Diving back into Exodus for the third and final time, we begin with the Ten Commandments. Together with the Apostles’ Creed and the Lord’s Prayer, this passage has a long history of being used to disciple and catechize new believers into the faith. Indeed, the great Reformer Martin Luther said, “Although I’m indeed an old doctor, I never move on from the childish doctrine of the Ten Commandments and the Apostles’ Creed and the Lord’s Prayer. I still daily learn and pray them with my little Hans and my little Lena.”
With much to cover as we attempt to tackle the back half of Exodus this year, you will not find an exposition of each of the Ten Commandments in this sermon. I did such a series back in 2019 (where I also preached through the Apostles’ Creed and Lord’s Prayer). Instead, because the Ten Commandments are a summary of God’s law, we will discuss the purpose of the law for us today as Christians.
A RECAP OF EXODUS 1-19
Before beginning our study through the second half of Exodus, let us take a quick moment to recap the previous nineteen chapters. Although Genesis ended with Joseph’s family settling into the very best of Egypt’s land, Exodus opens by telling us that a new Pharaoh enslaved the people of Israel, and after four hundred years in Egypt, the LORD raised up and sent Moses to the king of Egypt. While this story is quite familiar to most of us, let us take care that we remember it according to what the Bible actually says. The Israelites cried out to God to be delivered from their slavery but never to be taken out of Egypt. Since we know that many worshiped the Egyptian gods, it should not surprise us that they did not actually want to leave Egypt; they just wanted to be freed from their slavery.
Yahweh, however, told Moses from the beginning that He was bringing them completely out of Egypt and into the land that He promised to their ancestors. Even though the LORD always had the intention of bringing the Israelites out of Egypt entirely, He commanded Moses to only request their temporary journey into the wilderness to sacrifice and hold a feast to God. This continued with each of Moses’ speeches to Pharaoh throughout the outpouring of the plagues. His message to Pharaoh is almost always: “Thus says the LORD, ‘Let my people go, that they may serve me’” (Exodus 8:1). He never demands of Pharaoh the permanent exodus of Israel, even though that is exactly what God promised to do. The LORD purposely kept the demand for Pharaoh’s obedience low so that Israel’s exodus would be all the more glorious whenever God used the hard-hearted Pharaoh to accomplish it. And that is precisely what Yahweh did, bringing them out of Egypt as conquerors and drowning Pharaoh and his chariots in the sea.
In chapters 16-18, the LORD brought Israel through the wilderness, testing them along the way. Although we saw the first signs of trouble with this exodus generation as they grumbled and complained, God continued to work His wonders, giving them water from a rock and the bread of angels to eat.
Finally, in chapter 19, Yahweh brought Israel to Sinai (also called Horeb), and before He commanded them to prepare for His descent upon the mountain in glory, which is where the chapter concluded, He gave to them the very heart of the Old Testament. In order to properly understand the Ten Commandments and all of God’s law, we must keep these words in mind:
Thus you shall say to the house of Jacob, and tell the people of Israel: ‘You yourselves have seen what I did to the Egyptians, and how I bore you on eagles’ wings and brought you to myself. Now therefore, if you will indeed obey my voice and keep my covenant, you shall be my treasured possession among all peoples, for all the earth is mine; and you shall be to me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.’ These are the words that you shall speak to the people of Israel.
Exodus 19:3–6
That is the heart of the God’s covenant with Israel. God rescued the Israelites from slavery in order to make them His treasured possession, a kingdom of priest, and a holy nation. They were saved by God so that they could then live as God’s people. But they were also rescued to become a kingdom of priests. Priests, after all, were called to stand as mediators between God and men. The LORD did not lay claim upon the nation of Israel alone but rather the entire earth, and Israel was to be His nation of priests, mediating between Yahweh and all the other nations. Indeed, He chose Israel as a holy nation in order to also make them “a light for the nations, that my salvation may reach to the end of the earth” (Isaiah 49:6).
A SUMMARY OF THE LAW
After declaring His purpose for their deliverance from that very mountain and after three days of consecrating themselves, God now gives to His people the Ten Commandments. Although the LORD gave many more laws and commands to the Israelites, which we will study in the coming weeks, these ten were especially significant, which is testified by God speaking them directly to the people rather than through Moses and by their being etched into stone and kept in the Ark. They received this special treatment because the Ten Commandments serve as a succinct summary of God’s expectations for His people. In many ways, the remainder of the laws served to provide specific application and explanation to these ten.
Notice then how they begin:
And God spoke all these words, saying, “I am the LORD 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.
