The Pastor's Pen
The Pastor’s Pen is a weekly devotional space where our pastor offers reflections, spiritual insights, and words of encouragement rooted in scripture and everyday life. These writings are meant to challenge, inspire, and draw us closer to God and one another as we seek to live out our faith with boldness and compassion. Whether offering comfort, conviction, or a call to action, each column invites us into deeper discipleship and shared community.
It is typically posted on Thursday each week.
“In God’s Household” - Eph. 2:19 | July 17, 2025
The Ten Commandments. Almost of everyone has heard of them, but almost no one knows their context. This is partly because we think of them separate from their context—as universal laws for humanity. The last five do have a universal quality to them: do not murder, steal, commit adultery, lie, or covet. Nearly every other ancient culture had prohibitions like these. Even 5th command, honoring parents, has a universal quality. Particularly in Eastern cultures parents and ancestors are revered.
The Ten Commandments, however, are not abstract, universal laws. They played a very important part in the drama of the Hebrew people’s exodus from a life of slavery in Egypt towards the freedom of living in their own promised land. Their context is an important part to understanding them.
Each version of the Ten Commandments (There are three versions, with one [Ex 34] being very different from the other two [Ex 20 & Deut 5].) testifies to the transitional moment at which God gave the commandments. This is the God who brought them out of the “house of slavery” and who was giving them the “land to which you are going.” God had rescued them from a place where they had been murdered, stolen from and lied to. As slaves, they had been oppressed in the worst of human ways. Now, God was giving them a new beginning. But before sending them into the Promised Land God gave them the Ten Commandments, which basically meant two things in their context.
Out of gratitude for what has been done for you, worship the God who saved you and do not do to others what the Egyptians did to you. That’s what the Ten Commandments essentially meant. Jesus captured this sentiment in two different sayings. One is the “Golden Rule” – “Do to others as you would have them do to you…” [Matt 7:12]. The other is the “great commandments” – “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbor as yourself” [Luke 10:27].
Obeying the Ten Commandments really isn’t about keeping a list of do’s and don’ts. It is about loving God completely and your neighbor as yourself—and that does have a universal quality!
