Pastor of Formation & Mission Benjamin Kandt continues out Exodus series, preaching on the first table of the law in Exodus 20:1-11. There, we see that we are to be a people set free to live free in love of God and, as we'll see next week, neighbor.
Pastor of Formation & Mission Benjamin Kandt continues out Exodus series, preaching on the first table of the law in Exodus 20:1-11. There, we see that we are to be a people set free to live free in love of God and, as we'll see next week, neighbor.
My favorite definition of community comes from the North African pastor, augustine of Hippo. He says this a people is an assemblage of reasonable beings bound together by a common agreement as to the objects of their love. It's behind you, because it's wordy, that way you can look at it. But he says this is a definition that what makes a people a people is that there's this common agreement that we're going to love the same things. What an insightful way to talk about what a people is, a community is. But he goes on to say this is not only a definition, it's actually also a diagnostic. In other words, you can tell a higher order community or a higher order people based on the higher or lower order of their loves. If they love something great, they will be a great people. If they love something debased, they will debase themselves.
Benjamin:And so I was in a conversation with a historian that actually lives here in Orlando, who used this quote to study American history what is it that Americans love? I'm curious, what would populate your mind as I ask that question? And this historian argued that one of the things that's true about American history is that we have had a competing. We've had competition for our highest love. He argues, actually that America started maybe with. The highest love was unity, a love of unity, one nation, one nation under God, or the Ipluribus unum, which means out of many one. That's written all over the place in America. You see, the problem is that after the Civil War there was a severing. There was a severing between North and South and because of that unity would have been really hard to kind of rebuild. But the unity between North and South wasn't the primary issue. The unity between black and white was the primary issue, and the American people maybe just weren't up for the challenge and so the love of unity became downplayed among the American populace.
Benjamin:This is the way that on June 4th 1965, in the midst of the Civil Rights Movement, president Lyndon B Johnson said it. He said this had a commencement address to Howard University, which is the nation's most prominent historic black university. He said this freedom is not enough. Pause, just let those words linger. Freedom is not enough. He's talking about post-Civil War. What happened to the freed slaves in America? Freedom is not enough. Quote you do not wipe away the scars of centuries by saying now you're free to go where you want and do as you desire and choose the leaders you please, you do not take a person who for years has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say you're free to compete with all the others and still justly believe that you've been completely fair.
Benjamin:So America, I believe in this historian argued opted for a love of freedom in exchange for its love of unity at this point in our American history. And so we have a love of freedom, and this is a good thing. It's a pretty high order love. In a lot of ways, we are the land of the free. We've been that for so many people who can flee to this nation seeking refuge from tyranny. What a gift that is. America is remarkable in that way. We have these slogans that talk about our love for freedom. Things like no taxation without representation, right All the way to. Things like don't tread on me or we serve no sovereign here. These things depict our love for freedom. But here's the thing Freedom has two aspects to it.
Benjamin:As Ia Berlin, who survived the Russian Revolution in 1917, he made a distinction between negative freedom and positive freedom. Negative freedom is the freedom from constraints. So think about what happened in the Exodus. Is a negative freedom, a freedom from the constraints of Pharaoh's tyranny. That's a good thing. You want negative freedom, but there's also positive freedom, which is freedom to pursue a common cause or a moral good or some sort of a vision. So not only freedom from, but also freedom for, both really matter.
Benjamin:This is why Victor Frankel, a Holocaust survivor psychiatrist, in his book Man's Search for Meaning, said he challenged his words where I suggest that America should put a statue of responsibility on the West Coast to match the Statue of Liberty on the East Coast. Imagine if we would have listened to him in the 1940s. Because freedom from has to go connected with freedom. For this is really important that you get both aspects of freedom. And so, because we've failed to take freedom in both of its aspects seriously, we have now devolved not just from a love of unity or a love of freedom to a love of autonomy. That's the love that has captured the hearts and minds of the American people today.
