Grace and Law VIII: Approaching the First Table

Welcome to the Whole Council Podcast. I'm Jon Snyder. And with me again is Steve Crampton. And we are in, you can see, a different location because the air conditioner in our office died.

And so while we're trying to get that fixed, we've had to move. And so this is actually the sanctuary of the church.

We're looking at the law and the gospel and the interplay of those great realities in the life of a

Christian. And we've been doing that for some time. So Steve, why don't you kind of bring us up to speed? Sure.

Very quickly. We're using the law and the gospel by Ernie Reisinger. And what we've done to date, it's taken us several episodes, but we've taken it from Adam's day and how the moral law was written on the heart.

We've seen that between Adam and Mount Sinai, the law has been applied and the

Israelites knew there was never a question whether the law was in fact in existence and whether it applied to them.

And so we've kind of covered a lot of that ground kind of slowly to get to, as it were, Mount Sinai today.

And now we're going to dig right in to the moral law as written by the finger of God himself.

Yeah. So let us read the Ten Commandments and then we're going to talk about how do we approach those.

Does the Bible itself as a whole give us hints on how to come up to the

Ten Commandments? And are these hints a significant help in how we apply those to our lives?

Well, here is one of the places that the Ten Commandments shows up. It's in the book of Exodus chapter 20, beginning in the first verse and then going down through verse 17.

Then God spoke all these words saying, I am the Lord, your God, who brought you out from the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery.

You shall have no other gods before me. You shall not make for yourself an idol or any likeness of what is in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the water around under the earth.

You shall not worship them or serve them. For I, the Lord, your God, am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children, on the third and fourth generations of those who hate me, but showing loving kindness to thousands to those who love me and keep my commandments.

You shall not take the name of the Lord, your God, in vain. For the

Lord will not leave him unpunished who takes his name in vain. Remember the

Sabbath day to keep it holy. Six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is a

Sabbath of the Lord, your God. In it you shall not do any work, you or your son or your daughter, your male or your female servant or your cattle or your sojourner who stays with you.

For in six days the Lord made the heavens and the earth, the sea and all that is in them and rested on the seventh day.

Therefore, the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy. Honor your father and your mother that your days may be prolonged in the land which the

Lord, your God, gives you. You shall not murder. You shall not commit adultery. You shall not steal.

You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor. You shall not covet your neighbor's house.

You shall not covet your neighbor's wife or his male servant or his female servant or his ox or his donkey or anything that belongs to your neighbor.

So ten commandments, most of us are familiar with them, even if we can't quote them, and we want to see how we approach them.

And so what we're really talking about in one sense, we hope that this episode and the next will kind of have a dual benefit for those of you that haven't considered this, because we're going to be looking at two great things at once.

One is, how does the Bible expect us to approach the Bible so as to come to the right interpretation?

While there are many good applications of a passage, there is only one correct interpretation.

And we want to know what tools God has given us from the scripture, from the examples of the writers themselves, these tools by which we come at a passage and we have a clear way of trying to understand what it meant in its original context and therefore how do we bridge from there to where we're at and apply it to today.

And that process, that science is called hermeneutics. It's a strange word for us.

We don't use that word in normal life. But hermeneutics, we could kind of simplify it by saying it's the set of rules by which you interpret an ancient passage.

And so obviously it would apply to other literature, but the scripture is what we're talking about.

So we hope to kind of practice a good hermeneutic. We hope to practice careful, you know, to use carefully the tools that God has given us for interpreting scripture.

That's one benefit I hope that we receive from looking at this. How do we approach it?

But second, we're going to be looking at the Ten Commandments themselves and hopefully that will be a benefit as well.

Well, Steve, while Reisinger gives us a number of these, we've thrown in a few of our own and we're going to walk through them.

And I think we have 10 of them. So we hope to be able to get through the first five today.

Why don't you start us off? Sure. Number one is a phrase that many may have encountered before in interpreting scripture, which is context is king.

And what we mean by that in this case, applied as it were to the Ten Commandments is look at where they appear in scripture.

As we've discussed in previous episodes, of course, we've seen that that law is in existence and fully applicable before God ever reduces them to writing and to this form that they appear in the

Ten Commandments. But second is with respect to where the people themselves find themselves.

They are no longer in bondage in Egypt. In fact, that prologue, which is often skipped over, becomes so significant because when he says,

I am, first of all, the Lord, thy God, he is the only God, but who brought thee out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage, they've already experienced deliverance.

So we can deduce from that simple context, the fact that the law is, is not now and never has been a ladder by which one can climb up to God, earning salvation in any way, really contributing to his own good standing with God.

