Welcome to Bible class, turning your Bibles to Exodus chapter 20. Question for you, what makes something good or bad? How do we know that something is good or not? How do we know what's right and what's wrong? Well, God gave us his standard in the 10 commandments. Can you name them? Can you name the 10 commandments? You might want to pause this right now and see if you can. Any of you learn a song about the 10 commandments? Number one, we've just begun. God should be first in your life. Number two, the idol rule. Those graven images aren't nice. Number three, God's name should be never spoken in jest. Number four, the Sabbath's for our worship and for rest. So that's one that we did in our family. So today we arrive at Exodus chapter 20, one of the most famous passages in scripture, and one of the most important with regards to understanding God and understanding the rest of the Bible. In Exodus 19, we see that three months after the Exodus from Egypt, Israel lands at the foot of Mount Sinai. God speaks to Moses, what is referred to as the Mosaic covenant. Yahweh gives Moses a conditional statement offering blessings for obedience in Exodus 19 verse 5. Now, therefore, if you will indeed obey my voice and keep my covenant, you shall be my treasured possession among all the peoples. At Mount Sinai, God shows up in a terrifying display of power and awe. He comes in a thick cloud with fire, with smoke, with lightning and thunder. And with the threat of death, should the people go too close to the mountain. In Exodus 20 verse one, and God spoke all these words. Notice the chapter begins with the word and, which connects chapter 19 to chapter 20. Chapter 19 sets up the scenario where God will speak to his people. And then it says, God spoke. This is a rare moment when God speaks directly to the people, not through a prophet, not through Moses. The people behold the voice of God. And when God speaks, he defines righteousness. This is often referred to as the Decalogue. Deca meaning 10, log meaning words. Literally, these are 10 words. They're also referred to as commandments in other places in scripture. So God speaks, and the first thing he does is introduces himself. Hi, I'm God. Very similar to how the apostle Paul introduces himself at the beginning of each of his epistles. So 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 slavery. I am the Lord. I'm Yahweh. I'm the master. I'm the ruler over everything. And I am your God. Other nations worship other gods, but not you. I am your God. And you belong to me for two reasons. Number one, by virtue of the fact that I created you. You're my pencil, as I referred to earlier. And number two, by virtue of the fact that I rescued you from Egypt. I am the God who rescues. My identity is wrapped up in you in the fact that I rescued you from slavery in Egypt. I rescued you for my good purposes and I have some rules for you. Since you are my people, I demand that you obey these 10 words. These are not 10 suggestions. These are the 10 commandments. They are stated here in Exodus chapter 20. They are repeated over and over throughout the Old Testament and the New Testament. They are repeated in their entirety in Deuteronomy chapter 5. God blesses obedience to these commandments. And at the final judgment, at the end of the world, God will judge humanity based on adherence to these commandments. Commonly, the Ten Commandments are broken up into two categories. The first half, our relationship to God, the vertical. The second half, our relationship to man, the horizontal. How do we treat God? Well, that's the first four commandments. No other gods, no idols, reverence his name, prioritize our time with him, keep the Sabbath. How do we relate to people on the horizontal? We honor the first people that God put in our lives, our parents. We don't kill people. We don't commit adultery. We don't steal. We don't lie. We don't covet what other people have. And notice there's eight don'ts and only two dos. Jesus was asked, what is the greatest commandment? And surprisingly, he didn't mention any of the 10. In Matthew 22, beginning in verse 36, teacher, what is the greatest commandment in the law? Jesus replied, love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it. Love your neighbor as yourself. All the law and the prophets hang on these two commandments. Love God and love people. So love God, that's the greatest commandment. In essence, loving God is keeping the first four commandments. And then love people. This is keeping the second half of the commandments, numbers six through 10. So today we're going to begin with commandments one through four, those dealing with our relationship with God. Vodibacham points out that the first four commandments speak to the object of our worship, the limits of our worship, the reverence of our worship, and the regularity of our worship. So number one, the object of our worship, verse three, you shall have no other gods before me. And notice the you is actually, the Hebrew word is singular. God is speaking to you personally, not to the nation of Israel, not to you, the church, but you. God is saying specifically to you, these are my commandments for you. God says, I am the Lord your God, and you shall have no other gods. This speaks against all false religion. It speaks against the sin of atheism. saying there is no God when the evidence is all around you. It speaks against the sin of agnosticism. You say, well, I just don't know if there's a God. Well, Romans 1 says you do know. No gods before me can also be translated as no gods besides me. It wasn't that they could worship lots of gods as long as they also worshiped Yahweh or they worshiped Yahweh the most. No, Yahweh wanted 100% of their worship. They were to worship him and worship him only. The kings of Israel were called to destroy all the temples and the idols that were set up to false gods. They were to tear down the Asherah poles. God demands exclusive rights to our