Reflection for North Balwyn Uniting Church
The Third Sunday in Lent, 3rd of March 2024
Exodus 20:1-20
Psalm 19
Let the spoken words of my mouth
and the meditation of all our hearts
be acceptable to you, O Lord,
our redeemer and our rock.
The Ten Commandments, known by Hebrew scholars as the ‘Ten Words,’ do not have a good reputation among some Christians. I suspect we can blame this on the Apostle Paul, and his distinction between Law and Grace. In his letter to the Romans Paul even writes that, ‘if it had not been for the law, I would not have known sin. I would not have known what it is to covet if the law had not said, “You shall not covet.”’ (Romans 7:7) Despite Paul saying in the very same passage that ‘the law is holy, and the commandment is holy and just and good,’ (Romans 7:12) some Christians have taken the apparent impossibility of humans successfully obeying the law to mean that God never intended it to be obeyed. When I was at Williamstown Uniting Church the children spent a year reading through The Jesus Storybook Bible,[1] which told the entire Bible story through the lens of Jesus. The chapter on the Ten Words is called ‘Ten Ways to be Perfect’. It shows Moses receiving the Ten Words in the middle of a rather terrifying thunderstorm. Moses then tells the people that if they keep these rules God will always look after them, and the people promise that they will. But the Storybook Bible immediately says that this is impossible; that God knew it would be impossible; and suggests that God only gave the Ten Words so that the people would fail and turn to Jesus, the one Person who could keep all the rules. That particular story ended: ‘the rules couldn’t save them. Only God could save them’. Continue reading →