Rules for the Road Ahead

Rules for the Road Ahead

Exodus 20:1-18

            As I write this, we stand at the threshold of a new year and a new decade.  It’s a good time to look back and look ahead.  What should we bring forward from the past?  What rules should guide us as we move into the future?

            I remember sitting in school in seventh and eighth grade and thinking about how old I’d be in the year 2000.  As weak as my math skills were (not any better today) I realized I’d be in my late 50’s—not really old, but seemingly so to a boy of twelve or thirteen.  Now we’re twenty years into the new millennium, and I’m well past any age I could have conceived of in those younger years.

            The Book of Exodus begins with the Israelites in slavery to the Egyptians, and ends in the wilderness with the construction and dedication of the tabernacle.  We know this is only the beginning of Israel as a nation.  They have miles and years to travel before they reach the land God promised their ancestors.  Many hardships lie ahead, many trials and many temptations, temptations to forsake the God who has brought them this far in favor of gods who are easier to serve, less demanding, but also less able to guide and provide for them.

            We believe God can see the whole of history spread out in a great panorama, and God knew the way ahead would not be easy.  God could see the hardships, the trials, the temptations.  What would help this young nation survive infancy and adolescence, and become a fully-fledged member of the community of nations—not only an adult member of that community, but God’s people, bringing the worship of YHWH to the world?  The answer was a series of rules for the road ahead—rules that would guide and protect God’s people.

God gave Israel a complicated list of instructions—instructions to assist in making the difficult decisions that lay ahead.  Like the framers of our Constitution, God tried to anticipate as many problem situations as possible, and to give as much guidance as possible. 

I think God understood how difficult it would be to remember and follow the whole code.  To make life easier God simplified the instructions into ten basic principles.  If Israel followed these precepts faithfully, the nation would be able to grow to adulthood and be secure both in its worship of YHWH and in its community relationships.  We know these rules. Perhaps we can even quote them—although possibly not in the correct order.

The first four instructions define the relationship between the people and God.  They are to have no gods but YHWH.  They are not to make any image that they might be tempted to worship instead of YHWH.  They are not to defile the name of the Lord God in any manner.  They are to remember that one day each week must be set aside for worship and rest.

It is not by accident that the first commandments are about Israel’s relationship with God.  The message is clear:  put God first and everything else will be in perspective.

The remaining six rules define peoples’ relationship with each other:  honor parents, don’t murder, don’t defile the relationship with your spouse, don’t steal, don’t tell lies about your neighbor.  The final rule is the one I believe sums up the way humans should live in community:  don’t covet.  Wanting what someone else has can lead to the breakdown of social relationships.

It’s easy to put ancient documents aside and say they have no relevance today, but so much of what is wrong with society is due to our failure to follow the rules that God set down so long ago.  Lets commit to following them this year and see if doing so makes the road ahead smoother.