2110AFC030521 – You Shall Not
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Exodus 20:2-3 – 2 I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery; 3 you shall have no other gods besides me.
Leviticus 18:3 – 3 You shall not do as they do in the land of Egypt, where you lived, and you shall not do as they do in the land of Canaan, to which I am bringing you. You shall not follow their statutes.
Joshua 24:15 – 15 Now if you are unwilling to serve the Lord, choose this day whom you will serve, whether the gods your ancestors served in the region beyond the River or the gods of the Amorites in whose land you are living; but as for me and my household, we will serve the Lord.
Aloha nui loa, ʻŌmea! The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with all of you
There was a plaque very similar to this one in the house where my family lived after I moved out of the house in which I grew up . As I recall, it was on the main floor of their multilevel house at the bottom of the stairs going up to the second floor. Our dad was, in his own quiet way, proud of that declaration. It stated his faith simply but eloquently. His attitude was pretty much centered on “you shall.” There were rules in our house about what you could not do, that’s for sure, but there were more rules about what you should do. Later on in my own life I worked it out to “Do what you know is right. Avoid what you know is wrong. Ask God to bless the choice.” That pretty much works out every time I remember it. God has some simple rules, too.
In Jehovah’s dealing with Israel, he started them off with a list of actionable rules that began with “thou shalt not.” There’s a really good reason for that, and we’ll begin by discussing that reason.
We know that God is always Loving and Forgiving (↔ Music Link). How do we know? He told us so, over and over. In these writings I have often mentioned God’s Perfect Integrity. God is ONE. He first conveyed this through Moses. The first and most obvious place to see God’s oneness is in Deuteronomy 6:4. I’m going to put it here with some “added emphasis” so you can see how it is recorded in Scripture.
4 Hear, O Israel: The Lord is our God, the Lord is one.
שְׁמַ֖ע יִשְׂרָאֵ֑ל יְהוָ֥ה אֱלֹהֵ֖ינוּ יְהוָ֥ה ׀ אֶחָֽד ׃
Sh’ma Yisrael Adonai Elohaynu Adonai Echad.
Now, this Perfect Integrity is the authority on which God’s Perfect Justice is based. Justice applies to everything we do and can be understood as the natural consequences of our thoughts, words, and deeds. Justice always gives us what we deserve and those consequences can be pleasant or not. Another core aspect of the effect of Perfect Integrity is God’s Perfect Love. REAL love must be based in Integrity, otherwise it is fickle and unpredictable. God’s Love is REAL Love because it is unchanging and constantly unending. Because his Justice is Perfect and his Love is Everlasting, he offers us Love that reinforces Justice by making it a Gift to us – a Gift called Grace. Through this Gift of Grace, God is also able to bestow on us the Gift of Mercy – and make no mistake about it – Mercy is a remarkable Gift! In the same way that Justice applies natural consequences, Mercy applies Supernatural Consequences, and those are always GOOD consequences. As we said, justice gives us what we deserve. Mercy gives us what we do not deserve – consistently-good consequences. These consistently-good consequences are known to us as Blessings, and if you’ve made time recently to count how many of those you have already, you’ll know that Blessings abound when we are open to the Grace available to us through REAL Love. This Mercy from God is another core aspect of his Perfect Integrity. Like him, it is unique, eternal, integral to him and all he does (therefore integral to all Creation). This Endless Mercy is the enabling factor that brings us Endless Salvation through Christ our Lord. That Endless Salvation has a distinctly Divine Purpose in God’s dealings with his earthlings.
That Divine Purpose is Restoration. “In the beginning” our First Parents were created in the image and likeness of God, and shared his Integrity – they were without sin. Then, we broke that integrity through duplicity – compromise, which is the antithesis of integrity – and lost our original relationship with him through Original Sin. This was caused by a failure to be humble – we stretched out our hand to claim that which we already had – Unity with God – and traded it for separation, humiliation, and death. Humiliation is an affront to pride and a product of shame; shame comes because we know the difference between Good and Evil and chose (and choose) that which is not good. Humility is the only antidote for shame because being humble is an act of worship and a product of Love which leads us to unification God and with each other thus completing the restoration of our original relationship with our Creator. God does this because his Perfect Integrity is expressed for us in his unfailing Kindness – his care for his Creations. Kindness is an attribute of God that he expects us to have and to use. As sinful souls, how are we to know how to be kind and merciful as he requires? Well, Good God that he is, he has given us detailed instructions called the B.I.B.L.E. and in that Operator’s Manual he included an extensive set of Rules. Those Rules are summarized in a tidy little package we call The Ten Commandments. For most of the people who have a least a little familiarity with that package, what is most memorable is “thou shalt not.”
This would be a good spot to pause for a moment and review the Ten Commandments. There are several ways of listing them. There are differences in the order and wording for Catholic and non-Catholic Christians, and those differ from the Jewish listing. We’ll look at just the Christian comparison here.
| 10 Commandments ~ Catholic Christian Version | 10 Commandments ~ Non-Catholic Christian Version |
| 1. You shall not have other gods before Me.
