Rev. Don Campbell

THE TEN COMMANDMENTS [Ex 19-21]

THOUGHT FOR TODAY, FEBRUARY 5, 2019:

The Israelites arrived at Sinai where Moses went up the mountain and came back with the Ten Commandments. Several other laws were given in today’s reading, but the Ten Commandments shall be our focus.

The Supreme Court ruled in 1980 that posting the Ten Commandments in schools violates the Constitution’s ban on government-established religion. It is my guess that most Americans have no objection to the posting of the Ten Commandments in public buildings. It is also my guess that most Americans cannot list all ten of the Commandments. Perhaps this is the reason some are so eager to get them on the schoolhouse walls. When the Commandments were posted and the Bible was read in the classroom, the biggest discipline problems that teachers had were chewing gum and talking in class. Today it is guns, gangs, drugs, and pregnant 13-year-olds. That the rise of the one coincided with the decline of the other is not difficult to demonstrate. However, proving a cause and effect relationship is much harder. If there were a cause and effect relationship, then the solution to all our school problems—and ultimately to all society’s problems—is to post the Ten Commandment in public places. Such is too simplistic.

Posting laws—even God’s laws—in public places would be beneficial only if those laws were unavailable to the people and the people were hungering and thirsting for a knowledge of those laws. If that were the case, people would crowd around to catch a glimpse of them. The principles of the Ten Commandments were erased from a lot of hearts before the letter of the law came down from the schoolhouse walls. If this were not the case, it wouldn’t matter one iota whether they are posted anywhere. Someone suggested that if one finds the public display of the Ten Commandments offensive, they should not visit Washington, DC, because they are found throughout, including the Supreme Court building. If posting the Ten Commandments made any real difference, Washington would be a much different place than it is.
The entire Bible is readily available to anyone wishing to read it. Even if the Ten Commandments were taught in the public schools and each child had to correctly write down all ten before being promoted from one grade to the next, things wouldn’t be much different. My proof for this is in the fact that the Pharisees of Jesus’ day knew the Ten Commandments backward and forward, but Jesus says of them, “This people honors me with their lips, but their heart is far from me” (Matt 15:8).

We read in Hebrews 8:10-12, “For this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, declares the Lord: I will put my laws into their minds, and write them on their hearts, and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. And they shall not teach, each one his neighbor and each one his brother, saying, ‘Know the Lord,’ for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest. For I will be merciful toward their iniquities, and I will remember their sins no more.”

The truth is that the word of God was never really written in the hearts of millions of Americans, including millions of professing Christians. Many had parents or grandparents who had the word written in their hearts, and as a result, the offspring still held to a form of godliness. They knew about God, but they did not know God. We were a Christian nation only in the sense that most of us had our spiritual roots in Christianity. In other words, culturally we were Christian. Biblically, we were not. Some of us continued to practice the forms without the personal faith of our fathers. Others gave up both the form and the faith but continued to endorse the moral fruit of faith.

CONNECTIONS

1. For the Ten Commandments to have any force in the public arena, they would have to be enforced by the government. Would we really want that? Let’s suppose that when we awoke next Lord’s Day morning a great revolution had taken place and the Ten Commandments were restored to every schoolhouse wall and every courthouse in the country. If this were the case, we could expect officers to come through our door at any minute and demand that we cease worshiping on the first day of the week and comply with the Fourth Commandment to honor the Sabbath. Those same officers would have been enforcing the rules of the Sabbath the day before, meaning that no one could have gone to the grocery store, eaten out, mowed the yard, gone to work, or attended a ball game. Is it that many Americans just want the Ten Commandments on the walls, but do not want them enforced?

2. In Matthew 23:5, Jesus denounces those who made their phylacteries broad. These were small leather boxes containing Hebrew texts on vellum. One is strapped to the arm and the other to the forehead. Does this suggest that wanting to make a public display of God’s word instead of having it in one’s heart is a perpetual problem?