All Sizzle and No Bang? (Exodus 20:17)

Bursts of swirling blue, splatters of crackling gold, and explosions of racing red fill the sky, and then, for the finale, some kid comes out and twirls a sparkler. Is that what we have with this final word from the fire? Has the fire died so that were left with only smoldering embers. No, we may have left the glories of the heavens, but now we are plunged to the depths. These ocean depths can be as mysterious as the starry heavens.

All the other commands, taken on the surface, deal with external obedience, this one goes down to the heart, and thus, acts as commentary on all the Decalogue. Listen to the testimony of M&M&M:

“The tenth commandment is where the Decalogue ends, but it is, in fact, the point at which every breach of the law begins—when by our ‘own evil desire’ we are ‘dragged away and enticed’ (Jas 1:14). —Alec Moyter

“Improper desire is the root of all evil. It can seldom be reached by human legislation, but it is open to the Searcher of hearts. The intent is that which, in the last resort, determines the moral character of the act. This last ‘word’ is, therefore, the interpreting clause of the whole Decalogue (Rom. Vii. 7).” —J.G. Murphy

“It [the tenth commandment] is presented here as the last commandment because it points to the root of all breaches of the covenant as coming from wrong inner disposition.” — John Mackay

You must read all other commands in light of this one. You don’t understand God’s law until you see it as dealing with the heart. All the law is only a sizzling fuse with no bang when read heartlessly. When Jesus says, “You have heard it said, but I say unto you (Matthew 5:21–48),” He isn’t contradicting the law, but the Pharisees heartless reading of the law. His disciples are to display a righteousness superior to that of the Pharisees (Matthew 5:20), a righteousness that is superior, that is true righteousness, because it springs forth from the heart.

God’s love kindles our love. God’s love both ignites and fuels ours. We love because He first loved us (1 John 4:19). Redemption sets the heart right (Deuteronomy 30:6). Redemption replaces a heart of stone with a heart of flesh (Ezekiel 11:19). We come to these words of law through a preface of grace, “I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery (Exodus 20:2 (ESV).” When the redeemed heart hears, “You shall not covet,” it responds, “Whom have I in heaven but you? And there is nothing on earth that I desire besides you (Psalm 73:25 ESV).” When a redeemed heart meets the law of God its like sparks of love meeting a powder keg—from the depths, glory to heaven.

The Apologist: God Isn’t a Romantic Shouting “You Complete Me”

If this were not so, we would have had a God who needed to create in order to love and communicate. In such a case, God would have needed the universe as much as the universe needed God. But God did not need to create; God does not need the universe as the universe needs him. Why? Because we have a full and true Trinity. The Persons of the Trinity communicated with each other, and loved each other, before the creation of the world. —Francis Schaeffer, He is There and He Is Not Silent

Cleveland Is More Potent than Camelot (Exodus 20:16)

Each one of God’s ten words functions like a set of big brackets to bundle families of sin together. Thus anger was a violation of God’s command to not murder (Matthew 5:21–22). The head of each family was listed as a federal head representing all his lesser offspring. Murder heads up hatred, anger, wrath, malice, and cruelty and so on.

Who is the head of the family of lies? Spiritually, it’s Satan of course (John 8:44), but I’m speaking of the sin itself? What form of lies causes the greatest potential physical harm to our neighbor? Legal lies. That’s what is with the odd language of this command. Often this command is summarily cited as “You shall not lie,” and this is entirely justified, because daddy lie here brings all his kids in tow.

But we shouldn’t opt for the shorthand. Memorize and site the full thing. The legal context of the original commandment is best recalled because it speaks of the power of lies and truth. “You shall not spread a false report. You shall not join hands with a wicked man to be a malicious witness. You shall not fall in with the many to do evil, nor shall you bear witness in a lawsuit, siding with the many, so as to pervert justice, nor shall you be partial to a poor man in his lawsuit (Exodus 23:1–3 ESV).” By lies, evil is done and justice is perverted. A false accusation could mean death. Lies ultimately always bring about some form of death. In God, truth and life are linked together. To take the lie, is to reject the One who is life.  Lies run in the opposite direction of life. All human suffering and evil were birthed into this world through a serpent’s lie.

