His Law Is Love
Scripture Reading: Exodus 20:1-17
I can’t remember what I had for dinner last night, but I can recall every word of TV commercials that I saw as a child growing up in the late 1970s and early 1980s. One of them was for the brokerage firm E.F. Hutton. All of their commercials followed the same format. Two people would be somewhere out in public—an airport, a park, or poolside—talking about the stock market. The first would say to the other something along the lines of, “My broker says that now is a good time to invest. What does your broker say?”
The second person would respond with a confident and knowing gleam in their eye, “Well, my broker is E.F. Hutton, and E.F. Hutton says…” at which point every single person who was in the background would suddenly lean into the conversation with their hand cupped to their ear. Then you’d hear the voiceover deliver the tag line, “When E.F. Hutton talks, people listen.”
E.F. Hutton stopped talking when they went belly up in 1987, due to the stock market crash as well as a money-laundering scandal, but the commercials live on thanks to YouTube. And they were brilliant commercials.
As tag lines go, “When E.F. Hutton talks, people listen” suggests that the words of E.F. Hutton carry weight. They have power. On a much grander and infinitely more significant scale, the same is true of the words that God speaks. When God speaks, God makes things happen. God’s word brings about the very thing of which it speaks. Take, for example, the story of creation in Genesis 1. God creates the world by speaking.
When God speaks, God acts.
Then God said, “Let there be light;” and there was light (Gen. 1:3).
And God said, “Let there be a dome in the midst of the waters, and let it separate the waters from the waters” (Gen. 1:6).
And God said, “Let the waters under the sky be gathered into one place and let the dry land appear” (Gen. 1:9).
Then God said, “Let the earth put forth vegetation…” (Gen. 1:11).
And God said, “Let there be lights in the dome of the sky…” (Gen. 1:14).
And God said, “Let the waters bring forth swarms of living creatures…” (Gen. 1:20).
And God said, “Let the earth bring forth living creatures of every kind…” (Gen. 1:24).
When God speaks, God acts. That was true not only of creation but also of the formation of God’s people, Israel. Exodus 20 begins, “Then God spoke all these words.” When most of us think of the Ten Commandments we probably think of them in their written form, i.e., the stone tablets. But that’s not how they were given to the people initially. The first mention of stone tablets doesn’t occur until chapter 24, and Moses doesn’t present the tablets to the people until chapter 32. And when he does go to present them, he finds his fellow Israelites engaging in the most outrageous idolatry, and as a result he then smashes the tablets against the ground in a righteous fury!
Therefore, let’s note that God gives the Ten Commandments to the people directly by speaking them. "Okay, that’s interesting,” you may be thinking, "but why does it matter?” I will tell you why it matters. It matters because knowing that God first speaks the Ten Commandments shapes our understanding of what their purpose is. If we think of the Ten Commandments as just a collection of written rules to obey, like a teacher would post in their classroom on the first day of school, then we miss entirely what their purpose is, or I should say, what God’s purpose in giving them is.
The Ten Commandments are much more than a code of conduct to guide individual behavior. They are a constitution that transforms a nation of slaves into the people of God, not unlike the U.S. Constitution, which formalized our status as a new nation and no longer colonists subject to a foreign power (albeit with whole populations of enslaved and indigenous peoples who were excluded from the new nation).
Think of where we are in the story of the Exodus. The escape from Egypt and the crossing of the Red Sea happened not more than three months earlier. (We know that because Exodus 19:1 says, “On the third new moon after the Israelites had gone out of the land of Egypt, on that very day, they came into the wilderness of Sinai.) The people are still a long way from the promised land. They have only just begun their wilderness journey, a journey that will last some 40 years.
Yet God does not wait for the Israelites to reach the promised land before fulfilling the promise that he had made to Abraham. When God called Abraham to leave his father’s house, God had promised him, “I will make of you a great nation” (Gen. 12:2).
God’s nation-building project begins right here in the desert, at the base of Mt. Sinai. It begins with the words, “I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery” (Exod. 20:2). Israel’s foundational identity is that they were slaves who were liberated only by the grace of God. Their cry of despair was heard in the heavens and moved the heart of God to intervene on their behalf. And so before any “thou shalt” or “thou shalt not” we first hear the words “I am the Lord your God.” That’s why the commandments that follow are not about what Israel must do but rather who they have become. No longer Pharaoh’s slaves, they are now God’s people.
To be bound in covenant with the life-giving, liberating God is to be set free to live as God’s covenant people.
And as God’s people they will live in such a way that reflects the character of the God who liberated them from slavery. They will live in a manner that runs counter to all that they experienced as slaves in Egypt. No longer will they be subject to working without a day of rest. No longer will their purpose be found in how much they produce. No longer will they live in a land where life is cheap. No longer will they be subject to lifeless gods of wood and metal. Their guiding principle—the law that will govern how they relate to God and to one another—will be love. That is what the law commands…love.
I fear sometimes that we think of the law, and the Ten Commandments in particular, as simply a series of austere “thou shalt” and “thou shalt not” commands, as if God is just another task master like Pharaoh, barking orders and laying heavy burdens on our backs. But that is not the case. These Ten Commandments, while in one sense imperatives, in that they command us what to do or not do, are also descriptive. They describe how life is meant to be lived under the liberating, life-giving rule of the one true God.
I’m not going to go through all of the Commandments one by one. I’d be preaching from now until next Sunday. Each Commandment could easily be the subject of its own sermon. Instead, I’m just going to highlight a few things that I think are worth noting.
First, and this isn’t exactly breaking news, the first four commandments concern our relationship to God while the other six concern our relationship to other people. This ordering suggests that the way that we relate to God shapes the way that we relate to our neighbor. If I know that God is for me—and I know that because I have been liberated, set free from slavery to sin—then I am free to see my neighbor in the same light, i.e., as a brother or sister and not as a rival.
Second, a God who will not tolerate the worship of other gods doesn’t want us to be led astray from the truth. A God who forbids all our attempts to make false gods in our own image doesn’t want us to have the illusion of control. A God who warns against using the name of God frivolously doesn’t want us to diminish ourselves who are made in God’s image. And a God who demands that we take time to rest and to worship wants us to remember who we are and whose we are. That is a God who wants us to flourish. That is a God who—far from being a strict taskmaster—has made himself vulnerable to us by choosing to covenant with us.
To be bound in covenant with the life-giving, liberating God is to be set free to live as God’s covenant people. No longer do we live as slaves to fear, lust, greed, rage, envy, or deceit. No longer do we see our neighbor as a means to an end, as an obstacle to be overcome, or as a rival to be vanquished. No longer does God seem to us distant and indifferent or set against us in wrath. That is not the God whom we meet in the Sinai Covenant. The God of the Sinai Covenant speaks to us his word of truth, his word of promise, his word of love.
And God continues to speak to us through the new covenant of his Son Jesus Christ. When we celebrate the Lord’s Supper a few moments from now, we will hear the words that Jesus said at the Last Supper as he lifted the cup in the presence of his friends, “This cup is the new covenant sealed in my blood, shed for you for the forgiveness of sins.” The new covenant is God’s final and forever word. The word that God first spoke at the base of Mt. Sinai echoes all the way to a hill called Calvary. Jesus Christ himself is the very Word of God spoken to us and broken for us.