Exodus 20 - The 10 Commandments Part 1 (Graven Images, Latria, Dulia, Sabbath vs Lord's Day etc)

The Giving of the Ten Commandments at Sinai

All right, let's turn in our Bibles to the book of Exodus chapter 20. And last week, do you remember the Lord descended on Mount Sinai? It was quite a sight. He descended in fire and the people trembled, the mountain quaked.

So we're going to pray and we'll look at Exodus chapter 20 and the giving of the 10 commandments. Heavenly Father, as we come before you tonight and when we think about your law and the fearful sight that the Israelites saw in the wilderness, Lord, it humbles us because we know that like the Hebrews, every person in this room and indeed every person on earth has broken your law.

But Lord, that just makes us love and appreciate you that much more, the fact that you sent Christ to resolve our sin. So Lord, fill us with your spirit and teach us tonight as we look to this chapter, we pray it all in Jesus' name.

Amen.

Exodus 20.

Spoke all the house of bondage. You shall have no other gods before me. You shall not make for yourself 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, 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, to those who love me and keep, not to take the name of the Lord your God in vain for the Lord will not hold him guiltless 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 the Sabbath of the Lord your God. In it you shall do no work, you, nor your son, nor your daughter, nor your male servant, nor your female servant, nor your cattle, nor your stranger who is within your gates.

For in six days the Lord made the heavens and the earth, the sea and all that is in them and rested the seventh day. Therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and hallowed it for your father and your mother that your days may be long upon the land at which the Lord your God is giving 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, nor his male servant, nor his female servant, nor his ox, nor his donkey, nor anything that is your neighbor's.

Witness of a little trumpet and the mountain smoking, and when the people saw it, they trembled and stood afar off. Then they said to Moses, you speak with us and we will hear you, but let not God speak with us lest we die.

And Moses said to the people, do not fear.

For God has come to test you, and that his fear may be before you so that you may not sin.

So the people stood afar off, but Moses drew near the thick darkness where God was.

You have seen that I have taught you anything to be with me, gods of silver or gods of gold you shall not make for yourselves. An altar of earth you shall make for me and you shall sacrifice on it your burnt offerings and your peace offerings, your sheep and your oxen.

In every place where I record my name, I will come to you and I will bless you. And if you make me an altar of stone, you shall not build it of human stone, for if you use your tool on it, you have profaned it.

Nor shall you go up by steps to my altar, that your nakedness may not be exposed on it.

The Ten Commandments as God's Righteous Standard

Okay, so Exodus chapter 20, obviously is a very, very important chapter in the Bible because this is where God delivers to Moses the 10 commandments. And the 10 commandments are written in stone, which indicates to us something, I think.

What did the 10 commandments show us? They show us God's righteous standard along with his holy character. And there's another term for the 10 commandments. There's another term, what is that?

The long?

Decalogue.

The decalogue, good. And you can remember that because you think of a decade as 10 years. So the decalogue is the 10 commandments. And the 10 commandments are broken up into two parts. So the first half deal with man in his relationship and responsibility towards God.

So it's vertical. The second half of the commandments deal with man's relationship and responsibility towards his fellow man. So that's more horizontal. And as I said last week, the 10 commandments were given to a nation.

And that's the nation of Israel, as we see in verse one. And God spoke all these words saying, I am the Lord your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage. So the 10 commandments, this is very important.

It's obvious. We kind of know this, but we need to remember the 10 commandments were not given to the church. The 10 commandments were given to Israel, the nation of Israel. So based on that, we have to ask the question, are the 10 commandments for us today?

Well, the answer is yes and no. Yes and no. On the one hand, they are part of the old covenant given to Israel. We're not Israel. We're not under the old covenant. On the other hand, nine out of 10 of the commandments are reaffirmed in the New Testament scriptures.

So the Lord delivered the children of Israel from Egypt. And you remember what the message was that God gave to Moses to give to Pharaoh? Well, back in Exodus chapter eight, verse one, the Lord says, go to Pharaoh and say to him, thus says the Lord, let my people go that they may what?

Serve me. So the first commandment, look at it in verse three, you shall have no other gods before me. And then right after that, we see a prohibition about making graven images and serving graven images.

You shall not bow down to them nor serve them because who are they supposed to serve? Idols of brick and stone and whatnot. They're supposed to serve the Lord. You remember in the temptation when Jesus was in the wilderness being tempted by the devil, what did he say?

He said to the devil, you shall worship the Lord, your God, and him only shall you serve. So did Israel keep this law?

No.