Benjamin:A love of autonomy. This is the way that the book of Exodus talks about. A love of autonomy. In those days there was no king I'm sorry, book of judges. In those days there was no king in Israel. Everyone did what was right in his own eyes. You could write that about American culture today. And so no longer do we talk about things like taxation without representation. Now we say you do, you, don't apologize for being you, my body, my choice, live your truth. Those are our slogans today. That's because we love autonomy, not freedom, autonomy which is just self-law, self-rule I rule me, nobody else. And so, in this moment we are in, we realize that freedom of choice without constraints has become a sacred right for our people. In other words, you could use Isaiah Berlin's categories and say our culture has absolute negative freedom, freedom from constraints without the corresponding positive freedom Freedom to pursue a chosen moral good. And so this leaves us in a place where we, we are, our freedoms are actually being degraded over time.
Benjamin:Um Oz Guinness wrote a fantastic book called the Magna Carta of Humanity. If you're interested in both the book of Exodus and the upcoming election, this would be a worthwhile book to read. And he says this quote the great paradox of freedom is that the greatest enemy of freedom is freedom. Huh, he goes on to say no one and nothing enslaves free people as much as they enslave themselves. I felt some of this. I came back from a week of vacation and this past week I had five deadlines in one week and I was just kind of grumpy and I realized I was driving to our community on Wednesday night and I was praying about this and it dawned on me. I think the reason is because I'm used to having more freedom with my time and energy, but when you have five deadlines like you lose freedom. I want autonomy, I want self-rule, I want to dictate and decide for me and I have anybody else tell me how I should spend my time. Add there your energy, your money, your attention, and so I experienced this culture that we live in, that loves autonomy, and I love autonomy. And so to this.
Benjamin:Exodus speaks to us this morning. You see, the Exodus is the classic text on liberation for the oppressed. That's a really big deal, but where we find ourselves in chapter 20 is not only liberation for the oppressed, but it's also this reminder that the greatest threat to our freedom is self-slavery. Another way to say that is the same book of Exodus that has been utilized to set the captives free, whether you talk about in the abolishment of the slave trade or the civil rights movement. It's the same book that also commands our obedience to a sovereign authority outside of ourselves. And so we come to this famous passage in the Bible the Ten Commandments.
Benjamin:As we come to the Ten Commandments, we realize that the book of Exodus has an insightful way of looking at the human condition. It says there really are two tyrannies. The first tyranny is external pharaohs, which the Exodus chapters one through nineteen were all about setting the people of Israel free from an external pharaoh. This is a real thing, and liberating the oppressed from external pharaohs is a big deal in the Bible. But now we get to chapter 20 and here's the new liberation that people need, which is internal pharaohs, and that's what the Ten Commandments do. And so you cannot have freedom from pharaoh. If you don't have freedom from you, you become a new pharaoh. Liberation may take a moment, but you have to maintain freedom over a lifetime, and that's what we're going to see this morning. So I want to have one sentence that's going to break down into three points. The one sentence is this we are set free to live free in love. Set free to live free in love. If you have a Bible, go ahead and get it out. We're going to look at Exodus, chapter 20, starting in verse one Set free to live free in love. It says this, and God spoke all these words, saying I am the Lord, or Yahweh that's the personal name. I am Yahweh, your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery. If modern America is, as I argued, freedom without order, ancient Egypt was order without freedom. This is true tyranny. The Lord calls it here.
Benjamin:Quote the house of slavery. Just a little recap of early Exodus so you get an idea. In the house of slavery, pharaoh commits mass infanticide among the Israelites. In the house of slavery quote their lives are made bitter with hard service In all their work. They ruthlessly made them work as slaves. In the house of slavery quote the people of Israel groaned because of their slavery and cried out for help. In the house of slavery, they were forced to use less straw without reducing the quota of bricks. Exodus 6.9 summarizes what this experience was like for Israel when it says they had, a quote broken spirit from the harsh slavery. They were in misery in the house of slavery. This is what the Lord comes in to rescue them from.
