The Ten Commandments
We may worship the true God
I am the Lord your God who brought thee out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage. Thou shall have none other gods but me.
God is the Lord. There is no other God and no other lord.
We may know God because he makes himself known to us. He makes himself known as the Lord who brought Israel out of Egypt, out of the house of bondage, and as the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. He gives us this knowledge of himself.
To know God is to worship and be in awe of him. It is to be incapable of suppressing expression of your awe. We cannot help ourselves, so awe bursts out of us, and is heard by those around us.
That God is God, is the foundation and the source of all truth, and thus also of the truth of man. Man is a living being. The life he has is God’s life, the life that God gives him and shares with him. Man is not a lifeless being, and not a self-subsistent being either: he is neither thing nor god.
To love God, express awe and so worship him, is simultaneously to do the very best thing for yourself and for those around you. For the fundamental requirement of all human interaction is that it takes place in truth, not in delusion. To understand that God is God, is the beginning of truth and the basis on which all human relationships may flourish. You may love and serve your neighbour, and love and serve your enemy, by letting this exclamation of the truth of God, and of the glory of God, flow from you, so that it dispels delusion and establishes truth.
The first commandment is our foundation. The nine that follow it are amplifications and exemplifications of the first. The second commandment tells us that there are no imitations or substitutes for God; the third, the that you cannot use God’s name or authority as your own and thus cannot make yourself a junior god; the fourth, that other people are not your property, so you cannot hold them captive, but must release them on the Sabbath; the fifth, that you must give your grateful acknowledgement that you have received all things from those prior to you, who are your parents, who taught and mediated this knowledge to you, so you acknowledge that you are not the source or master of it; the sixth, that no one derives their life from you such that you have authority to take it away from them, since you are not their god, for that would be murder; the seventh, that there may be no adultery, mixing, dilution, ambiguity, confusion, darkness or chaos, but only purity, simplicity and clarity, so that appearances do not deceive us; the eighth, that we may not steal; the ninth, that we do not bear false witness and so do not lie; and the tenth, that we master our desires, and do not desire what is not ours to have, and so remain content.
The Commands tell us to give our worship to the true God, not to any other, and so not to make fake gods, and not to claim for ourselves the authority of God and make ourselves a rival to God. All the commandments that follow simply amplify this first commandment. Because God is our Lord, we are free. Any obligation or constraints that are not based in this truth, are false, invalid, and not binding. Our freedom from all other constraints is established by the acknowledgement that God is sovereign. As a result of his sovereignty, freedom is sovereign for us.
Worship God …
God must be worshipped. God is he who cannot not be worshipped.
When you give your worship to the true God, you live in the truth, and many other things may become clear. When you withhold that worship, either believing in some other god, or in the belief that you worship nothing, so much more remains confused, contradictory and puzzling. The God you want is the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. He who brought Israel out of Egypt, out of slavery and into the promised land, will do the same for you. The correct identification of God opens up to you a larger world.
Those who espouse atheism and agnosticism are, inadvertently perhaps, advocating for the unchallenged and unchallengeable power of the elite. Christianity say that the elite are attempting to make themselves gods. We use the concept of ‘god’ in order to challenge those who don’t want to be challenged, who are attempting to make themselves divine, putting terms so far above us that they cannot be called to account. Atheism is the resort of those elites who don’t want to hear any challenge from Christians, and who therefore want to belittle and take away the conceptuality by which we can make that challenge.
- Do not worship any other being
You must not worship or revere any other god. Other gods are idols, representations of God that are untrue. They have a power that is dangerous to us. Although these forces have no reality of their own, they still seem to us as compelling as any of the real forces of creation.
‘Pagan’ is the traditional name for those who do not worship God. They worship many gods or conceptions of God, but these are all just the products of their imagination. They are copies and they are fictions.
