Main news for 28 February 2020

For every religious person the question of what is and what is not sin becomes one of the central questions. What criteria can guide one in this case? The Bible offers us commandments and many different interpretations of them.

In essence, all biblical books are in one way or another connected with the question of keeping or breaking the commandments given by God. But one can relate to keeping them in different ways. One can be guided by external criteria, as most believers usually do. In that case much depends on how one understands a given commandment, how one interprets it. What, for example, should or should not be considered murder, theft, debauchery, blasphemy?

The Decalogue already forbids all this. But there have been and are many variants of interpretation of the commandments of the Decalogue. First of all, because all interpreters in one way or another analyzed them from the outside, as if from the side, trying to establish rules and laws given once and for all. The Bible itself refutes such an approach. Already the Old Testament offers us at least two variants of legislation based on the Decalogue. And they do not coincide in everything. In this way the Bible as if tells us: do not seek the only correct and only possible interpretation; it does not exist. The fulfillment of the commandments depends on place and time.

Only God's will is unshakable, those divine intentions that stand behind each of the commandments of the Decalogue. A person's behavior can differ in different situations. Old Testament legislation is only an example of how the commandments can and should be applied in real life. There could be more such examples. And in order not to become confused, God's commandments must become for a person an inner spiritual imperative. What in Gospel times was called the inner Torah.

Its commandments, as Jeremiah said of this, are not carved on stones, but written in a person's heart. Then any situation will be perceived by the person through the prism of this inner Torah. And one will be able to rely on one's heart concerning sin or its absence. If the heart, led by the inner Torah, does not condemn the person, then he can calmly turn to God. Such a person, of course, is also not sinless, but from a pure heart he can say to himself and to God: I have done everything I could to fight my sin.