Benjamin:This is really important that we see that set free comes first. The Ten Commandments begins with this phrase here. I am Yahweh, your God, who set you free from all of that. Don't forget it. That's really important because you have to see the flow, that redemption comes before requirement. Another way to say that is freedom from comes before freedom, for grace before obedience, indicative before imperatives. This is true proceeds, go and do. This is really important to the grammar and the logic and the flow of biblical religion. If you get these mixed up, you get every other world religion that exists, but only Christianity, only the biblical religion puts what God has done for us before how we respond to God. This is core to the logic of our faith. And so, as we look here, israel's obedience is nothing more than simply applying and enjoying the freedom that the Lord has already freely given to them. That's really important. The obedience is just applying and enjoying all that is theirs because they've been delivered from the house of slavery already, and so the Lord knows that the danger of merely negative freedom freedom from means that Israel's greatest threat now is actually within them, not around them.
Benjamin:I'm going to quote Martin Luther King Jr somebody who is steeped in the Exodus narrative when he warns against this exact danger the danger of becoming a tyrant yourself in a famous speech called Give Us the Ballad, which was on a prayer pilgrimage for freedom, and he says it like this quote there is the danger that those of us who have been forced so long to stand amid the tragic midnight of oppression, those of us who have been trampled over, those of us who have been kicked about, there is the danger that we will become bitter. You see what he's warning If you've lived in slavery for a long time, there's a real temptation to become bitter because of that. That would be an inner slavery, a slavery to bitterness, even though your outer slavery is gone. He goes on. But if we will become bitter and indulge in hate campaigns, the new order which is emerging will be nothing but a duplication of the old order. You can recreate Egypt wherever you go. Beware, he goes on.
Benjamin:We must meet hate with love. We must meet physical force with soul force. We must not seek to use our emerging freedom and our growing power to do the same thing the white minority that has done to us for so many centuries. Our aim must never be to defeat or humiliate the white man. We must not become victimized with a philosophy of black supremacy. God is not interested merely in freeing black men and brown men and yellow men, but God is interested in freeing the whole human race. We must work with determination to create a society not where black men are superior and other men are inferior and vice versa, but a society in which all men will live together as brothers and respect the dignity and worth of the human personality.
Benjamin:What a profound vision of freedom. Because he was steeped in the Exodus narrative and he knew the danger of being set from an external tyrant is that you will become yourself an internal tyrant. And he's warning the people that he's leading, because he learned from his Lord that the greatest threat for liberated people is within them, not around them. And so, set free from Pharaoh's tyranny, yahweh wants to give his liberty instead of Israel's autonomy. So let's look at the second point he set free in order to live free in love. So what does living free look like?
Benjamin:A biblical scholar, graham Goldsworthy, says this the Exodus is the end of captivity, but it is only the beginning of freedom. Coming out of Egypt is only the beginning of freedom. That's starting right here at Mount Sinai. Now I'll give you a few pictures of what I mean by this. A fish who's liberated from water is not free. Right, a boat is not free from oppressive channel markers. No, in fact, if you avoid the channel markers, you run aground. Right, a caterpillar is not a freedom fighter for resisting the constraints of a cocoon, it just loses the freedom of flight.
Benjamin:Modern highways are called freeways. You ever notice that? But how free would it really be if everybody chose whatever speed, whatever lane, whatever direction that they wanted to? You see, freedom is only freedom within proper constraints. Think about this If you've ever had your kids kind of playing around you in the front yard, if you've got a street in front of your house that has cars going about it, you are way more protective and way more kind of overwatching them than when they're in the backyard, where there's a fence and they can't escape. Why? Because constraints actually create the ability for real freedom. That's what the Ten Commandments are. They're proper constraints to give us true freedom, to give us real liberty. And so not only is Israel set free, but they actually have to learn to live free. That's really important and that's what the Ten Commandments is about. Yahweh is trying to guard their freedom by giving them these definitions of what it looks like to live free.
