Commandments – The Theft of our Precious Free Will?
Paul Kingsnorth grew up in a non-Christian family in the 1980s, said that despite being taught Christianity at school for most people in our culture,
“Religion was irrelevant. It was authoritarian, it was superstitious, it was feeble proto-science. It was the theft of our precious free will by authorities who wanted to control us by telling us fairy tales. It repressed women, gay people, atheists, anyone who disobeyed its irrational edicts. It hated science, denied reason, burned witches and heretics by the million. Post-Enlightenment liberal societies had thrown off its shackles…”
From https://www.firstthings.com/article/2021/06/the-cross-and-the-machine
Today we are starting a series on the Ten Commandments, God’s rules for life. Most Church of England churches have them on their walls, you are meant to have learnt them before you are confirmed.
But how do you feel about the 10 Commandments? Do you know them all? Do you care whether you know them? Do you teach them to your children as our reading suggests? Talking about them in the home on a regular basis?
Most people would sign up to some of them at least. ‘Do not murder.’ ‘Do not steal.’ ‘Do not commit adultery.’ But there are others that are at best forgotten and at worst ridiculed or seen as oppressive, as ‘the theft of our precious free will.’
Teaching the commandments to people who do not want to be told what to do or are worried about being made to feel guilty or condemned by them is just seen as a power grab and oppression. It is not very appealing.
Law Rooted in Story – 5:6; 6:19-25
In the U.K. we are seeing generational decline in the Christian faith. Each generation has less people going to church than the generation before and with that less people believing in God. Is that because we have failed to answer the next generations questions properly? Have we focussed so much on the importance of following laws like the Ten Commandments, without telling them the story that undergirds why we should follow them.
In the last section of our reading, Moses tells us how to respond to the questions of the next generation. We are not to dismiss or ridicule the questions, but to retell the story of God’s action.
In 6:20, we are given a question that a child asks,
“What is the meaning of the stipulations, decrees and laws the LORD our God commanded you?”
Perhaps the question is due to a natural inquisitiveness. Maybe it is more rebellious – ‘why should I allow my precious free will to be stolen by all these rules and regulations from God?’
The temptation in answering this question is to say something like,
‘Because God says so…’ – which he did.
or,
‘Because it is beneficial…’ – which it is.
But that is not the way Moses tells us to answer the question. What Moses tells us to do is to tell the story of God’s salvation.
Perhaps the reason we are losing more and more from each generation is that we have failed to answer the question correctly.
We have divorced the commands from the story,
the rules from the rule giver,
the instructions from the saviour?
Without the roots or the foundation in the story of God’s salvation, the Laws fall apart. They are heard simply as words of condemnation, irrelevant utterances from an unknown God. With the story as a foundation, however, we see them for what they really are, words of promise, freedom and blessing.
The Bible never separates the commands from the story. If you look at chapter 5, where the laws are listed, the commands begin with a prologue, which is a summary of the story of God’s salvation:
“I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery.”
Only with the story in place, do the commands make sense.
Israel’s Story:
So what is the story of God’s salvation for Israel?
A Story of Promise => God is faithful
It is a story of promise. It begins with God calling Abraham and making some amazing promises to him. He takes Abraham out into the night and shows him the ancient Palestinian sky, packed with stars and says to him. See all that – your descendants will be as numerous as the stars. For Abraham who was childless it seemed like a ridiculous promise. But, God acted and even in old age, Abraham and his elderly wife Sarah had a son Isaac, who had a son Jacob, who had twelve sons, who in Egypt grew to become a massive group of people. God’s impossible promise, was fulfilled over many generations.
He also took Abraham outside and showed him all the land of Palestine as far as he could see. And said your descendants will own this land. It was a promise that also came true soon after the time of Moses giving the Ten Commandments, Israel settled into a new and wonderful land.
The story of the Bible shows again and again that the God of Israel is a God who makes great promises and fulfils them. He is a faithful God, who can be trusted.
A Story of Freedom => God is mighty and loving
Then at the start of the book of Exodus, we find that Israel are slaves in Egypt. Forced to build cities for the Egyptians, beaten and oppressed. What is more because the Egyptians were worried that there were too many of them, they had the babies of the Israelites thrown into the river Nile. Slavery to Pharaoh the king of Egypt was a terrible thing.