So just right out of the box, as it were, we have this context and we have to keep that in mind as we move forward.

I think there's that constant temptation that all of us probably are prone to at some point to go back to thinking, maybe

I didn't earn my, my salvation initially, but I feel distance from God.

And if I can do some good deeds, I will feel closer and earn my way back to him.

Yeah, the temptation to think that the Ten Commandments are given, almost as if they were given in Egypt, you know, and, and, you know, almost, we know that the

Bible doesn't say this, but it's, you know, you, you kind of feel that the law is something that should have been given in Egypt.

And Moses could have said to the people, God is going to rescue you if, and here are 10 things you have to do.

Now, if you can do all 10, if you can do them well enough, if enough of you can do them well enough, then

God is willing to become your God. Instead of the very opposite, that because God is your

God, because he's the one that rescued you out of slavery to live with him, you need to understand what kind of a

God he is. And here's the moral law. This is what God loves, what he hates. This is how we walk with him.

And by the way, and he's chosen them and chosen to set his love upon them. Again, wholly apart from any action, any good deeds on their part, right?

Yeah. Yeah. I remember doing, when I was working, working on the PhD in Wales, I was covering a, so the

PhD covered the Welsh side of the evangelical awakening or the great awakening in the 18th century.

And I was trying to show that some of the more modern historians.

Now, when I say modern, I'm thinking 1950s and forward. So some of the more modern historians of that movement, because they no longer understood the doctrines that those men held, these men were religious.

They were in the same denomination. They were denominational historians, but they were liberal. They had lost the gospel really that, that those

Welshmen held. So when they wrote their histories, not understanding the great truths that those men understood, they misinterpreted the whole movement.

There's a reason I'm mentioning this. One man who was a really great brain, great historian, very influential man in Welsh history, wrote and said that the, that the early

Welsh Calvinistic Methodist in that revival believed that if you progressed enough in sanctification, if you kept the law enough, if you became a better and better and better kind of person using religion, the goal was in the end,

God would reward you with the new birth, which was completely opposite of what they, they taught that the new birth came first.

And it was an act of complete grace, the purest form of a gift. And what flowed from it was a wonderful, serious embrace of God's moral purity, his law.

If we were to say it theologically, we would say this, never does sanctification precede justification, but those that God justifies, those that God brings out of a spiritual

Egypt, he gives his law and they gladly embrace that for love of their

King. So the context is really important. And even in the old Testament, we're amazed to see that the law was a gracious gift, not a gift that earned.

Well, the second basic rule we have other than context is what we call progressive revelation.

And you may not have thought of this, but it is really a significant reality in scripture.

And it, it is how you understand that greatly affects how you interpret the

Bible, how you understand the distinctions between old and new Testament and how you understand the connections between old and new

Testament. And there is about as wide a variety of answers to that question as possible.

You know, we have some that it's almost as if they have no old and new Testament. It's just, you know, one

Bible and there is no distinction between old and new covenant at all. And, and we, we feel that that's probably not a very healthy approach.

Then there's others that it's, it's like, there is no old Testament at all. The new Testament is the only thing important.

Old Testament just has some stories for Sunday school class, but if you want to really know God and the doctrines that God gives us for the

Christian, you don't need the old Testament. It's just new. And so in a sense, they, they divide the

Bible. So, so harshly that you have two Bibles or only the new

Testament, and that's wrong. So how do we understand that progressive revelation? Progressive revelation is the teaching that from Genesis to revelation,

God has been revealing great truths that we need to believe and to live correctly.

And, but it's like a person kind of opening a door. And so in Genesis, the doors open a little, you know, but by the time you reach

Malachi, it's open more. And by the time the gospels and the epistles and revelation, then the door is wide open.

So there's a progressive, there's a, there's an ever clearer unveiling of the same truths.

May I interject? Yeah, go ahead. Okay. There are some, I think a great many in our land today that would say, well, we can agree in large part with the way you lay it out there, but we see distinct dispensations whereby you almost change in ages, if you will, and you have pretty dramatic change.

It's not such a gradual progression. It is kind of leaps and bounds, and then you're in a whole new dispensation.

What do you say to that? Well, dispensationalism, that approach to interpreting the scripture by like what you said, by, by these very clear cut dispensations.

There are a lot of varieties within there. There are those that would hold a pretty mild version of dispensationalism where they recognize that there seems to be some distinct differences in God's unfolding of his redemptive plan.

And, you know, and so with, with those that hold that view, we would have a lot in common. Then there is kind of a classic, you know, dispensationalism that's really very

Scofield Bible kind of dispensationalism where there are clear, cut, distinct dispensations.