2. You shall not take the Name of the Lord in vain. 3. Remember to keep holy the Lord’s day. 4. Honor your father and your mother. 5. You shall not kill. 6. You shall not commit adultery. 7. You shall not steal. 8. You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor. 9. You shall not covet your neighbor’s wife. 10. You shall not covet your neighbor’s goods. |
1. You shall have no other gods but me.
2. You shall not make unto you any graven images 3. You shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain 4. You shall remember the Sabbath and keep it holy 5. Honor your mother and father 6. You shall not murder 7. You shall not commit adultery 8. You shall not steal 9. You shall not bear false witness 10. You shall not covet anything that belongs to your neighbor |
(For the Jewish summary, please follow this link.)
We have been told repeatedly here and elsewhere that the way to keep these commandments (they are the Ten Commandments, not the Ten Recommendations) is to Love God and neighbor as we love ourselves. That sounds simple, but we all know that its simplicity is what trips us up. Why is it so difficult to Love God and our neighbors? It is difficult because we forget. Being reminded we’ve forgotten is truly humbling, sometimes even humiliating; we resolve to do better, but sooner than we wish – we forget again. Fortunately God is patient. When we ask Him “What more do you want?” He says, “I don’t want more. I want it all.” Yikes! Talk about Amazing Grace!! He wants all our imaginations about what we are, have, and can be, and He will replace that with all we are created to be. That’s a pretty good deal! So why don’t we always accept the terms of that deal? We forget to remember what He put there and displace it with what we put there. We choose to disremember because we decide not “to walk humbly with our God.” (Once again, Micah 6:8 comes to mind). We have an abundance of ways to be reminded, to remember that Love is the Way of God. Here are a few of those reminders.
Colossians 2:8 – 8 See to it that no one takes you captive through philosophy and empty deceit, according to human tradition, according to the elemental spirits of the universe, and not according to Christ.
Romans 8:6-9 – 6 To set the mind on the flesh is death, but to set the mind on the Spirit is life and peace. 7 For this reason the mind that is set on the flesh is hostile to God; it does not submit to God’s law—indeed it cannot, 8 and those who are in the flesh cannot please God. 9 But you are not in the flesh; you are in the Spirit, since the Spirit of God dwells in you. Anyone who does not have the Spirit of Christ does not belong to him.
John 14:15 – 15 If you love me, you will keep my commandments.
1 John 5:3-5 – 3 For the love of God is this, that we obey his commandments. And his commandments are not burdensome, 4 for whatever is born of God conquers the world. And this is the victory that conquers the world, our faith. 5 Who is it that conquers the world but the one who believes that Jesus is the Son of God?
2 John 1:6 – 6 And this is love, that we walk according to his commandments; this is the commandment just as you have heard it from the beginning—you must walk in it.
1 Corinthians 16:13–14 – 13 Keep alert, stand firm in your faith, be courageous, be strong. 14 Let all that you do be done in love.
1 Peter 2:1 – 1 Rid yourselves, therefore, of all malice, and all guile, insincerity, envy, and all slander.
1 Pet. 3:10 – 10 For “Those who desire life and desire to see good days, let them keep their tongues from evil and their lips from speaking deceit.
Deuteronomy 4:2 – 2 You must neither add anything to what I command you nor take away anything from it, but keep the commandments of the Lord your God with which I am charging you.
There are nearly equal numbers of Bible verses that contain “you shall” and “you shall not.” Here are a few passages where Israel was told “you shall:”
Genesis 3:19 By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread until you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken; you are dust, and to dust you shall return.”
Exodus 3:15 – God also said to Moses, “Thus you shall say to the Israelites, ‘The LORD, the God of your ancestors, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, has sent me to you’: This is my name forever, and this my title for all generations.
Exodus 28:30 – In the breastpiece of judgment you shall put the Urim and the Thummim, and they shall be on Aaron’s heart when he goes in before the LORD; thus Aaron shall bear the judgment of the Israelites on his heart before the LORD continually.
Numbers 3:15 – Enroll the Levites by ancestral houses and by clans. You shall enroll every male from a month old and upward.
Deuteronomy 5:1 – Moses convened all Israel, and said to them: Hear, O Israel, the statutes and ordinances that I am addressing to you today; you shall learn them and observe them diligently.
Jeremiah 7:23 – 23 But this command I gave them, “Obey my voice, and I will be your God, and you shall be my people; and walk only in the way that I command you, so that it may be well with you.”
There we have it, Belovéd. The answer is that we must not forget to obey his voice, to know him as our God, to know ourselves as his people, and only to obey his commandments by not forgetting what he put here for us so that we do not replace them with what we put here for him. If we remember to do these things, all will be well with us.
We must not compromise on his Commandments or his Law! There is only ONE God and he has only ONE Law. When we break any part of that Law, we have broken the whole Law, but he still Loves us and redeems us because he does Love us. We must only remember how much he loves (↔ Music Link) us, even to his death.
Whatever, whenever, wherever, whoever, however, if ever, forever —
at your service, Belovéd!
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Unless otherwise indicated, all scripture passages are from the New Revised Standard Version Catholic Edition (NRSVCE) New Revised Standard Version Bible: Catholic Edition, copyright © 1989, 1993 the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
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