Now let me review a little information about the Ten Commandments. First, we must understand that they are all archetypal commands. All the authoritative teachings in the Old and New Covenants are either covered by these Ten Commandments or administer them through God’s priesthood of the church. All the 613 laws of the Old Covenant either directly or indirectly relate to these ten laws. Even the ceremonial laws symbolize the fulfilling of these ten laws, and being separated unto God for a life that fulfills these ten laws. The laws of the priesthood, feasts or physical signs of being sanctified all relate to the first four of the Decalogue. The commanded Sabbaths and all of the animal sacrifices remind us of works that God has done so His people can fulfill His Ten Commandments, so they might love as He loves. The first four commands of the Decalogue are about loving God, the fifth is about loving God and mankind, and the last five are about loving His creation. Then the laws regarding the priesthood often deal with the administration of all ten laws, the whole of God’s Law.
So the entire body of God’s Law revolves around the Ten Commandments. All God’s laws are either leading into, incorporated within, or effects of these ten authoritative teachings. All the statutory and case laws, all the authoritative principles taught the entire Bible, relate to the Ten Commandments. This Decalogue represents the whole of God’s Law, both the ceremonial and moral laws. And all of God’s Words relate to it as well. Thus, if we know the Ten Commandments, we know the foundation of the whole of the Bible. We gain the essence of all Jesus’ teachings about the just, God-like love, since all His teachings fulfill all the Old Covenant Law. But, if Jesus fulfills God’s Law, then God’s Law is incomplete, because it needs to be fulfilled by Jesus. Yet, by fulfilling all God’s Law, Jesus does not nullify anything in God’s Law, but fills in only what is lacking or missing. Thus, when we learn the Decalogue, we not only learn a summary of the Old Covenant Law, but also a summary of the larger, greater, fulfilled Old Covenant Law granted by Jesus. We learn the core principles of what is sometimes called “Christ's Law.” We learn the true and loving righteousness that Jesus works in us and through us. If we know the genuine, God-intended meaning of these Ten Commandments, we will have begun to comprehend the essence of a full, wise, pure, just, righteous and God-like love.
Now you should also know that the Ten Commandments are divided in different ways by the Roman Catholics, Jews and Protestants. I delineate the Ten Commandments in the standard Protestant order:
10.“You shall not covet ...” (Ex. 20:17, NKJV).
But the Jewish Old Covenant branch of the church does not even call these the Ten Commandments. Jews call them the ten “words” of God, which is what they actually are, authoritative words. For none of God’s laws are like Greek, Roman or pagan commands, requiring blind obedience that serves the pleasure of a despot. All God’s laws were authoritative words from God, teachings that needed to be understood and practised for the good of all. Also, the Jews take the prologue (verse 2) as the first of the “ten words.” Then they combine the first and second commandments (verses 3 to 6) into one “word.” So their first two words or “commandments” of the Decalogue are different than the first two of Christian churches. But the remaining eight words are in our own Protestant order.
Roman Catholics (and Lutherans) also divide the Ten Commandments differently. They say the first commandment begins on verse three, just as the Protestants do. But then they combine the first two commandments (verses 3 to 6) into one commandment. Of course, in doing so, they only have nine logical categories of commandments. Their second is the Protestant’s third, their third is our fourth, and so on. Now, to get around this problem, and make the nine commandments into an even ten, they artificially split the tenth commandment in half (verse 17, on coveting). Of course, rationally, there is only one category or archetypal commandment against covetousness. But, since Roman Catholics knew that the Jews, for millenniums, called them “the Ten Words,” they had to transform them into ten. Thus, they ended up with two archetypal commandments against coveting. Then they denied that the Decalogue consists of archetypal commands, just to make their interpretation different than that of the Jews, so they could pretend to have divine inspiration that Jews and others were lacking.
Now we should know that God listed the Ten Commandments in the order of their priority. That is, God thought it was most important for His people to learn to apply the principles taught by His first archetypal commandment most of all. Then the next most important principles to learn to apply were those taught by the second archetypal commandment, and so on, down to the tenth. So the difficulty and importance of each of the Ten Commandments generally decreases from top to bottom. The hardest to obey, but most important to obey, is the first. The easiest and least important is the last.
