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 Playing by the Rules By Clifford Goldstein
“Because,” the child answered, “they let me know when I’m cheating.” The Ten Commandments do the same. They’re the rules of the game, and they show us when we’re doing something wrong, either against ourselves, others, or God. Of course, some plead ignorance to the rules. A few years ago, a Danish newspaper phoned one hundred ministers in the Lutheran State Church of Denmark and asked if they could cite the Ten Commandments. Eighty couldn’t! (Even worse, three of the clergymen violated the ninth commandment by asking their wives to tell the reporters who called that they weren’t at home!) A recent survey of 1,200 Americans aged fifteen to thirty-five found that the vast majority could name only two out of the Ten Commandments—and most weren’t too happy about some of the others when told what they are. Some people who know the rules would rather live without them. The lines Rudyard Kipling gives one of his characters reflects their desire: Ship me somewheres east of Suez where the best is like the worst, Where there aren’t no Ten Commandments An’ a man can raise a thirst. And some who know the rules want to change them. A Silicon Valley industrialist named Orion Kopleman wrote a book, The Second Ten Commandments, in which he argued that “the struggles we now face require a new universal code to help future generations survive in a global and planetary society, freed from individual and uni-cultural survival concerns.” Instead of the Bible’s first commandment, “I am the Lord your God. . . . You shall have no other gods before me,” Kopleman would have, “Maximize your time spend in flow and happiness.” And in place of “You shall not misuse the name of the Lord your God,” the new code would command, “Develop greater self-acceptance by loving yourself unconditionally.” But what about the original Ten Commandments? Why did God give them to us? Are they out of date? Do they need revision? What would happen if we just got rid of them entirely? Undoubtedly, the form in which the Ten Commandments came—two stone tablets handed down three thousand years ago in some barren desert in the Middle East—makes them seem woefully out of date. And the tenth commandment does forbid coveting your neighbor’s ox or donkey! So these commandments often conjure up images of everything from Charlton Heston playing Moses in a grainy old movie to starch-faced Puritan divines in colonial America locking some poor sinner in stocks for “shooting fowle on the Holie Sabbath Day.” Yet however “outdated” this law might seem to some, few advocate abolishing law completely. Whatever wacky revisions are promulgated (one web-site version included the command “to have fun with sex but without upsetting your spouse”), the fact that the law is being promulgated at all shows that human beings understand the need for it. People obviously understand that our lives, property, families—the whole foundation of our existence—would be without protection if human laws didn’t exist. Imagine this Imagine a society without law. What would stop a person stronger than you from taking your house or your spouse or children? Nothing would. In contrast, law allows the government, an entity stronger than your adversary, to protect you, your family, and your property. No society could function without laws of some kind. Now if earthly society must have established law, shouldn’t God, the Creator of the universe, have established law as well? However inconceivable that the sovereign of an earthly nation should suddenly abolish all law, it’s even more inconceivable that the Sovereign of the universe would have no moral law. What would it mean if God didn’t have a law? Here’s an example. Years ago in Borneo, a man who wanted to marry had to bring his prospective father-in-law a dowry of shrunken human heads. This was the local custom, a tradition carried down from generation to generation, one upon which all the people of Borneo agreed. But when the Dutch colonized Borneo, they stopped this practice. Now here’s the question. Who’s to say this well-established custom of the people of Borneo was wrong? What gave the Dutch the right to impose their own moral values on people of another culture? If God didn’t have a law, if He didn’t have a clear universal command about killing, then there would have been no justification for the Dutch to intervene simply because they deemed what the people of Borneo were doing wrong. There would have been no more moral justification for the Dutch to substitute one cultural norm for another than for them to tell the women of Borneo to wear blue garments instead of red. Yet the Dutch were justified in ending that practice. They were justified in doing so because, just as earthly societies have laws that transcend individual desires, so God has a universal law that transcends the distinctive practices, norms, and morals of time, culture, and nationality. The people of Borneo may have had a long, firmly-entrenched tradition of headhunting, but God’s law supersedes that tradition. That law is called the Ten Commandments. And if that law didn’t exist, no one could justifiably assert that stealing, adultery, lying, or head hunting for a dowry were wrong—especially if a majority of folk in a specific culture believed that they weren’t. So, however pure their motives, those who want to revise the Ten Commandments might just as well try to change the law of gravity or the speed of light (which Einstein’s special theory of relativity proves never changes). God’s law isn’t like man’s. It isn’t a subjective, arbitrary code that ebbs and flows with the times. Rather, it is the immutable standard of righteousness revealed by a righteous and holy God who created us as free beings in a moral universe. In a post-modern world full of flux, change, instability, moral ambiguity, and moral relativism, the Ten Commandments remain a transcendent code of right and wrong. They’re an eternal standard unmoved by the vicissitudes of fads, trends, and cultural whims—a standard that’s valid for all people in all times in all lands because all people in all times in all lands exist in God’s universe. It’s been said that life is a game. If that’s true, then the Ten Commandments are the rules. You don’t change the rules in the middle of the game. And when you consider Who wrote the rules and Who is working as referee, you know that this is one game in which—one way or another, sooner or later—cheaters will always get caught. Additional thoughts The New Testament identifies love as the most important of Christian virtues (see 1 Corinthians 13). To some, the Old Testament’s Ten Commandments seem, in contrast, rigid and harsh—and consequently, incompatible with the way of life Jesus introduced. But Jesus Himself linked love with that law. He said that the entire Old Testament (“the Law and the Prophets”) is founded on two commands: Love God with all your being, and love your neighbor as yourself (see Matthew 23:34ff). And, in what must be a reference to Jesus teaching, Paul taught, “The commandments are summed up in this one rule: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself’. . . . Love is the fulfilling of the law” (Romans 13:8-10) Law gives focus and structure to what the Bible means by love—a grace that people otherwise all too easily confuse with lust or with silly grins and warm fuzzies. The Ten Commandments tell us that if we love God, we will have no other gods before Him and that we will not make idols for ourselves. They say that if we love our fellow human beings as God wants us to, we will honor our parents, we won’t kill, and so forth. In other words, the Ten Commandments describe Christian love in terms that are simple and easily understood but broad enough to speak to the questions of daily life in any time and place. Clifford Goldstein is editor of Liberty, a magazine dedicated to the preservation of religious freedom. |
        
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