God of Order

Transcript

This transcript was generated automatically from the audio and may contain small errors.

I want you to imagine a TV show. Here's the premise. I don't think I'm gonna get money for this, so I'm just gonna give it away for free. Here's the premise. You take a million teenagers and you put them on an island and you make them a sovereign nation. I call it feedback. I call it Absurdistan, okay? Here we go. It's gonna be streaming September 12th on Paramount and CBS. It's not. But Absurdistan. Absurdistan would be this big thing, okay? So this sounds fun, right? Sounds at least fun to watch, not fun to be a part of, but it sounds fun to watch, right?

I want you to imagine that you are a producer on this show. One of the many producers for the million teenagers, okay? You're the producer and you, as part of the contract, you have to write four rules into the contract, things that they can never do or else they are removed from the island. What four rules are you putting in the contract? And you can't put don't be stupid.

That's why I know some of you are don't be dumb or nothing kind of all inclusive. You have to think it through. What rules are you putting into that contract? Okay, you're one of the producers. There's only four rules, you only get four, you have to put them in the contract and if they break that rule, they get off the island, okay? All right, I want you to think of your rule. Think of it hard, okay? What you are trying to do right now is the basic underpinning of the Ten Commandments.

What you're trying to do right now, that rule that you're trying to make is the basic underpinning of the Ten Commandments. God is forming a nation out of his people and through the Ten Commandments, God is giving wisdom and grace through ordered living. We're gonna be breaking that down later. But through the Ten Commandments, God is giving wisdom and grace through ordered living. God is not some producer writing a contract, right? But he is giving people what they need to thrive and what they need to grow into a nation and so he's imparting wisdom and grace to them through these. Now, let's not forget the context that God is giving the Ten Commandments in. These are former slaves, generational slaves, or 400 years slaves, with no particular national identity.

They don't know anything except Egypt. They don't know any culture except Egyptian. They don't know anything about other gods. It's all what they were serving. Now, there are stories that they know, obviously. I'm not saying they're completely Egyptian in culture, but they are slaves. And this understanding that helps us understand the how and the why of these Ten Commandments. God is not just coming up with rules because he feels like it. God is dumping a million people into a nation and having to help them figure it out. That's what the Ten Commandments is. He's preparing them for an inheritance and preparing them for influence. And this is what we lose. This is what we lose. We forget that these are people that have never been a people before. And we forget that these rules are, there's actually a lot of genius in the Ten Commandments that we miss. And to be perfectly honest,

I'm not against posting Ten Commandments anywhere, right? However, if all you do is post them places, let's just say schools, it's fine, it's fine. But all you're going to do is communicate, obey these things, and God will be nice to you. That's really, without context, without really understanding what's going on. You just post 10 rules. The thing you pick up from that as a third grader is I do this and God's nice to me.

And that's a little bit less of what the Ten Commandments is. It's a little bit less than what we are going to be talking about today. God's law is actually way more than this. I want to read long form. I want to read Psalm 119, obviously not the whole Psalm, just a couple of verses. But I want you to hear about how it talks about rules and obeying it. It says, verse 10, Psalm 119, 10 through 16, it says, with my whole heart I seek you. Let me not wander from your commandments. I have stored up your word in my heart that I might not sin against you. Blessed are you, O Lord. Teach me your statutes. With my lips I declare all the rules of your mouth. In the way of your testimonies, I delight as much as in all riches. I will mediate, meditate on your precepts and fix my eyes on your ways. I will delight in your statutes. I will not forget your word. This is what it is to know God.

This is what it is to be in a relationship with Him, to love Him, to serve Him, to be in a nation that He has put together, all of which we are if we profess to know the Lord. And so this is our sermon series, No God. We're gonna be going through slow form. We're gonna be going through God's law in Exodus. And through that we're gonna be coming to know kind of who God is, what His heart is, and we're gonna try to see the law in a new way. Okay? First, I wanna point out two pitfalls on that, okay? Because it can sound all cool to say like, yeah, we're gonna read Exodus law, and we're gonna read it different. Okay. Number one, the law can sound and be super boring to read, like super boring. Whenever I read the Bible all the way through, a lot of times I may skip some law that may happen.