God did this because all the kings of the time did this, because His people were familiar with this method of prioritizing some commandments over others. For the application of any body of laws requires each law to be set in a system priorities—since it is often necessary to break one law in order to fulfill another law and, in making that decision, one must choose to obey the law with a higher priority. Thus, God considered the worst sin to be disobedience to the laws represented by His first commandment, and where all the laws that fall under the first archetypal law are themselves prioritized as well. Then the least sin was to be through disobedience to the laws related to the tenth archetypal commandment. After all, if the first commandment was the most important to obey for one’s own benefit, as well as for the benefit of others, and in order to maintain a right relationship with God, who was one’s High King, then breaking any law related to that first commandment was surely the worst of the sins could commit. And, actually, God’s Law was designed in such a way that, if one truly obeyed the first of the Ten Commandments, one would also be obeying all of the first four commandments by default, since all of those first four pertained to a right relationship with God, which is what obedience to the first commandment ensured. And, if one truly obeyed all of the first four commandments, then one also would be obeying all the other Ten Commandments as well, all the last six which pertained to the love of mankind and God’s creation. For, if one truly loved and obeyed God, then one’s love would not sin against any of God’s possessions either, which include all mankind and all of His creations. So all begins with love for God. The first four commandments, and part of the fifth, pertained to the love of God. Then the last six pertained to love for God’s creations.
But this obedience was, in the Old Covenant times, all theoretical. For no man could ever obey even the tenth and easiest commandment, much less the nine above it. No human being could stop the greedy and covetous desires of the flesh, much less obey the first commandment, which called all God’s people to make all their decisions according to God’s will. For this is the work of Christ, to do what we cannot do for ourselves, to do what our own strength and ignorance cannot do. God gave us a sign of His direct intervention in our lives by delivering the Ten Commandments (the first time) by speaking directly to His people in His own voice (Exodus 20:2-17). And He addressed His people in second person singular. That is, He spoke directly to each individual heart, “You (singular) shall ...” By speaking to each individual personally, God implied that the promised Messiah would also teach them in this way. Then the prophets, His servants, later confirmed that this personal teaching of each of His elect children was indeed God’s intended way of fulfilling His Abrahamic Covenant. When the Messiah came to fulfill it through His New Covenant relationship, He would personally write the ways taught in God’s Law upon each individual elect heart, by teaching and training each elect spirit.
Most of the covenants created by worldly kings in those days would address the common people with a plural third-person or second-person substantive. And their laws were not nearly as wise or personal as God’s laws, since their laws were primarily for the benefit of the elite, without much of any concern for the lives of common people. Yes, some pagan laws were fairly just, resembling some of God’s laws, since a knowledge of good and evil still existed in all men, and God has always been the God of all men, their only authoritative Teacher, who has always personally taught somethings to the spirits of His elect children. But, in general, no pagan laws were ever as just as God's laws, and never nearly as personal, addressed to each individual’s spirit. In fact, although all laws have moral implications, and are all therefore spiritual, pagan laws tended to focus only upon things of the flesh, forgetting any terrible spiritual effects, which were ultimately destructive to the flesh as well. Almost all the rulers who formed the pagan laws never even thought of addressing each individual's heart. The only things on their minds were the needs and pleasures of their own flesh. Only God's Law declared that God Himself would personally condone or personally condemn each individual, in a one-to-one relationship, based on the way each one’s spirit guarded His ways and laws in the heart. Some pagan kings thought God was not interested in the affairs of human beings. Others thought God merely maintained a general interest in His creation, watching the fate of mankind unfold from afar, with a very mild and dispassionate interest. But God’s Law, and all His other words found in His Book, demonstrated that He knew and remained intimately involved with each individual life.