The pagans venerate these images and archetypes of their society. They idolise the strong man and adore the desirable woman. Pagans worship power. They worship power without truth, or goodness or beauty, and so without understanding the purposes to which power must be put. They do so without understanding that there are proper limits to power, and that self-control is needed to resist the temptations of power. They love power simply because it allows them to gain more, and to take away power away from others. Eventually their use of power without control will destroy whatever they touch, until finally they are also destroyed by it. When it is uncontrolled by any other desire, the desire for power draws all things towards chaos and destruction. In their long-term effect, all pagan cults bring about the destruction of our civility and humanity.
Those in authority uses the media to pump out a torrent of images, of fictional characters that represent passions and that meet in brief encounters. If you let it, this torrent may fill your imagination and displace all other real relationships. These images are pushed at you by those who want to keep you bewitched and malleable so that they can control you. Such images are carried into your awareness, your affections and life as on a conveyor belt, and at every moment as the gloss disappears from them, they are replaced by new ones. The powers behind the media want you to believe that these figures love you as truly as you love them, and forget that they are a performance designed to make you powerless. These figures are the gods of our age. As long as you watch and stay entranced you are caught in their cult, and you remain childish and helpless. You are giving your worship to pagan gods, whilst not realising that this is what you are doing, and in denial that this is what has happened to you. The powers of the present regime do not want you to become master of yourself. They want you to remain a slave.
- Do not misuse the name of the Lord your God…
We may not claim to have the power of God. We may not say that our undertakings have the authority of God.
To make use of the name of the Lord is to claim to speak with ultimate authority. It is to suggest that you yourself have the authority of God. Do not claim that you have the Mandate of Heaven, or of History, or of Science. Do not claim that you are the Representative of the People or the Embodiment of the Nation or the Voice of the Future. All these are claims to be God. Do not take the name of the Lord in vain. If you claim such authority, you surely do so in vain. Your attempt will fail and bring you disaster.
Our contemporaries believe that the identity of things depends entirely on their knowledge and their will. Those in power believe that they can determine our identity for us, and that we have to accept their account of ourselves. They want us to recognise them as the spokesmen for reality, the infallible representatives of truth and science. They want us to acknowledge that they have authority. Though they do not want the absolute and cultic nature of their claims to become clear. They believe that they only have to acknowledge only what they are willing to acknowledge, so they don’t need to acknowledge either God or any reality whatever outside themselves. Their will is supreme: there are no other sources of authority. They want to be our master and want us to be their prisoners and slaves.
The will to power is the fundamental principle of the modern era. Our contemporary pagans clamber up through media, government and every institution to win power over us. They want to decide what we may think. They want us to be interchangeable so they may freely employ us or discard us. They hate anyone who is able to hold out against them. They are at war with the Christian gospel because it enables us to think for ourselves.
In order to defend ourselves against their constant, well-concealed, aggression we have to become familiar with our own history. We have to get to know the long experience of Christians in every generation who have held out against the powers of their own time, who have kept the faith, and passed Christian teaching down to us, even at the cost of their own lives. We have to revere these people who are the saints and the martyrs of the Church. Only the Church of faithful witnesses displays the wide range of talents that can make us servants of all and finally masters of ourselves. Only the life and experience of our Lord, that we now participate in, can turn a people from worship of power and consequent dissolution to worship of God and consequent blessing.
- Remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy…
You can work for six days but on the seventh there must be rest. For six days you can send your workers out to work, but you must leave them on the seventh. They do not belong to you so their lives are not yours to dispose of. You have no authority to work them until they drop. There is no obligation on them on the seventh day, so do not prevent their release, or hold them back from worship of God. On that day they are free, and free of you.
We are given authority to live with all other creatures and to interact with them in order to make our contribution to its beauty. We may work and do what is good. We may do this for ourselves, through our own labour, struggle and risk-taking. But we cannot coerce other people to work for us or force the land to produce without limit.
