After the first two commands, God adds a warning: “For I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God - punishing the children of the sins of the fathers, for the third and fourth generation; but showing love to a thousand generations of those who love Me, and keep My commands”.
God is not trying to make us good. God is trying to make us free, and in order to live the freest life, two things have to be true:
1) We have to walk all the time in an awareness of Almighty God.
You live in New Zealand for goodness sake, this ought to be easy. I mean, how hard would it be, to be riding down some of these roads, and just stop for 10 seconds, and look at that great mountain and think: the God who put that there - He lives in me. He's as close to me as the air that I'm breathing. What would your life look like, if you stopped and felt the truth of that all the time; and in your imagination, you built that down to be true in your life?
The Bible says – and we quote this all the time – “the truth will set you free”. Actually it says: “You will know the truth - and the truth will set you free”. Truth, in and of itself, doesn't make you free at all; it’s about knowing the truth - and I'm talking about a deep knowing.
Hebrew people ‘feel’ thoughts; Greek people ‘think’ thoughts.
We're followers of Jesus Christ in here, and most all of us would believe that: Jesus Christ has forgiven us of every single sin? Jesus forgave you of every single sin? I'm not trying to confuse you - so you believe the truth, that: Jesus has forgiven you of every single sin, and you're completely innocent before God.
Now with that being a believed truth, how many of us have felt guilty in the last week? Yeah, so you believe you're innocent, but you feel guilty. That's not doing anything for you. When you believe you're innocent, but you feel guilty, then the truth that you're innocent doesn't matter! We have to take the truth that God is with me. What we just stopped, and became aware, that the Mighty One was in me; that He's not in heaven somewhere - He's actually in me!
God's not trying to make us good - He's trying to make us free.
Deuteronomy is a re-telling of the Book of Exodus; and in the re-telling of this command, something interesting happens...
Deuteronomy 4:13 – “and He declared to you His covenant, which He commanded you to perform, the Ten Commandments; and He wrote them on two tablets of stone. And the Lord commanded me at that time to teach you statutes and judgements, so that you might do them in the land where you go over to possess it. Therefore take good heed to yourselves, for you saw no kind of likeness in the day Jehovah spoke to you in Horeb out of the midst of fire”.
So there's that whole ‘he spoke out of the fire’. They ‘saw languages, inside fire’ at Mount Sinai.
He says: “remember you didn't see any likeness”. You saw things that you couldn't get your head around - things like: voices inside fire; wind; trumpet sounds - things that you can't contain.
“...lest you act corruptly, and make yourself a graven image, the likeness of any figure, the likeness of male or female, the likeness of any beast on the earth, the likeness of any winged fowl that flies in the air, the likeness of anything that creeps on the ground, the likeness of any fish in the waters beneath the earth. And lest you lift your eyes up to the heavens, and when you see the sun, moon and stars, all the host of heaven, lest you should become driven to worship them and serve them, which the Lord your God has allotted to all the nations under heaven.”
If you can think it up - I'm not that.
Deuteronomy 4:23 (a couple of verses down) – “Take heed to yourselves, lest you forget the covenant of the Lord your God which He made with you, and make yourself a graven image, a likeness of anything which Jehovah your God has forbidden you. For Jehovah your God is a consuming fire, a jealous God. When your fathers, sons, and sons of sons, and when you have remained long in the land, and have dealt corruptly by making a graven image the likeness of anything, and shall do evil in the sight of the Lord your God, to provoke Him to anger.”