The Decalogue: God's Singular Word

Laying the Groundwork for a Forthcoming Series

Laying out some groundwork for our series on the Ten Commandments and the moral life.

Housekeeping Notes

1. Tomorrow is the last day of the subscriber sale, the last one for 2024. If you’re among those who upgrade before midnight tomorrow, you’ll be in a drawing for a free copy of the newly issued Upside Down Kingdom study Bible, which I contributed the notes on violence and war to.

2. For supporting subscribers, our next book club will be on Michael Sandel’s The Things Money Can’t Buy, on September 23rd. Mark it down!

3. School starts in earnest next week for all concerned. May God have mercy on us.

God’s Singular Word: The Decalogue

Before we dive into the content of the Decalogue, how these are numbered, or whether posting them in schools is a fitting action for them, we need to say a bit about what the Decalogue is. We’ll do this by way of negation, which will carve out the room for us to be able to say more soon about what the Decalogue is:

1. The Decalogue Is Not Ten Individual Statements. Known as the “Ten Words” (Ex. 34:28, Deut. 4:13), what we have here are not ten individual commandments with no logical connection to one another. Traditions of numbering the commandments differ, but what binds them all together is that the prologue places all of these words into one cohesive relationship. To be the people of the God who has brought Israel up out of Egypt is to hear these ten words as a summary statement of that life together¹.

2. The Decalogue Does Not Go Away. Much like its status within the Old Testament, it retains guiding status within the New Testament as well. In tests with the Pharisees, Jesus’ names two laws upon which all the Law and Prophets hang, including Deuteronomy 6:5 (just after the first giving of the Decalogue). While not one of the Decalogue, you have to squint really hard to say that it is not in fact related to what just came before it. The whole of the passage Jesus quotes reads:

⁴ Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one.^{[a] 5} Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength. ⁶ These commandments that I give you today are to be on your hearts.

The love of God and the commandments just given are assumed as interrelated, and thus, pious feelings are obviously not what’s in view.

3. The Decalogue Is Not Two Separate Tables. In interpretations of the Decalogue, it’s fairly boilerplate to try to say that one table is for God, and the other is for our lives with neighbors. But this isn’t how the Old Testament works, carving up our lives into distinct spheres with distinct duties². The explicit case: when Jesus engages with the rich young ruler, the man ennumerates the parts of the Decalogue he has kept, while Jesus needles him about the bits he hasn’t kept regarding covetousness. It’s not as if his money-making was somehow at arms length from his devotion in the temple.

4. The Decalogue Is Not Restrictive. Related to point #1, to say that the Decalogue is ten words that are ultimately one word also means that we continue to listen to that one word. This a theological undercurrent: the world exists by the Word, the Word who speaks eternally. It should come as no surprise, then, that the Decalogue continues to expand through the Old Testament, and to include Gentiles in its orbit as well³.

To approach the Decalogue is to enter into the heart of a complex and living relation to God, the One who is encountered but not seen fully⁴. It is to enter into a living mystery. It is staking out a claim about what the world and all that it is within it is about, and inviting us into a cosmic struggle against all that would undo the world. And this should scare us a little.

We have said little about the positive frame, of what the moral life of the Decalogue takes up, but I think this will unfold as we go. For now, I’ll let Brother Tom sing us out.

1. Patrick Miller, who we’ll hear from throughout, convincingly argues that the Decalogue provides the backbone for much of the Old Testament, and that its precepts are elaborated, argued about, and spoken of throughout the rest of the Old Testament. It reverberates throughout the prophets and becomes one of, if not the lodestone.

2. I said we wouldn’t get into interpretation stuff yet, but I’m going to pick an early fight: to have one commandment here is to have them all, and to be the people of God means refusing having spheres of application. Either you take on board a whole life in which idolatry, money, marriage, murder, and virtue are related or not. This will have some radical implications.

3. I want to signal here that the natural law will have something to do with all this. But we’ll get there.

4. This remains true in the New Testament as well: we behold Jesus and through Jesus see God, but this is different than saying that we know what God is, having encountered God.