Judges chapter two, verse 17. Judges 2, 17 says that Israel played the harlot with other gods and bowed down to them. What does that mean? Israel played the harlot. Do you remember a couple of weeks ago when we were in Jeremiah 31, when he was talking about the new covenant, the Lord says, I was a husband to them.

So that's the picture that Jehovah was a husband to Israel, the nation, they were his bride. And Israel went after other gods, they played the harlot. And that's contrasted in the New Testament with the church.

So Israel is the unfaithful bride, the harlot, and the church is called what? The bride of Christ, which is depicted, the church is adorned in pure, fine linen, pure white. So the first commandment is you shall have no other gods before me.

We're gonna take a little detour now because we wanna focus on Israel, that's the context, that's who the commandments were given to. But we kind of have to ask, do these apply to us? We wanna make sure we're not violating God's commandments that are still in effect.

So we're gonna just talk about something now for a moment. Concerning the 10 commandments, this list, let me just quiz you, what's the third commandment? Thou shalt not take the Lord's name in vain. Is that true, do you have a different, okay.

Well, I said a different thing.

Okay, all right. You know, it depends who you ask. If you ask a Roman Catholic, they're gonna give you a different answer. So it's good to be aware of this because the Roman Catholic Church has a different set of 10 commandments than we do.

So Protestants and independent Christian groups have one set of 10 commandments. The Roman Catholic Church has a different set of 10 commandments. Same commandments, just they're numbered differently.

Why is that? Because Rome rolls the first commandment and the second commandment into one. So the problem with that is then you only have nine. The nine commandments, that just doesn't sound right. Yeah, so what they do is they take the 10th commandment and they break it up into two.

Thou shall not covet thy neighbor's wife and thou shall not covet thy neighbor's goods. Of course, if you look at Romans 13, verse nine, the apostle Paul regards it as one commandment. He just says, thou shall not covet.

But that's another story. So the point is, why would Rome do this? Can you think of any possible reasons why they would take the prohibition about graven images and kind of just roll it into the first commandment?

Yeah, they bow down to graven images. So if you ask, could there be a reason or why would they want to obscure the second commandment? That's obviously why. It's obviously why. Look at verse four. You shall not make for yourself a carved image of 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. Now we wanna be fair. Does Rome profess to worship the one true God? Yes, yes, they do. Do they bow to graven images? Yes, they do. Okay, so we have a little problem here.

So Rome historically has tried to get around this. You're gonna have a little theology lesson, all right? So if you take notes, you might, maybe you can remember, that's great. But here's how they get around this.

They make a distinction using two words that come from Greek and the Latin. The two words are latria and dulia. Who has ever heard this? Latria and dulia. So latria is worship. So if you give God latria, you're worshiping God.

Dulia, what do you think that refers to?

Service.

Service, or they might call it veneration. So latria, worship, dulia, service. So what they say is, no, yeah, okay, yes, we do encourage bowing to and praying in front of statues, but we're not worshiping them.

We're not giving the statues latria. We're giving them dulia. We're only venerating the statues. We're only serving the statues. But what does the commandment say? You shall not what? Bow down, which they do, and you shall not serve them, which they're basically admitting to.

So this is just very, very strange, and someone might think, well, how did they think they could get away with this? It's so clear in the Bible. Remember, before the Protestant Reformation and before the printing press, people had no idea what was in the Bible.

The Bible was completely inaccessible. A lot of the people were illiterate. They wouldn't be able to read it even if they had it, but they didn't have the Bible, so people only knew what the church told them.

So it was really easy to keep people in the dark.

Jim.

My thought was is that I'm not sure that the average Catholic is aware of that because they will pray to the Statue of Mary. So they're praying to the Statue of Mary. I would almost think that they're thinking that that is Mary, however that works.

Okay.

And some of the other, like the Stations on the Cross and some of those things.

Yeah, well, we're gonna touch on that, I think, a little later on. Incidentally, they give Mary not just Dulia, they give her hyper -Dulia, so she gets a hyper service. As one theologian said, Latria and Dulia, this is a distinction without a difference.

If you're bowing down to something, you're worshiping it. It's a sign of submission. You remember the angel when John in Revelation falls down on hands and knees, bows, what does he say? Get up, don't worship me, worship God.

It's a distinction without a difference. All right, so that's our church history and theology lesson for the night. What are the two words? Latria and Dulia.

Okay.

Go back and watch the video if you forget. And click thumbs up and share and subscribe.

Okay.

Ring the bell. But going back to Israel, did Israel keep this commandment of bowing down to idols? No, and we have to say that at times they were generally keeping this, but overall, no, because in Exodus chapter 32, what do they do?

