5 The Lord Your God
When God gave Israel the Commandments on Sinai (Exodus 20:1–17), he introduced them by introducing himself. “God spoke all these words, saying, ‘I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of . . . slavery. You shall . . . ’” (verse 1ff.). What God is and has done determines what his people must be and do. So study of the Decalogue should start by seeing what it tells us about God.
First, he is the God of creation and covenant. The fourth commandment says that he made heaven, earth, sea, “and all that is in them” (verse 11). You and I and everything else exist, then, not independently, but by God’s will and power. With this, the five-times-repeated formula, “the LORD [Yahweh] your God” (verses 2, 5, 7, 10, 12) reveals a covenant commitment.
“The LORD” is “Yahweh” (Jehovah), the proper name by which God wanted the Israelites to know him (see 3:15). It is from the verb “to be.” God’s explanation of it can be rendered, “I am what (or who) I am” or “I will be what I will be” (3:13ff.), but in either case it highlights his self-existence, eternity, and sovereignty. The added words “your God,” how-ever, point to a special relationship for which “covenant” is the regular biblical term.
COVENANT
“Yahweh” is God’s covenant name, and Scripture compares his covenant to the man’s commitment in marriage: a free, deliberate undertaking to love, protect, and provide for the one whom he calls “my wife” and to whom he presents him-self as “your husband.” “Your Maker is your husband” (Isaiah 54:5). There is no richer declaration of God’s love-link with the redeemed than the simple phrase “your God,” along with others equally simple: “God to you” (Genesis 17:7); “I am with you” (Haggai 1:13; so also said Jesus, Matthew 28:20); “God is for us” (Romans 8:31). Prepositions and personal pronouns can say a lot!
Creation and covenant together give God a double claim on our obedience. The claim springs, you might say, from both paternity (fatherhood in the sense of creatorship) and matrimony (the covenant relationship). The Creator’s covenant, which in Old Testament times was for Abraham’s seed through Isaac and Jacob, now embraces all who are Abraham’s seed through Christ by faith. So all we who trust Jesus Christ as our Savior must realize that, according to the covenant that Jesus mediates, God stands pledged to bless us “in Christ with every spiritual blessing” (Ephesians 1:3; cf. Romans 8:32); and obedient faithfulness to him, as our Father through Christ and our Husband in the covenant, must henceforth be the rule of our lives.
LIBERTY
Second, God is redeemer and rewarder. Redeeming means recovering from alien possession, normally by payment (thus, the old-style pawnbroker displayed with his three brass balls the sign “Redemption Office”). The God who redeemed Jews from Egyptian slavery has redeemed Christians from bondage to sin and to Satan at the cost of Calvary. Now it is by keeping his law that the liberty thus secured is to be preserved.
The God who redeemed Jews from Egyptian
slavery hos redeemed Christians from bondag
to sin and to Satan of the cost oj'Calvary.
This was true for Israel at a typical level: God told them that obedience would mean, instead of captivity, long life in “the land which the LORD your God is giving you” (verse 12), as he showed “steadfast love to thousands” of those who loved him and kept his commands (verse 6). But for Israel then, as for Christians now, the deeper truth was this: keeping God’s law brings that deeper freedom (inner contentment) at which the tenth commandment tells us to aim. That is why James called it “the law of liberty” (James 1:25). Law-keeping is that life for which we were fitted by nature, unfitted by sin, and refitted by grace, the life God loves to see and reward; and for that life liberty is the proper name.
JEALOUSY
Third, God is jealous and judges. His jealousy is not a moral flaw, as the word might suggest, but a moral excellence; it is the jealousy of a loyal husband who rightly desires his wife’s exclusive affection. Where God’s love is spurned, his will flouted, and his loyalty betrayed, he can be expected to “visit” as judge (verse 5). God speaks of those whom he thus visits as persons who, in each successive generation, “hate” him, and the verb points to the fact that deep down all who defy God’s rule without being able to forget his reality do wish him dead, or different, and resent with bitter irreverence both his claims and his warnings. Can we wonder, then, or demur when God deals with such folk in retributive judgment?
Do we reckon with God the lawgiver as he really is? “Note then the kindness and the severity of God,” says Paul in Romans 11:22, speaking of the gospel; “severity toward those who have fallen, but God’s kindness to you, provided you continue in his kindness. . . .” Kindness and severity appear together in the Decalogue too, and we shall be wise to heed its witness to both.
FURTHER BIBLE STUDY
Covenant and commandment:
• Deuteronomy 29-30
QUESTIONS FOR THOUGHT AND DISCUSSION
• Why should study of the Decalogue start by examining what it says about God?
• What does marriage teach us about Gods covenant commitment to his people?
• How does keeping Gods law produce liberty?
You shall have no other gods
before me.
EXODUS 20:3