Why is the Law of God still important today? Can we learn anything new from it? Join the Sabbath School series going through the Ten Commandments.

<p>Why is the Law of God still important today? Can we learn anything new from it? Join the Sabbath School series going through the Ten Commandments.</p>

<p>Free sharing permitted under the Creative Commons <a rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/us/">BY-NC-ND 3.0 (US)</a> license.</p>

Granite Bay SDA Church

God's Law, Grace, and the Gospel

Luccas Rodor

The First Commandment

Aron Crews

The Second Commandment

This was recorded at the Granite Bay Hilltop SDA Church, located in Granite Bay, California.

Hope you are blessed by the message and that it draws you closer to God.

I'm Pastor Aaron and we are continuing our series on the great law of God, the law of love.

We took a little break last week for the prayer summit.

A lot to live up to, but we were truly blessed last week, but we continue our series breaking down the 10 commandments, the Decalogue.

And I wanna begin by doing a little bit of a refresher for us to make sure we understand what is God's law all about.

It can be summarized in a few different ways, and the easiest way that we could summarize God's law is by saying that it's a law of love.

God's law is a reflection of his very own character.

The first 4 commandments focuses more so on our love relationship with God and the last 6 more so our love relationship with 1 another.

1 of, I think a really helpful quote by a theologian called Millard Erickson, he wrote that the law should not be thought of as something impersonal and foreign to God, but as the expression of God's person, and of course, his will.

He does not command love and forbid murder simply because he decides to do so.

God pronounces love good because he himself is love.

Lying is wrong because God himself cannot lie.

In effect then, the law is something of a transcript of the nature and character of God.

When we relate to it, the law, whether positively or negatively, we are not relating to an impersonal document or set of regulations, but rather to God himself.

We shouldn't think about the law as just a written code, but a reflection of who God is.

Disobeying the law is serious, not because the law, just written rules, has some inherent value or dignity that must be preserved, but because disobeying it is actually an attack on the very nature of God himself.

Thus, legalism, the attitude that the law is to be obeyed for its own sake, is unacceptable.

Rather, the law is to be understood as a means of relating to a personal God.

And I might add, a means of also relating to other personal creatures, other humans made in his image.

The law is a transcript of the character of God, an express written revelation of what love looks like in action.

We were originally made in his image, which we're gonna get into more this morning.

And so the law provides that road map of what it means to be and live and act like him.

For example, all throughout the Bible you have the repeated theme that we are to be like God.

For example, in Leviticus, repeated later in 1 Peter, we have the statement, be holy.

Jesus echoes this in Matthew 5 in the Sermon on the Mount, by saying, be ye therefore perfect, how?

Ephesians chapter 5, verse 1, Paul tells us, therefore be imitators of God as beloved children.

This is sort of the default when a child is born, whether human or otherwise, it looks at its parents and it imitates.

It first learns not by being instructed verbally, but by being instructed visually by what it sees.

Paul also says in 1st Corinthians 11 verse 1, imitate me just as I also imitate Christ.

The law is the is the roadmap, it's the blueprint of how we can be like God.

Not in his position, but in his character.

And that's what the law is all about to direct us to learn how to love.

Now, it's also important to note that the law of God in all of these commands is anchored in to the way that God designed humans to operate way back at the beginning.

Another quotation taken from a theologian says that Hebrew Bible scholarship has recognized for some time that in order to adequately understand the demands of the Decalogue, the 10 Commandments, the 10 Words spoken by God, it is necessary to do so in the context of creational theology, referencing Genesis chapter 1 and 2.

All of the 10 commandments, if I had time to go through all of them, I'm gonna focus on the second 1 here for this presentation.

But if we look through all the 10 Commandments, we can find all of them are rooted in what it means to be made in the image of God, into the way in which God designed humans to operate and flourish all the way back in Genesis 1, chapter 1 and chapter 2.

All right, love is how God constructed and designed the world to operate, and these laws are not arbitrary.

They are what allows for humans to maximize flourishing.

You can break God's laws, we've all done it, but you will inevitably injure yourself and those around you.

Breaking God's law is like pouring water into your gas tank of your car, right?

Gas is a fluid, water's a fluid, let's put orange juice in it, that's a fluid too, right?

It may work for about 5 seconds, and then what's gonna start happening?

Now, your car engine not working after pouring orange juice in the gas tank will probably break down a bit faster than if we go about our lives sinning.

Now, the sins that we do have a cumulative effect to tear down and break down our lives and the lives of those around us.

But we need to think of it that really, anytime you do sin, you are really going completely contrary to the way in which the designer has built the engine, has designed the thing to operate.

Okay, so now coming back to the second commandment.

2 weeks ago, Pastor Luke has covered for us the first commandment, you shall have no other gods before me.'" This commandment, basically, God is asking us to practice exclusivity.

He says, I am the only God that I want you to be in a relationship with, because frankly, God, the creator, is the only true God.

Now there are false gods out there and there are demons who are powerful beings that like to masquerade as God and to procure our worship but ultimately there's only 1 true creator God and God says I want to be in a covenant relationship with you.

The second commandment, many scholars have seen, is really, I mean, all of the 10 commandments are connected, definitely, but the second commandment is certainly, probably even more closely connected to the first than any of the other commandments.

The first commandment says, we need to worship the correct God.

And the second commandment says, we need to worship the correct God correctly Amen We need to know the true God him alone to worship, but then the question arises.

Also, I want us to be thinking about the 10 Commandments like a covenantal marriage.

God says, like many of you in this room are married.

And when you get married, I know I said in my vows, forsaking all others, cleave only unto you.

And in the second commandment, it actually highlights the jealousy of God.

Is it right to be jealous if you are a husband and wife of your spouse?

You should say, hey, I don't want you to be in a relationship with any other person.

I mean, you can have friends, amen, but not in a deep romantic relationship.

Now, all of us who are in a relationship or married know that our spouse has a particular, you could say, love language, right?

The way in which he wants to be worshiped is according to how he specifies in the 10 Commandments.

He wants to be worshiped without the use of graven images.

So let's go ahead and read the second commandment.

You shall not make for yourselves, Exodus 20, verse 4, you shall not make for yourselves a carved image, any likeness of anything that is in heaven above or that is in the earth beneath or that is in the water under the earth.

You shall not bow down to them nor serve them for I, the Lord your God, Here we have the second half of the command is an explanatory clause.

It explains why God doesn't want us to make raven images and Certainly not to bow down and worship them for I the Lord your God am a jealous God Visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children "'to the third and fourth generations "'of those who hate me, "'but showing mercy to thousands.'" Other translations understand it to be thousands of generations, "'to those who love me and keep my commandments.'" So here within this very command itself, God explains why he doesn't want us to be using images in the worship of him.

He says, because these things have a negative consequence, not just on us, but on who?

Our descendants, all the way to the third and to the fourth generation.

So that's what we're gonna be exploring today.

What about image worship is detrimental, not only to ourselves, but also to our prodigy?

In the immediate context of Exodus 20, when God spoke from Mount Sinai, did the Israelites see physically any image of God?

In fact, in Deuteronomy chapter 4, verses 15 through 19, God reminds the Israelites quite a few years later the following, sort of elaborating on the second commandment.

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Series

God's Law, Grace, and the Gospel

The Second Commandment

Transcript

Description

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