Benjamin:Now we preached a series through each commandment in 2017, and it was called A Liberated Life, and so if you want to get a deep dive on any of these commandments, go back. 2017 is not too too far away in the podcast loop, but you can go find those sermons and look at each one. So what that means is, today and next week, I'm just going to look at the first four pretty briefly. Next week, kenny's going to look at the next six, and so we're going to take our time actually talking more about what's happening here than the specific commandments. But what I do want to do is jump in and just show you. I want to illustrate from the first four commandments, this lens of liberty in how these commands are actually being worked out. So look with me at the first commandment in verse 2. It begins here I am Yahweh, your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery. You shall have no other gods before me. Here's the question what does this antiquated law about monotheism have to do with sophisticated, modern, pluralistic, tolerant Americans Like? What does this have to say to us? Well, I think it depends on what you think a human is Maybe the most common phrase to describe a human being these days is homo sapiens, right, which essentially just means wise person, or wise human beings as the wise one.
Benjamin:That's what a homo sapien is. But more recently, yuval Harari's best-selling book, homo Deus, actually argues humans as gods, humans as gods. He goes on to say it like this we are, quote the gods of planet Earth and quote the new god links. He pushes far. I actually really appreciate like blatant honesty, like that's what I love about this. Most of us live as if we're gods, but he's just going to like write a big book about it that's going to become best-selling and say things like quote scientists today can do much better than the Old Testament. God End quote. Just brash, I love it All right.
Benjamin:There's another, more ancient take on what a human being is Not a human, not a homo sapien, not a homo Deus, but a homo Adorans. A homo Adorans is this it's this more ancient concept of human as worshipper, and this isn't a distinctly religious approach. The very non-religious David Foster Wallace has a famous commencement speech in 2005 called this Is Water. You can go look it up and listen to it on YouTube, where he argues the same thing Humans are worshippers, fundamentally. Blaze Pascal, the famous philosopher and mathematician, in his panse says it like this he talks about how we have a quote God-sized hole right, this is the picture that we get from him. And he says quote we try in vain to fill it with everything around us because we are worshippers.
Benjamin:There's something called the secularization theory, which was put forward by people like Max Weber, who argued that as the world becomes more modern, it will become less religious. In other words, religion just kind of thrives where people don't really know that much or science and politics and free thinking hasn't pushed away the dark corners of our minds to where we can let God kind of remain in those places. So as we become a more modern culture, we'll become more secular. We need religion less. Well, most people think that that's embarrassingly wrong, and the reason why that is is because we are homo-Adorans before we are homo-Sapiens. We're worshippers before we're wise.
Benjamin:And you can tell because, as practiced organized religion has dropped in the modern West, religious fervency has grown and grown and grown. It's just channeled differently. It's not about Christianity or Judaism or Islam or Buddhism. Now it's about sex and politics and social justice and your favorite brands. You see, there's a religious fervor that's deeply embedded in what it means to be human, and if you don't channel it and chasing it with these ancient religions, it will come out somewhere else. You will give yourself religious devotion to something somewhere. That's why, brilliantly, god says you shall have no other gods before me. He's drawing them to channel their religious devotion properly because he knows that if you displace God, you will find a substitute, and that substitute will be less freeing than the God who is the true and living God.
Benjamin:And so I want to just look at a few modern gods that we might be tempted to worship. You see, here in the text it says you shall have no other gods before me. The phrase there in Hebrew is before my face, and this is the picture In the tabernacle, the place of worship. Do not set up other gods in a place where you're worshiping them, where I can see. Now, this is a really big deal, because our bodies, according to 1 Corinthians 6, are the tabernacle of the Holy Spirit, which means this concept that it's a big deal, kind of in our tradition, of this idea of idols of the heart. In other words, these are not statues that you bow down to and worship, these are idols of the heart, they're internal. It actually has a lot of legitimacy given the way that this text is worded. You shall have no other gods before me before my face. He sees your hearts, he knows those idols.