The Sabbath and Jubilee command that we live within the limits of what the world provides without depletion. But, by mineral extraction and over-farming we have been losing forests, soil and water systems, we have been turning the world into a desert and contaminating what remains to us.
The Sabbath is the coming together of all things, through the resurrection when death is overwhelmed by life, and so the start of the coming together of all broken parts, the reconciliation, restoration and completion of all things, the eschaton.
- Honour your father and your mother…
We owe acknowledgement, first to our parents and their generation, to our teachers and local leaders, and then to our grandparents and their generation, and then to all the generations of our nation before them. They passed down to us whatever good practices we now rely on. They discovered them, recognised their goodness, taught and defended them and passed them on to us. We received these talents from them. We did not invent them for ourselves. We may receive what they offer us with gratitude. What they passed on us above all was the gospel with the entire package of Christian discipleship which alone enables us to grow up out of childhood and sullen adolescence, out of the bitterness and frustration of enforced servitude, to independence and maturity. They enabled us to aspire to self-mastery, and they taught us that this hope comes to us in Jesus Christ. We acknowledge that everything we have, we have received from someone who has worked for it, preserved it, kept it in good order for us and passed it on to us. For this reason, we honour our father and mother and all previous generations.
Our predecessors intended to pass on to us all that would benefit us. We must do the same for our own successors. We must look for stability and permanency, not upset and rupture. Tradition and continuity are the basis of human society.
We must honour our parents by giving them grandchildren, and so bring a new generation into being. We owe them life, but instead we have withheld life. Our generation has decided that the next generation owes us. We have put them in debt and like Pharoah, allowed them no Sabbath, no debt relief. We have not obeyed the wishes of our parents and so have not found our dignity through service to the next generation.
The leaders of the present age want to divert our affection from our family to them, and so to replace our parents with themselves. They want us to accept their fiction as reality. Those who are convinced that they know better than their parents did suffer from a wilful blindness. Their effortless superiority, their determination to rip away our own roots, and do without the input of all previous generation tells us that they have set out to build their new world without considering whether they have the resources to do so.
Because it does not acknowledge its debt to past and to future generations, this generation has become idolatrous. It has attempted to avoid the bill for its expenditure by borrowing. It has lived by delaying the reckoning. As a result, disaster, demographic, cultural and economic, is coming.
- Do not murder…
The life of every human belongs to God. It cannot be taken away without the formal judgment under the process of law by a man’s peers.
To take away the means of life is murder. To deny people the means by which they can support themselves and provide for their family, is murder at slower pace. Driving people out of public life, loading them with financial burdens and so impoverishing them so that they cannot take part in the life of the nation, is murder at its slowest.
Life has been withheld from us. The generation that does not pass on life to the next has raised itself above all other generations, past and future. It has taken life but it has not given it. It does not want to take its place in the succession of generations, and does not acknowledge its own createdness and mortality. It sees itself as the summit of history and so wants to stop time and make itself immortal.
- Do not commit adultery…
Do not introduce confusion. Do not mix or dilute or adulterate. Do not introduce copies and substitutes, do not replace the reality with mere images of it. Do not create ambiguity. Do not allow appearances to deceive us, so that everything is delivered to us mixed with its opposite, and nothing can be seen for what it is. Do not create ignorance, darkness or chaos. Ambiguity, confusion and any sense of the impermanence of our relationships are socially destructive. Instead establish purity, simplicity and clarity.
Do not commit adultery. The basis of every society is the marriage of one man and one woman. Marriage establishes the equivalence and mutuality of one man with one woman. Marriage cannot be dissolved and no other form of partnership can substitute for it. Marriage safeguards the formative years of new generation of children, which makes that society robust.
Those in power want to rub out the differences given to us by nature and make us all equivalent and interchangeable. Their agenda is to dissolve all the things that make you unique, the first of which is your sex. They assert that there is no functional difference between male and female, but only complete interchangeability, so that every individual is functionally identical to every other, and any individual can be substituted for by any other.