The Creator of the Universe can spend every second of our entire lives with each of us. For God is not subject to His own creation of time or space. So He able to personally be with each one of us always, every moment of every day. And He personally desires to be with each of His elect children always, every moment of every day. So who can stop Him from being with each of us every moment of every day. Our sins may cause Him to withdraw a short distance and partly turn His back to us, as His words rebuke us. But His love will not let Him abandon us, not ever, never to hell. And our Lord Jesus is fully the one and only God, one with the Father of our spirits. Then the Holy Spirit of Jesus is fully the one God too, one with the Father and Jesus. He enters our hearts, to reside beside our spirits. But, before God can draw that close to a sinful elect soul, and work inside that one, to make one able to fulfill His commandments, Jesus must first claim, call and awaken the spirit of that one. Christ’s claim to us, through His sacrifice on the cross, frees us from the guilt of our sins, so He may enter our hearts, so He is free from any possibility of any accusation of aiding and abetting sinners. By this legal and just claim made upon our lives, He stands before us as our Lord and God, granting us His infallible and irrevocable guarantee that He will indeed make us fully righteous by the end of the judgment day. Without His cross, our utterly holy God could not “draw near” our unholy hearts.
And this is why the children of Israel, and the many Gentile slaves who entered Israel during their Exodus from Egypt, stood in anxious, hopeless terror before God on that day, as He uttered the Ten Commandments from Mount Sinai. Hearing this summary of all His laws, their spirits knew that this truly holy and just Creator of the heavens and the earth could never allow Himself to work upon their ignorant and infantile spirits, which allowed their flesh to sin, nor call them His holy children. For their spirits realized they were impure in thought and deed. The very words of His Law, uttered with lightning and thunder, confirmed this, to both their spirits and their flesh. And they did not yet know that God Himself would justify them someday, and guarantee that they would depart from all their sinful thoughts and ways by the end of His judgment day. So the people of Israel did not dare, and were not allowed, to draw near to their God, the Father of their spirits, as He gave them the Ten Commandments. And God Himself set a barrier between Him and them, a line no one was allowed to cross, upon penalty of death, even as He preached His Law, teaching love from the dark mountain.
When God first taught His people the Ten Commandments, Moses described the event in this way: “Now all the people witnessed the thunderings, the lightning flashes, the sound of the trumpet, and the mountain smoking; and when the people saw it, they trembled and stood afar off. Then they said to Moses, ‘You speak with us, and we will hear; but let not God speak with us, lest we die.’ And Moses said to the people, ‘Do not fear; for God has come to test you, and that His fear may be before you, so that you may not sin’” (Ex. 20:18-20, NKJV). It says that God caused this power of groundshaking thunder and lightening to cause their spirits and flesh to fear Him, to respect Him as their only God, so they might reject all the fake gods which the pagans taught them to fear in superstition and ignorance. So God was testing them, as we test metals to purify them, to purge out the useless and worthless dross. For that was the only definition of the word “test” in those days. Then notice how the church of Israel did not want to hear truth directly from God. Instead, they wanted another human sinner, like themselves, to speak to them. This would be much more preferable. They wanted Moses, not the perfectly holy God, to discuss their sins, hoping Moses would wink, knowingly smile and compromise on the sins they shared in common. Realizing that God knew exactly how badly they were sinning in their spirits and through their flesh, in thought and deed, they could not bear to hear the true and just admonishments of the utterly holy God. Likewise, all elect souls in all history have had a tendency to do the same, to seek other human sinners who would preach compromises which tickled their ears of flesh, rather than seek salvation directly from their utterly holy God, from the Father of their spirits. And Satan’s religion of the world order, humanism, came to provide false preachers who would do just this, to catch them unawares, to turn them away from God. However, our utterly holy and sinless God knew Satan’s plan from the beginning, and countered that sabotage by coming to His children in a body of human flesh, just as He came to the spiritually immature souls of Adam and Eve in that same body. And Jesus came just after humanism had fully matured.