Benjamin:Let me give three ancient and ever new versions of those idols of the heart. The first one is the idolatry of the appetites. This is the way Paul puts it in Philippians 3. He says their God is their belly, just straight forward. You see, most of us have freedom to buy whatever we want whenever we want it. Our appetites have free reign. We can see it in our pocketbooks, we can see it in the way we spend our time.
Benjamin:Psychologists have this term, which is called the hedonic treadmill, which is this experience where you think the next hit, the next thing that you buy, the next promotion, the next raise is going to bring you to this place of happiness. It does for a moment. It gives you that little hit of dopamine, but then your baseline drops back down to normal and you are chasing it ever, ever after, over and over again. See, as Lewis put it best, I think, when he defined the formula as an ever-increasing craving for an ever-diminishing pleasure Do you see this slavery in the idolatry to our appetites. This is a real danger. In his fantastic book on addiction called Addiction and Grace, the psychiatrist Gerald May said it like this the presence of addiction should be suspected wherever interior human freedom is compromised. How's your interior human freedom this morning? Do you experience a liberty from anxiety? Do you experience a true freedom from bitterness or sugar? Do you feel a freedom from social media and streaming media? Or do you need these things? Do you seek these things with an ever-increasing craving for an ever-diminishing pleasure? If so, you are a slave to the idolatry of appetites.
Benjamin:The second one is the idolatry of approval. Some of us are enslaved to the desire to be well seen, well thought of and well spoken of by others. Ephesians 6, 6 says it like this beware of serving others. By the way of, here's the actual word in Greek. It translates literally like this don't be eye slaves. What's an eye slave? Think about that. He goes not by the way of eye slaves as people pleasers, but as slaves of Christ, doing the will of God from the heart. Let me tell you what an eye slave is.
Benjamin:When I got into seminary, I thought I was big stuff, and so one of my first classes, my professor was asking questions and I just knew the answers, and so I was just spouting them off and at some point the professor gave me this look. That was a look of not disgust but totally dismissal. And it was this moment where I realized, oh, I've been seen, I'm an eye slave and the person who's seen me is actually I'm not right in their eyes, I'm not right in their sight right now. And you see, what happened in that moment was I felt crushed because I wanted the approval of this professor and I got instead disapproval from this professor.
Benjamin:One of the most helpful diagnostics I've heard comes from a pastor named Mike Bickley, who says like this the level of depression you get from criticism and failure is the exact measure of intoxication you would get from praise or success, I don't care which one it is. Are you being praised right now? Are you getting lots of affirmation and success? Is that intoxicating to you? It's the exact measure of what it will be like if you get criticism or rejection. How destroying that will be to you. Do you see how this is slavery?
Benjamin:God wants to set you free from the idolatry of approval. He also wants to set you free from the idolatry of ambition. So we've got appetites, we've got approval, we've got ambition. Ambition is good I want you to hear me say that, just like your appetites are good, just like approval is good. But it's not good when it becomes God, when you become controlled by the desire to close the gap between what you have and what you want. That's a definition of ambition. Thomas Merton, the American monk, said it like this he pointed out that we can spend our whole life climbing the ladder of success only to realize that it was leaning against the wrong wall. That's the danger of an idolatry to ambition.
Benjamin:The Stoic philosopher Seneca said show me a man who isn't a slave. One who is a slave to sex, another to money, another ambition all our slaves to hope and fear. I get these three temptations of appetites and approval and ambition from the temptation of Jesus in the wilderness by Satan. Look closely at those three temptations in Matthew 4. You'll see it is the temptation to appetite, to approval and to ambition. They're ancient temptations and we're being enslaved to them today. And to that, god wants to say to you I am the Lord, your God, I am the one who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery. You shall have no other gods before me, and that will be your freedom. The second commandment says this you shall not make for yourself this is Exodus 20, verse four you shall not make for yourself a carved image or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. You shall not bow down to them or serve them, for I, yahweh, your God, am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children to the third and fourth generation of those who hate me, but showing steadfast love to thousands of those who love me and keep my commandments.
