NOTES for Exo 20:1-17

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.