New Life Baptist Church, College Station Texas

In last night’s mes­sage, we saw that God — not man — spoke the Ten Com­mand­ments. That is very impor­tant to under­stand, because then it is clear that the Ten Com­mand­ments are not man’s sug­ges­tions, but God’s com­mands for us.

But it just as impor­tant that we under­stand who God was speak­ing to. In Exo­dus 20:2, God says, “I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery.” It is the peo­ple of Israel whom God is address­ing, and more specif­i­cally, it is the peo­ple of Israel that God brought out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slav­ery. God is speak­ing to the for­mer slaves that He set free by His power. This is crit­i­cal to keep in mind! God is speak­ing not to those who were not His peo­ple, but to those who by His grace had become His people.

This is of the utmost impor­tance to under­stand. The Ten Com­mand­ments can never be under­stood as, “Do these things and you will become my peo­ple.” That’s the com­mon view of the Ten Com­mand­ments in our day. Peo­ple view them as the Judeo-Christian ver­sion of the Five Pil­lars of Islam – do these ten things and you’ll be accepted by God.

But the peo­ple of Israel had already been accepted by God! They had already been bought by Him out of the house of slav­ery. I want you to remem­ber John Stott’s wis­dom, which I shared last night:

The peo­ple were given the law not in order that they might become the redeemed, rather it was because they had already been redeemed that they were given the law. The law of God is the way of life he sets before those whom he has saved, and they engage in that way of life as a response of love and grat­i­tude to God their Redeemer. (Stott, The Mes­sage of Exo­dus, 213, bold mine).

There­fore, the Law is God’s rev­e­la­tion to believ­ers for how He desires us to live our lives. Because we are His peo­ple, we seek to honor Him by keep­ing His com­mands. And when we fail to keep His com­mands (as we do time after time because of our sin­ful hearts), we repent:

1) agree­ing with God that we have sinned against Him,

2) con­fess­ing our sin to Him,

3) and receiv­ing for­give­ness for our fail­ures through fresh faith in the per­son and work of Jesus, who kept God’s com­mands on our behalf and died for our fail­ure to keep them.

This is just the first pur­pose of the Law, though, because God’s Law is not just for believ­ers. God’s Law is also for unbe­liev­ers. This is what Paul writes in Gala­tians 3:23–26:

Now before faith came, we were held cap­tive under the law, impris­oned until the com­ing faith­would be revealed. So then, the law was our guardian until Christ came, in order that we might be jus­ti­fied by faith. But now that faith has come, we are no longer under a guardian, for in Christ Jesus you are all sons of God, through faith.

So what is Paul say­ing here? I really love the way the New King James ver­sion ren­ders this sec­tion, where verse 24 reads, “There­fore the law was our tutor to bring us to Christ.”  For unbe­liev­ers, the point of the Law is to bring us to Christ. God’s Law reveals our inabil­ity to keep God’s Law, much like we learned last week that His holi­ness reveals our unholiness.

Whether you are a believer in Jesus or not, you must under­stand these twin pur­poses of God’s Law: it is to reveal God’s will to His peo­ple (as well as to encour­age con­tin­ual repen­tance) and it is to bring unbe­liev­ers to see their need for God’s grace in Christ. Have you under­stood God’s Law in this way?

This entry was posted on Monday, February 27th, 2012 at 6:00 am and is filed under Elder Blog, Exodus, Sermon Applications. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.