, you lose your protection and you’re setting yourselves up for disaster.

As you read through later parts of the Old Testament, you find with each new king there is a reminder from the Lord that he should keep the commandments and the statutes. And that was his main function in leading the people – to hold them to an allegiance to this covenant or agreement with the Lord. In that sense you could say the Ten Commandments were like a contract. And a contract is only valid as long as both parties obey or follow the guidelines of the contract. That’s why we have the word to “break” a commandment, because it’s “breaking” an agreement. Or it’s going back on the contract, and the consequences could be very serious.

Well, how serious? One way of looking at that is to ask yourself the question, “What happened to people who broke one of the Ten Commandments?” I decided to do a little research and to go back to each of the commandments, and to see what penalty was involved.

Let’s take the first commandment of all. Our first lesson was from the book of Deuteronomy, and you may have noticed the words, “Your eyes have seen what the Lord did at Baal Peor. For the Lord your God has destroyed from among you all the men who followed Baal of Peor.” In their journey to the promised land they got in touch with nations who worshipped all kinds of other gods. At the time when they went through the land of Moab, many of the people were attracted to the worship of Baal Peor, one of the most corrupt religions of that time. And because they broke the first commandment by having other gods instead of the Lord, 24,000 died of a plague. You see, to break that first commandment was to break the whole agreement that the Lord was going to be their God, and they were going to be His people. When Moses came down from the mountain with the tablets in his hand and found them worshipping the golden calf, he broke the tablets, and 3000 people died that day, because they broke the first commandment. They worshipped other gods. So to fail to keep this commandment was to risk your life.

What about the second commandment, the commandment not to take the name of the Lord your God in vain? This is something that people these days hold very lightly. You hear people using the name of God, or Jesus, or Christ in very careless and inappropriate ways, as if it’s no problem; nothing very serious about taking the Lord’s name in vain. But what about the time of the Old Testament?

Two Israelites were fighting. One of them, in the midst of the fight began to blaspheme the name of the Lord. When that was heard, they took him outside the camp and they stoned him to death. Not for fighting, but for cursing or blaspheming. Because this is how it’s worded in the Old Testament. “Whoever blasphemes the name of the Lord shall surely be put to death!” There’s a death penalty for swearing. Kind of startling when you think of our day, and our customs, and compare it with the attitude they had toward the second commandment.

You may know the story of Ahab who was coveting the vineyard of Naboth. And he was disappointed because Naboth wouldn’t sell it to him, wouldn’t give it to him, wouldn’t trade it. But Jezebel, Ahab’s wicked wife, found a way of getting the vineyard. She told the men of Naboth’s city to pay people to say that Naboth blasphemed the god and the king. And once they were convinced that Naboth had blasphemed, they stoned him to death, and Ahab could take the vineyard. So the second commandment carried the death penalty.

What about the third commandment, the commandment to remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy? One of the most positive of all the commandments. But listen to what is said in Exodus: “Work shall be done for six days, but the seventh day shall be a holy day for you, a Sabbath of rest to the Lord. Whoever does any work on it shall be put to death.” Imagine – being put to death for breaking the Sabbath. And there’s a story, later in the Word, in the book of Numbers: a man who went out and he was gathering sticks on the Sabbath day. It was reported to Moses, and Moses said that he should be stoned. And they took him outside the camp and stoned him until he died.

It’s very hard for us to understand the importance of this commandment in the life of the Hebrews, the Israelites. It was their main form of worship. They had the temple worship, but that was done mostly by the priests. As far as the people were concerned, their worship consisted of setting aside a day in which they would do no work. They would meditate, they would relax, they would think about the Lord. But they weren’t to do any labor, and they weren’t to hire anyone to work for them. It was a day of total rest. So every week they had this reminder that they were the Lord’s people, and they were going to let go of their efforts and striving, to just put themselves in the Lord’s hands. Their chief form of worship. No wonder, in the New Testament, we find such conflicts coming up between Jesus and the Pharisees over the Sabbath day. To break the Sabbath was a capital offense.

And what about the fourth commandment: Honor your father and mother that your days may be long upon the land which the Lord your God is giving you. Once again, a very positive commandment. How would a person break this commandment? If a person struck his father or mother, or cursed his father or mother, he could be put to death for it.

Listen to these words from the book of Deuteronomy:

“If a man has a stubborn and rebellious son who will not obey the voice of his father or the voice of his mother, and who when they have chastened him, will not heed them, then his father and his mother shall take hold of him, and bring him out to the elders of his city, to the gate of his city, and they shall say to the elders of his city, ‘ This son of ours is stubborn and rebellious, he will not obey our voice, he is a glutton and a drunkard,’ then all the men of his city shall stone him to death with stones. So you shall put away the evil from among you. And all Israel shall hear and fear.”

Dishonoring parents was a capital offense.

That was the fourth commandment, and the fifth commandment is “You shall not murder.” And most societies, at least at one time in their history, have had a death penalty for people who murder. Of course, even in the Old Testament they saw a difference between intentional murder and involuntary manslaughter. But those who kill would face the death penalty. For there is the principle in Genesis: “Whoever shall shed man’s blood, by man his blood shall be shed.”

What about the sixth commandment, the commandment against adultery? In the New Testament there’s a story about people bringing a woman to Jesus who had been caught in the act of adultery. And they said, “Moses said she should be put to death, but what do you say?” seeking to trap Him. They wanted to catch him in a dilemma. He would either affirm the law of Moses and have the woman put to death, and so run counter to the mores of His day, or He would protect the woman and so suggest that the law of Moses no longer applied. And that’s when Jesus said, “He who is without sin among you, let him cast the first stone.”