Reading the law to find God's heart is a bit like reading an instruction manual to find the greatness of a product, okay? It's in there. You just really have to know what you're looking for, right? A lot of contextualization of what you're reading to understand what you're reading, okay? And sometimes, whenever we're reading what's supposed to happen when you sell your daughter into slavery, which is in Exodus 21, and we're getting to that next week, there's your teaser, okay? What happens when you sell your daughter into slavery? Okay, we're gonna hit it. We're not hiding, I promise. It's gonna be amazing. If all you do, if all you do is just read that, like I just did to you without any contact and that I understand kind of what's going on, then you're gonna fill in the blanks. Many of you already have. On that law in particular, you're like, wait up. I'm gonna read Exodus 21, okay, do it.

You have to kind of know what you're looking for. You have to read it well. And so the law, it can be if you don't, obviously if you don't know how to read it very well or aren't familiar with like ancient near Eastern law writing, then it can be confusing or sound redundant or sound weird or be oddly worded or something, okay? So just know that. The other thing that you need to know is that it is good for us to have a suspicion about the ability of the law, okay? It is good for us to be suspicious of anybody that says like all we need to do is follow the law, okay?

There's many books written about this in the New Testament actually. Romans does a great job of talking about this, but it's enough to say this, that the law can teach us about God's heart. It can show us how God intends life to be lived. However, the law itself cannot give us life by obeying it. Okay, so the law, and you might have heard it before that the law is like an X-ray machine, okay? The law shows you where the problem is, but it's not the doctor, right? So the law is the X-ray, it's not the doctor, and that's good, but at the same time, the law is also like a template. It shows us what the blessed life should, can look like.

So it reveals part of how God intended life to be created. So it's not bad, the law itself is not evil. Using the law, using the law to substitute for a relationship with God will lead you to death, okay? So it really does depend on how you use it. So it shows us the ideal. So with the law, just understand we've got some pitfalls there if you're like, I'm gonna read the whole Exodus law. Okay, that's cool. But it's gonna be a bit of a trudge, and that's okay. So let's go through Exodus law the same way Exodus does. Exodus starts by hitting all the highlights, it hits the top 10, right? And then it spends chapter upon chapter moving slowly through particular cases of how those 10 are applied. That's how Exodus law is written out, that's how it's laid out. So we're getting kind of highlights in the 10 commandments, like an overview, not a highlight, but like an overview, like here's kind of all

that we're talking about with the law. And then from Exodus, that's Exodus 20, and then at the end of 20 and end of 22 and many chapters after that, we go through particular cases where we're gonna be talking about it, okay? All right. So Exodus is going to hit all 10 first, then move slowly. The first three, here's kind of the warning real fast, the first three are different than the last seven, okay? The first three commandments are different than the last seven. We're gonna go through each one, and I want you to kind of see it as we see it here. So we'll start in Exodus chapter 20, which is where the 10 commandments are. We're gonna start in verse one. We're gonna go all the way through 17 today. So Exodus 20, verses one through three, it says, "'And God spoke all these words, saying, "'I am the Lord your God who brought you "'out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery.

"'You shall have no other gods before me.'" Okay. God opens with his primary identity to these people. "'I am the one who rescued you.'" It's interesting and instructive because God could have chosen a lot of other things. Like, I'm the one who called Abraham into my promise. I'm the one who rescued Jacob from his brother Esau. I'm the one who raised up Joseph to save the people of Israel. Like, he could have done it a lot of different ways, but he introduces himself here this way specifically. I'm the one who rescued you. Okay, so God is kind of doing that. Technically, verse three is the first commandment. So let's read three and four together. This is kind of the first two commandments. It says, "'You shall have no other gods before me.'" Verse four, "'You shall not make for yourself "'a carved image or any likeness of anything "'that is in heaven above, "'or that is in the earth beneath,

"'or that is in the water under the earth.'" Okay. So in the second commandment, God prohibits kind of imitation gods. Sometimes we read this and there's kind of an eye roll. Right? Because we read that and we're like, I know not to bow to a statue of Jesus. Okay, yeah, great, good. You get a gold star. Let me give you a different situation. What if there was a statue of Jesus right outside? Like right there, right in our little courtyard, right next to that big tree. Okay, big statue of Jesus. I mean, like a nine footer, okay? Just real big, big statue of Jesus. Maybe he has his hands up, I don't know.