worship. This commandment reminds us not to mix religions or to worship other gods. We reject any kind of syncretism that would mix Buddhism or Islam or Hinduism or any other false religion with true and right worship that focuses completely on Yahweh. This commandment bars the worship of false gods, but it also bars an over-obsession with what we might call the idols of the heart. Even good things can become gods to us, things that we put before God. John Calvin, arguably his most famous quote, he says, man's nature, so to speak, is a perpetual factory of idols. According to Calvin, our hearts are constantly involved in the idol making business. Constantly alluring us to set other gods on the throne of our affections. What is it that you love more than God? As a child, I remember my obsession with trading cards. First it was baseball cards. Then it was garbage pail kids. Then it was baseball cards again. For you, maybe it's Pokemon or lububu dolls or video games. Junior high, for me, it was television. TV was the idol of my heart, my drug of choice, if you will, until God convicted me and I stopped watching TV and movies for five years, from ages 12 to 17. At times, the idol of my heart was my grades in school. Sometimes I wanted an A more than I wanted a close relationship with Jesus. At times, it was a girl that I was obsessed with. It's the things we love, even good things, especially the good things that can become the idols of our hearts. Often it's the things we collect, the things we spend our time with, the things we spend our money on, the things we think about more than we think about him. These are the things that vie for our affections, that cause us to, at least for certain moments, to love them more than we love God. He says, you shall have no other gods before me. Commandment two speaks to the limits of our worship. Verse four, you shall not make for yourself a carved image or 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 or serve them. For I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children to the third and the fourth generation of those who hate me, but showing steadfast love to thousands of those who love me and keep my commandments. So basic meaning, don't make an idol and bow down and worship it. Don't carve something out of wood or stone with your hands and call it your God. Now you may have noticed that in our church, if you go to our church, we don't incorporate pictures of God or Jesus in our worship. We don't kneel and pray down to images of God or the saints. There has been some debate within Christian circles, is it okay to make images of Jesus? Some would argue that based on the second commandment, that would be forbidden. Is it okay to read a children's Bible that includes pictures of Jesus? Is it okay to see the Jesus movie or the Passion of the Christ? Vati Bakam points out that even if you're okay with Jim Caviezel dressing up as Jesus, we are not okay with people coming up to worship Caviezel while he has his Jesus costume and his makeup on. Similarly, if you see your kids open up their Jesus coloring book and they start bowing down to worship and they start praying to the images on the page, you got a problem. You need to give your child some instruction about the second commandment. We take worship seriously. God has put certain limits on the worship that he allows. Commandment number three speaks to the reverence of our worship. Verse seven, 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 heard a little girl saying God's name in vain at a movie theater while just waiting around for popcorn. It's amazing how common this sin is. People constantly say God's name in vain. It's one thing to say, oh my God, when you're praying and you're calling out to him, But in our society, people say this phrase all the time when they're just joking around. And this is what we do with the sacred, holy name of God. We use it and abuse it. We use it like an expletive or a cuss word. And God says, I will not hold him guiltless who uses my name like that. Sometimes I miss the majesty of the big cathedrals. There's something about those cathedrals, the stone walls, the echoing voices, the stained glass windows that gives the sense of awe and reverence. It communicates the message, worship is serious. Now, maybe it's a similar reverence you feel toward God when you're standing at the edge of a cliff, looking at the ocean or staring up at the stars. you realize that you are in the presence of one who is much greater than yourself. We are in the presence of the one who came down upon Mount Sinai with fire and smoke and thunder and lightning. This is the God we worship and he commands us to reverence his name. Vati says that the fourth commandment speaks to the regularity of our worship. 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 a Sabbath to the Lord your God. On it you shall not do any work, you or your son or your daughter, your male servant or your female servant, or your livestock, or the sojourner who is within your gates. For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth. the seed and all that is in them and rested on the seventh day. Therefore, the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy. Work six days, rest for one. So in this text, we see God created the world in six literal days. We see that rest is good. Don't work all the time. Take a break. If you're an employer, don't make your employees work all the time. Give them a break. The seventh day was to be holy. It was a day that focused not on work, but on worship. In the New Testament, the church started meeting on the Lord's Day, on the first day of the week, because Christ had risen on the first day. That's why we go to church on Sunday and not on Saturday. Still, they were setting aside one day a week for worship and meeting weekly on that day. How important is weekly church attendance? Very important. If we want to stay close to God, even on vacation, I always try to