Main news for 12 April 2025

The Decalogue is known to everyone who has read the Bible even once in life, and many who have never read it know or at least have heard something about the Ten Commandments. It is the only part of the Torah that for the overwhelming majority of Christians today is truly relevant: most Christians today look at Old Testament law, whether civil law or cultic law, as something that has no direct relation to them. This perception is explained in large part by the fact that these laws appear irrelevant to Christians today, first because, as people usually say in such cases, "Christ fulfilled everything for us," and second because the laws we find in the Torah, whether in the book of Exodus, the book of Leviticus, or the book of Deuteronomy, were given by God for another age and today seem completely inapplicable.

Meanwhile, much here depends on how we perceive the Torah as a whole and the Decalogue in particular. The Decalogue is not simply a moral code in which the order of prescriptions and prohibitions has no significance; it is an integral literary composition in which each commandment occupies its own strictly defined place, outside of which it loses, if not all its meaning, then a significant part of it. Indeed, if we look at the first part of the Decalogue, the first five commandments, it is not hard to see that the first commandment is the main one here, not because it forbids paganism, but because it speaks of God, before whom a person stands and who can and must become the center and meaning of that person's life. The other commandments among the first five are given as means for solving this spiritual task. To exclude from life everything that blocks God from view by claiming His place in a person's soul and heart (the second commandment); to make prayer not a formality, but real, full communion with God (the third commandment); to learn to spend time with God (the fourth commandment); finally, to add to communion with God full and respectful communion with neighbors, while avoiding every form of worship of human beings and human traditions (the fifth commandment): this is the path offered by the first part of the Decalogue.

Its second part describes another path, a path leading away from God, a path by which a person spiritually and practically destroys himself, his relationship with God, and his relationship with neighbors. Here, in the second set of five commandments, the fifth is the main one, or the tenth if we take the whole Decalogue together: it forbids envy, forbids desiring "your neighbor's house," desiring his world, his spiritual space, which God gives him and from which the envious person wants to push him out. The violation of each following commandment, leading to lying and slander, theft, sexual immorality, and finally murder, is only the logic of this displacement carried through to the end.

Thus the Decalogue already marks out two paths: the path of life and the path of death, between which a person must make his choice. And the whole Torah also places a person before this choice, because one must choose not "in principle" and not "in general," but in concrete situations; and the laws we find in the Old Testament books describe the typical situations in which each of us, one way or another, finds himself in life. Understood in this way, the Torah can become for us, in the words of the apostle Paul, a "guardian leading us to Christ," to whom we think we have come and no longer need guides, but after whom we will have to keep reaching and whom we will have to keep catching up to until His return in glory.

The famous Ten Commandments, which became the symbol and foundation of Jewish and Christian ethics, actually serve as an introduction to a large body of laws and rules for life. Most of them are laws of social, clan, and family law, regulating relations between people at every level. It is entirely natural to call this biblical ethics, since the conduct of a member of God's people must be based on these rules.

But what is unusual and uncharacteristic of other peoples and cultures is that "human ethics" here is intertwined with ethics toward God. These are not ritual instructions, not lofty words about God, but precisely instructions about how to relate to God. He is the first subject and object of this ethics.

Therefore first look at God's faithfulness, then be faithful to God yourself, and then apply this faithfulness, for example, to your parents and to your wife. First remember how God delivered your people from slavery, and then do not create that slavery and oppression yourself: do not kill, do not steal, do not claim what belongs to another. Religion here becomes not simply the "ideological basis" of ethics, but its key, source, and model.

"You shall have no other gods besides Me" - what does this mean? And is it easy to avoid paganism for us, living in a country that presents itself partly as Orthodox, partly as Islamic, but certainly not as pagan? At first glance, everything is simple. Pagan cults like those that filled the ancient world and still permeate the life of some pagan countries are exotic for our country. Therefore, it would seem, there is no problem.

There probably really would be no problem if pagan worship necessarily required outward expression. But it, like every kind of worship, is born first of all in the soul, not in the stone, wood, or metal from which images of pagan gods are made. And the soul does not tolerate emptiness: abstaining from participation in pagan religious rites and ceremonies is not enough. An empty soul will still find an object of worship for itself, and that object will become its god. The only way to avoid this is to fill the soul, not with theology, morality, or even religion, but with that direct and immediate communion with God for which God intended it. Only then will there be no place for paganism in our life.