Think about life in your house right now. The new ‘shiny’ period where quarantine was kind of cool and fun and we all thought that we were going to be super productive has worn off. A new routine has been mostly found. Now think about the squabbles and disagreements that have occurred. Maybe the person on dish duty didn’t run the dishwasher for what feels like the millionth time, somebody stole the chocolate that you were saving for later, and the table that once seemed large enough for everyone to work at is no longer big enough because somebody keeps sprawling all of their papers out everywhere. Or something like that. Now imagine if you were doing quarantine in the desert and it had been almost 40 years since you last had a normal life. No no no, this is not what I think is coming, but it is what happened to the Israelites. They had been wandering the desert for almost 40 years and the squabbles were really kicking up. Not only squabbles but also sin and skirmishes. In Deuteronomy 29, Moses decides that he needed to help the people review what God had commanded them to help bring the people back to a more pleasant state. 

 

Now we aren’t in the exact same spot as the Israelites, but we are stuck at home in close quarters with the same people that we saw yesterday and the day before and the day before that, which can make some people a tad on edge. So because Moses found success in reviewing the Lord’s command with the people many many years ago, I thought we might review some of the Lord’s commands (specifically the Ten Commandments). I’m not going to do all ten in one post because information overload, but I encourage you to really contemplate if you are living life within the bounds of these commands. 

 

Also, I’m really talking to myself here. I am by no means perfect nor do I have all ten commandments down and think they are easy to follow. We all struggle with things in this world. Not everyone struggles with the same thing, but everyone struggles with something. 

 

The first commandment is “You shall have no other gods before me”. At first glance, this seems pretty simple: don’t go bowing down to Zeus. Got it. Easy. Check. Done. But wait! The word for god here is the Hebrew word Elohim which translates roughly to ruler: someone (or something) that rules over us. While we might not have a person who rules over us in place of God, it is very easy to let things rule over us. Are you more concerned about the number of followers you have than how close you follow God? Is it more important to you to level up in a video game than in your knowledge of the Lord? Are you more concerned with what your boss thinks of you than what the Maker of the entire world thinks of you? Think about that for a minute or two. What might be ruling in your life above God?

 

The second commandment is “you shall not make for yourself an image… you shall not bow down to them”. Most people translate this to ‘don’t make any idols’. When I hear the word idol, I think of the golden calf and tend to think “well I don’t have any golden cows or anything like that laying around, so I think I’m good!” But when I really think about it, this commandment is so much more. When God does something miraculous, do I point to Him or do I point to myself? Do I worship the newest pop star more that I worship God? Am I more concerned about how I look than how I convey God to others? 

 

The third commandment is “you shall not misuse the name of the Lord your God”. While this commandment is pretty easy to understand on the surface, if you think about it in a deeper context it really helps clear up why it is so important. Think about this: if every time something bad happened I said “Oh my George Washington”, people would find me quite weird. Why is that? Because George Washington was a nice guy (I think, I’ve actually never met the guy) and he didn’t cause the bad thing. The way that we use a name conveys how we feel about that person. If I say “what the Benjamin Franklin are you doing”, it shows that I don’t really respect Benjamin Franklin (I actually do like the guy, he just made a good example). When we throw God’s name around flippantly, we are degrading the sanctity of it. 

 

Think about these three commandments for the next couple of days. Despite being written many years ago, they still apply today and should still be followed to help us maintain a healthy relationship with the Lord.