Modernity is simply hatred of the idea that there are any givens of nature, and that the powerful are not able simply to make and re-make us as they desire.
- Do not steal…
We have been taking from our people their identity and dignity. We have not allowed them to receive what previous generations intended for them, and so they have not received what is owing to them. Their inheritance has been withheld and so they have been robbed.
Each generation rightly demands that the next should pass on the life they have received. We must take from past and give to the future. What we have received, we may pass on to those who come after us.
Our parents want us to pass on what we have received and so serve the next generation. They intended that we have children just as they did, and that we bring them up to adulthood so that they can do the same too. Our parents want us to be the servants of our children just as they were servants to us all through our childhood.
But this transmission of life is now being suppressed. Transmission of life is what culture is, and it requires the knowledge, the attitudes and skills which enable this transmission. But our children have not received the culture that would tell them what they are due from us, and what they have to hand on to those who come after them. This culture has been taken from them and concealed by the very institutions, in particular educational institutions, responsible for that transmission. It has been hidden from them, and as a result they are bereft and exposed. They do not have the moral, emotional or intellectual resources that would allow them to defend themselves from the constant incursions of those who want to rob us of our decision-making powers, of responsibility and of our sovereignty. This is how the holders of power hold the present generation to ransom.
Debt is the way we put off paying mode of our obligations to the past and the future. It is the form in which we repress and disguise our obligations to the generations before and after us. It is the form in which we hold and consume for ourselves what should go to them. It is usury, and it is theft.
Debt takes from those with little and left them with less. It has given most to those who already had most. It has taken all financial security from the middle class and turned them into an insecure and frightened people. It has made the poor destitute. All the fissures in the nation have opened so the gap between top and bottom has widened into a chasm. It has taken away that social mobility which gave each of us the hope of improvement, that hope which is the constant gift of the gospel and which gives us our motivation and confidence
Bank credit effectively brings future spending power into the present. Debt repayments to banks destroy money. This means that the credit which enables commerce is withdrawn and customers have neither credit or currency with which to make a purchase, so that they are unable to buy and none of us can make a living. Our entire economy is being plundered and emptied out by our financial class and the power-seekers who have only contempt for us because they do not fear God.
- Do not give false testimony…
Be true witnesses. Live not by lies. Reject the delusions that keep people fearful, and pass on the good tradition you have received.
The gospel is the source of public speech. We may speak freely and so make whatever suggestions seem best for our nation. The gospel is source and guarantor of the public realm in which anyone may offer ideas, and in which we give a hearing to other people, and are prepared to consider their proposals. We do not set out to silence anyone. We do not regard anyone as beneath us, and do not consider ourselves beyond challenge. We concede that the truth is sovereign, and the truth may make itself clearer to us through a multitude of voices, including those not we do not welcome. If we suppress them, and put ourselves forward as sole arbiters and possessors of the truth, we give lie. If the authorities are telling us lies, and we do not speak out, we are complicit because we share in testimony that is false.
Our generation is being told a lie. We are told that we should lift ourselves above all other people. If you wanted to destroy the happiness of a people, follow our current formula: remove yourself as far as possible from the natural world; repudiate the continuity of your culture; believe you are wise enough to do whatever you happen to want and not only get away with it, but have a right to it and a right to silence those who disagree; minimise the role played by a common body of belief; actively attack and dismantle every social structure as a potential source of oppression; and reject the idea of a transcendent set of values.
We give false testimony when we reduce education to indoctrination and homage to the state, which represents our determination to avoid responsibility and adulthood and freedom. We give false testimony when we bail people out and maintain their delusions, so they never have to face the consequences of their actions and so become morally mature. False testimony keeps them in immaturity, for it takes the power of judgment away from them. The whole discipline of modern economics is just about removing ethics and moral judgment, and acting as though we were in a mechanistic system and so under fate.