And theologically speaking, it's accurate, right? It's not, he's not too happy. He's not too sad. It's like, it's a good statue of Jesus, right? Like it's not a weird statue of Jesus. It's a normal statue of Jesus, okay. And maybe I get a little upset about that. I probably would get a little upset about that. I'd be like, we don't need a statue of Jesus out here. And people like, Drew, calm down. Nobody's bowing to that. You know, nobody's, okay, okay, great. Nobody's bound to it. What if the next Sunday we roll up in here and there is lipstick and a hula skirt on it?

You getting mad? Maybe. Oh, what if somebody spray paints a few choice words and a few choice images? You still okay with that? What if somebody just dumps a huge pile of calender on it? You still good? No, you're not. Because there is a way that icons or statues receive the value of the thing it represents. That's not anything anybody does consciously. It's just what we do with graven images. It's what we do with statues of Jesus. Even if the statue of Jesus got a little dirty, we'd say like, we need to keep Jesus' statue totally clean. Why? It's just a statue, right? We're not bound to it, are we? Are we? There's a reason the second commandment is there. There's a reason it's second. There's a reason it made the top 10.

Because we have a proclivity toward making idols. And if you want an exhibit in, I'll give it to you. Something that we already all do, many people do. When they call this building God's house. Guys, news flash, God does not live here in this building. This is not his address, right? God promises to be among us when we are gathered as a church. This is just a church building. This is just wood and cheap carpet, okay? I mean, this is, we got to free. We got to free, it's not that cheap. There is a way that we can attach. So like, don't run in church. You ever heard of that? We don't subscribe to that here. But I definitely grew up hearing that, right? Like, hey, you're in God's house, so take your hat off. You're in God's house, so don't run. You're in God's house. None of these we subscribe to, by the way, so if you have a hat on, you're fine. But this is where it comes from.

It's by people attaching the value of God to a building. Guys, this building could be demolished tomorrow and God's not breaking a sweat. God's not worried about what it, oh, what it's gonna do, where's it gonna live? Okay, and yet, and yet, and yet, we still act like this physical space should be more sacred than other spaces. We do, we act like that. You shall not make for yourself a carved image or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, earth beneath, water beneath, water below. Okay. Second commandment, no imitation gods. Third commandment, here we go, Exodus 20 verse seven, so I'm skipping a few. Says, you shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain, for the Lord will not hold him guiltless who takes his name in vain. So the third commandment, watch how you talk about me. Okay, these are funny commandments, right? What is God doing with these first three?

Remember what I said, the first three are different than the other seven. God is helping us see all the ways that he is preeminent over everything, that no one deserves what he deserves, that no one compares to who God is, that words fail to describe his greatness, his grandeur, his goodness, his mercy. There's no superlative, that's too much. You cannot over endow the Lord with compliments. You can't say too much about him.

This is the God of the universe. This is the one who created us. And it's helping us understand that knowing God, if we're gonna know God, if we're gonna be in relationship with God, we have to understand that part of that equation is allegiance, that we're not on equal footing. That whenever God comes to you, he has to condescend to come to you, enemy. He has to lower himself, why? Because he's high and lifted up. There's no way, if God would reveal his true self to you, you would be a mark on the ground. At the very least, you'd be on your face in tears wondering if you're gonna die, at the very least. Like if you survived it, that's the presence of God. That's the one we worship. God is trying to help his people understand, I'm him, it's me. I'm the guy, I'm the one. And so knowing God includes allegiance to him that we try to love him and keep his commandments,

that we respect him, that we fear him. And I don't mean some particular kind of fear, I mean fear, we fear him. We fear God, like we feel like a downed electrical wire. If you touch that thing wrong, you are toast, literally. Sean Webb, yes, yes. Electrician back there, he knows. He knows. You gotta respect that. You gotta respect that. In fact, you even have to pay attention to how you speak about him according to the Third Commandment. This is God. I want you to imagine being in a room with Colin Powell. Now some of you might not know who Colin Powell is, maybe you don't recognize that face. Colin Powell is a big deal. Colin Powell was the 65th Secretary of State, which is fourth in line. It's President, Vice President, Speaker of the House, and then Secretary of State. It's Colin Powell.