Yet look at how this preacher and prophet, this faithful servant of God, responded to the people who only wanted his sinful, human face to speak to them. Moses said: “Do not fear; for God has come to test you, and that His fear may be before you, so that you may not sin.” Here it may look like Moses contradicted himself, by telling God’s people to let the “fear” of God “be before” them, immediately after telling them, “Do not fear.” But, when he spoke about allowing the “fear” of God to “be before them,” he referred to their spirits’ loving respect and a high esteem for God, not a fear worked by their minds of flesh. And, when he told them, “Do not fear,” he referred to the fear of their spirits. Elect spirits, born of God’s Spirit, must not fear their Father’s wrath, but should respect His infinite wisdom that He applies only for their own good, even at a great cost to Himself. First Moses told them to stop fearing God, in the minds of their spirits, but also by the irrational thoughts of the flesh, which imagined God to be like them. They thought God might impulsively lash out against their sins with great wrath and destroy them, possibly even with unjust violence, just as they did to others. But God never does that, and it is a sin to anthropomorphize God in this way. God is not an ignorant and impulsive sinner like us. Yet this is exactly how most churches like us to see God, since they want us to fear God in a very ignorant and superstitious way, to stop us from sinning, but also so they can manipulate our minds of flesh into paying money to them and into serving them. But carnal fear in a mind of flesh can never keep anyone from sinning. Fear of the flesh is the means by which Satan and his world order keeps souls bound in slavery, and can never help anyone gain true spiritual holiness.
Therefore, when God came to the church of Israel, to His elect children among them, with this terrifying manifestation that caused their flesh to fear, it was to “test” them, like metal is “tested” in fire, to make it purer and stronger. In other words, God caused great fear in their flesh and in their spirits so they would realize that God is far more powerful than Satan or the world order, far greater than any of the fake human or demon gods of Egypt. Egypt was Satan’s most ancient, powerful and fearful subject kingdoms in his entire world order. So Satan had a hold on their thoughts, by causing their minds of flesh and the minds of their spirits to fear both him and the task masters he appointed over them. Thus, God demonstrated, through the earthshaking thunder and lighting, as well as by the many plagues which struck at Egypt’s false gods, that His far greater power is to be feared more than all of Egypt’s gods put together. And these physical displays of God’s power especially addressed the weak minds of flesh granted to His elect children. For most elect walked almost entirely according to the thoughts of the minds of their flesh, and seldom heeded the voice of their own spirits. Now, when their flesh learned to fear God more than Satan’s henchmen, the world order could no longer enslave their flesh through fear. But God did not want them to merely fear Him through their minds of flesh, but wanted their spirits to know Him personally, to become familiar with Him, without any fear, just as a beloved child does not fear one’s patient and wise Father, who loves one unconditionally. So, as Moses said, God wanted their spirits in their hearts to not fear God, but respect Him, where a respect for God would go before them, guiding all their decisions in their walk of life, so they might not sin.
Yet it was not until Jesus Christ paid the full penalty of our lifetime of sins, and entirely reconciled us to our Father, God, that the Holy Spirit, who is God, could enter us, to dwell beside our ignorant and infantile human spirits. Only then could the Messiah’s Spirit teach us a child’s loving respect for our Father and God, where even our flesh properly fears our God’s discipline more than the power of Satan and the world order. The only real fear our spirits actually possess is a fear that we might cause damage to our loving relationship with Jesus and our Father. But Jesus and our Father never fear that we will somehow fall out of love with them, since God has absolute confidence in His own power, wisdom and ability to teach, train, build up, perfect and complete our loving relationship with Him. God laughs at the suggestion that we might somehow be lost to Him. Such a thing happening seems utterly ridiculous and impossible to Him, since He knows too much about us and about Himself to ever think that could ever possibly occur. So our spirits should also realize this, and stop being afraid of losing of our relationship with God. For that relationship does not depend on us at all, only upon the undying love of our Father and Brother, our omnipotent, omniscient and immutable God. When Jesus’ sacrifice and power frees us from slavery to sin, Jesus will never lead us into temptation and, if Satan temps us into sin, Jesus will always deliver us from that evil, if not while we live in flesh on this earth, then surely and perfectly on the judgment day. So our personal relationship with Him will eternally grow and it cannot ever die. It is impossible to steal us from His hands. And the barrier of darkness and terror on Sinai, for the flesh, like the temple curtain at the moment of Christ’s bodily death on the cross, has been opened once and for all time. In the works of Jesus, God provided us with utterly unrestricted, free access to the innermost Holy of Holies, to God’s very heart and mind.