Of all the wondrous things that we could consider within those first three verses, we should certainly note the pronoun being used. The LORD uses the second person singular, you. The original audience was Israel, God’s people, who were standing around Mount Sinai hearing God speaking to them from the smoke and fire and lightening. Yet in the midst of this great congregation, God spoke directly to each Israelite. The laws were given to the whole nation, but each person bore the responsibility for obeying them.
Yet God did not solely speak to those ancient Israelites. He etched these words into stone to symbolize their permanence and inspired Moses to write them into a book called Exodus. He even repeated them in Deuteronomy. Indeed, God speaks these words to all His people throughout history. They are still very much rules for governing life in the community of God’s people, yet the responsibility of obedience does not fall upon the collective unit but rather each person. If you have ever desired for God to speak a direct message to you, hear now what God says, “You shall have no other gods before me.”
Indeed, whenever we speak about God’s law and about how He expects His people to act, we can turn to the Ten Commandments because they served as a sort of constitution for what life among the community of God’s holy nation was meant to be. The beauty of this vision only requires a moment’s imagination to grasp. Who would not want to live in a community where people served the LORD with all their heart, soul, and might, where they exalted His name instead of their own, where they worked hard for six days but rested in God and one another on the seventh day, where parents and the family unit were held in honor, where life was sacred, where spouses were always faithful in both body and heart, where falsehood was unthinkable, and where everyone rejoiced in the possessions of others as much as they would their own? Such a place would rightly be called heavenly. Indeed, obedience to the Ten Commandments is heavenly because in heaven all submit perfectly to God’s will. On the other hand, the breaking of these laws both leads to hell itself and to a hellish existence here. Sin, after all, is lawlessness, and a lawless society is a dystopic society.
Through obeying God’s law, Israel was meant to display a savor and aroma of heaven to the rest of the nations on earth. The Old Testament narratives, however, is filled with accounts of the Israelites falling into disobedience, of their constant failures to measure up to God’s standard. Indeed, the New Testament writers confirm that such obedience is utterly impossible. No one can fulfill the Ten Commandments perfectly, constantly, and genuinely. As Moses, the giver of the law, died before entering the Promised Land, so too will all perish who attempt to enter eternal life through their own obedience.
What then is the purpose of the Ten Commandments today? Do they serve no other purpose other than to heap condemnation upon our heads as we continue to disobey them? Question 15 of the New City Catechism is of great help here:
Q. Since no one can keep the law, what is its purpose?
A. That we may know the holy nature and will of God, and the sinful nature and disobedience of our hearts; and thus our need of a Savior. The law also teaches and exhorts us to live a life worthy of our Savior.
In the catechism’s answer, we are given three purposes that the law of God serves. First, that we may know the holy nature and will of God. This means that the law has a purpose in teaching us about God. Particularly, it reveals two aspects of God: His nature and His will.
The law reveals God’s nature because His law is a reflection of Himself as the Lawgiver. This is why when preaching through the Ten Commandments I aimed to show how each displayed an attribute of God. For example, the First Commandment’s decree of exclusive worship reflects God’s holiness, that there is none like Him. Likewise, the Second Commandment reflects that God is spirit and must be worshiped in spirit and in truth. God’s faithfulness, graciousness, truthfulness, and sufficiency are reflected by the Seventh, Eighth, Ninth, and Tenth Commandments.
But the law also reveals God’s will. The very nature of the commandments testifies to this. In commanding us not worship anyone or anything else, God is making His will known to us. We do not need to guess or wander into mysticism to know God’s will. God’s law tells us quite plainly what pleases Him and what grieves and angers Him.
The second purpose of God’s law is “that we may know the sinful nature and disobedience of our hearts; and thus our need of a Savior.” This ought to be the most obvious use of God’s law, for even a glance the law should reveal that we fall woefully short of God’s holy will. Indeed, Paul even goes so far as to say in Romans 3:20 that “through the law comes knowledge of sin.” It is God’s law either written in Scripture but also written imperfectly upon each human’s conscience (see Romans 2:15-16) that we are ever able to recognize our sin for what it is. Even with the guilt of our conscience, we very often justify our own sins; thus, we should not be surprised that without the law we would be so steeped in sin that we would have little knowledge that it was sin.
Yet because the guilt of our conscience cries out against us whenever we transgress against God’s law, our need of a Savior is also revealed. Any honest assessment of ourselves against God’s holy standard will find us coming up wholly and completely short. We cannot even keep the First Commandment for an entire day, let alone perfectly since we were born. No, gazing into God’s law reveals that we are entirely unable to save ourselves. Either God must make a way to redeem us or will we be justly damned by Him.