The delusions of the current age are maintained by arrogance that does not allow truth to be uttered. These delusions allow the arrogant to remain unaccountable and secure themselves against risk, and express their contempt for those who withstand and defy them and testify to the truth against them.
The true testimony is that is truth, judgment, accountability and justice. There are long-developed codes which enable us to say what is good and just, and this code is given to us in Christian teaching and in the culture, morality and law that that have developed through each nation’s reception of that Christian teaching. The fundamental act that establishes our freedom is the gathering and worshipping of the Christian community shaped by this revelation and this teaching. In the fundamental act of free speech, the act that founds and sustains the public square, this community proclaims that only God is God, and that without the authority of God all claimants to power others are dangerous, delusory, parasitical, lordless powers. The God-worshipping community makes its stand, raises its voice and gives its witness to what is true, good and right.
Do not covet
Self-restraint must govern our desires. Desire without limit is idolatrous. Without self-control, with absolute surrender to our passions and to those who are able to manipulate them, there is only misery.
We have been consuming the material resources that future generations may need. We have written ourselves promissory notes, and so created the debt that binds future generations. We have spent resources without understanding their limits, unconcerned about what we have left for those who come after us.
Our society has decided not to admit to its own mortality or acknowledge that we are under an obligation to pass life on to our children and successors. We have not decided which desires are good and pursued them only. We have pursued every desire without discrimination. The result has been resource exhaustion, loss of relationship to our own land and ecology, and deracination and dispossession. We have created an utterly dependent and vulnerable proletariat in cities, in countries that have to import their power, not fed by their own national agriculture but on food imported from continents away.
We have to decide between desires, to give up some in order to purse others, in order to achieve self-control. A man seeks wisdom by being educated in the traditions and formed by the disciplines of his culture. He may demonstrate courage, justice and good judgment, wisdom and self-restraint. He may master his passions. He not just the helpless victim of his appetites for he intends to be a responsible being, not just a man out-of-control and endlessly manipulatable. A man is independent when he is able to provide for himself. A man whose needs are provided by others cannot claim he is independent. When the needs of a society are provided by populations of migrants, slaves, prisoners, underpaid factory workers, clients and colonies, that society is not independent. When everything is provided for us, we are helpless babes, and when our demands and desires are not met fast enough, and we are enraged, our helplessness becomes so embarrassingly obvious, that we are further enraged. We are that man so lacking in self-control that he is pitiable. But the man who hears the command of God, and understands that he is summoned to maturity and adulthood, will take up the discipline that can bring him self-mastery, and so he will grow up into the sovereignty that God intends to share with us.
The Commandments express the sovereignty of man with God
The first commandment is the foundation of human life. It alone enables man to grow towards maturity and self-mastery and so become civil and humane. This commandment, to worship the one God who reveals himself in Christ and in his people Israel. It has become fundamental for those societies shaped by the gospel, and which we came to call the West. That Christian culture enabled those societies to spread beyond Europe and around the world, briefly creating a global political culture and economy. But without the continuing, living witness of a faithful Church renewing that culture, that culture has become moribund and has not renewed those nations. As a result, they have lost their identity as living political nations, in which each individual is sovereign, responsible, and so accountable to his fellow countrymen. They have become part of a totalitarianism that is everywhere, a universal bullying and childishness, where no moral obligations, and no sources or limits are acknowledged. The ascent to maturity stalled, became bogged down and has been abandoned. But it lives and it continues wherever God is worshipped, wherever the first commandment is celebrated, and the creed is repeated.
Christianity represents the possibility of human maturity, and sets out the conditions of its realisation. Our self-mastery comes to us from God. It is the self-mastery of God, shared with us, so that it is really his and really ours. Let us turn to one another every new day and say ‘Let us begin with what we know to be true…’. Let every Christian all the faithful Church say together, ‘Our Father, which art in heaven….’ And ‘Hear O Israel, the Lord your God is the only God…’, and ‘I believe in one God, the Father almighty…’