They fashion a golden calf, remember? And by the way, when it comes to idolatry, sometimes we have the tendency, people do, of thinking that ancient civilizations, you know, people were just stupid back then.

You know, they really thought that this, because you think, they must know that that cow that they fashioned out of metal, they can't really believe that that's God, or if they really believe this hunk of wood is God, I mean, how dumb, they understood this is not God, okay?

Idolatry, they didn't really believe that the image was literally God. They understood that the image represented God. So basically, when they made the golden calf, that cow represented the Lord. And just think of how much of an insult that is to say, God, oh yeah, that's God, and it's this weird looking cow.

I mean, imagine if somebody made a statue of you, and it was really just a poor sculpture. Wouldn't be flattering. But what if they made a statue of you, and it's some grotesque animal? Like, you would be a little insulted about that.

How much more to say, this is what God looks like. So you can understand why God hates idolatry. Paul says in Romans chapter one, that unbelievers do what? They change the glory of the incorruptible God into an image made like corruptible man, and birds, and four-footed animals, and creeping things.

So the Israelites would eventually break the first commandment. They went after Baal, and Asherah, and Molech, and then they broke this commandment and made graven images and worshiped them in the high places.

And God would punish them. He said he would punish those who did such a thing. Look at verse five. 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 what?

Hate me.

Hate me. But showing mercy to thousands to those who love me and keep my commandments. So one of the ways we show that we love God is we do what he says. It's like a little child. You know, you tell your little child to clean their room or to please do this, go to bed by a certain time, and they show their love and respect for you by doing what you ask.

So that's part of loving God, obeying him. All right, any questions or comments so far?

Dennis.

No, one of the symbols for Baal that they've dug up archeologically is I believe it's a crescent moon with a little kind of star down below it.

Really?

Yeah, so it's a symbol we still see today. It's just the gods keep changing names.

Mm.

Yeah, which I thought was interesting.

You can dig it and look.

Well, not dig it, but I mean look it up. Yeah, Google is always correct.

Is this something?

No, no, it was a pretty verifiable thing that these were, and when I looked at it, I was shocked because that wasn't what I was looking for. I was like Baal images and whatever, and I was looking up some of the old idolatrous things, and when I saw that, I was, oh, that looks like something I see today.

Right.

Yeah, the devil doesn't come up with new ideas.

He just.

Recycles.

Just recycles old ideas.

Yeah, you have the ancient gods in the Greek world, and once Rome took over, they took the same gods and just gave them different names, and I think you'd be surprised that those gods actually are still around.

They just call them something else. All right, look at verse seven. Here's the third commandment. You shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain, for the Lord will not hold him guiltless who takes his name in vain.

I think a lot of people, when they hear, using the Lord's name in vain, they think you just take the name of God and attach it to a curse word, and that's what it means to take the name of God in vain.

Obviously, that is taking the name of the Lord in vain. I don't think anyone's gonna argue with that, but it's not just that. Can you think of any other ways that you can take the name of God in vain?

Any examples?

Okay. O-M-G.

O-M-G, yes, you text O-M-G. Certainly, if you spell it out, that's using God's name in vain because you're talking about God, but you're not doing it in a reverential way. And I think a lot of people who do that, it never even occurs to them.

There's a lot of people who use God's name in vain, and you can kind of tell that they're not intending to do it to them. It's just something you say. So people need to be taught this. So just a general rule, if you're gonna use the name of the Lord, Jesus Christ, God, you should be talking about Jesus or God.

And if you're talking about him, you talk about him in a reverential way. Otherwise, his name should not be on your lips if you're not talking about him in that way. But what are some other ways you can use the name of God in vain?

Well, someone could utter a false prophecy. God spoke to me and he said, and you just come out with what you're saying. God didn't say that. You said it, and you're claiming God said it. When you take an oath or a vow and you swear, I swear to God.

Well, what did Jesus say? What does the New Testament teach? Our yes should be yes, and our no, no. I mean, your word should be good enough. You don't need to swear by this and swear by that. If you're honest, people should know that if you say something, you're going to follow through, you mean it.

But if you do make a vow and swear to God, and then you don't do it, that's you.

He's gonna remind you of it. He's gonna keep track of it. And if you don't, he's gonna bring it to pass.

Yeah, that's using the name of God in vain. Now, as we go through this list, someone might think, oh man, I've done this, and I've done that, and I'm guilty of this. Right, but that's the point. You are, and that's the point of the commandments and why they were given.

We'll talk about that too. Now, the fourth commandment. Remember the Sabbath day. Look at verse eight. Remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy. Six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is the Sabbath of the Lord, your God.

