The Ten Commandments (literally, "the ten words") are given in Exodus 20:2–17. Beyond these, the Law contains hundreds of other commands dealing with specific situations the Israelites would face in the Promised Land; Jewish tradition counts 613 commandments in all. Together these constitute the Law of God given through Moses.

Forty years later, as the Israelites are about to enter the Promised Land, Moses repeats the Ten in Deuteronomy 5:6–21. The other commands are not repeated there but are referred to in Deuteronomy 5:31.

Then, in Deuteronomy 6:4–9, God sets out the attitude and method He expects His people to follow in order to obey what He has commanded: "Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one." These words were to be on their hearts; they were to teach them diligently to their children, talk of them at home and on the road, when lying down and rising up; bind them on their hands and foreheads; and write them on their doorposts and gates.

The Israelites had to make God the first, central, and total focus of their affection. They had to make His Law their primary consideration, study, and conversation in every waking hour. If they did this, perhaps they could come closer to obeying God's commands.

Friends, when Israel heard this, they should have fallen on their faces and cried out, "Who can obey the Lord?" In the New Testament, when people heard Jesus' Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5–7), they too should have exclaimed, "Who can fulfill these commands?" In both cases, only God — only Jesus — could fulfill them. That was Jesus' mission: "Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets," but to fulfill them (Matthew 5:17). Our salvation rests on Jesus' perfect obedience on our behalf. When He died on the cross there was a great exchange: He took our sins and gave us His righteousness (2 Corinthians 5:21).

That said, we must not discount the principle of the attitude and method God gave His people regarding their affection for Him and their devotion to His Word. God desires that we have a total love for Him and an all-consuming devotion to His Word.

Therefore, as we enter the second month of the new year, I encourage you to persevere in your daily reading of God's Word. And when that practice comes as naturally to you as eating and drinking, I encourage you to give daily time to praise and prayer as well.

If you want to follow my example: I give my mornings to reading God's Word, and my early mornings and late evenings to praise and prayer. I would encourage you to start with minutes and allow the Spirit to extend that time. I think you will discover that as God brings more opportunities your way, He will also move you to spend more time in His Word and in prayer. And as you follow His leading, you will discover that more is accomplished, because God blesses what is done in dependence on Him. That is my testimony.

AI-Expanded Reflection

The Ten Commandments begin not with a command but with a statement of grace: "I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt" (Exodus 20:2). Redemption precedes obligation. Israel was not told to obey in order to be rescued; they were told to obey because they had been rescued. That order is the same in the New Testament, where Paul's letters typically move from what God has done in Christ to how believers should therefore live (e.g., Romans 12:1; Ephesians 4:1).

The comment's point about the impossibility of perfect obedience is exactly Paul's argument in Galatians 3:10–14: the law pronounces a curse on everyone who does not abide by all of it, and Christ redeemed us from that curse by becoming a curse for us. Jesus' own summary of the Law — love God with everything, and love your neighbor as yourself (Matthew 22:37–40) — shows that the commandments were never merely external rules but expressions of love. The comment's practical rhythm of Scripture, praise, and prayer is how that love is cultivated day by day.

"When a man strikes his slave... with a rod and the slave dies," he shall be avenged. But if the slave survives a day or two, he is not to be avenged, "for the slave is his money" (a paraphrase of Exodus 21:20–21).

Looking through a modern lens, it may seem that the Mosaic Law condoned slavery. But seen against the backdrop of its times, the Mosaic Law was remarkably protective of slaves, who usually became slaves through war or economic hardship. If we learn about the times, we gain a clearer perspective and can appreciate how radically the Mosaic Law departed from the prevailing culture.

The older Pulpit Commentary provides a window into those times. In summary, it observes that in most ancient states a slave was the absolute property of the master and could be mistreated, even killed, without any interference from the law. At Athens the law did protect a slave's life, and even moderate mistreatment gave a slave grounds for action; at Rome, by contrast, the master could sell, punish, or put a slave to death at will, and this was closer to the ordinary state of the law in the ancient world. The commentary concludes that the Mosaic legislation greatly improved the condition of slaves in Israel: Hebrew bondservants were placed nearly on a par with hired servants (Leviticus 25:40), and foreign slaves were also protected to a great degree. Under Exodus 21:26–27, masters had to set a slave free for any serious injury — even a lost tooth — which sharply limited brutality. Under 21:20, a slave's life was given nearly the same protection as a free person's: striking a slave to death was punishable like any other homicide. The single exception was when the slave did not die for some days, in which case the master was judged not to have intended death and was considered sufficiently penalized by the loss.