Benjamin:Verse four sets up what theologians call the creator-creature distinction. We have to keep God from ever being identified with anything in his creation. That's really important why? Because we become what we worship, the way New Testament scholar GK Beal says it is. We resemble what we reveal, either for ruin or for restoration. You turn into whatever you give your trust to, and so this matters.
Benjamin:Psalm 115 says it like this their idols are silver and gold. This is the idea of actually building, assembling something, an image, a picture of what your God looks like. Their idols are silver and gold the work of human hands. They have mouths but do not speak, eyes but do not see. They have ears but do not hear, noses but do not smell. They have hands but do not feel, feet but do not walk. And they do not make a sound in their throat. I love that last line. They do not make a sound Like your. God's can't even do that. What more can they do? But here's the nail in the coffin of idolatry. Right here, verse eight those who make them become like them. So do all who trust in them. God's setting you free from dehumanizing yourself and dehumanizing others.
Benjamin:You see, idolatry and injustice are two sides of the exact same coin. Read the prophets in the Bible All the time. They're railing against two things idolatry, false worship and injustice, treating the people who bear the true image of God as if they are images of lesser gods. You see how these go hand in hand. The second commitment has real implications for how we understand ourselves and how we understand others, because how we esteem God will directly play out in how we esteem our brothers, our sisters, our friends, fellow image bearers.
Benjamin:What is racism? What is sexism? Or nationalism or classism, but at its core, a form of self-ism or me-ism. It's a form of making God into your own image, setting you up as the supreme example. This is where the idea of supremacy comes from, the supreme example of what it means to be the ideal. And in light of that comes injustice. When you make an idol an image of the ideal, what happens is any human beings that don't represent that ideal are therefore lesser than Can.
Benjamin:I meddle a little bit. You're like what have you been doing this whole time? Let me just meddle a little bit here. I have friends who are not white that grew up in America, in the church, and they grew up seeing pictures of Jesus as a white Anglo guy with blonde hair, parted down the middle with a little bit of gel. And so one of my friends said it like this. He said I grew up and I would look at my hand, the lighter part of my skin, and I wished so much that my entire body looked like that, because his understanding of who God is is God is a white man.
Benjamin:If all the portraits of Jesus he sees are white men, do you see the danger at work in this? If brown and black boys and girls grow up seeing Anglo Jesus everywhere, they begin to wonder if everybody in power is white. It ought not be so. This is a violation of the second commandment, and this is why God is protecting us. He's reserving the right to make. He is the only one who reserves the right to make anything in his own image, and he's made people in his image who have different skin tones and complexions and body types, male and female, different socioeconomic classes, different education levels all made with equal dignity and value and worth, because they are the image of God. Therefore, do not make any images of God. Do you see the logic? This is how this works. But before anybody in here gets a little too high and mighty about, yeah, those religious people and their condescension and whatnot.
Benjamin:Russian philosopher Vladimir Soloyev says it like this modern people believe this man descended from apes. Therefore, you shall love your neighbor. You're the insanity of it. Like liberal, progressive modern thought has no basis for the rights that they're constantly claiming for the poor and marginalized. Only biblical Christianity has that. Only biblical Christianity has offered that to the world. So, as soon as you want the kingdom without the king, you're just sawing off the branch that you're sitting on. This is the day and age that we live in right now.
Benjamin:And so what does it look like to properly venerate the image of God? It looks like this go to your neighbor, bow down before them, not in worship, but to wash their feet. If you want to venerate the image of God, see it in your brother and your sister and your friend, and especially in your enemy, and wash their feet there. That's what it looks like to take up the proper obedience to the second commandment. Rabbi Jonathan Sacks says "'The Exodus was the first attempt? "'to create a society of equal dignity? "'under the sovereignty of God'". That's what's happening here A society of equal dignity under the sovereignty of God. You lose God, you lose equal dignity. There's no other way about it. Third commandment, verse seven "'You shall not take the name of the Lord, your God, in vain, "'for the Lord will not hold him guiltless? "'who takes his name in vain'". This is not about cussing. It's about liberty from the tyranny of hypocrisy. It's about freedom from being a fraud.
