The Second Table

Series on Exodus

V. The Conscience of God’s People

B. Walk in Love

1-5. Text: Exodus 20:13-17

Title: The Second Table

Introduction

This section of the law represents the second part of the great commandment. The first part is loving God with all your heart. The second is loving your neighbor as yourself. These commandments teach us how to love our neighbor. No study of these commandments should be undertaken without reference to Jesus’ interpretation of them in the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 5. It is here that our Lord reveals the inner components of the sins forbidden in these commandments. The Pharisees of Jesus time were sure that they were keeping the law of God. They were doubly sure of this because the law of Moses had been surrounded with so many accretions, interpretations, extenuations, and extensions that it became easy to think you were doing the right thing if you followed all those commandments of men. In fact the Rabbis proudly announced that they were building a hedge of a fence around the law to protect it. To them regulating the amount of a burden that could be carried on the sabbath, or how far you could walk without working, was a perfect way to guarantee that you would not break the law. In point of fact, they were doing the opposite, because they were so obscuring the commandments that the real meaning and purpose of them was lost in the mass of legal details. In the middle ages a theological science called casuistry grew up in Christendom. This “case law’ unfortunately became a way of avoiding obedience to God’s commands because it would say in this case you may do it and in this other case you may not do it, and ultimately that engendered disrespect for the true meaning of the commandments. It is no wonder that Jesus had to say to His own in Matthew 5:20, For I tell you that unless your righteousness surpasses that of the Pharisees and the teachers of the law, you will certainly not enter the kingdom of heaven. One more thing should be said before we turn to the individual commands. I want to point out that we are prone to classify sins. As an example, murder is very bad, but gossip is just a little sin. Adultery is bad, not as bad as murder, but bad, yet lying is just a little sin. Sins may vary in their degree of offensiveness to us, but we need to understand that all sin is sin against God and deserve His wrath and judgment. So James 2:10 says, For whoever keeps the whole law and yet stumbles at just one point is guilty of breaking all of it. Oh, you say, then nobody does it or can do it. Now you are getting it. We can only be saved by the grace of God through Jesus’ atoning sacrifice because we have all broken the whole law, and deserve the whole punishment. We are accustomed to think in terms of human justice, with the idea that the punishment should fit the crime. The problem is that when we are dealing with God’s justice the punishment fits the crime, but we usually think of the wrong crime. We are thinking the murderer should be more sorely punished than the liar. That’s good for human justice, but divine justice insists that the offense is an attack on God in both cases. Thus the punishment should not fit our estimate of the crime, but rather our estimate of the greatness of the one offended. How great is that? With this in mind, let’s look at the commandments.

I The Head

You shall not murder. In the authorized version which most people have learned, this commandment is translated “Thou shalt not kill.” That is a bad translation because, as you know, God commanded the Israelites to kill in His name and to visit his punishments upon the heathen whose iniquity was filled up. It may satisfy the liberal elite and the uninstructed to oppose capitol punishment on the grounds that the Bible says, thou shalt not kill, but God never said that. One may also refer to capitol murder. Capitol comes from the Latin for head. What is in view here is capitol murder which is personal vengeance or hatred. In John 8:44 Jesus says Satan was a murderer from the beginning. We are all murderers because Jesus says in Matthew 5: 21 and 22, You have heard that it was said to the people long ago, “Do not murder, and anyone who murders will be subject to judgment.” But I tell you that anyone who is angry with his brother will be subject to judgment. Again, anyone who says to his brother, “Raca,” is answerable to the Sanhedrin. But anyone who says, “You fool!” will be in danger of the fire of hell. “Raca” means empty and so is not significantly different from “fool.”What Jesus is saying is that anger towards someone is equivalent to murder and should bring both earthly judgment by the Sanhedrin and eternal judgment by God. Jesus is not changing the commandment. He is simply amplifying and explaining the root of sin that leads to murder, and that root is in all fallen sinners. Soldiers and policemen carrying out their sworn duty to protect life are not sinning when they take the life of a criminal or an enemy of the people. If they did not carry out their duty of protection, they would be breaking the commandment.

II The Home

You shall not commit adultery. It is important to remember that God created us as sexual beings. This command forbids all types of sexual sin. The Victorians and the Puritans get a lot of bad press, but they were not against sexuality. They simply insisted that it had to be expressed in obedience to God’s law. If you read the catechisms on the commandments, you discover that they remind us that there are both duties required as well as sins forbidden by each commandment. With reference to this commandment, one of the duties is marital love and cohabitation. Others include chastity, modesty, temperance, and avoiding all occasions of uncleanness. Thus, the thing that makes adultery wrong is not that it is sexual, but that it denies God’s authority to tell us when, where, and how we may express our sexuality. This is increasingly important in a culture that is overwhelmed with the sale of sex and pornography. The prohibition in the tenth commandment, not to covet your neighbor’s wife, reminds us that we are not immune to this temptation.As Jesus says in Matthew 5:27-29, You have heard that it was said, “Do not commit adultery.” But I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart. If your right eye causes you to sin, gouge it out and throw it away. It is better for you to lose one part of your body than for your whole body to be thrown into hell. Jesus also talks about divorce in his explanation of this commandment because divorce is also destroying God’s order for our sexual expression.