AI-Expanded Reflection

The servitude regulated in Exodus 21 was not the race-based chattel slavery of the modern era, and Christians today universally condemn that system as a grave evil. Israelite bondservice was generally a means of working off debt, limited to six years, with release in the seventh (21:2) and generous provision at release (Deuteronomy 15:12–15). Kidnapping a person to sell them was a capital crime (Exodus 21:16; 1 Timothy 1:10 lists "enslavers" among the lawless), which condemns the transatlantic slave trade at its root. Israel was also commanded not to return an escaped slave to his master (Deuteronomy 23:15–16) — the reverse of ancient practice and of later fugitive-slave laws.

Many interpreters understand these laws as regulating and restraining an existing institution rather than endorsing it, much as Jesus explained the divorce provision: "because of your hardness of heart Moses allowed you," but "from the beginning it was not so" (Matthew 19:8). The trajectory of Scripture runs toward Philemon, where Paul asks a master to receive a runaway slave "no longer as a bondservant but... as a beloved brother" (Philemon 16), and toward Galatians 3:28, where in Christ there is "neither slave nor free." Christians such as William Wilberforce and the abolitionists drew on exactly these texts, and on the creation truth that every person bears God's image (Genesis 1:27), to end the slave trade.

Moses was to set limits around the mountain, warning the people not to go up or touch its edge: "Whoever touches the mountain shall be put to death" (a paraphrase of Exodus 19:12).

Stop and think about what is happening here. God commanded Moses to put to death anyone who even dared to touch the mountain. If you took off, for a moment, the special glasses of faith with which we read all of Scripture, might this seem extreme, ruthless, and arbitrary? It isn't for murder, rape, or molestation. A person would be put to death simply for touching a particular mountain.

If this seems absurd, remember what God commanded Adam in the Garden. He was not to eat from one particular tree, and if he did, he would surely die — and with him, in a sense, every person born after him. Again, this does not seem to rise to the level of the terrible sins we believe warrant the death penalty.

But God commanded it to be so.

Friends, I share this to help us understand that the weightiness of a command from God lies not in the command itself but in the One who issued it. This is what God wants us to understand. I believe the Law is not holy in itself; it is holy by virtue of its relationship to God. God, who alone is holy by nature, made the Law holy, so that violating it warranted severe condemnation.

Remember when the people were at Kadesh-barnea. God commanded them to go up and take Canaan, the Promised Land. They grumbled against Him, and God punished them by refusing to give them the land and sentencing them to forty years in the desert. Then they said they had changed their minds and would obey — but by then God had given them a new command: to wander in the desert for forty years. Presumptuously, they tried to take the land anyway and were beaten back by its inhabitants.

But hadn't God commanded them to take the land in the first place? How could He punish them for doing what He had wanted them to do from the moment they left Egypt? Because God had given them a new command when they hesitated to obey. When they went ahead and tried to take the land anyway, they were not obeying the first command; they were simply disobeying God.

So, friends, it is not the command itself that is most important, but God who issued it. The God who declared some foods unclean later declared all foods clean. The God who gave the Mosaic Law as part of the Old Covenant later replaced it with the law of Christ in the New Covenant. The Bible never says God's Law never changes. It teaches that God never changes. He remains holy, sovereign, and good, unchanging in all His perfections. He does as He pleases.

Let us be careful not to project our own sense of morality onto God. To us, touching a mountain may not seem like a capital offense. To us, eating a certain fruit may not seem like a capital offense. To us, reaching out to steady the ark so it does not fall off a cart may not seem like a capital offense. Yet God treated all these as capital offenses. It is God we must honor and obey.

Why do I emphasize so much that every believer must be an expert in the Word of God? If you do not understand what God has said, how can you be sure you are truly pleasing Him? I believe many pastors and teachers speak naively of the "heart of God" in a way that portrays Him as a benevolent Being who would never send anyone to hell forever. Rather than taking God at His Word, they twist the Scriptures to fit their own conception of Him. They pick and choose what they want to believe and apply. This is both dangerous and wrong.