Four-star general. Several, several tours, not a perfect man at all, but you could even see by his face right there. Colin Powell, if you're in a room, if you're in a room with like three friends and Colin Powell walks into your room, you're gonna feel something. You're gonna feel something move. The gravity of the room will change. You will just like feel him, you know? And he's not like strutting. That's not what he's doing. That's not what I mean. I don't mean that he's coming in assuming all of that. I mean that when he comes in, it's just going to shift. He's just going to command respect with his person. And if you've been around a lot of four-star generals, and I really haven't, then you know what I mean. If you've been around people that are major professionals, very, very high ranking officials in any capacity, you understand that whenever they walk into a room,

that you're going to defer to them in conversation. You're going to show them respect. You're going to feel the need to honor. And that when Colin Powell opens his mouth, it's time to listen. He's not gonna just kind of say things he doesn't need to say. He's not gonna drone on about anything. He's gonna keep it tight. And when he speaks, you should probably take notes, because he's Colin Powell, right? God is helping us and his people grasp the magnitude

of the fact that if they're going to be in a relationship with him, that worship, allegiance, respect, and obedience is already on the table. It's already there. It's part of our relationship already. It's a lot more than that. It's a lot more than that, but it is not less than that, right? It's a lot more than that because God's gracious to us. But it is nothing less than absolute allegiance, respect,

worship, ascribed authority, praise on end. If we started now to praise the Lord God out loud, and then we all died in this room because we just stayed here the entire time of our lives praising God, it wouldn't be enough. It couldn't explain how good and great God is. This is why we have the first three commandments, and this is why they're the first three. We're also gonna find this in the next seven. We're also gonna find that God desires good things for you.

It's not just that he's high and above. It's not just that he commands respect or deserves worship. It's not just that, but also his heart for you. He desires good things for you. God wants you, in fact, God wants you to want good things. His plan for your life includes not just him wanting good things for you, but you wanting good things for yourself and for others. And this is what the last seven commandments are about. And this is what we're gonna call the ordered life. The reason we call it that is because in something in ordered list or any kind of order,

you're talking about what gets built first or what goes first, but also you're talking about something that is prioritized over another thing, okay? So this is the ordered life, and God gives us this ordered life so that everything else can work. God gives us an ordered life so that everything else can work. This is similar to what we would call the rule of law and injustice, okay? We'll actually get to some of these, but when you don't have some basic fundamental things laid down, nothing else works. It gets super complicated super fast because these things that are supposed to be bedrock aren't there. God gives us an ordered life so that everything else can work, okay?

And this is actually, going back to the original illustration, this is the real genius of the 10 commandments because it is short and powerful. It kind of just hits them all real quick, but even in their quick hits, there's a lot of genius even in the wording. Okay, here we go. Commandment number four, Exodus 20, verses eight through the first part of 10. It says, remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy, six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord your God. So we are prioritizing rest over exhaustion.

God is prioritizing rest over exhaustion. He sets the Sabbath aside as belonging to him. And he gives a reason in the next verse, verse 11, here we go. For in six days the Lord made the heavens and the earth, the sea and all that is in them and rested on the seventh day. Therefore, the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy. In the ordered life, you build Sabbath rest into it because God made it holy. It is dishonoring to God when you don't take a break. In fact, or I'm being attacked by a gnat right now. In fact, when you don't take that break, you will find that life begins to break down. You begin to burn out. It's because you're made, actually made, life is made for you to take a break.

Now I'm not all up on it. It has to be on this day of the week or it has to be this long or sundown to sundown or morning to night or whatever. That doesn't matter, honestly. That's not what this is about. This is about taking one seventh off. My seventh day happens to be Saturday and I don't respond on Saturday. I don't answer a lot of texts on Saturday unless your cow's in a ditch. Then biblically I'm responding. Beyond that,

it's in the Bible. Okay, if your cow's in a ditch, I got an ox. If your ox is in a ditch, I'm sorry. If your cow's in a ditch, you know, I'm off. If your ox is in a ditch, though. This is the ordered life, right? This is how God created life to work. Let's look at the next one. Exodus 20, verse 12. It says, honor your father and your mother, that your days may be long in the land and that the Lord your God, excuse me, your days may be long in the land that the Lord your God is giving you, okay? This is the fifth commandment. We are prioritizing heritage over hubris. They don't all start with the same letter, I promise. Prioritizing heritage over hubris. So heritage, hubris is kind of believing in some capacity that you can't get something wrong or believing that you're way smarter than anybody that's come before you, okay? That might sound strange to call it that