Words are powerful. We serve a God who spoke and there was light. We serve a God of powerful words, and we are made in His image. Our words have immense power. In a passage in Reflections on the Psalms, where C.S. Lewis is making a point that is completely wrong, He says something brilliantly right, “Myth can be truer than historical fact.” As one of Lewis’ disciples put it, “A good adventure story is truer than dull history.” Here’s my point, in the magical tales we see that words have power, but here we’re told, “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can never hurt me.” Bah! Your words, my words, man’s words are much more powerful than that—for good and ill. If Camelot were real and Cleveland the tale, Merlin would blush with envy over the power of our words.

We’ve not only believed a lie, for which we are culpable because we loved the lie, we’ve also spread the lie, a lie about God. For our loving and believing the great lie, for our rejecting the God of all truth in who is life, we are dead in our sins. But in Jesus, truth and life have come for our Redemption. When Jesus says “I am the way, and the truth, and the life,” He is saying that He is truth and life for dead liars. As by believing the lie of Satan we died, so by believing the truth of the Savior we live.

The Apologist: The Mystery of the Trinity Is the Only Source for Answers

Every once in a while in my discussions someone asks how I can believe in the Trinity. My answer is always the same. I would still be an agnostic if there was no Trinity, because there would be no answers. Without the high order of personal unity and diversity as given in the Trinity, there are no answers. —Francis Schaeffer, He Is There and He Is Not Silent

Theft Royal (Exodus 20:15)

God owns everything. It’s all His stuff. This is the basis for human ownership, the only basis. God entrusts man with dominion as a steward. Man is a small “k” king. God takes from Canaan and gives to Israel. The true test of ownership isn’t if you took, but if God gave. If dualism or polytheism is true, then the strongest wins, and so it shall be in creation: might makes right. If atheism is true then the chaos remains. No God, no ultimate ownership, no reference point. Winner take all. If you’re smarter, faster, sneakier, meaner, or tougher, it’s yours. It’s no coincidence that atheism and communism rhyme and travel together, married couples like poetry and gallivant, and these two are definitely wed and in love.

But if God is, then ownership can be. All is His, and He thus has the right to freely distribute and entrust as He will. God is no egalitarian. To some He gives much, to others He gives little, but to every son of Adam He gives lavishly. He makes His sun to rise on the just and the unjust. Hell on earth is short of the hell of hell we deserve.

This means that all theft is sin against God, and all sin against God is theft. All theft is against God because it’s all His stuff. Queen Elizabeth has given certain items to the British Museum on long term loan. Should a thief steal them, he’s not only stolen from the museum, he’s stolen from the Queen. But that is not as high as the crime goes, for a majesty greater than even the British Empire at its height could muster is involved. An infinite majesty is involved in the theft not only of earth’s sovereigns, but also of her peasants. Indeed, God may very well count the penny entrusted to the lowly serf the greater treasure, and thus robbery of that penny as the greater crime.

All sin against God is theft. God is due, and He is due all. Sin incurs a debt you cannot repay. You may be able to repay the human victim. You may even be able to pay the double, quadruple, or quintuple the law specifies, but you can’t repay the debt you owe back to God. Do you carry extra time in your back pocket? God is infinitely worthy of worship now. Should you worship him perfectly now and forever forward, you would only be rendering unto Him what is His due then. Can you reverse time? Do you have some infinity in the bank? Because that is how worthy He is.

Sin is a debt only man is obligated to pay, but only God can pay. Glory be to God, He did. “And you, who were dead in your trespasses and the uncircumcision of your flesh, God made alive together with him, having forgiven us all our trespasses, by canceling the record of debt that stood against us with its legal demands. This he set aside, nailing it to the cross (Colossians 1:13–14 ESV).” Dead men can’t pay back debts, but, because Jesus paid our debts, we can be made alive.

