Then,
we come to the Sabbath Day, a blessing and a privilege that God granted men and
women of a guarantee of one day off from work every week. This is to be a day
of no work, not Mom cooking a meal for family and friends who visit or Dad
mowing the yard, but no work. Period.
This was important
enough to God to call for the death penalty if it was disobeyed.
Exodus
35:2 Six days shall work be done, but on
the seventh day there shall be to you an holy day, a sabbath of rest to the
LORD: whosoever doeth work therein shall be put to death. 3 Ye shall kindle no fire throughout your
habitations upon the sabbath day.
The
Ten Commandments are God’s basic standard. These first three are towards God.
Obeying God’s commandments were the external evidence that a Hebrew loved God.
Deuteronomy
6:4 ¶ Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God
is one LORD: 5 And thou shalt love the
LORD thy God with all thine heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy
might. 6 And these words, which I
command thee this day, shall be in thine heart: 7 And thou shalt teach them diligently unto thy
children, and shalt talk of them when thou sittest in thine house, and when
thou walkest by the way, and when thou liest down, and when thou risest up.
8 And thou shalt bind them for a sign
upon thine hand, and they shall be as frontlets between thine eyes. 9 And thou shalt write them upon the posts of
thy house, and on thy gates.
Which Jesus
reinforced;
Matthew
22:37 Jesus said unto him, Thou shalt
love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all
thy mind. 38 This is the first and great
commandment.
The
Hebrew, the Israelite, the Jew had proof of their love for their Creator that
flowed from their heart to their outward behavior. The Christian has evidence
because of something that God Himself puts in his or her heart by the mechanism
of the Holy Spirit. This is the proof that the Spirit resides in the Christian.
Galatians
5:22 But the fruit of the Spirit is
love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, 23 Meekness, temperance: against such there is
no law. 24 And they that are Christ’s
have crucified the flesh with the affections and lusts. 25 If we live in the Spirit, let us also walk in
the Spirit.
God promised the
Jews back in the Old Testament that this would happen.
Ezekiel
11:17 Therefore say, Thus saith the Lord
GOD; I will even gather you from the people, and assemble you out of the
countries where ye have been scattered, and I will give you the land of Israel.
18 And they shall come thither, and they
shall take away all the detestable things thereof and all the abominations
thereof from thence. 19 And I will give
them one heart, and I will put a new spirit within you; and I will take the
stony heart out of their flesh, and will give them an heart of flesh: 20 That they may walk in my statutes, and keep
mine ordinances, and do them: and they shall be my people, and I will be their
God. 21 But as for them whose heart
walketh after the heart of their detestable things and their abominations, I
will recompense their way upon their own heads, saith the Lord GOD.
And,
in that great tribulation at the end of history those who belong to God will be
obvious by their faithfulness to God’s commandments.
Revelation
14:12 Here is the patience of the
saints: here are they that keep the commandments of God, and the faith of
Jesus.
This
is the beginning of the civil and religious standard of laws given to the
physical, temporal Hebrew people to live by, manage their affairs by, and to
run their government by. God Himself was to be all three branches of government
for them; leading, creating laws, and judging.
Isaiah
33:22 For the LORD is our judge, the
LORD is our lawgiver, the LORD is our king; he will save us.
The
Founders of the American government were primarily influenced by The
Enlightenment at their very uppermost levels although there were many
evangelical Christians in the second tier and below. The Enlightenment was a
time of a rejection of political religion and it was a time of worship of man’s reason, and humanism with
so-called great thinkers like Voltaire and Locke and Thomas Paine leading the
charge, sometimes religious, sometimes atheists. The Enlightenment political
philosopher that Founders like James Madison, the so-called ‘Father of the
Constitution,’ leaned on for the three branches of government was Montesquieu.
You can look but I doubt you will find, in the debates over the Constitution,
any reference to the verse in Isaiah as a reason for our three branches of
government. I have read two volumes of those debates and one collection of
Madison’s letters and there is no reference to the verse in Isaiah. I will be
very happy if you prove me wrong with a primary source like a letter or a
transcript of a debate. In any event, substituting the words, “our Republican
government,” for the LORD is
blasphemy so please don’t do it.
The
Ten Commandments are a way to see the mind of God, to understand His efforts to
draw mankind, or at least those who will come, to Him. Christian culture
reveres these commandments as standards to live by and there is no reason to
believe that God’s standards have changed. You and your fellow citizens would
do well to follow the Ten Commandments and adopt God’s standard as your own.
Your life would be less filled with regret and sorrow at the end if you did.
However, WE are not justified by the Law before God but by Christ’s
resurrection and our belief and faith in it.
Galatians
3:22 But the scripture hath concluded
all under sin, that the promise by faith of Jesus Christ might be given to them
that believe. 23 But before faith came,
we were kept under the law, shut up unto the faith which should afterwards be
revealed. 24 Wherefore the law was our
schoolmaster to bring us unto Christ, that we might be justified by faith.
25 But after that faith is come, we are
no longer under a schoolmaster. 26 For
ye are all the children of God by faith in Christ Jesus.
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