III The Hand

You shall not steal. When we are young our parents often tells us to keep our hands to ourselves. Sometimes this is said to keep us from taking things that do not belong to us. In some current middle eastern societies the penalty for stealing is cutting off the hand. I am not recommending this, but not surprisingly, it greatly reduces the incidence of theft. We often think of burglars when we think of theft, but the fact is that our society is riddled with usury, bribery, vexatious lawsuits, fraud, and unfaithfulness in contracts, and all of these are a breach of the commandment. We are less likely to think of idleness, wasteful spending, and gambling as theft, but they are. In fact one of the most common ways to steal is refusing to tithe to the Lord. Malachi 3:8-10, Will a man rob God? Yet you rob me. But you ask, “How do we rob you?” “In tithes and offerings. You are under a curse-the whole nation of you-because you are robbing me. Bring the whole tithe into the storehouse, that there may be food in my house.” This commandment is essentially concerned with personal property and property rights. Therefore, it obligates me to protect my neighbor’s property and to do what I can to preserve it. Jesus does not comment on this in Matthew 5, but later as recorded in Luke 20: 46 and 47 he says, Beware of the teachers of the law. They like to walk around in flowing robes and love to be greeted in the marketplaces and have the most important seats in the synagogues and the places of honor at banquets. They devour widows’ houses and for a show make lengthy prayers. Such men will be punished most severely. They were thieves, and sadly many so-called Christian leaders have turned out similarly, but the Devil is a thief too, and so are those who follow him.

IV The Honor

You shall not give false testimony against your neighbor. When Jesus touches on honesty he speaks of it in terms of oaths in Matthew 5:33-37, Again, you have heard that it was said to the people long ago, “Do not break your oath, but keep the oaths you have made to the Lord.” But I tell you, Do not swear at all: either by heaven, for it is God’s throne; or by the earth, for it is his footstool; or by Jerusalem, for it is the city of the Great King. And do not swear by your head, for you cannot make even one hair white or black. Simply let your “Yes” be “Yes,” and your “No, No;” anything beyond this comes from the evil one. We should not confine our thinking to the idea of a courtroom and sworn witnesses. The problem Jesus is addressing here is that they were swearing in everyday life that they were telling the truth. They were careful to choose something less than God to swear by, but they were still lying through their teeth. A vast amount of false witness comes through insincere oaths. Politicians swear to uphold the constitution, and then they do not. Preachers swear that they believe all the doctrines of their churches, but they do not. People swear in the church that they will be faithful in marriage and they have no intention of doing so. This should not surprise us because the Bible says the devil is a liar and the father of lies, John 8:44, You belong to your father, the devil, and you want to carry out your father’s desire. He was a murderer from the beginning, not holding to the truth, for there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks his native language, for he is a liar and the father of lies. We are by nature and by birth his children until we are converted. Even so the New Testament advises Christians, “Lie not to one another.” One of the most common ways in which this command is broken is by gossip. It should obligate us to protect our neighbor’s reputation, rejoice in their good name, and cover their infirmities. Therefore gossip is wrong, slander is wrong, and even speaking the truth unseasonably is wrong. I always chuckle and the alleged moral dilemma of a Christian family in the Netherlands hiding Jews during World War II. Should they lie and say nobody is there. This is not dilemma at all. Of course they should lie, because it is to protect life, and if they do not lie, they are “speaking the truth unseasonably,” and breaking the commandment.

V The Heart

You shall not covet your neighbor’s house. You shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, or his manservant or maidservant, his ox or donkey, or anything that belongs to your neighbor. The tenth and last commandment is the most heart searching of all. It searches the heart because it can only be committed in the heart, the mind, the inner man. There is no outward visible manifestation unless the covetousness turns into gossip, or slander, or theft, or adultery. That is why Paul makes a special point of this commandment when he is discussing how he came to realize that he was a sinner. Prior to that time, like all Pharisees, Paul regarded himself as righteous according to the law. But he says in Romans 7:8-10, But sin, seizing the opportunity afforded by the commandment, produced in me every kind of covetous desire. For apart from law, sin is dead. Once I was alive apart from law; but when the commandment came, sin sprang to life and I died. I found that the very commandment that was intended to bring life actually brought death. It was the command not to covet that awakened in Paul the realization that he was sinful, even though his outward life complied in large measure with the law. His heart was covetous, and he could not escape the indwelling sin that ruled his life in spite of outward conformity. This command is important because so many people judge their lives by their external actions and never get to the root of the matter. God cares about your heart and the allegiances of your life. Evil thoughts and desires do matter to God, not just actions. When we realize this the full weight of the law and the accompanying guilt descends on us and we must flee to Christ or be lost. I am reminded of the rich young ruler in Israel who came to Christ asking what he had to do to inherit eternal life. Jesus said, “Keep the commandments,” and he replied that he had kept them from his youth up. Then, said Jesus, all he had to do was to go sell all that he had and follow Christ. He did not and he went away sad. Jesus has diagnosed his problem. He was covetous, and in his heart he loved his riches more than he loved God. He looked outwardly righteous, but he was lost.