The Apologist: Apologetics a Subset of Evangelism

Thus apologetics, as I see it, should not be separated in any way from evangelism. I wonder if “apologetics” which does not lead people to Christ as Savior, and then on to their living under the Lordship of Christ in the whole of life really is Christian apologetics. —Francis Schaffer, The God Who Is There

“How Far Is too Far?” Is too Far (Exodus 20:14)

It seems the Pharisees were like hormonal teenagers raised in a dead Christendom; they read the law wanting to know how far they could go (Matthew 5:27–30). You could lust, only you mustn’t commit adultery. When one asks the question, “How far is too far?” they’ve already crossed the line. The law makes hard lines, no doubt, but we shouldn’t treat the law like a cow does a barbed wire fence, straining our necks through the lines to get the green grass on the other side. “But my feet and body are still on the other side.”

Think of the law less like a line between and more like a line to: a line leading you unto godliness, a line to express love to God, a line that you want to climb higher up. The law is a line to pursue deeper intimacy. The point isn’t how close you can stay to sin, but how you can grow closer to the Holy one in holiness. The point isn’t to stay an inch away from sin, but to run miles away from sin towards God.

In Proverbs 5 Solomon calls for his sons to flee the forbidden woman. He doesn’t give his sons wisdom for how to knock on her door and stare only at her face. “Keep your way far from her, and do not go near the door of her house (Proverbs 5:8 ESV).” But that alone isn’t the full prescription: “Drink water from your own cistern, flowing water from your own well. Should your springs be scattered abroad, streams of water in the streets? Let them be for yourself alone, and not for strangers with you. Let your fountain be blessed, and rejoice in the wife of your youth, a lovely deer, a graceful doe. Let her breasts fill you at all times with delight; be intoxicated always in her love. Why should you be intoxicated, my son, with a forbidden woman and embrace the bosom of an adulteress (Proverbs 5:15–20 ESV)?”

Enjoying the aged and refined scotch in your cupboard curbs the appeal of the illicit and deadly moonshine. Delighting in the truth that God has given you the best grass is the way not to succumb to Satan’s lie that the grass is greener on the other side. The Puritan Thomas Watson commented, “It is not having a wife, but loving a wife, that makes a man live chastely. He who love his wife, whom Solomon calls his fountain, will not go abroad to drink of muddy, poisoned waters. Pure conjugal love is a gift of God, and comes from heaven; but, like the vestal fire, it must be cherished, that it go not out. He who love not his wife, is the likeliest person to embrace the bosom of a stranger.”

This is a glorious way to fight sexual sin, but it is yet a lesser way. It is a lesser way in that marriage is lesser thing than that which it is a copy of, Christ’s love for His bride. The way to avoid violating the command to not commit adultery, in all that it entails, is for the bride to delight in Her Bridegroom. He is without peer. He is altogether lovely. He is without fault. When we truly see Him, we have eyes for no other. Be intoxicated in the unequalled jealous love of your Savior, and may this overflow into your marriage, and may it keep you from adultery of every sort.

The Apologist: Why the Easiest is the Hardest

We must realize that Christianity is the easiest religion in the world, because it is the only religion in which God the Father and Christ and the Holy Spirit do everything. God is the Creator; we have nothing to do with our existence, or existence of other things. We can shape other things, but we cannot change the fact of existence. We do nothing for our salvation because Christ did it all. We do not have to do anything. In every other religion we have to do something—everything from burning a joss stick to sacrificing our firstborn child to dropping a coin in the collection plate—the whole spectrum. But with Christianity we do not do anything; God has done it all: He has created us and He has sent His Son; His Son died and because the Son is infinite, therefore He bears our total guilt. We do not need to bear our guilt, nor do we even have to merit the merit of Christ. He does it all. So in one way it is the easiest religion in the world.

But now we can turn that over because it is the hardest religion in the world for the same reason. The heart of the rebellion of Satan and man was the desire to be autonomous; and accepting the Christian faith robs us not of our existence, not of our worth (it gives us our worth), but it robs us completely of being autonomous. We did not make ourselves, we are not a product of chance, we are none of these things; we stand there before a Creator plus nothing, we stand before the Savior plus nothing—it is a complete denial of being autonomous. Whether it is conscious or unconscious (and in the most brilliant people it is occasionally conscious), when they see the sufficiency of the answers on their own level, they suddenly are up against their innermost humanness—not humanness as they were created to be human, but human in the bad sense since the Fall. That is the reason that people do not accept the sufficient answers and why they are counted by God as disobedient and guilty when they do not bow. —Francis Schaeffer, The God Who is There

The Blood on our Hands has been Sprinkled on Our Hearts (Exodus 20:13)

Murder isn’t far from any of us. We’ve got blood on our hands.