because it's extremely common today. It's actually been extremely common for the last 100 years where the next generation that's come up pretends like their grandparents were cavemen, okay? And just didn't understand how to do anything. It's a common thing. Kids still do it today. It's encouraged in the national media. It's to kind of eye roll your parents, like they don't know what they're talking about. What you see in the fifth commandment is to honor your father and your mother. And that doesn't stop after you're out of their house because I still honor my parents even though I'm not under their roof. I don't obey them the same way. That's different, but I do honor them. And that actually changes even as they age, as I age. It all changes. Honor your father and mother. There's an attached promise to this command that's actually picked up in the New Testament

in talking about children. In the ordered life, you honor your heritage. You honor the people that have come before you. You say, listen, the only reason that we're here is because we're standing on the shoulders of people that have come before us. And that's true. That's even true in our church. We are here because people saved up. People bought land. People bought a building. People that aren't here anymore. People that are long gone. You have people that donate money to buy the five acres that our church has. The five acres that our church is sitting on, they donated that money and then they never saw a church built on that property. That it's always a heritage. We talked about that a lot last week with children of our heritage. But the idea that you are putting things down in the ground now. You're putting seeds down and you might not see them come to full flower,

but you know that that work is faithful. You honor the heritage that you receive and you honor the fact that you will also be passing something on. Whether you're a biological father or mother or not, you're gonna be a father or mother to somebody if you are discipling people. You resist the urge to believe that everybody who has come before you is dumb and hasn't figured it out. The number one thing, I went through seminary, obviously. And the number one thing I remember oftentimes, I went through seminary as a non-traditional student. I went at 30 years old. So I'm in class with 22 year olds. Which might not sound like a lot, but I already had like three kids by then and I mean like a lot of life. And some of these 22 year olds were unmarried and just hadn't lived a lot of life yet. That's fine, it's fine.

But I always knew the mature ones from the immature ones. Because when we'd be talking about the papers we were writing or having discussion in class, the ones that thought like, oh, I can come up with an explanation of the Trinity. It's gonna be super easy. All these people for hundreds of years, all these theologians that have had a really difficult time explaining the Trinity before, that's no big deal. I got this. And my thought was like, do you think everybody else is dumb? Like, do you think everybody else like, just wasn't trying their hardest? Like it was their side job or something? You had people that were devoting their entire lives to like trying to figure this thing out, like the Trinity, and I'm picking something particularly mysterious, but sometimes it's even just like how to run something, how to run a church, how to talk to people, how to, it's like, man,

there's some wisdom that has been laid down somewhere. And if you're just not looking at it because you think, no, I can totally wing this, I got this, super easy. Listen, man, that's called hubris. It is not wise. 10 commandments say honor the people that have come before you. Okay, sixth commandment, verse 13, you shall not murder. This prioritizes others over self.

In the ordered life, murder is prevented by serving others. You are serving them, usually you don't wanna murder them, although that, you know, part of the genius in this, I'm just gonna move on, part of the genius on this though, you shall not murder. It doesn't say you shall not kill, because you shall not murder. It forbids murder, it does not forbid killing. Interesting.

The only reason I say this, the only reason I just kind of like pick at that little fissure is to show you why we have more law written down after this, because there are plenty of examples where, you know, even in America, we have first, second, and third degree murder, right? If you don't know, first degree murder, I'm gonna get this wrong. Okay, no, I'm gonna get it right. First is the worst, right? First is the worst, thank you, gosh, I was like, first degree murder, sorry, first degree murder, you got premeditation, if you planned the thing out and then you carried it out, that's first degree murder. If you planned it out and don't get to finish it, it's still first degree attempted murder, okay? Second degree murder is what we call the crime of passion, you're in the middle of something, you didn't plan it out, but you definitely intended to kill them and you killed them.