The law’s third purpose reminds us that we do indeed have such a Savior and that the law also teaches and exhorts us to live a life worthy of Him. This purpose seems to be often ignored today as many Christians wrongfully label any diligent pursuit of holiness to be legalism. Yet the Scripture is clear that Christians ought to strive to obey God’s law. Such striving becomes legalism if we attempt to earn God’s favor through it. As Ephesians 2:8-9 makes clear, we are saved by God’s grace, not by any works of our own. However, in verse 10, Paul does tell us that we were “created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them.” Only Christ’s finished work upon the cross saves us, yet He has saved us for the purpose of now walking in obedience to Him.
Indeed, rather than the gospel being an abolition of the law, as many Christians think, the gospel eliminates our debt for breaking God’s law and writes His law upon our hearts, giving to us the freedom to actually choose obedience. Since we no longer have any fear of the condemnation that the law brings, we are free to see the beauty of the law as it reveals the will of our Father. Thus, it is in the law that we discover how to “be imitators of God, as beloved children” (Ephesians 5:1). Indeed, the cry of all followers of Christ ought to be: “Jesus paid it all. All to Him I owe!”
As the people of God, we look upon the Ten Commandments not as abolished but rather fulfilled in Christ. Jesus summarized the essence of God’s commands down to these words: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets” (Matthew 22:37–40). Love God and love others. Obedience to these two commands results in obedience to the entire law of God. Jesus still teaches us to walk in obedience. Indeed, our faith in the work of Jesus does not negate our obedience but emboldens it. Now that we no longer have dread of the law’s consequences, Christ has freed us to see the beauty of obeying. In Him, we now see that God’s commandments are the rules of a loving Father for our joy and flourishment rather than viewing them as the arbitrary confinements of a megalomaniacal God. We see them as the path of wisdom, the road which God Himself has paved for us.
THE TERROR OF THE LAW // VERSES 18-21
Yet Israel’s reaction to God’s ten words was not one of delight but terror:
Now when all the people saw the thunder and the flashes of lightning and the sound of the trumpet and the mountain smoking, the people were afraid and trembled, and they stood far off and said to Moses, “You speak to us, and we will listen; but do not let God speak to us, lest we die.” Moses said to the people, “Do not fear, for God has come to test you, that the fear of him may be before you, that you may not sin.” The people stood far off, while Moses drew near to the thick darkness where God was.
God had come before the Israelites, shrouding His glory in smoke, thunder, lightning, and flames, and He spoke audibly to them. This same God who rescued them from Egypt was speaking directly to them, but this receiving of God’s law was far from a blissful meeting with God. Like Isaiah whenever he was brought into God’s heavenly throne room, fear seized all of Israel. Their sin-stained souls were thrust into the presence of the Holy One, and they were undone. Their creatureliness was unraveling upon being near the Creator. The giving of the law, therefore, was not a scene of serenity in the presence of God; rather, it was moment of terror before the almighty Creator of all things. Philip Ryken notes:
Back in chapter 19 God set limits around the mountain and warned his people not to break through the boundary; otherwise they would be destroyed. By the time he was finished giving his law, those precautions hardly seemed necessary! The people were trembling with fear; they were shaking in their sandals. The Bible says that “they stood far off” (20:18), which implies that they kept well behind the safety perimeter that Moses set around the mountain.[1]
Indeed, notice that they begged for Moses to mediate between them and God. They could not bear God’s direct voice and holy presence. Our text ends with Moses dutifully embracing that function. As the mediator of God’s covenant with Israel, Moses can easily be called the most significant of the Old Testament saints. Indeed, upon his death, the Scriptures say of him:
And there has not arisen a prophet since in Israel like Moses, whom the LORD knew face to face, none like him for all the signs and the wonders that the LORD sent him to do in the land of Egypt, to Pharaoh and to all his servants and to all his land, and for all the mighty power and all the great deeds of terror that Moses did in the sight of all Israel.
Deuteronomy 34:10–12
Even so, both Moses and the covenant that he mediated were not perfect. Moses was just as guilty of sin as the rest of the Israelites, and the covenant at Sinai was a come-but-stay-away covenant. God told His people to come near but not too near. They needed a better mediator and a better covenant. Recall that the author of Hebrews compared Moses to Jesus in 3:1-6, saying,
Therefore, holy brothers, you who share in a heavenly calling, consider Jesus, the apostle and high priest of our confession, who was faithful to him who appointed him, just as Moses also was faithful in all God’s house. For Jesus has been counted worthy of more glory than Moses—as much more glory as the builder of a house has more honor than the house itself. (For every house is built by someone, but the builder of all things is God.) Now Moses was faithful in all God’s house as a servant, to testify to the things that were to be spoken later, but Christ is faithful over God’s house as a son. And we are his house, if indeed we hold fast our confidence and our boasting in our hope.