Benjamin:One of my things that I hear a good bit is this concept of imposter syndrome, which essentially is when you second guess your abilities because you feel this persistent internalized fear that you're gonna be found out or exposed as being a fraud. And most of the time we live with imposter syndrome. It's actually not reality, it's more of this inner affliction. But here's the danger For some of us. We actually are frauds, like the external portrayal of ourselves does not match the internal reality of who we are, and God wants to set you free from that because that's a tyrannizing enslavement.
Benjamin:This is one of my favorite inroads with not yet disciples of Jesus, because our culture rightfully so, values authenticity, that who you are inside matches who you are outside. It's a really good way in which our culture prizes that value. And the flip side of that value is our culture also despises hypocrisy, especially religious hypocrisy, and I love to be like. You know who really hated religious hypocrisy? Jesus. You'd really like him. You'd get along at least on this point. Because it's true, jesus comes and he says hey, the religious people who bear the name of God but who bind up other people's consciences and who oppress them with greater burdens, those people actually don't know who God really is. They do not bear the name of God properly. They bear it in vain. The most egregious example of breaking the third commandment is when Judas kisses Jesus to betray him. The outward manifestation of a kiss of Jesus' face with an inward heart of total and utter betrayal. What does that look like in our lives? Where do we kiss Jesus with a heart of betrayal?
Benjamin:The fourth and final commandment we're gonna look at today and more quickly, is the Sabbath day. Look with me at verse eight. Remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy. Six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is a Sabbath to Yahweh, your God. On it you shall not do any work, you or your son or your daughter, your male servant, or even your female servant, or your livestock or the sojourner who's within your gates. For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea and all that is in them, and rested on seventh day. Therefore, the Lord blessed the seventh day and made it holy.
Benjamin:I'm gonna be brief on this one, because we've talked about the Sabbath in the last few weeks. The Jewish sages would say it like this it took God one day to get the Israelites out of Egypt, but 40 years to get Egypt out of the Israelites. What are they getting at there? God, in his genius, gave his people a habit command. This is the only of the 10 that's actually a habitual one. You've got a weekly commitment to resting. Why? Because he gave a habit command to rehabilitate a people who were enslaved to their doing for too long. Another way to say that is he wants them to be free to find their worth apart from their work. And maybe this command because of those reasons is still relevant to us today. I wanna close where I began, which is with Augustine's definition of community, because we were set free to live free in love. Remember what he said A people is an assemblage of reasonable beings bound together by a common agreement as to the objects of their love. What is all this freedom for? It's all in love, by love and for love. That's really important.
Benjamin:If you've been to a wedding, which most people have, you might reread Exodus 20 in light of that and see that this is actually a wedding ceremony. Every wedding has commands, vows, commitments that are made In the same way. God asked Israel to marry him at Mount Sinai and Moses is the officiant. In Exodus 24, 7, israel says we do. It says quote all that the Lord has spoken, we will do and we will be obedient. In Ezekiel 16, 8, the Lord actually refers back to this as a wedding and he says it like this. I made my vow to you and entered into a covenant with you. The covenant with you declares the Lord God, and you became mine.
Benjamin:There's a romance in the 10 Commandments. That's what I'm saying. The first commandment is really well summarized by the vows that we take in our wedding ceremonies, forsaking all others from this day until your last day. If so, say I do. Right, you hear this. There's this commitment to an exclusive covenant fidelity. The second commandment says, in verse five, articulates for I, yahweh, your God, am a jealous God.
Benjamin:The jealousy of a husband for a wife, this is love language. This is really important, you see, because jealousy is the unwillingness to endure any sharing of your beloved. And so let me ask you this what if a husband was indifferent to the sexual advances by her colleagues at work? What would that say about the husband's love for his wife? What if a wife was apathetic about her husband's porn addiction? God is not indifferent, he is not apathetic, he is a God who has a jealous love, and he's after your complete allegiance and affection, out of love for you.