But God had rescued them from all that. He had sent terrible plagues on the Egyptians until Pharaoh agreed to let them go. Pharaoh, who was seen to be a god himself and the representative on earth of all the Egyptian gods was no match for the God of Israel. When Pharaoh tried to corner the people against the Red Sea, God led Israel through the Red Sea, but drowned the army of Pharaoh that followed them.
God was committed to his people, he loved his people and he was mighty and powerful enough to save them from the oppression of Pharaoh.
A Story of Rags to Riches => God is generous
Finally, this is a story of rags to riches for the Israelites. But not because of their hard work, but because of God’s generosity. He gave them the land to live in, going ahead of them and driving out the people before them, so that they found themselves with cities already built, wells already dug and vineyards and olive groves already planted. They did nothing, but became rich, because of God’s generosity to them. He is a generous God
The Christian Story:
You might say, well that is all very well, but it is Israel’s story not our story. But it is the same God and the story connects with the main story for us as Christians. Jesus himself, connected it when he set up the communion meal, at a Passover Meal, the meal where the story of Israel’s rescue was remembered and recounted.
His life, death and resurrection was shown again and again to be a fulfilment of the promises to Israel of the past. Jesus was the greater prophet, the true servant and the better king, who brought God’s word with powerful signs, died a sacrificial death for our sins and rose from the dead.
He showed his utter love for us by dying for us.
He proved his incredible power by rising from the dead.
He proclaimed God’s incredible generosity by promising the free gift of forgiveness for sins and eternal life to all who came to him.
The Call to Loyalty to God
Only when we understand these stories, only when they become our stories, can we get to know the God of the Bible and so come to value his commandments as trustworthy and for our good and blessing.
The first commandment is a call to loyalty to God, to make him the supreme power and authority in our lives. Nothing should have more say over how we live than him. No god should be before him.
Positively, the command is flipped and repeated in Deuteronomy 6:5:
‘Love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength.’
When we have understood who this God is, through the stories of how he has saved his people, that he is faithful, loving, mighty and generous, then it makes sense to make him number one in our lives, to give him absolute loyalty. He wants the best for us, he has shown his love for us and he has the power to bless us more than we can imagine.
Only he has the answer to the wickedness in our hearts. Only he has the answer to death.
Holy Resistance to the Slavery of Other Gods
The only problem is that this means rejecting other potential authorities in our lives. For the Israelites it meant rejecting the ways of Egypt and the gods of the Egyptians, for us it means rejecting a world of sin, the world that had Jesus crucified. In being called to be loyal to God, we are called to reject the powerful loyalties of the world around us.
We need to see our world, which lives in rebellion against God as a good world, under the occupation of evil. Jesus actually talks of Satan being the Prince of the World. It is a good world, but because of Satan’s rule it has become corrupted, it is cold and harsh.
In the book, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, the Witch is meant to represent Satan. Her rule, attractive at first, freezes people and takes away their freedom. The Lion, who represents Jesus, however, leads a resistance her occupation of Narnia, one that eventually wins out.
As Christians, as followers of Jesus, we need to see ourselves as living in a world occupied by evil, full of attractive other ‘powers’ wanting to call us away from the faithful, loving, mighty and generous God. We are called to a holy resistance to this occupation, by committing ourselves wholeheartedly to the God who has saved us in Jesus Christ.
True Freedom
The world thinks that following the Ten Commandments is allowing your free will to be stolen. But, when we are caught up in the story of the God who gives the commandments, we find that actually they show us a way of holy resistance that frees us from the oppressive powers of the world.
After a long journey into faith, Paul Kingsnorth has finally discovered that to be true:
“I grew up believing what all modern people are taught: that freedom meant lack of constraint.” Orthodoxy taught me that this freedom was no freedom at all, but enslavement to the passions: a neat description of the first thirty years of my life. True freedom, it turns out, is to give up your will and follow God’s. To deny yourself. To let it come. I am terrible at this, but at least now I understand the path.
St. George's Church Ramsgate 