Anyone who has read even the minimum of material on this site will be aware that I meditate regularly on the Ten Commandments. I humbly thank God for giving me this task, as it is a source of continual blessing and refreshment and, from time to time, offers what seems to me a deep insight into God’s ways.
I have shared before on God as Lord of time. Recently, God gave me a revelation on how time is structured through the Ten Commandments.
No doubt you have heard or read testimonies that the Ten Commandments are necessary to social order. Most people would accept that we are all better off if there are restraints on anti-social behaviours like murder, theft and bearing false witness. Families, and therefore society, work better if we honour our parents and keep faith with our spouses. And we are all better off if we don’t give way to destructive thought patterns like envy. The Commandments also provide us with rules for spiritual order: put God first, be mindful in the way God’s Name is used, and keep God’s Sabbaths.
This separation of the Commandments into three distinct areas of relationship – God, family and community – can be misleading, because all the Commandments are inter-related: our relationship with God is governed by all of them, and so is our personal and social happiness. Nonetheless, it is useful to group, ungroup and regroup the Commandments as a way to learn more about them.
It is while I was considering the Commandments as laws to ensure the health of human societies that I had the revelation of the Commandment to remember and keep the Sabbath as a law that maintains the fabric of time. As with the physical laws – like the law of gravity, which helps keep us and our belongings usefully anchored to the surface of the Earth – the Ten Commandments govern the proper operation of human endeavour. Unlike the physical laws, they do not work independently of us, we have to co-operate with them: we have to keep them, to keep them working properly.
We can see how failure to keep the Commandments has led to a progressive breakdown in spiritual and familial relationships and in civil society. Similarly, we have a sense that time is passing faster and faster and faster, and that there is never enough of it. Quite simply, time is not working the way it should because not enough people are keeping the Sabbath.
Pray for the peace of Jerusalem, because time depends on it.
I have shared before on God as Lord of time. Recently, God gave me a revelation on how time is structured through the Ten Commandments.
No doubt you have heard or read testimonies that the Ten Commandments are necessary to social order. Most people would accept that we are all better off if there are restraints on anti-social behaviours like murder, theft and bearing false witness. Families, and therefore society, work better if we honour our parents and keep faith with our spouses. And we are all better off if we don’t give way to destructive thought patterns like envy. The Commandments also provide us with rules for spiritual order: put God first, be mindful in the way God’s Name is used, and keep God’s Sabbaths.
This separation of the Commandments into three distinct areas of relationship – God, family and community – can be misleading, because all the Commandments are inter-related: our relationship with God is governed by all of them, and so is our personal and social happiness. Nonetheless, it is useful to group, ungroup and regroup the Commandments as a way to learn more about them.
It is while I was considering the Commandments as laws to ensure the health of human societies that I had the revelation of the Commandment to remember and keep the Sabbath as a law that maintains the fabric of time. As with the physical laws – like the law of gravity, which helps keep us and our belongings usefully anchored to the surface of the Earth – the Ten Commandments govern the proper operation of human endeavour. Unlike the physical laws, they do not work independently of us, we have to co-operate with them: we have to keep them, to keep them working properly.
We can see how failure to keep the Commandments has led to a progressive breakdown in spiritual and familial relationships and in civil society. Similarly, we have a sense that time is passing faster and faster and faster, and that there is never enough of it. Quite simply, time is not working the way it should because not enough people are keeping the Sabbath.
Pray for the peace of Jerusalem, because time depends on it.
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