Benjamin:The third commandment you shall not take or bear the name of the Lord, your God, in vain. Just as a wife takes her husband's name. So we, the people of God, take his name upon us, and just as a wife who takes her husband's name cannot act as though she's unmarried, so those who belong to this God, who've been giving his name in baptism. I baptize you in the name of the Father, son and Holy Spirit. Right when we take that name in baptism, we bear it in a way that shows that this is the God to whom we belong. Did you see throughout the whole first section of the 10 commandments Yahweh your God. Yahweh your God. Yahweh your God. This is covenant, relational marital fidelity. But there's something about this word here bear.
Benjamin:The word bear comes up elsewhere. In Exodus it's the idea of taking on a burden or lifting up a burden onto yourself. In Exodus 19.4, god says this you yourselves have seen what I did to the Egyptians and how I bore you on eagle's wings and brought you to myself Like a husband carrying his bride to himself. We bear God's name because he gave it to us in baptism. But this word bear means something else in Exodus, exodus 32 says this but now I will forgive or lift or bear away their sin.
Benjamin:In Exodus 34, keeping steadfast love for thousands, forgiving or bearing or lifting away their iniquity and transgression and sin. You see, this God forgives by bearing our iniquity and transgression and sin, the ways in which we go our own way out of autonomy to live our own lives in self-rule. He bears those sins on himself. First, peter 2 says Jesus himself bore our sins in his body on the tree. Why? That we might die to sin and live to righteousness so we could be set free, to live free in love. That's why Jesus died.
Benjamin:And so when we come to the 10 commandments, we have to take the New Testament's understanding of love in mind. It says in Romans 13, love is the fulfilling of the law. In John 14, if you love me, you will keep my commandments. In 1 John 5, for this is the love of God that we keep his commandments. And his commandments are not burdensome. They're not burdensome for lovers. 2 John 6, and this is love that we walk according to his commandments. So how do we learn to love God like this? I've said plenty of times before in this pulpit the seven word summary of the entire Bible is 1 John 419. We love because he first loved us, when we see the love that this God has for us, when we see that Jesus died in order to set a people free, but then to live free, ablaze with affection for him. When we experience that and know that truly, we're set free to actually live out the 10 commandments in a legitimate way and those commandments are no longer burdensome.
Benjamin:I wanna close with Paul's words. In a short story Paul says this for freedom. Christ has set you free. Do not submit again to a yoke of slavery.
Benjamin:The story of that that, I think, encapsulates it best, is the story of a man who is set free to live free in love, named John Newton. Some of you know him as the hymn writer that wrote Amazing Grace. Some of you know that he had a backstory of being the captain of an enslave-orship that would travel the Atlantic Ocean bringing Africans to America to enslave them. But once he became a believer in Jesus he was set free and he actually became a prominent figure with a lot of personal credibility in the movement to abolish the Atlantic slave trade in Great Britain. Why? Because he was set free to live free in love and he gave that freedom to set other people free. And this is how he summarized it with this quote from one of his hymns Our pleasure and our duty, though opposite before since we have seen his beauty, are joined to part no more.
Benjamin:It is our highest pleasure, no less than duty's call, to love him beyond measure and serve him with our all. Let's pray, father, we come to you now. We hear your call. We hear your desire to wed us to yourself through your son. For those of us in this room who have said I will and belong to your son, are in union with him, would you give us a new felt sense of your affection for us, your love for us, your undying love in the dying of your son, jesus? Would you set us free to live free in love this morning, for those of us who are in here who don't know Jesus, would you give us a glimpse of the way in which our self-rule, our autonomy, is a tyranny, and bring us to that glad obedience and that holy surrender that Thomas Cramer called perfect freedom? Would you bring us, all of us here, to be set free to live free in your love for us and in our responsive love to you? It's in Jesus' name we pray, amen, amen.