Friends, take this warning to heart. If you have misunderstood, you will not be able to stand before God at the end of your life and say, "Oops, I guess he was wrong about that. Can I try again?" The answer will certainly be no. You must be sure for yourself and "fully convinced in your own mind" while you live this life. You do yourself a great disservice if you do not search out the matter deeply for yourself.

AI-Expanded Reflection

The boundary around Sinai had a clear purpose in the text: God was about to descend on the mountain "in fire," and the people needed to understand that His holiness is not something to be approached casually (19:18, 21–24). Hebrews later contrasts that scene with the gospel: believers have not come to a blazing fire and darkness and gloom, but to Mount Zion and "to Jesus, the mediator of a new covenant" (Hebrews 12:18–24). The mountain no one could touch finds its answer in a Mediator through whom sinners may draw near.

The comment's argument touches a longstanding theological discussion. Christians broadly agree that God's commands carry authority because they come from Him and that some commands — ceremonial and covenant-specific ones like food laws — were temporary. Many theologians would add a distinction: God's moral commands (such as those against murder, adultery, and false witness) are not arbitrary decrees but expressions of His unchanging character, which is why they remain in force across the covenants, while positive or ceremonial commands can change. Paul himself calls the law "holy, and the commandment holy and righteous and good" (Romans 7:12), grounding its goodness in the God who gave it. The comment's central exhortation — to honor God by knowing and obeying what He has actually said — is shared across these views.

I liken the Ten Commandments to the Bill of Rights. The Ten Commandments summarize the laws God gives Moses, and the following chapters elaborate on what God wants done in particular situations. Can you imagine having to memorize all of these — everything you may and may not do, and what restitution is owed if your animal injures mine?

I understand now why the laws were given to the Hebrews. They were to set the people apart from their pagan neighbors. Until then, the laws the Hebrews followed were man-made, given by men with a man's perspective on what constituted right and wrong. The law given to Moses came from God, with God's eternal perspective — with a full view of the far-reaching consequences of sin against oneself, against one's fellow man, and in view of eternity.

AI-Expanded Reflection

The constitutional analogy works better than it might first appear, and the correspondence is structural: a compact statement of foundational principle followed by case law working out its application to specific circumstances. Exodus 21–23 functions much like statutory elaboration, and ancient Near Eastern legal collections were organized similarly.

The comparison to surrounding law codes is the more interesting question the comment raises. Israel's laws were not the first in the region — the Code of Hammurabi predates them by centuries and covers much of the same ground. What distinguishes the biblical material is less its novelty than its framing: the code arrives embedded in a covenant with a God who has already delivered these people, with obedience grounded in gratitude for a rescue that preceded the law rather than in obedience earning the rescue. The order matters, and it is the same order the New Testament preserves.

I have come across an excellent study of the command against misusing the name of the LORD (Exodus 20:7). Daniel Block argues that the meaning is better conveyed as a command not to bear God's name in vain. On that reading the violation is much broader than usually conceived — including not only using God's name to curse others, but invoking it for any manner of unbiblical cause. The article is in the Online Articles section of this site.

Another article compares the Ten Commandments with the New Testament's restatement and expansion of certain moral principles from them. It helps Christians understand that while we are no longer under the Old Covenant, which includes the Ten Commandments, we are under the law of Christ, which restates many of the moral principles found in the Old Covenant.

Finally, Exodus 21 may trouble some of you with respect to whether the Bible condones slavery, since there are many regulations concerning the buying, selling, owning, and treatment of slaves. I have included an article addressing that question in the same section.

AI-Expanded Reflection

Block's reading is worth the attention it gets here. The Hebrew verb in the third commandment is the ordinary word for lifting or carrying, and the same construction is used of the high priest bearing Israel's names on his shoulders. Read that way, the command governs how a person who belongs to God represents Him — which makes it a commandment about the whole of a life rather than about profanity specifically, and correspondingly harder to keep.