But adultery was a capital offense. The man who commits adultery with another man’s wife, he who commits adultery with his neighbor’s wife, the adulterer and the adulteress, shall surely be put to death. The first six commandments all carried the death penalty. Isn’t that amazing?

What about the seventh commandment, against theft? Well, normally the penalty for theft is that you would repay double or triple or even five times what you stole, and you’d make an offering to the Lord. But if a person stole something that was devoted to the Lord, as Achan did in the city of Jericho, he was put to death for it. And kidnapping, or stealing another person, was also a crime that brought the death penalty.

What about false witness? False witness carried the death penalty, if the witness was intended to accuse the person of a capital offense. And this is the principle. If the witness is a false witness who has testified falsely against his brother, then you shall do to him as he thought to have done to his neighbor. So you shall put the evil away from among you.

Remember at the time when Jesus was on trial, they tried to get false witnesses, and they couldn’t get any two that would agree? I think one of the reasons was that if you bore witness in such a trial that would lead to the death of some person, and you were shown to be a false witness, you would suffer the penalty that that person would have suffered. So they would have been crucified if they’d been found to be a false witness, in this kind of trial.

Six commandments bring the death penalty. Two could bring the death penalty, and that only leaves nine and ten, the commandments against coveting your neighbor’s house, and his wife, his ox, his donkey and his possessions. These did not carry the death penalty. They are attitudes of the heart. Who can tell when you are coveting? But coveting will tend to lead to one of the other crimes.

Why, then, was the punishment so harsh for people who broke the Ten Commandments? Much more severe than in our own day. Can you imagine a society in our own day in which we put people to death for adultery, for blasphemy, for dishonoring parents? It partly has to do with the realities of life in the desert as they journeyed from Egypt into the land of Canaan. In that kind of existence you simply cannot tolerate evil of any kind, because it threatens the whole tribe, it threatens the whole nation. They didn’t have prisons. There were very few options open to them.

But there’s a spiritual reason for the death penalty. And the spiritual reason is to remind us that something dies in us when we break one of the commandments. Take the example of a little boy who grows up in a very strict home. He’s warned by his parents that if he breaks the commandments God will punish him, will send him to hell. Lightning might fall out of the sky. So this child grows up with the thought that if he ever breaks one of the commandments, he’s in very deep trouble and he is going to get immediate retribution.

But the boy is unhappy and miserable, and in his teen years he finds himself involved with a satanic cult. And part of the nature of the cult is that people are required to break the Ten Commandments. So at first the boy starts to swear, and blaspheme the name of God, and then he looks up as if waiting for the lightning to strike. And nothing happens. Then he worships Satan instead of worshipping God, and nothing happens. It seems as if he’s getting away with it. And then, as part of the satanic ritual, he has to dishonor his parents of course. He has to commit adultery, he has to steal, he has to lie and he has to murder.

And this poor kid goes through all these processes, and every step of the way he says, “Nothing happened. I even murdered someone and God didn’t strike me dead with a lightning bolt. Maybe there’s no power in the commandments, maybe the power is with Satan.”

Years later this same boy is going through counseling to deal with all the troubled states that came through his involvement with Satanism. And at one point he says to the counselor, “I don’t understand it. I was brought up to believe that if I broke the commandments, God would surely punish me. But the punishment never came, and so I kept on breaking the commandments and the punishment never came.”

Finally the counselor looked at him and said, “You’ve been coming to me for six months. You’re one of the most disturbed people I’ve ever met, and you say you’ve not been punished? See, God doesn’t punish you for breaking the commandments: you punish yourself by breaking the commandments. When you murdered that person something died inside yourself. You were punishing yourself at that moment! When you commit adultery, you’re killing something in yourself. When you lie you’re killing something in yourself, and you don’t even realize that you’re doing it. You’re not punished for breaking the commandments, you’re punished by breaking the commandments.” /p>

At times God seems to be remote and very threatening – “I’ll strike you dead if you violate my precepts.” The reality is that God is pure love and mercy. There is absolutely no anger in God, there’s no desire to punish or to hurt. Why, then, are the commandments worded the way they are? It’s a way of cautioning us not to hurt ourselves. As the Heavenly Father says, “Dear children, don’t hurt yourself. Because if you do these things, you kill something in yourself.

And you can recover. People can do all kinds of terrible things, and recover. But take an easier path of life. Sooner or later people realize the terrible damage that comes by breaking the Lord’s commandments. And the sooner they realize the better off they are. Because these are commandments of love, and mercy, and peace. The Lord is constantly leading us toward a society that is happy, respectful, where there are values that are maintained, and upheld. He’s leading us to a kind of spiritual “promised land.” And for a while we imagine that lying, or murder, or theft are unimportant, as long as we can get away with them. And later we find, to our cost, that we’ve lost something in the process. Something has died. That’s the death penalty.

But fortunately, it’s not a permanent earth. And the Lord can use those very painful experiences to bring people back into a state of order. Into a love of integrity. Into a desire to respect society, and not injure or hurt the neighbor in any way. A desire to – in your heart – love God, respect marriage, respect human life, love the truth. This is the opposite side, the inner side of the Ten Commandments. So if you look deeply enough you see this wonderful message of love from the Heavenly Father that’s saying, “If you understand and follow these laws of order, you will come to a promised land of inner peace and security. And that’s why the Lord has created us, and that’s where He’s leading us in our journey, step by step, so that every event of our life brings us closer to this quality of heaven.

Jesus said, “If you love Me, keep My commandments.” And again, “If you will enter into life, keep the commandments.” Or, in Deuteronomy: “ I command you this day to love the Lord your God, to walk in His ways and to keep His commandments, and His statutes, and His judgments, that you may live and multiply. And the Lord your God shall bless you in the land where you go to possess it.”