make it to church. And if I don't, I feel it. I feel it in my life. I feel it in my family. We need fellowship with the body of Christ. We need to sit under the preaching of God's word. Hebrews 10, 25, let us not neglect meeting together as some have made a habit, bad habit, but let us encourage one another and all the more as you see the day approaching. Now, to be honest, I was confused about the Sabbath for a long time. They make jokes about people like me who only believed in nine out of 10 commandments. I was that guy. I used to feel bad whenever I thought about commandment number four. I didn't get it. The New Testament never commands us to keep the Sabbath. Jesus and Paul seem to undermine the Sabbath in the New Testament. Even at the Jerusalem Council in Acts 15, they don't tell Gentiles to keep the Sabbath. I was jealous of Jews and Presbyterians because they seemed so confident about their understanding of Sabbath. For Jews, Sabbath means don't work on Saturday. For Seventh-day Adventists, Sabbath means go to church on Saturday and don't work. For Presbyterians, Sabbath means go to church on Sunday. And I was just like, I don't get it. How did a commandment to not work on Saturday turn into a commandment to go to church on Sunday? And why did Jesus seem to agree that all the commandments were important except for the fourth commandment? I mean, he's God. He made up all 10. Why is he having second thoughts about that fourth commandment? In Matthew chapter 12, it says, Jesus went through the grain fields on the Sabbath. His disciples were hungry and they began to pluck heads of grain and to eat. But when the Pharisees saw it, they said to him, look, your disciples are doing what is not lawful to do on the Sabbath. Do you remember how the Israelites went looking for manna on the Sabbath? And God got really mad about that. Jesus and his disciples picked grain on the Sabbath. How is that different than getting manna? I would have thought that would have been a big no-no. In Numbers chapter 15, the Israelites stone a man to death for picking up sticks on the Sabbath. So grain is okay, but manna and sticks are not. What's up with that? In Luke 611, Jesus says, the Son of Man is Lord of the Sabbath. Son of Man? Who's that? That phrase can be taken two ways. Son of Man can mean Jesus. It was a title he used to refer to himself. Or it can mean any human. You are all sons and daughters of men. So is Jesus in charge of the Sabbath? Are you in charge of the Sabbath? Then in Mark 228 referring to the grain incident. Jesus says the Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath. Oh, OK. So it's for me. So does that mean I can do it if I want? Is that what you're saying, Jesus? But if that's the case, then why did you kill people for not observing it? In Colossians 2, 16 through 17, Paul gives us a little clue. As to what's going on, he says, therefore, let no one pass judgment on you in questions of food and drink or with regard to a festival or a new moon or a Sabbath. If you don't keep the Sabbath, don't let anyone judge you for that. Why not? Then he says these key words. These are a shadow of the things to come, but the substance belongs to Christ. The Old Testament Sabbath is a shadow. It's not the real deal. It gives you a dim picture of the ultimate purpose of the Sabbath rest. Then I read Hebrews chapter four, and that's when the lights really came on for me. Hebrews four, beginning in verse nine. So then there remains a Sabbath rest for the people of God. Oh, really? So in the New Testament, the Sabbath still matters. There's still a Sabbath rest for us. Well, what does that look like now? Verse 10, for whoever has entered God's rest, something you enter, whoever's entered God's rest has also rested from his works as God did from his. What's going on here? There's no day of the week mentioned. And he doesn't say rest from work. He doesn't say take the day off. He says rather than rest from work, he says rest from works, plural. And where have I heard that before? Ephesians 2, 8, 9, for by grace you have been saved through faith and this is not your own doing. It is the gift of God, not a result of works so that no one may boast. So somehow the Old Testament Sabbath rest is connected to the New Testament understanding of salvation, to us not working. The Old Testament picture, don't work on Saturday, was simply to help us understand the gospel, which is this, don't work for your salvation. It's not by works. This is a salvation that is completely by grace through faith. Galatians 2 verse 16, we know that a person is not justified by works, not justified by works of the law, but through faith in Jesus Christ. So we also have believed in Jesus Christ. We didn't do anything. We just believed in Jesus in order to be justified by faith in Christ and not by works of the law. Because by works of the law, no one will be justified. You cannot earn grace. It is a free gift. And if you are trying to earn it, you will not be justified. You will not be made righteous. You will not be saved by the works of the law. No one will be justified. All of a sudden the fourth commandment came alive to me. And yes, I believe all of the 10 commandments now, and maybe I believe the fourth commandment more than the rest. Is the Sabbath thing in the New Testament? Yes, absolutely. The gospel is our Sabbath rest. Jesus is our Sabbath rest. There is a Sabbath rest for me. I keep the Sabbath every day. And how do I do that? I keep the Sabbath by believing the gospel. I keep the Sabbath by not doing works to earn my salvation, Rather, I rest in the finished work of Jesus on the cross. Let's pray. Heavenly Father, Jesus paid it all. Jesus paid it all. Once and for all, Jesus has died for my sins. And Lord, I am so grateful that there remains a Sabbath rest for the people of God. Lord, destroy the idols of our hearts. Help us to put no other gods before you. and to honor your holy name in Jesus' name, amen. God bless you.