“You have heard that it was said to those of old, ‘You shall not murder; and whoever murders will be liable to judgment.’ But I say to you that everyone who is angry with his brother will be liable to judgment; whoever insults his brother will be liable to the council; and whoever says, ‘You fool!’ will be liable to the hell of fire (Matthew 5:21–22 ESV).”

“Everyone who hates his brother is a murderer, and you know that no murderer has eternal life abiding in him (1 John 3:15 ESV).”

When Peter preached to the crowds on Pentecost He spoke of “Jesus whom you crucified (Acts 2:26 ESV).” It is highly unlikely that this is the exact crowd that cried out “Crucify Him!” but that cry expressed every rebel sinner’s heart. Later the church would pray, “truly in this city there were gathered together against your holy servant Jesus, whom you anointed, both Herod and Pontius Pilate, along with the Gentiles and the peoples of Israel (Acts 4:27 ESV).” The cross isn’t about ethnic hatred for God’s Messiah, but human hatred.

The first murder was committed by the first son of Adam. As weeds and thorns now find ready root in cursed soil, so anger finds fertile ground in fallen man’s heart to bud in the fruit of murder. Cain slew his brother Abel. God told Abel “The voice of your brother’s blood is crying to me from the ground (Genesis 4:10 ESV).” The blood of the murdered cried out against the murderer.

The cross expresses every son of Adam’s heart towards One more innocent than Abel. But the blood of Christ instead of calling out for our condemnation, speaks for our justification. Hebrews tells us that we have come “to Jesus, the mediator of a new covenant, and to the sprinkled blood that speaks a better word than the blood of Abel (Hebrews 12:24 ESV).” With Jesus, the blood of the murdered cries out for the murderers. We are given life by His death; pardon in His bearing our condemnation. O what horrid sin, O what unfathomable grace: the blood on our hands has been sprinkled on our hearts.

The Apologist: The Glory of the Christian System: The Personal-Infinite God

The Christian system is consistent as no other system that has ever been. It is beautiful beyond words, because it has that quality that no other system completely has—you begin at the beginning, and you can go to the end. It is as simple as that. And every part and portion of the system can be related back to the beginning. Whatever you discuss, to understand it properly, you just go back to the beginning and the whole thing is in its place. The beginning is simply that God exists and that He is the personal-infinite God. Our generation longs for the reality of personality, but it cannot understand it. But Christianity says personality is valid because personality has not just appeared in the universe, but rather is rooted in the personal God who has always been.

All too often, when we are talking to the lost world, we do not begin at the beginning and therefore the world stops listening. Without this emphasis on personality we cannot expect people really to listen, because without this the concept of salvation is suspended in a vacuum.

If we understand this, we understand the meaning of life. The meaning of life does not end with justication, but is seen in the reality that when we accept Christ as our Savior in the true biblical sense, our personal relationship with the personal God is restored. Every place we turn in Christianity we find that we are brought face to face with the wonder of personality—the very opposite of the dilemma and the sorrow of modern man who finds no meaning in personality. Consider the words of Paul, ‘The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Ghost be with you all.’ It is the personal to which we are brought. First of all there is the personal relationship with God Himself—this is the most wonderful, and is not just in Heaven but is substantially real in practice now. When we understand our calling, it is not only true but beautiful—and it should be exciting. It is hard to understand how an orthodox, evangelical, Bible-believing Christian can fall to be excited. The answers in the realm of the intellect should make us overwhelmingly excited. But more than this, we are returned to a personal relationship with the God who is there. If we are unexcited Christians, we should go back and see what is wrong. We are surrounded by a generation that can find ‘no one home’ in the universe. If anything marks our generation, it is this. In contrast to this, as a Christian I know who I am; and I know the personal God who is there. I speak, and He hears. I am not surrounded by mere mass, nor only energy particles, but He is there. And if I have accepted Christ as my Savior, then though it will not be perfect in this life, yet moment by moment, on the basis of the finished work of Christ, this person to person relationship with the God who is there can have reality to me.  —Francis Schaeffer, The God Who is There