The Truth About the Ten Commandments

Did you know that the Bible contains love songs? That might be hard for some to imagine, but it’s nonetheless true. Some of our biblically savvy readers might think of the Song of Solomon—which, indeed, contains rich meaning for many today as a beautiful part of the Bible. However, a love song that most might not consider is Psalm 119, which King David, Israel’s most famous songwriter, filled with passion, praise, and heartfelt devotion.

What was the object of such emotion? Believe it or not, the Ten Commandments.

If this surprises you, your perspective on the commandments of God may need to be expanded, because the Ten Commandments paint a beautiful picture of the mind of God and play a key role in the transformation of the whole world that Jesus Christ will establish upon His return. If you’ve been taught, even implicitly, that these commands are burdensome rules for modern Christians to gleefully cast aside, read on to uncover the truth about the Ten Commandments—God’s immutable laws of love.

God’s Laws Bring Liberty

Millions of people try to make sense of today’s confusing world through the pages of the Bible. But many misinterpret what that very book reveals about one of God’s greatest gifts to mankind—the Ten Commandments. Indeed, without understanding the truth about the Ten Commandments, understanding the rest of God’s word becomes impossible.

When you look closely enough, the core doctrines of mainstream “Christianity” imply that these divine commands from God have been done away with—as if God makes no binding obligation on us any longer and we’ve been freed from the need to obey any of the laws that He established. But when we come to understand the commandments and what they represent, this approach might as well have us speaking of being “freed” from food and water, from air and light—or, for that matter, from understanding, from righteousness, and from freedom and liberty, itself. In fact, in his inspired letter, Jesus Christ’s half-brother James twice refers to the Ten Commandments as “the law of liberty”—even “the perfect law of liberty” (James 1:25; 2:12).

Some preachers might insist that they would never preach against the Ten Commandments. Yet most of them preach in a pulpit on Sunday after having gone to the mall or lake or ballgame on Saturday, in violation of the Fourth Commandment. Indeed, in April 2021, exposing modern Christianity’s opinion on the Seventh Commandment to keep sexual relations within the confines of marriage, Christianity Today reported that “evangelicals, especially those under 40, increasingly see cohabitation as morally acceptable. Most young evangelicals have engaged in it or expect to.” And how many cathedrals are filled with statues and images toward which people bow, pray, or even weep, filled with religious devotion—when the Second Commandment forbids such objects of worship?

Yes, a lot of lip service is paid to the Ten Commandments—but few people really take them as seriously as God the Father and Jesus Christ do. And what a shame that is, because when we embrace them and take them seriously as protective instructions handed down by a merciful and loving God, the Ten Commandments become a source of beauty that is unmatched by any competing laws or philosophies of men.

King David’s Love Song for God’s Law

As mentioned earlier, the warrior poet of Israel penned in Psalm 119 some powerful words of praise and fondness for these beautiful laws of God:

Make me walk in the path of Your commandments, for I delight in it…. And I will delight myself in Your commandments, which I love…. Your hands have made me and fashioned me; give me understanding, that I may learn Your commandments…. Therefore I love Your commandments more than gold, yes, than fine gold!... I opened my mouth and panted, for I longed for Your commandments…. Trouble and anguish have overtaken me, yet Your commandments are my delights (vv. 35, 47, 73, 127, 131, 143).

There are of course many more expressions of love for God’s commandments to be found in Psalm 119, but these few examples should help to paint the picture. The Bible says that King David was a man after God’s own heart (Acts 13:22), and in his trials he found comfort in God’s commandments. In his distress, he found wisdom in them. He found them more beautiful and precious than gold and silver, and he wrote that he longed to understand them and live by them, like a thirsty deer longs for water.

No one writes songs of such heartfelt devotion and passion about speed limits or legal regulations pouring out of Congress. The Ten Commandments are different—they provide guidance, aid, and understanding. They represent the core of the way of life of the very Creator of mankind, who has shared them with us in His mercy. And as we get to know them and understand them—not just in our minds, but with the sort of understanding that only comes from obeying them in our actions—we begin to better understand God’s character and mind.

With God’s help, this becomes more than a matter of obeying rules and regulations: Keeping the Ten Commandments changes us, helping us to not only understand the mind of God, but to even begin to share the mind of God. Obeying God’s commandments helps us think like Him. As David wrote, “The law of the Lord is perfect, converting the soul” (Psalm 19:7).