And the real problem with that, there are a lot of problems, but the, but the,

I would say the most dangerous problem with that is that you ultimately come to view that God saves men differently in different dispensations.

So we have the, the pre -law dispensation. Well, how were people saved?

Well, they were saved this way, but then when the law came, you were saved by keeping 10 specific commands.

And then, but then when Jesus came and well, but when the Sermon on the Mount was given, that was just for Jews and that doesn't apply to us.

And then after the sending of the spirit at Pentecost, well, then we're in the church age. And so it's very different again.

So ultimately you have different ways that God is saving. And one problem of course, there is, it does present the idea that, that God can save in any way he wants and that it's kind of arbitrary.

So instead of the, the life, the perfect obedience and the sacrificial death of Christ as the only way for a holy and just God to also be the justifier of those who broke his law without the law being dishonored, without the judge lowering his standards.

Instead, you have these other ways. Well, but in this dispensation, they could, you know, they could do their best or in this.

So there's a lot of problems with those. The other option on the other side of the scale would be covenantal views of the

Bible. And again, there are different views of that, but Baptists have historically been covenantal theologians.

We're not very good at it. Presbyterians and, you know, Dutch reform that they tend to be better than us. But so covenantal theology looks at, which

I think is a much more biblical grid, looks at how God has dealt with his people through covenant and through a covenant head or mediator.

And we see that argue throughout the Bible, especially when we hit Romans five, where basically

Paul says, you can either be in Adam, the representative of humanity, or you can be in this, the final

Adam Christ, the representative of God's people. And if you are under Adam, then you are treated in light of Adam's choices as a sinner, as one in the camp of God's enemies.

If you are in Christ, even though you have sinned or do sin, you are treated in light of Christ's actions and you are justified and you are washed and you are brought into the family.

So two very different ways of understanding the unfolding. When we think of progressive revelation, think of pictures of Christ in the

Old Testament. So Isaiah 53, that wonderful final servant song where Isaiah describes, it's the pinnacle of his kind of an unfolding of an argument in 42, 49, 50, and then finally 53.

In those chapters, he gives us four pictures of Christ. And chapter 53, of course, is the pinnacle that the great servant will come, but he will accomplish all that the father gave him to do by dying, by being crushed by the father on behalf of his people's sins.

So when you read Isaiah 53 from the perspective of the New Testament, it's so clear.

But if you had a Bible that stopped with Isaiah 53, there was no chapter 54, no

New Testament. You could know a lot, but you cannot know nearly as much as a child today can know reading the account of Christ's life.

So we have the entire Bible and we, as we see the door thrown wide open on the cross, by the time we reach revelation, we use that full understanding to go back and understand what was

Isaiah talking about. And we see that in the writers of the New Testament. Sure. And from that perspective, it seems to me, it is absolutely supernatural to be able to look back in the

Old Testament and see that unity of the message again and again. And as you're describing

Isaiah 53, I'm thinking of the Ethiopian eunuch, you know, whose eyes are opened right there on the road and it becomes so clear to him.

So yeah, progressive revelation makes a whole lot of sense. Yeah. Now let's apply it to the law.

When Moses spoke these things, when he brought the tablets down, the people understood enough.

They understood what God meant for them to understand. But we have centuries that followed that where the prophets said more about the law, where the

New Testament, where Christ explained the law, where the apostles who are writing to Gentiles and Jews together who have now embraced the

Messiah and their eyes are open and their heart on their heart is written a love for God's rule, a love for God's law.

And you find Paul and James and John and Peter, you find them explaining the law in a much fuller way than Moses could ever have explained it.

And so when we read the Ten Commandments, one of the fundamental principles is you need to read the

Ten Commandments in light of the entire Bible. That's not a dishonest thing. It is what the

Bible expects you to do. And we know that because it's what the New Testament writers did when they talked to the people.

So for example, they say things like the law is a tutor that leads you to Christ. Well, Moses didn't say that.

Right. But later Paul says that. And because it's God giving of ever fuller, ever, ever more clear picture of this truth about law, we read what

Paul says. And then we go back and read the Ten Commandments and we say, I see it. Those Ten Commandments, which

I do not keep, point me to the need of a savior. Another thing, you know, when we read the moral commands in the

New Testament letters, how often do we see the morality of the

Ten Commandments reapplied over and over to the you could ask it negatively.

Do we ever see the apostles counseling men and women who say that they belong to Christ to do things that go against the

Ten Commandments? Not once. Right. So when we look at that, it helps us to understand.