Third degree is an unintentional killing of somebody. So we, in America, we have first, second, and third degree murder, okay? The Bible covers all of those in particular examples in the following chapters. And it's because if you just say don't murder, someone will ask, what do you mean? Okay, this is why we have, when is it okay to kill? Is it okay to kill? Is it okay to kill? Oh, it's tough, yeah, it is okay to kill, it is okay to kill, it's not generally okay to kill, but there are, what we're trying to say is there are particular instances where killing is necessary. It's not fun to talk about, but it's right here, and it's things that we should kind of understand as a people, right? Some of you in here are just freaking out right now because I said it was okay to kill people. Look, I'm not saying it's okay to just randomly kill people. Okay, for example, if somebody's coming into your home

and they're attacking you and you kill them, that's justified, right? Like that's not something that you need to repent before God before, okay? That's not, that's not that. All right, just to give an example. Let's move on before I get in trouble. Wow. Exodus 20 verse 14. You shall not commit adultery, okay? It prioritizes loyalty over playing the field, okay?

It prioritizes loyalty over playing the field. In the ordered life, loyal love points us toward joy. Part of the reason that people commit adultery is because they are under a deception that the adultery they're going to commit is the freedom that they're looking for. What the Ten Commandments help us understand is that there is freedom in honoring your commitments. Again, there's so many things to say on each one of these. I mean, it's almost impossible not to preach a whole sermon on each one of these. Exodus 20 verse 15. You shall not steal. In the ordered life, it is prioritized, sorry, it prioritizes private property over communal property. You shall not steal. How can you steal something that's communal? You can't. It emphasizes, prioritizes private property over communal property, okay? Inherent in this law is that people can and should own things, okay?

Private property, I know it sounds so strange to say this, private property is actually the backbone of basic justice in America. It might even be the backbone of basic justice, period. But it's at least here. The Founding Fathers wrote a lot about this. James Madison, many of them wrote about this. James Madison, many others, a guy named author, Schopenhauer, who was a political philosopher, he said, without private property, justice is impossible, actually. Because if justice is about giving people what is due to them and nothing is private, privately owned, then how can you give something to another person? That's kind of his point.

You shall not steal the basic understanding, the inherent understanding is that people can own things and that they should not be taken from them without their consent, okay? You shall not steal. And just to kind of flush this out a little bit, we're gonna read this next week, actually, that you shall not steal even includes stealing people. Like, so it includes trafficking people. It's actually one of the sub-laws kind of under you shall not steal. Like, don't steal a man and make him a slave. Don't steal, don't kidnap somebody and sell them into slavery for money. That's human trafficking is what we call it today. But it's in, at the dawn of civilization in Exodus chapter 21, God is making sure that people aren't entering into human trafficking. Just to help you understand, like, there's not a lot of new ideas out there. A lot of them are already covered in scripture.

Okay, next one, Exodus 20 verse 16, you shall not bear false witness against your neighbor. Okay, this is the ninth commandment. It prioritizes truth over advantage. Not truth over lying, although, yes, truth over lying, but truth over advantage. The reason why is because it didn't say you should not lie. We're not gonna get into that discussion. It says that you should not bear false witness against your neighbor, which is lying, but it's lying in particular in a court of law against your neighbor. So bearing false witness, you might think, well, why do we need a rule for that? What's happening? Bearing false witness was a big deal because everything, everything that was proven in a court of law by two or three witnesses. So if you are one of those witnesses, you carry a heavy burden, right? This is what I saw, it's what I didn't see, it's what he says, what he didn't say.

This is where he was, where he wasn't, right? That's a big deal, because they couldn't check the cameras, okay? So two or three witnesses, that's basically saying it's fact that happened, okay? So if you think about it, if you are in a court of law and you are rich and powerful, and you've done something that you don't want anybody to know about, you know what you can do? You can give people money to make them say whatever you need them to say. And that happened a lot. It was how rich and powerful, stay rich and powerful. So we say it prioritizes truth over advantage. The advantage would be like getting money from a bribe, getting a favor from a very powerful person, right? Some deal that's gonna work out your way later whenever you have a need, like whenever you need to call in that favor, there's a way to bear false witness that benefits people that can benefit you, okay?