The Old Covenant, represented by the Ten Commandments, came with darkness and thundering, with much fear of the flesh, because it was, in spite of what some say, a very conditional covenant. The relationship of the church with God, if one walked only according to the mind of flesh, was to depend upon the body’s obedience to literally all the laws of that covenant, on the flesh fulfilling literally all 613 laws represented by the archetypal Ten Commandments. Yet God commanded these laws even while He knew full well that no one could obey them through the weakness, dishonesty and easily manipulated mind and will of the flesh. The flesh could not even comprehend God’s own intended and full meaning of the moral, thus spiritual, principles inherent to those laws. This utter inability to obey God’s Law is realized by all the Old Covenant prophets, who all claimed that all human beings are sinners, without one exception. Likewise, the awakened elect in New Covenant times also proclaimed: “For we have previously charged both Jews and Greeks [i.e., Gentiles] that they are all under sin. As it is written: ‘There is none righteous, no, not one’” (Rom. 3:9-10, NKJV). No human being can reconcile oneself or anyone else to God. Only God Himself, Jesus the Messiah, can reconcile the sinful elect to their Father. “For Christ is the end of the Law [i.e., the finishing or completing or fulfilling of God’s Law] for righteousness to everyone who believes” (Rom. 9:31-32; 10:2-4, NKJV).
God sent the Law to “test” us, the kind of “test” that perfects and purifies. He did not provide the Law to test the knowledge or faithfulness of His elect children. God did not utter His commands to prove anything unknown to Himself, because God already knows all things. God knows every detail of how the end of the earth and the end of the judgment day will turn out, and has known everything from the beginning, since He created all earthly time, from its beginning to its end, in one thought, in one single “moment.” Before God gave us His Law, He knew we all would utterly fail to express the spiritual principles of His Law. God even granted prophecies through Moses to tell us that we would utterly fail, that we would always continue to fail until the day He Himself circumcised our hearts, to cut away the unholy desires of our brains and bodies of flesh. Yet Israel did not seem to believe the words of God spoken through His servant, Moses. To this day, Jews and fake “Christian” churches do not believe God’s words, and somehow think their flesh can obey God. Even after a few thousand years of utter failures, many still somehow believe they can succeed in becoming righteous and fit for heaven through their own “free wills,” by their own efforts of their filthy, hypocritical minds and bodies of flesh. Even if souls admit they fail, they somehow think others sinners—who make a show of religion with their robes copied from the gowns of pagan priests and their modified pagan rituals accompanied by magic words—might help them to fulfill the demands of God’s Law. But, of course, these showmen are nothing but liars and the very worst of sinners. Now, after more than 3,500 years of complete and utter failures, where not one human being could ever be declared righteous in God's sight, where not one was ever able to become even remotely fit for heaven, where not even one has ever earned or merited any of God’s approval, we can all surely admit that we all need Jesus to work His miracles of sanctification and regeneration in our hearts and minds, causing us to truly love Him.
Now, as mentioned, some say the Abrahamic Covenant was as conditional as the Old Covenant, or that the Old Covenant was not really a conditional covenant of works. Of course, neither is what the Bible says. The Abrahamic Covenant did not place any condition on the people whom God would call His people. God Himself chose who would enter the Abrahamic Covenant after Abraham. First God chose Isaac and not Ishmael, nor any of the other sons of Abraham. Then God chose Jacob and not Esau. Then God chose all twelve sons of Jacob, who was later called Israel. All God asked was that Abraham and His descendants would take circumcision as a “sign” of the eternal, unconditional Abrahamic Covenant, the very “sign” which God would later replace with His real circumcision of the heart. So the Abrahamic Covenant was entirely worked by God Himself, since God shaped only the souls He chose for His priesthood, and gave only those souls the land of Israel, while fulfilling all the other aspects of the Abrahamic Covenant through them. And there was nothing that Ishmael, Esau or the others could possibly do to cause themselves to inherit the blessing of the Abrahamic Covenant, not circumcision nor anything else, nothing either physical or spiritual. Therefore, it is abundantly clear that the Abrahamic Covenant was not conditional at all. It was nothing like the highly conditional Old Covenant. But it was exactly like the unconditional, eternal New Covenant.