So how did they apply it in a New Testament church? And that helps me to know how I'm to approach the

Ten Commandments. Yeah. So the third principle is these commands demand both outward and inward obedience.

And there's another example, it seems to me, that we have that benefit of the

New Testament lens. We have the benefit of Christ himself, the law giver, explaining the law and explaining to us, for instance, that thou shalt not murder doesn't mean only that you won't pick up a sword and take the life of another, but you must not even hate inwardly.

Right. And you have that in sort of inceptive or, you know, seed form in the

Tenth Commandment, as Paul famously said in Romans seven, I didn't know that coveting itself, you know, applied that that was that inward side that applied to all the other commandments.

The law, he tells us, is spiritual. And again, how often I've read through that and just go, yeah, yeah, whatever.

But when you look at the Ten Commandments in their very bare bones, summary fashion, through the lens of the recognition that they do apply inwardly as well as outwardly, it changes everything.

Right. And so we are now in a position where you can't be like the

Pharisee and please God by simply complying with the outward form, no matter how well you do it.

And of course, you're not going to do it perfectly, but neither can you set aside the outward and say, well, in my heart,

I love God. And so I don't have to really follow the letter of those commandments. They're really kind of hindering my style here.

It is both. And we are far from God if we try to separate those two.

Yeah. And of course, Sermon on the Mount is probably the clearest example where Christ, the law giver, the king himself on earth, explaining his own law, the nature of the law.

So really very clear. We don't want to be like the Pharisee, a cup that is really scrubbed clean on the outside.

But if you were to try to take a drink from it, you see at the bottom, there's this there's filth in the cup. You know, there's a tomb whitewashed.

So beautiful. But inside is the rotting, decaying body of the deceased.

That's not the kind of religion that Christ brings. Well, that's the third principle.

A fourth principle. The commands in the Ten Commandments are summaries of God's moral demands of humanity.

So not only is that is the list of commands are these ten commands. Not only are they moral laws and not ceremonial or civil that would pass away, they are moral laws that are summaries.

Let me read you what an old Baptist catechism, which was written by Keech.

And we use this for our in our church. And with just a couple of updated words,

Spurgeon used it basically, you know, it represents the Puritan view. This is what we this is what the catechism says.

And I want to talk about this because of a personal anecdote. The 47th question in Keech's catechism says this.

Where is the moral law summarily comprehended? All right.

Summarized and comprehended. Where is it kind of stated in a nutshell?

Yeah. All right. We didn't by the way, we didn't say where is it stated in a nutshell, you know, so we kind of stuck close to this.

Where is it summarily comprehended? And the answer is this. The moral law is summarily comprehended in the Ten Commandments.

Now that's fundamental because from that point forward in Keech's catechism, he says things as did all the other

Puritans that I, when I read it for the first time just a few years ago, one of the elders was saying, you know, we need to look at this catechism and make sure that we agree with it before we recommend it to the church.

And I thought, well, it's a Puritan catechism. Of course, we're going to agree with it. I mean, it's Baptistic and Puritan. So what could be wrong with it?

I mean, my PhD had to do with the Puritan theology. And so I thought

I was, you know, it was a no brainer. So to my great astonishment, when

I read what Keech said, I totally disagreed. And I was really upset.

And not only was I upset, I was confused. I thought, come on now, you know, I've read a lot of Puritans academically and devotionally, and I never noticed this before.

And I don't understand why they are so wrong, because I normally think they're so right.

So let me give you an example. Here's how he approaches each commandment.

So let's take the first commandment. What is the first commandment? Okay, so that's an easy question for the catechism.

The first commandment is you shall have no other gods before me. Part two, what is required in the first commandment?

Now, here's what I thought. Well, it's kind of a no brainer. You said it. You're not allowed to have any other gods for him.

So no, no, no idols. Listen to what he said. The first commandment requires us to know and acknowledge

God to be the only true God, our God, and to worship and glorify him accordingly.

And I, you know, kind of did one of these, shake my Bible, like did the new

American Standard leave out some Hebrew phrases? And, you know, is somebody going to say to me, well, the

Hebrew word there actually means no. And I thought, well, that's not what the Bible says.

Those are great things, but that's not what the Ten Commandments says. Then he goes on, part three of each command is what is forbidden in the first commandment.

The first commandment forbids the denying or not worshiping and glorifying of the true God as God and our

God and the giving of that worship and glory to another, which is due to God alone.

So in each of the commands in the catechism, the approach was this.

What does the Bible actually say? Okay. What's the command? What's required in that and what's forbidden.

But if you look at the commands, you know, they're negatives. Don't murder.

