This past week I have been working on the next article in my series on the Ten Commandments. This week it’s the fifth commandment, “Honor your father and your mother.” As I’ve been reading, researching, and praying in preparation to write that article, it brought to my mind the years my sister and I cared for our mother in our home.
“Remember the Sabbath day by keeping 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…
“You shall not misuse the name of the Lord your God, for the Lord will not hold anyone guiltless who misuses his name” (Exodus 20:7; Deuteronomy 5:11). Let’s look further at the phrase: Don’t…
“You shall not make for yourself an image in the form of anything in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the waters below. You shall not bow down to…
In the first commandment, God forbad the recognition of any other god. Basically He told them, “I’m your God, not only because I chose you to be mine, but because in reality there are no other gods. Not even one.”
Now, God goes a step further and told His people that they were not to give the worship due to Him to any other thing—anything in heaven, in earth, or in the ocean depths. Nothing made (e.g., a wooden idol), nothing imagined (the power of the sun, moon, stars), nothing experienced (feelings, external forces), nothing natural (trees, rocks, gems) were to take His place as our object of worship.
The first thing God does as He begins to give His Law is to remind Moses and the Israelites of exactly who He is, and why they can trust Him. He is, after all, the God who chose them and who has brought them safely out of slavery in Egypt. He has already demonstrated both His power and His compassion. He has already demonstrated that He is able and willing to provide for them.
The Israelites had been living for 400 years as slaves to the Pharaohs in Egypt. Through a series of miraculous events, they have now been set free, and are on their way to the land God promised to give their nation.
Two men have been sent by Joshua to secretly check out the city of Jericho to get a feel for what the Israelites would face when they got there. Unfortunately, either they weren’t very good at covert operations, or they just stood out as “not one of us,” and the king of Jericho found out about them. He sent soldiers to the house of Rahab, where he had been told the men were staying.
We find the story of Tamar in Genesis 38. As the chapter opens, Jacob’s son Judah has married a Canaanite woman named Bath-shua, with whom he had three sons, Er, Onan and Shelah. Er, the oldest son, married a Canaanite woman named Tamar, but he died before they had any children. Genesis 38:7 explains, “But Er, Judah’s firstborn, was wicked in the Lord’s sight; so the Lord put him to death.” The exact nature of his wickedness is not given.
Grasping the literary structure of Genesis 2 and seeing how it builds upon the structure of Genesis 1 is key to understanding Moses’ account of creation. With this, I am much indebted to a journal article by Mark Futato that first brought this to my attention.