The reason that it's in here is because again, basic justice is built on witnesses telling the truth. And it kind of still is, I know that we have cameras, I know that we have video tape, I know that we have all that, but when you have eyewitness testimony, it's pretty powerful in court in 2026 in America. You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor. The ordered life in order for things to continue to thrive and be good, and you can kind of see it just with all these things that we like don't commit adultery, don't steal, don't murder, don't bear false witness. You can kind of see it all that if, when you begin to lose these things, when people begin to do these things like in increasing measure, things happen that we don't want to happen. Society starts kind of contorting and bending in weird ways that we don't think about. For example, there is a rash of petty

and sometimes not so petty theft that happens in stores, right, in certain stores. In some stores, they say their rule now is, hey, if you saw them steal, don't confront them, just alert security, and they're just gonna kind of keep them in view, but many times they won't be arrested. Well, the aftermath of people not being arrested for petty theft in stores is more petty theft in stores. Okay, so petty theft in stores has actually climbed a ton because there's no immediate consequences for it, right? A lot of those are gone. And truly, from the storage perspective, it's not worth it. They don't want bad press on social media. They don't wanna arrest some teenager who stole gum or something, or maybe even didn't steal at all, and they're getting a bunch of negative press for it. They just figure, man, we'll just eat the loss.

Now, that might be shrewd business-wise, but it begins to unravel societies when that happens, even local societies. If your family was growing up in that society, and a lot of the kids are stealing things from stores, your kid is going to feel direct pressure to do that, at the very least, or might begin to think that that's a good idea. They might even have a teacher that says, well, it's no big deal if you steal something from the store, they're not gonna arrest you anyway. It might happen, right? It might happen because society is built on this kind of ordered life. Whenever this is in place, everything else works. This is the foundation that the ordered life is kind of built upon, right? Justice must not be perverted.

Because when it is, and nobody trusts the courts anymore, there's no recourse. There's no other way for them to get justice, except to handle it themselves. And you wanna see people taking out justice for themselves, that's anarchy. That's not a safe place for anybody. That's the wild, wild west, baby. That is tough living. Okay, last, last commandment, 10th commandment, a very different commandment.

It says, you shall not covet your neighbor's house, you shall not covet your neighbor's wife, or his male servant, or his female servant, or his ox, or his donkey, or anything that is your neighbor's. It's a weird list, admittedly, strange. This is also gonna be really, really helpful in the weeks to come. This, all of this is written to a people in an ancient Near Eastern culture 4,000 years, 6,000 years ago, okay? And the people that are receiving all of this

are not, like, they're not going to immediately think like, oh man, slavery is wrong. We should just abolish slavery right now. Like, that's not what's happening, okay? They're dealing with ancient Near Eastern slavery, which is different than 1800s chattel slavery in America. It's fine. Still, it's still slavery, we could still call it that. However, it still worked very different. Slavery, in fact, in the ancient Near East was a great way for people to buy out their debt. So if you owed a ton of money, and there was no way for you to pay it back, you would sell yourself into basically what we would call endangered servanthood, but slavery. I mean, it's what it was. And you'd be a slave for a certain amount of time until you paid that debt back, and then you weren't a slave anymore. You'd buy back, buy back your slavery, your freedom, excuse me, you'd buy back your freedom.

That is how ancient Near Eastern culture worked often. And so that God is writing rules for these people within that culture, including that, it's not the same thing as condoning it. It's helping them understand what to do in the middle of it. Okay? It's not some big check mark from God on slavery of all kinds, okay? That's not what's happening. It's talking about how you operate in the middle of that. All right.

The last commandment that I just read about, you shall not cover your neighbor's house, et cetera, it's it prioritizes contentment over greed. This is the only one in the last seven that focuses on the heart. The other ones are all action. Don't commit murder, don't commit adultery, don't commit theft, don't commit, don't profane the Sabbath, don't, make sure you honor your father and mother. These are active things, action things. This is what you're doing in your heart, you're coveting. It doesn't say don't steal your neighbor's house, don't sleep with your neighbor's wife, all that's been covered. It's saying on the heart level, in the ordered life, you must find joy in what God has given you. In the ordered life, and this is almost the most important of the last seven, in the ordered life, you must find joy in what God has already given you, which in 21st century America is hard to do sometimes,