On the slavery question the comment raises but leaves to an external article, a few things are worth stating directly rather than deferred. The institutions regulated in Exodus 21 are not equivalent to the chattel slavery of the transatlantic trade: Hebrew debt-servitude was time-limited to six years with mandated release and provision (Exodus 21:2; Deuteronomy 15:12–15), kidnapping a person to sell was a capital offense (Exodus 21:16), and an escaped slave was not to be returned (Deuteronomy 23:15–16) — the precise opposite of the fugitive slave provisions of American law. That said, the passage also contains provisions modern readers rightly find disturbing, particularly the distinctions drawn between Hebrew and foreign servants, and it is not honest to present the regulations as though they were simply humane by any standard.

The interpretive question this raises is the broader one: whether Scripture regulating an existing institution constitutes endorsing it. Christians have generally answered no, and the abolitionist movement was driven substantially by Christians arguing from Scripture — from the image of God in every person, from Israel's own deliverance out of slavery as the foundational act of the Old Testament, and from Paul's instruction to Philemon to receive Onesimus as a brother rather than a slave. It is also true, and should be said, that slaveholders quoted these same chapters in defense of the practice. That history is a reason for care in how the texts are handled, not a reason to avoid them.

Throughout Galatians and Romans, Paul discusses the Abrahamic covenant extensively, alongside the Law, or Mosaic covenant.

The Abrahamic covenant was unconditional — a covenant of land, descendants, and blessing. That blessing didn't apply to Abraham alone; God says that through Abraham, He'll bless all peoples of the earth (including us). This promise didn't depend on Abraham performing any specific duty — only that he believe, and it's said his faith was credited to him as righteousness, which is why he's known as the father of faith. God tells Abram to leave his country, promising to make him into a great nation, bless him, make his name great, bless those who bless him and curse those who curse him, so that all peoples on earth would be blessed through him (a paraphrase of Genesis 12:1–3). Later, God tells him directly that his offspring would receive this land (a paraphrase of Genesis 12:7), and Genesis 15:6 records that Abram believed the LORD, crediting it to him as righteousness.

Up to this point, Israel had simply been waiting for God to fulfill His promises to Abraham. Now, in this section, a new covenant is established — the Mosaic covenant, different from the Abrahamic because it's conditional, an "if... then" arrangement requiring Israel's full obedience to the coming Law, with blessing dependent on whether they could actually keep it. God tells them that if they fully obey and keep His covenant, they'll be His treasured possession above all nations, a kingdom of priests and a holy nation, even though the whole earth already belongs to Him (a paraphrase of Exodus 19:5–6).

So the question becomes — does this new Mosaic covenant make the Abrahamic covenant obsolete? Is the earlier covenant no longer valid now that a new one is being established? If Israel can't keep the Law God requires, do they lose everything, including the promises made to Abraham? And why would God even give this covenant, knowing in advance Israel wouldn't be able to keep their end of it?

Paul answers this in Galatians — using an illustration from everyday life, that no one can set aside or add to a properly established human covenant, and the same holds true here. The promises were spoken to Abraham and to his "seed" — not "seeds," meaning many people, but "seed," meaning one specific person, Christ. The Law, introduced 430 years later, doesn't set aside the covenant God had already established, or cancel its promise — since if inheritance depended on the Law, it would no longer depend on the promise, though God graciously gave it to Abraham entirely through promise. Why, then, was the Law given at all? It was added because of transgressions, until the promised Seed would come (a paraphrase of Galatians 3:15–19).

In other words, God's covenant with Abraham is everlasting, and the promised "seed" is Jesus Christ Himself — it's through Him that every nation on earth is blessed. From the very beginning, every blessing was always meant to flow through Jesus.

So why establish the Law at all? Because of transgressions — sin — so we'd become conscious of our own sinful nature. No one is declared righteous in God's sight by the Law's works; rather, it's through the Law that we become conscious of sin (a paraphrase of Romans 3:20). Once we recognize our own unrighteousness, we come to truly appreciate who Christ is and what He did for us — there's now no condemnation for those in Christ Jesus, since through Him, the law of the Spirit of life has set us free from the law of sin and death; what the Law was powerless to do, weakened by our flesh, God accomplished by sending His own Son in human likeness as a sin offering, condemning sin in the flesh, so the Law's righteous requirement could be fully met in us, who live not according to the flesh, but according to the Spirit (a paraphrase of Romans 8:1–4).