Don't bear false witness. Don't commit adultery. Don't have any other gods before him. So I, when

I read that, I really got upset and I said, we can't give this to the church because that's not what the Bible says.

And I don't care what Puritan said it. And then I went back and thought a little bit more about what Keech and the other

Puritan said. The Ten Commandments are where the moral law of God is summarily comprehended.

That is the Ten Commandments. We're not just 10 kind of, I guess

I must've thought of them as just 10 really important ones. You know, they, they are kind of 10 categorical, moral categories where you are given a statement that sums up much more than just what's stated in those words.

So there's much more implied. So here we have a principle, but inside that principle, there are hundreds of applications depending on your circumstances.

So where do, and, and by the way, I think Keech was right. I think that they're right. That the

Ten Commandments are a summary in which we find comprehended or encapsulated in these 10 short statements.

We find a very portable summary of God's moral expectations that really touches on every area of life with 10 short statements.

Very easy to carry with you. Now, where do we get that?

Or do we say, well, because the Puritan said it, that means it's right. Well, no. And Steve and I were talking about this before, before the episode there, there are two fundamental places that we feel that this shows up.

First is the context. If you follow on in your reading after Exodus 20 and in through Leviticus, while we do find a lot of civil laws, and which really are applications of these, and we find a lot of ceremonial laws that speak, you know, about things that are not quite, so they're not applications of these, so to speak, you know, which bird you're allowed to sacrifice and in what order and which parts of the animal are burnt and which are boiled.

And well, that's not in the Ten Commandments. That's a ceremonial law. But what we do find is we find hundreds of very specific explanations of moral situations and what pleases

God and what doesn't please God. So, for example, if you see a neighbor's donkey in a ditch, you are to help that neighbor or you are to get that donkey out of the ditch.

Now, you might say, well, I didn't push the donkey in the ditch. It's not my fault. I had nothing to do.

Right. So I didn't destroy his property. If you hear a neighbor being talked against and, you know, being defamed and, you know, you know, being run down, and it's not true, you know, libel, slander.

And you say, well, I didn't say it. Yes, you didn't say it. So I didn't bear false witness.

I didn't lie. But is that all that the Bible requires? When you read the chapters that follow, the context of the

Ten Commandments is that there are hundreds of applications that are found in seed form in the

Ten Commandments. And many of them are positive, not just don't do bad things, but do good things.

And from a lawyer's perspective, right, when we are faced with a criminal charge, the first place we go is to look at the text of the law and say, wait a minute, if what my client did wasn't within the four corners of what the the text expressly states, then he's not guilty.

In the same basic way, I think the heart that is seeking to sin will try to cabin the commandments of God and say, wait a minute, all it says is no other

God, or all it says is I shouldn't steal. I'm not stealing my neighbor's donkey.

Therefore, I don't have to get involved kind of thing. And clearly that is not what is comprehended here.

Yeah. Another argument that we talked about, other than the context of the Ten Commandments, where what follows is specific applications.

And so we understand that these are encapsulated in the Ten. Another argument is that when

Christ says in the New Testament, when Paul says it, that, you know, really the sum of the whole law is love, to love

God and to love other people. Can we imagine that love would only avoid the negatives and never require positives?

So let me give you one more example, and then we'll have to be done for today.

What is the Sixth Commandment? Keech asks. The Sixth Commandment is you shall not murder.

Then he follows that up. What is required in the Sixth Commandment? So what's the positive side of not murdering?

The Sixth Commandment requires all lawful endeavors to preserve your own life and the life of others.

Haven't thought of it that way. Then the next question, what is forbidden in the Sixth Commandment?

The Sixth Commandment forbids the taking away of our own life or the life of our neighbor unjustly or whatsoever leads to the taking away of their life.

So think again about the issue that the law is summed up in the one great word of love, the act of love.

So if I love my neighbor and I see him in terrible danger and I say, well,

I didn't put him in the danger. I'm not hurting him. I didn't make him get into that situation.

And I don't have, I'm busy. I don't have time to help. Then you've broken the law because you have not loved your neighbor.

You have not done what is implied in that command not to murder. And all

I can see in my mind is the good Samaritan and the poor man lying on the side of the road as the priest goes right by, right?

So again, good example of that fourth principle. And that is that the

Ten Commandments summarily comprehend all the moral law. And therefore it is the positive as well as the negative, the positive implications and the negative that's clearly stated that are both combined in really understanding how do

I approach these commands? Well, we will pick back up next week and we'll look at the fifth through the 10th command.

And we'll continue to ask ourselves, what are the principles for approaching the Ten Commandments?