Israel remained under the unconditional Abrahamic Covenant for almost half a millennium before God brought the Old Covenant to them. And the Old Covenant did not nullify the eternal Abrahamic Covenant. Thus, even to this day, the true Israel, the entire body of elect Jews, still remain bound in an unconditional, eternal relationship with God, in the relationship that God Himself had originally formed with them through His Abrahamic Covenant promises. For Israel became God's church, His one and only true and eternal church, through that unconditional Abrahamic Covenant. But all the promises and curses found in the Old Covenant related directly to the obedience of their flesh to the conditions or laws stipulated by the Old Covenant. Thus, nothing in the Old Covenant ever nullified any of the unconditional promises that God made to those same people through His eternal and fully unconditional Abrahamic Covenant. Now some might claim the Old Covenant is unconditional too, because its curses were only to fall upon a soul through one’s disobedience to God’s Law, but one’s relationship with God would remain. However, this ignores the fact that God actually did nullify His Old Covenant relationship with many individual sinners, even with almost entire generations of the whole church of Israel at times. Therefore, the only way His relationship remained eternal with the sinful elect in the church of Israel was through His Abrahamic Covenant with those whom He chose to belong to the priesthood of Israel. It was not His Old Covenant relationship that remained with these elect Jews, as an eternal and unconditional relationship. For what we see in the Old Covenant is that God’s relationship is entirely conditional, where all blessings and all curses related directly to their obedience or disobedience of its Law. The Old Covenant actually had nothing to do with their initial eternal relationship with God, since that relationship was entirely established through the more ancient, unconditional, eternal Abrahamic Covenant. All the elect need to realize this, so we will no longer believe the lies of humanistic churches, especially whenever they teach replacement theology.
The humanistic churches say their Gentile churches replaced God’s original church of Israel because the Jews became sinners, whom their church must still jealously persecute and silence to this day. But, if we think about what they are saying, we realize that they are actually proclaiming three basic doctrines: (1) the god they worship is fickle and unreliable because he broke his promises to Israel, which he himself declared to be eternal and unconditional when he made his Abrahamic Covenant with them; (2) their totally unreliable, lying god permanently cast out and now continually punishes Israel without ever allowing them any forgiveness which He promised in His Old Covenant Law, for all who broke His Old Covenant Law, if one broke it unintentionally, such as through ignorance, or if one’s heart truly repented; and (3) each church believes their Gentile, man-made, so-called church has become God’s only new true church because they are so much more righteous and obey the Old Covenant Law so much better than the Jews now obey it, since their god, whom they call Jesus, was not rejected by them through their theoretical, pagan, Platonic “free wills” worked by their loveless minds of flesh. But, since the real Creator God cannot possibly be a fickle, backstabbing, unreliable, lying, unjustly vengeful god, like the gods they worship, churches preaching replacement theology obviously do not worship the real God. Those churches worship a fake and demonic god, since only demons were liars and murderers from the beginning, just like they are. They may call their fake god by the same names as the Bible does, and may claim their god is the real God who wrote the Bible. But the real God who wrote the Bible uses His own words to expose them as fakes. And the real God’s own words condemn them as the very worst of sinners, as those who break all the first four orders of His Law. The real God will never break His unconditional, eternal Abrahamic Covenant made with the true Israel. God will always allow His Old Covenant laws of forgiveness and the full atonement of their relationship with Him—laws that Jesus also fulfills and does not nullify—to be believed and made effective, as He promised. And God only every created one nation-priesthood for Himself in all history, the church of Israel, whom He will never destroy nor replace in all of eternity.
The entire Old Covenant, with all its promised blessings and all its promised curses, is obviously and indisputably conditional, entirely based upon man's obedience or disobedience of its conditions or laws. And these utterly impossible-to-obey conditions or laws were to be done through human effort, including these commandments: “You shall love Yahweh your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your might. And these words which I command you today shall be in your heart” (Deut. 6:5-6, NKJV). Clearly, no matter how much one studied the attributes of God and His Law with one’s intellect of flesh, one could never even beg