I truly believe we need to understand what we actually claim to believe — how can we defend our faith without understanding it? Reading the Old Testament might seem irrelevant to us today, but it has everything to do with us. It was through Abraham, who lived two thousand years before Christ, that God promised to bless every people on earth — His plan for our redemption was already fully in place before Christ was even born. Isn't that amazing?

AI-Expanded Reflection

The "seed, not seeds" argument this comment traces from Galatians is a genuinely clever piece of exegesis worth appreciating on its own terms — Paul builds his entire case for Christ being the promise's true fulfillment on a grammatical detail in the original Hebrew text of Genesis, where the singular collective noun for "offspring" could always be understood either individually or collectively, and Paul deliberately reads it individually to make his theological point. Whatever one makes of that specific interpretive move (some scholars debate how much weight the original Hebrew grammar alone can bear), it's a good illustration of how closely Paul reads his own Scriptures — building major doctrinal arguments on details modern readers, working from translation, would likely never notice on their own.

Friends, God tells Moses to relay to Israel that if they obey His voice and keep His covenant, they'll be His treasured possession above all peoples — since the whole earth is already His — serving Him as a kingdom of priests and a holy nation (a paraphrase of Exodus 19:5–6). God reveals Himself here not just as the God of their fathers, but as God of the whole earth — commissioning Israel, through this covenant, to serve as a mediator between God and the world. They'd be His treasured possession, His kingdom of priests, His example of a holy nation to everyone else.

Revelation tells us Jesus has similarly made Christians "a kingdom and priests" through His blood (a paraphrase of Revelation 1:5–6) — as Israel was under the Old Covenant, Christians are under the New. Believers are called to be salt and light, countering the world's moral apathy and spiritual ignorance, so our lives and testimony reveal both God's righteousness and mercy. Let no one say, "I don't know what to do with my life" — whatever else is unclear, this much is: God has called us to be His witnesses to the world through faith in Christ and obedience to His Word — the New Testament equivalent of "obey My voice and keep My covenant."

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Exodus 20 gives us the Ten Commandments, followed by the broader Books of the Law explaining them across various situations. Aspects of the Law existed before Moses, as Genesis shows, but here they're formally codified with clear blessings and consequences attached. Much of the Ten Commandments reappears throughout the New Testament epistles, with the possible exception of the Sabbath — but that overlap shouldn't lead us to think the Law of Moses generally still applies to Christians. In fact, while genuine overlap exists between the Old and New Covenants, none of the Mosaic Law applies directly to Christians today. As Paul writes, dying to what once bound us has released us from the law to serve in the new way of the Spirit rather than the old written code (a paraphrase of Romans 7:6) — and Paul gives personal testimony to exactly this change, describing himself as becoming like one under the law to reach those under the law, though not himself bound by it, since he's under the law of Christ instead (a paraphrase of 1 Corinthians 9:20–21).

Christians are no longer under the Law of Moses, but under the Law of Christ. As Hebrews explains, calling this covenant "new" makes the first one obsolete, and what's obsolete and outdated will soon disappear (a paraphrase of Hebrews 8:13). Christ didn't come to abolish the Law of Moses, but to fulfill it (cf. Matthew 5:17) — and through faith in Him, the Law's requirements are fully met in us (cf. Romans 8:1–4), so that His death could inaugurate this new way of the Spirit.

It pains me that Christians, even Christian leaders, still argue we remain under the Mosaic Law, even the Ten Commandments, as though it were permanently codified for all peoples for all time — even though Moses himself indicates this particular covenant was unique to that generation, not given to their ancestors before them (cf. Deuteronomy 5:3). This misunderstanding persisted even in the early church, until the Jerusalem Council in Acts 15 resolved it — where Peter himself came to recognize it was wrong to place the Mosaic Law's burden on Gentile believers, asking why they'd test God by placing a yoke on Gentiles that neither they nor their ancestors had ever managed to bear (a paraphrase). They reduced the Law's requirements to just a few basic provisions, likely to maintain peace between Jewish and Gentile believers — a matter Paul addresses further in Romans 14. Yet even today, some still try placing that same yoke back on believers' necks, despite Paul's clear teaching that no one should judge us over food, drink, festivals, New Moon celebrations, or Sabbaths, since these were only ever a shadow of what was to come, with the reality found in Christ (a paraphrase of Colossians 2:16–17).

