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Studying the Ten Commandments reveals the very heart of human rebellion: we don’t like God telling us what we can and cannot do.
And that goes for commandments as well as for boats. The Bible says the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom (Prov. 9:10). The way to find moral instruction is not by listening to your gut but by listening to God. If we want to know right from wrong, if we want to know how to live the good life, if we want to know how to live in a way that blesses our friends and neighbors, we’d be wise to do things God’s way, which means paying careful attention to the Ten Commandments.
Reason 4: Centrality to New Testament Ethics The Ten Commandments are also central to the ethics of the New Testament.
for those who have been forgiven and know Christ, we see in both the Old and New Testaments that the Ten Commandments are foundational for living an obedient life pleasing to God.
But for the right reasons. Working hard to obey the Ten Commandments from the wrong motivation and for the wrong end is a surefire way to live out our relationship with God in the wrong way. God gave the commandments that they might be obeyed—not to earn salvation but because of who we are, who God is in himself, who he is to us, where we are, and what he has done.
The law is an expression of the Lawgiver’s heart and character. We must think about that before we say, “I don’t care for laws,” or before we bristle at the thought of do’s and don’ts. The commandments not only show us what God wants; they show us what God is like. They say something about his honor, his worth, and his majesty. They tell us what matters to God. We can’t disdain the law without disrespecting the Lawgiver.
We need to hear it again: salvation is not the reward for obedience; salvation is the reason for obedience. Jesus does not say, “If you obey my commandments, I will love you.” Instead, he first washes the feet of the disciples and then says, “If you love me, you will keep my commandments” (John 14:15). All of our doing is only because of what he has first done for us.
what set the Israelites apart from the other nations, was that their God demanded to be worshiped alone, as the only God, to the exclusion of all others.
Because there is only one God, who is God over all and has divine rights over all, we can have the subsequent nine commandments—an objective moral code that isn’t just true for some people, in some places, depending upon their circumstances, but is true for all people everywhere.
In other words, the more he studied the history of antiquity, the more Holland wondered if his sense of morality—and that of his friends—really came from Christianity.
We have a moral code because we have a moral Lawgiver. The only reason that the Ten Commandments can have any sort of binding obligation
“I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt” (Ex. 20:2), he is reminding them of the staff, the plagues, and the Red Sea. He’s saying to them, “Why would you trust any other so-called god? Why would you trust yourself? You didn’t escape Egypt by your own ingenuity or because of Pharaoh’s great kindness. I put you on eagles’ wings. I defeated mighty Egypt. You can trust me.”