It is no wonder that Jesus Christ told a young man quizzing Him about salvation, “But if you want to enter into life, keep the commandments” (Matthew 19:17). Clearly, the Ten Commandments mattered to our Savior. In fact, they matter so much that the Apostle John wrote in his first epistle, speaking of Christ, “He who says, ‘I know Him,’ and does not keep His commandments, is a liar, and the truth is not in him” (1 John 2:4).

Anyone preaching that you do not need to keep God’s commandments in order to know Jesus Christ is a false preacher—whether he knows it or not—and should be avoided.

What Are the Ten Commandments?

If we’re going to spend all this time reading about the Ten Commandments, we should certainly take the time to read those commandments, themselves! You will find them in the book of Exodus, where the heart of God’s law is given in only 16 verses:

[1.] I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage. You shall have no other gods before Me.

[2.] 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 nor 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 fourth generations of those who hate Me, but showing mercy to thousands, to those who love Me and keep My commandments.

[3.] 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.

[4.] 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.

[5.] Honor your father and your mother, that your days may be long upon the land which the Lord your God is giving you.

[6.] You shall not murder.

[7.] You shall not commit adultery.

[8.] You shall not steal.

[9.] You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor.

[10.] 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 (Exodus 20:2–17).

The whole of the Ten Commandments fits in just 16 verses, but the art of living by them—and the depth of truly understanding them—really comes only through practice, the light of Jesus’ teachings, and the help of God’s Holy Spirit.

And there is much to understand in their structure and organization. We read of a young lawyer who asked Jesus an important question: “‘Teacher, which is the great commandment in the law?’ Jesus said to him, ‘“You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind.” This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like it: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” On these two commandments hang all the Law and the Prophets’” (Matthew 22:36–40). Yes, Jesus said that the entirety of the law and the prophets hangs on these two great commandments: Love God and love your neighbor.

Now, let’s look again at the Ten Commandments to see how they are structured. The first of the Ten Commandments teach us how to fulfill the First Great Commandment—to love God. And the latter Commandments teach us how to fulfill the Second Great Commandment—to love our fellow human beings.

The Ten Commandments aren’t just some legalistic list of dos and don’ts. When we understand what Jesus is saying, we recognize them as essential instructions in love. And nothing is more beautiful than the love of God—not just receiving it, but also growing in it in our compassion and outflowing concern. If we seek to know the beauty of God’s love in our lives, then we will naturally want to keep the Ten Commandments!

But don’t take our word for it—take the Apostle John’s! Often called the Apostle of love because love is such a consistent focus of His writings, John teaches us a very important truth of God: “For this is the love of God, that we keep His commandments. And His commandments are not burdensome” (1 John 5:3). When you understand how the Ten Commandments are central to teaching us how to love God and to love each other—and indeed that “God is love” (1 John 4:8)—you begin to see how the Ten Commandments represent God’s own mind and character in print. Learning to practice them and make them a part of our lives is a vital aspect of the beautiful transformation God seeks to achieve in all of us.

How to Love God: Keep the Commandments

Let’s now dive into some of the individual commandments. Just as the brilliance of each individual facet enhances the beauty of a gemstone, each of the commandments contributes to the overall beauty of these laws of God.

We should begin by considering the first one: “I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage. You shall have no other gods before Me” (Exodus 20:2–3). Compare this to the beginning of the United States’ Declaration of Independence, which lays its foundation on the idea that all men are created equal, or the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which states in its first article that all human beings are free and equal in dignity and rights.

In our free resource The Ten Commandments, the late Roderick Meredith explains the stark difference between these human works and the Ten Commandments: “In our day of human reason, agnosticism, and creeping materialism, it is important to notice that the Almighty spoke first not about the ‘brotherhood of man,’ but about obedience and worship to God, the Creator and Ruler of heaven and earth—and the personal God of those who serve and obey Him” (p. 7). What a difference! Unlike human philosophers or politicians, who ground our obligations in moral theories or passing ethical fashions, God grounds our obligations on His own eternal and immutable status as the Creator of all things, who does not change (Malachi 3:6).

Consequently, the Ten Commandments are grounded in a beautiful and immovable foundation—the firmest foundation conceivable. For instance, the Fourth Commandment, which tells us to keep the Sabbath holy, is about the day God sanctified at creation. The Sixth Commandment, against murder, is grounded in the truth that man is made in God’s image—as we’re told in Genesis 9:6. The Ninth Commandment, which prohibits our bearing false witness, reflects that God is a God of truth and that His word is truth (Deuteronomy 32:4; John 17:17). Grounded in the nature and character of the Eternal God who created all life—indeed, the God who created all of reality—these inspired commandments reveal a richness and depth that few ever take the time to explore.