Moses is by far the greatest prophet of the Old Testament, and Moses’ greatness stems directly from his faithfulness. He was a faithful steward over God’s house, which was Israel. Yet as worthy of honor as Moses was, Jesus is worthy of far more glory and honor. Notice that the author gives two pictures for understanding the superiority of Jesus. First, Jesus is greater than Moses in the same way that the builder of a house is greater than the house itself because without the builder the house would not exist. Moses may have had a foundational role in being used by God in the formation of Israel as a nation, but it was through Jesus that the Father created the cosmos. Second, Moses was faithful as God’s servant, but Jesus was faithful as a son. Again, the point is that as great as Moses was Jesus is far greater.
Indeed, it is Jesus’ deity, alongside His assumed humanity that makes Jesus the only true Mediator between God and man. Without Jesus being truly human and truly God, He could not be our Redeemer. As a man, Jesus was truly human as we were designed to be. Moses left the riches of Egypt to become Israel’s redeemer, but Christ left all the glories of heaven itself! He became like us in every way except for sin, which is to say that He became as we were meant to be. He became the second Adam, yet He resisted the pull of sin that the first Adam fell into. When offered the fruit from Eve, Adam ought to have rejected the temptation, slew the serpent, and then offered himself to die in Eve’s place. As the second Adam, that is precisely what Jesus did for us, His Bride.
Yet Jesus’ death would have been insufficient unless He was also God. How can one man’s physical death cover the eternal spiritual death that was the consequence of sin? Only the infinite One Himself could pay our infinite debt against Him. Since God was sinned against, only God could also redeem. Without both Jesus’ divinity and humanity, He could not be our mediator, yet as the God-man, our Lord has mediated a far greater covenant than what was delivered at Sinai:
But as it is, Christ has obtained a ministry that is as much more excellent than the old as the covenant he mediates is better, since it is enacted on better promises. For if that first covenant had been faultless, there would have been no occasion to look for a second.
For he finds fault with them when he says:
“Behold, the days are coming, declares the Lord,
Hebrews 8:6-12
when I will establish a new covenant with the house of Israel
and with the house of Judah,
not like the covenant that I made with their fathers
on the day when I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt.
For they did not continue in my covenant,
and so I showed no concern for them, declares the Lord.
For this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel
after those days, declares the Lord:
I will put my laws into their minds,
and write them on their hearts,
and I will be their God,
and they shall be my people.
And they shall not teach, each one his neighbor
and each one his brother, saying, ‘Know the Lord,’
for they shall all know me,
from the least of them to the greatest.
For I will be merciful toward their iniquities,
and I will remember their sins no more.”
The problem with Sinai is that it could not deliver upon God’s desire to make Israel into a holy nation and a kingdom of priests. Although God led them like a shepherd out of their slavery in Egypt, the covenant and laws that He delivered at Sinai did not remove the sin from their hearts that kept them in spiritual bondage. As we have said throughout our study of Exodus, God took them out of Egypt, but Egypt had not been taken out of them. That was the fault of the old covenant.
But in the new covenant God’s law would not be etched upon tablets of stone but upon the minds and hearts of God’s people. Because Christ has rescued us once for all from our justly deserved punishment for breaking God’s law, we no longer under the law; rather, the law can now be written within us. We can truly look at the law of God with love rather than fear, knowing that Christ has perfectly fulfilled the law in our place and now upholds us as He summons us to follow after Him. Indeed, the writing of God’s law upon our hearts goes hand-in-hand with Ezekiel 36:26-27’s promise:
And I will give you a new heart, and a new spirit I will put within you. And I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh. And I will put my Spirit within you, and cause you to walk in my statutes and be careful to obey my rules.
As the 1689 wonderfully expresses: “The Spirit of Christ subdues and enables the will of man to do freely and cheerfully all that which the will of God, as revealed in the law, requires to be done.” He will both will and work within us the obedience that He has required.
Under the covenant that Jesus inaugurated by the sacrifice of Himself, our Lord has removed the curse and burden of the law from us. We rest in His obedience rather than our own. Furthermore, He has given to us the Spirit of life that produces His fruit within us, fruit of love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control, which are characteristics that naturally fulfill the law. Again, as Jesus said, the law has not been abolished; it has been fulfilled. Christ has met its demands on our behalf and has given us the Spirit who causes us to long for a life of imaging God, which entails walking according to His commands. Obedience, therefore, is no longer a burden; it is a delight. Through the Spirit’s power, we rejoice in being faithful rather than adulterous because our Father is faithful to the uttermost. We rejoice to be generous rather than thieves because our Father is truly generous. In Christ, we who have been liberated from the curse of the law should look to it and cry out with the psalmist, “O how I love your law!”
B. C. Newton 