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Life, Death and the Law

25/5/2021

It is rare to hear a reference to the Ten Commandments in Anglican communion services now, or at least in the Anglican parish where I attend church. As with so much in the Anglican church, they have been oh so politely ignored in the hope that they would disappear without disturbance. Because the Ten Commandments are disturbing. In Romans 7, Paul ties himself in knots trying to explain that the law is death, or . . . or . . . or perhaps a sort of life, or well, something to do with sin perhaps but, anyway, not at all a Jesus sort of life!
I suspect Paul meant well. Fortunately the gospel of Matthew records Jesus as saying:

Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets. I have not come to abolish them, but to fulfill them. For I tell you truly, until heaven and earth pass away, not a single jot, not a stroke of a pen, will disappear from the Law until everything is accomplished. So then, whoever breaks one of the least of these commandments and teaches others to do likewise will be called least in the kingdom of heaven; but whoever practices and teaches them will be called great in the kingdom of heaven. (Matthew 5:17-19)

Well, that's pretty alarming, especially as I do not keep the entire Mosaic code. As God has so far called me to keep only the Ten Commandments, I try to avoid thinking about the jots and tittles, but I do take this text to mean that the Ten Commandments at least - if not the full quiver of 603 laws - are very much to do with a Jesus sort of life.
God has shown me again and again that the Ten Commandments support life, not death. Even without years of personal experience of this truth, I would anyway struggle to accept that God brought the Israelites out of the land of Egypt and the house of slavery - brought them into freedom, holy covenant and the promise of nationhood - only to shackle them to death. No, the Ten Commandments are the laws of life; they are a very precious gift - a blessing, not a burden.

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Law as Destiny

11/7/2018

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God has shown me how to pray and meditate on the Ten Commandments in several different ways, offering wonderful new learnings and deeper understanding. Recently God invited me to pray the Commandments over myself as prophetic declarations.

“You will have no other gods beside Me.”

“You will not make for yourself false idols.”

“You will not take My Name for emptiness.”

“You will remember the Sabbath and keep it holy.”

“You will honour your mother and father.”

“You will not murder.”

“You will not commit adultery.”

“You will not steal.”

“You will not bear false witness against your neighbour.”

“You will not covet anything that belongs to your neighbour.”

For good measure I proclaimed over myself, “You will love the LORD your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, with all your strength and, yes, you will love your neighbour as yourself.”

What a revelation and what sweet relief. For ‘Keeping the law’ read ‘Aligning with your destiny’. How can the law be a burden? It is a part of becoming who we are destined to be.

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Time Lord #2

7/1/2017

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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.

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The Name

31/1/2015

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In Volume I of The Schocken Bible, Everett Fox translates Exodus 20:7a as ‘You are not to take up the name of YHWH your God for emptiness’.
I found this translation to be a revelation!
I was more familiar with the translation of the third Commandment which reads, ‘Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain’. I’d always interpreted that as not using the Name as a swear word, and had never really bothered to seek for meaning beyond that. But it had always been like a loose thread my mind would pull on, especially as the Lord's Prayer begins, 'hallowed by Thy Name'. Wondering what I was praying with those words would inevitably bring my thoughts to the third Commandment.
The Fox translation, and the notion of not calling on God or referring to God in an empty way, revolutionised my prayer life.
It can be so easy during a church service, when prayer is corporate, to fall into the habit of reciting the prayers rather than praying them, to choose sound over substance. Now I hold myself accountable for whatever I pray. If I call on the Lord, then my intent is communication. And just as if I were addressing anyone directly, I expect God to respond.
So this third Commandment is yet another instruction in how to maintain a close, loving relationship with God. It is very hard to take God for granted or to maintain the pretence that God can be neatly contained when you are being mindful of the way you are using God’s Name.

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The Beginning of Happiness

10/7/2013

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It is now well over 20 years ago since I first became conscious of God's tug on the leading strings of his Law. it began with an awareness that commencing a new relationship after separation and divorce from my husband was untenable, that it would be committing adultery, and that no matter how much I might wish otherwise, the vow of marriage - taken in the name of God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit - could not easily be set aside.
This awareness was so strong that I did not question it. It was more than awareness, it was knowledge. I knew. I knew God did not like the separation from my husband; I knew staying with my husband was impossible; I knew there was a boundary and that to breach that boundary by entering into a new relationship would somehow be a trespass against my own best interests; I knew that whatever I decided was critical to my future. And I knew that the choice I had to make was so self-evident that it was hardly a choice. Without even a murmur of regret, I chose for God.
At that time I was not attending church. Yet without any difficulty, and in the absence of any institutional or familial guidance, I held to the certainty that I was choosing for God.
Far from feeling limited or confined by the consciousness of this new boundary, I felt somehow that I had been liberated into a new space, a vast and exciting terrain in which everything was unfamiliar but to which I had a right to belong. I was no alien here.
It was probably about seven, perhaps nine years later that I knew I was being asked to keep the Commandments - specifically what are generally known as the Ten Commandments, the Ten Words or the Decalogue. By this time I was attending a home church and was regularly reading the Bible with considerable enjoyment if not deep understanding. Not that immersion in the books of what Christians call the Old Testament - or even the Gospels - was encouraged. The home church movement is as much influenced by Pauline theology as the Anglican diocese in which I now worship, with an emphasis on doctrines of grace, faith and belief. But a call is a call, and so I set about finding out what these Commandments were. At that time I could have listed perhaps five or six, but not in the order that they are given in Exodus 20.
I took to the task quite lightly. I remember thinking that at least I didn't covet! How wrong, how very, very wrong I was. I was to discover and face (and heal) some entirely dark and unlikable aspects of myself - while experiencing the most intense joy. Happy is the one indeed . . .

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IT IS WRITTEN
May the words of my mouth, and the meditation of my heart, be acceptable in thy sight, O Lord, my strength, and my redeemer.
Psalm 19:14

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Hi! As you'll gather from my first blog entry, 'The beginning of happiness', God called me to keep the Ten Commandments some years ago. Thank you, God! Here you'll find some musings about the journey. I'd love to hear about your journey with the divine, too. - Lyndal Wilson

Life, Death and the Law

Law as Destiny

Time Lord #2

The Name

The Beginning of Happiness

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