Consider the Third Commandment, against using God’s name in vain. How frequently this commandment is trampled—often by the very ones who claim to be living a godly life! Yet keeping this commandment is so much more than simply not using His name in curse words or swearing. For instance, everyone who claims to be a Christian is, in a very real way, taking on the name of Jesus Christ—so, if we behave in an un-Christian manner and set a bad example, we’ve taken on that name in vain. Keeping the Third Commandment means taking our lives seriously enough to bring honor to the name we bear—and, seen in that way, the commandment becomes far more than a guide concerning the statements we make with our mouths, but a motivation to consider the statements we make with our actions.

Even the commandments that might seem most obvious—such as the Sixth Commandment, “You shall not murder”—have much more to say than their words might seem to reveal. Jesus Christ makes this plain, explaining that hating your brother in your heart is the spirit of murder and that hating others violates the Sixth Commandment (Matthew 5:21–22). When we look at the world today and see how full of anger it is, and when we recognize the faces of rage that fill our streets and news feeds as bearing the spirit of murder, we realize just how far we’ve fallen from what God seeks to make of us.

Further still, the command against murder is rooted in the truth that every human being is created in God’s image. This world surrounds us with a culture of death, in which abortion, euthanasia, and assisted suicide are considered moral progress instead of the signs of moral degradation they truly are. In contrast, a devotion to living the values of the Sixth Commandment is a devotion to respecting the beautiful image of God inherent in every human life—not just the life of the healthy and strong, but also the life of the infirm and weak! As God told Moses in Exodus 4:11, “Who has made man’s mouth? Or who makes the mute, the deaf, the seeing, or the blind? Have not I, the Lord?” The Sixth Commandment declares that no human life is without value and meaning in God’s eyes. Yes, even a supposedly simple and “obvious” command like “You shall not murder” has beautiful depths that are worth exploring.

Now let’s take a step back, because we can begin to see a larger picture by imagining the world that Jesus Christ will establish at His return. When we imagine that beautiful world, we quickly find that the Ten Commandments are our key to envisioning it—and to achieving it.

Keeping God’s Law Will Change the World

Imagine a world where every human being in every country on earth has no other God than the true God of the Bible. Every living, breathing soul understands that nothing in their devotions should come before God the Father and Jesus Christ, and everyone worships Them alone. That worship is free from any and all trappings of paganism.

No one’s devotion is distracted or corrupted by statues or images of so-called saints. Every soul on earth uses God’s name with a sense of respect for everything that it represents, because they know that the words they utter matter. Consequently, no one uses foul language. No one utters God’s name in a curse, and it would not even cross someone’s mind to swear or speak in a filthy manner.

Imagine a world where everyone keeps God’s seventh-day Sabbath. Gone forever are the days when so many people worked seven days a week—such excessive devotion to “the job” is replaced by a joyful, worldwide observance of God’s ordained rest from labor, a time for families to reaffirm their affections for each other and seek the face of God together. Every week, everyone gathers in congregations as God commands, to observe a holy convocation, to sing praises to their Creator and their Savior, and to learn together from the pages of Scripture.

In that world, families have been restored as the fundamental building blocks of civilization. Parents are honored and loved, in accordance with the Fifth Commandment, and grandparents and great-grandparents are held in high esteem as children are taught to respect those who have gone before them. Those same children play safely in the streets as families spend time together in neighborhoods where violence and hatred are no longer part of anyone’s experience. Families remain intact for life, and marriages remain strong as men and women learn the joy and peace that comes when physical intimacy is reserved for the God-ordained marriages for which it was designed. There are no locks on doors, and children leave their bicycles on front lawns, as no one would ever think to take something that is not theirs. Relationships in the community—and between people and their leaders—are built on a foundation of mutual trust and respect, and everyone speaks truthfully with one another.

Now imagine that, encompassing all of this, is an air of contentment and gratitude—because the whole world has discarded the idea that happiness is dependent on the number of things you can buy or collect to keep up with the neighbors. Instead, everyone finds their deepest satisfaction in the profitable work of their hands, their joy from the love of friends and family, and their peace from the knowledge that the God they worship knows them, loves them, and is personally working in their lives. They find total peace in knowing His desire to bring to fruition His purpose for their lives—for them to join His own Family and step into eternity with Him forever.

That beautiful world—which Jesus Christ will establish at His return—is one in which everyone keeps the Ten Commandments. By zealously keeping those commandments in our lives today, we can begin to taste that world even now.