when there's always the next thing coming out. You know, be happy with your five year old iPhone. Okay, amen, anybody? Okay, yeah, yeah. It's tough, it's tough to be happy with your five year old iPhone. It's also tough sometimes to be happy with your seven year marriage. It's also tough to be happy with your 10 year career. It's also tough to be happy with your adult children. It's tough to be happy with your grandchildren. It's tough, it's tough to find joy in those things sometimes. It can turn into a rut, it can turn into a bag of regret or resentment, right? It can do and be all those things. The 10th commandment is to actively find joy in what you have, and to not think that the grass is greener on the other side, in the other job, in the other person's bed, in the other person's life, in the ordered life, you must find joy with what God has given you. I wanted to hit all of these 10

to kind of do a flyover, to point toward what's coming. You know, we're gonna be on this, in this series, we're gonna be talking a lot about the law. All of it's gonna be very different, by the way. It's not just gonna be like the same thing kind of over and over again. But in the middle of all of it, I do wanna continue to focus on that joy. If we go back and look at what the psalmist wrote about how like, I delight in your commands, right? I'm excited to do, I have joy in what, in being obedient to what you've asked me to do. This is what God's desire is for us. It's not just so that we don't steal things. Sure, God doesn't want us to steal things, yes and amen. But if that's the goal of your life, you're kind of aiming low, right? Like, okay, I didn't steal something today, it must be a good life. Okay, okay, man.

What God is saying is like, what if we could aspire to joy? What if we could aspire to contentment? What if we could aspire to a life that is just, that is submitted to him? Man, look, do you wanna know God? Do you wanna really know God? Do you wanna know how he created life to work? It's not possible by obeying the 10 commandments. Not really. I mean, I guess in theory, if you're loving God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength, then yes. But if you're just keeping a law, it's not the same thing. That's not knowing God. It's only possible in a relationship with him.

I asked you to think about Colin Powell, the four-star general who was very stern, whose gravity you feel when you walk in the room, who commands all that respect, right? Now, I want you to imagine Colin Powell in the middle of that conversation, turning and looking you right in the eyes and beginning to inquire of you and ask you questions about your life and how you're doing and asking about your dreams and giving you this undivided attention and interest and just sits with you for like an hour and a half, this long conversation. And in the middle of it, several times, you've had this thought to yourself like, this is completely surreal. Colin Powell, who's not even alive anymore, so that'd be even weirder. But Colin Powell,

Colin Powell's having this conversation with me long form. This person who could command anybody's attention is giving me his, right? What a weird moment, what a life-changing moment. At the end, Colin Powell is like, hey, thanks for talking with me, Drew. Here's my number. You can call me anytime you want. You can text me anytime you want and I will make the time to be with you, bro. I don't get on social media a lot, but I might say that. That's a big deal. I would at least tell my wife and family and most people who would listen to me, I'm like, I've got Colin Powell on speed dial.

How cool is that? Look, God did not stop with just being your creator. He takes the time to look you in the eyes, to listen, to give you his undivided attention, to ask you how it's going. The Lord God in heaven, who doesn't need to care about you to validate himself, totally cares about you. He knows you in ways that you don't even know yourself. He knows the number of hairs on your head. He knows everything you've ever done and he's still after you. If you're standing before God and you're feeling guilty, quit it. Stand before God and know that the Lord God in heaven wants you in a relationship with him. I'm gonna end by just reading the little bit of the Psalms that I read before, a little bit less of it, but just to let it sink in. Blessed are you, O Lord, teach me your statutes. With my lips I declare all the rules of your mouth. In the way of your testimonies I delight

as much as in all riches. I will meditate on your precepts and fix my eyes on your ways. I will delight in your statutes. I will not forget your word. Let's pray. Lord, thank you for your word. Thank you for your rules. So often your rules can just come off with a negative tone with us. We don't like being told what to do. Lord, you have gifted us, you have gifted us these rules to show us what a life in submission under you looks like. Not a template that we could fit in, but a space where you could graciously bring us. Lord, help us to walk in a manner worthy of the gospel. Help us to repent whenever we have not measured up to that template. Help us to know when we have messed up before you so that we can repent and we can be made right with you again. Lord, help us to walk in submission to you. Help us to walk in the blessing of an ordered life. Give us the courage and the vision to see it and do it.

It's your name that we pray. Amen.