In it, you shall do no work, you, nor your son, nor your daughter, nor your male servant, nor your female servant, nor your cattle, nor your stranger who is within your gates. For in six days, the Lord made the heavens and the earth, the sea and all that is in them and rested the seventh day.

Therefore, the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and hallowed it. All right, let's turn to Colossians chapter two, because this is the one commandment that is a little, it's a little different than the rest.

We'll put it that way. As we asked, do the 10 commandments still apply? Are they for us today? And the answer I gave was yes, they are, but in a sense, no. So that statement that God created, rested the seventh day, that goes back to the first few chapters of Genesis, right?

The first chapter, right? So the people who still say that the Sabbath, we should worship on the seventh day, that's what they go back to and say right there, it was from the beginning and it's unchanging.

Well, but you never see Abraham worshiping or observing the Sabbath. You never see that. God never tells Abraham to observe the Sabbath. You never see Isaac observing the Sabbath. You never see Jacob observing the Sabbath.

There's no New Testament commandment for the church or for Gentiles to observe the Sabbath. Look at Colossians chapter two, verses 16 and 17. What does Paul tell the New Testament church? So let no one judge you in food or in drink or regarding a festival or a new moon or what?

Sabbaths.

Sabbaths.

So Paul's saying, don't let anyone judge you concerning the Sabbath, which are a shadow of things to come, but the substance is of Christ. So it's not that the Sabbath is done away with or that it's invalid, it's just been fulfilled.

Okay, the Sabbath is different from all the other commandments. The other commandments are moral precepts, right and wrong. One day isn't necessarily better than another day, except that God tells you to observe it.

But the Sabbath was fulfilled in Christ. Now turn to Hebrews chapter four. And I understand that, I mean, maybe somebody in this room has a different view of the Sabbath. I guess that's possible. Somebody watching online at some point, I'm sure we'll have a different view of the Sabbath.

Presbyterians and Baptists typically disagree on this. Certainly Seventh-day Adventists disagree on this. Marcus.

Question, you said that the Sabbath was fulfilled in Christ.

Right.

Could you expound on that just a little more?

Yep, we're gonna do that right now. So Hebrews chapter four. So the Sabbath, here's my statement, the Sabbath was fulfilled in Christ. He did the work, right? Because what is the Sabbath? It's the Hebrew day of rest.

Jesus did the work, and now we rest by trusting in him. Look at Hebrews chapter four, verse nine. There remains therefore a rest for the people of God, for he who has entered his rest has himself also ceased from his works as God did from his.

Let us therefore be diligent to enter that rest, lest anyone fall according to the same example of disobedience. So what does it mean to enter into his rest? Entering into the Lord's rest is believing in Christ.

So when Jesus, we talk about his work on the cross, right, the person and work of Christ. So when he died on the cross, that was his work. He earned, he worked and earned our salvation. So we don't work for our salvation.

We don't work our way to heaven. You could say we rest our way to heaven by trusting in him. Now that doesn't mean you sit around and do nothing, obviously, but yes, Christ fulfilled the Sabbath. He is our Sabbath rest by doing his work on the cross.

We simply trust in him.

Does that?

Okay, all right.

Any comments or questions on the Sabbath?

No, all right.

So does this apply to us? Because the seventh day, if you look at a calendar, what's the seventh day? Saturday. So should New Testament Christians rest on the Sabbath? Saturday. You can if you want. Typically, we Christians have looked at Sunday as, well, some Christians have seen Sunday as the Christian Sabbath.

I don't hold to that view. I don't describe it that way. I think Sunday is different. It's the Lord's day. The general principle of not working, taking a day to rest one day out of seven is a good principle.

But I would say this. If you have a strong conviction that you should rest on Saturday, I mean, if that's your conviction, go ahead. Or if you have some conviction about mowing your lawn on Sunday, you do what you feel is right based on your conscience.

But typically, people that try to observe a Saturday Sabbath are usually mixed up on a lot of other things too, in my opinion. All right, go back to Exodus chapter 20. And as I said, when we looked at this back in chapter 16, I think, my position has been simple concerning this, that the Sabbath isn't for New Testament Christians.

What we do on the Lord's day is we gather on Sunday. And I tend to leave it at that as far as what I'm certain about. All right, so this concludes the table, first table of the law. I think I'll break this into two parts because tonight we wanted to pray for our country and make sure we spend a good amount of time in prayer and give people a chance to pray.

So we're just gonna stop here, but I will say this, as far as what is the purpose of the 10 commandments or what do we need to pay attention to, Paul says in Galatians about the commandments that they are our tutor.

He says in Galatians 3 .24, therefore the law was our tutor to bring us to Christ that we might be justified by faith.