The whole letter to the Galatians was written to counter exactly this mistaken notion that the Mosaic Law remained in effect — Paul writes there even more sharply against those who tried practicing it, asking how, having come to know God, they could possibly turn back to weak and miserable principles, wanting to be enslaved by them all over again, observing special days, months, seasons, and years, leaving him fearful his efforts on their behalf had been wasted (a paraphrase of Galatians 4:9–11).

Remember, the Law of Moses remained technically in effect until Christ's death — which has confused some regarding why Christ Himself obeyed a Law that would later be done away with. The answer is that it was only set aside through His death on the cross. As Paul argues in both Romans and Galatians, covenants can only be broken by death — so it was through Christ's death specifically that the Old Covenant was set aside and the New Covenant established. Through His blood, the law of commandments and ordinances was set aside (cf. Ephesians 2:13–15), the record of debt nailed to the cross (cf. Colossians 2:14).

Some argue only the Law's consequences were removed, not the requirement to obey it — but this creates havoc with the many passages addressing the futility of "observing" the Law's ordinances, and there's no real biblical basis for separating the ordinances from their attached judgments this way. This same arbitrariness leads many to wrongly claim Old Covenant blessing-promises for Christians today — promises of health, prosperity, land restoration, victory over enemies, and more, all tied directly to obedience to the Mosaic Law. Prosperity theologians, and unfortunately some evangelical leaders too, mislead God's people by claiming these promises apply directly to Christians now.

Just as many curses accompany violation of the Mosaic Law — loss of land, poverty, sickness, plague, death by the sword, exile — I rarely hear these preached from the very same pulpits emphasizing the blessings. Let's understand clearly that no part of the Mosaic Law, neither its blessings nor its curses, applies to Christians today. We're under the Law of Christ instead, expounded predominantly throughout the New Testament epistles — something like the New Testament's own parallel to the Old Testament's Books of the Law. I've written more extensively on this topic (in three parts) on my blog, for anyone wanting to dig deeper.

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Friends, if you've read this far, God bless you. One last comment, on Exodus 21:12–14 — notice the distinction made between someone who strikes another intentionally and someone through whom God simply "delivered" a death, unplanned; the former faces death, while the latter is granted a place of refuge (a paraphrase). Later, this distinction becomes "presumptuous" versus "unintentional" sin (cf. Numbers 15:22–31). It's significant that this passage doesn't describe unintentional killing as an "accident," but specifically as something God delivered into someone's hand. In God's sovereignty, there really are no true "accidents" (cf. Isaiah 45:7) — not even a sparrow falls apart from His will (Matthew 10:29). This doesn't mean God directly initiates everything Himself — He may simply permit things to happen. But while both premeditated and unintentional killing may fall within His permissive will, only the former carries human legal accountability under His Law.

That said, notice what this passage does not say — it never calls such an event a "judgment of God for sin." Some preachers have presumptuously classified disasters like Hurricane Katrina or the Haiti earthquake as direct divine judgments for sin. While we can rightly call these "acts of God" in the sense that no human premeditation caused them, we have no genuine biblical warrant for calling them specific judgments against particular sins.

Finally — and I'll expand on this later — the distinction between intentional and unintentional sin matters greatly for understanding the Mosaic sacrificial system. As we'll see, there's no sacrifice available for intentional sin — no burnt offering, for instance, covers premeditated murder; the Law prescribes death instead. That's why it's so significant that David's premeditated murder of Uriah didn't result in his own death — God forgave David's sin entirely apart from what the Law itself provided for, presumably because David genuinely humbled himself before Him (cf. 2 Samuel 12:13; Psalm 51:16–17).

AI-Expanded Reflection

The distinction this comment draws between "acts of God" and specific "judgments for sin" deserves reinforcement, since Jesus Himself addresses exactly this instinct directly — when told about Galileans killed by Pilate and others crushed by a collapsing tower, He explicitly rejects the assumption that their deaths meant they were worse sinners than anyone else, redirecting the question entirely toward everyone's shared need for repentance instead (a paraphrase of Luke 13:1–5). That's a useful biblical corrective for the exact modern impulse this comment names — treating a specific disaster as a specific divine verdict on specific people's sin is precisely the move Jesus refuses to make, even when directly invited to make it.