Sunday, December 8, 2024
Scripture: Deuteronomy 5:1-22

The Journey Class has been watching The Chosen on Thursday nights for the past year or so. I highly recommend the episodes if you haven’t seen them. Hopefully, we will finish Season 4 before Christmas. It has given us a good glance into what it was like to be a Jew in the time of Jesus.

The Jews were tied to the Law of Moses, the Ten Commandments, so much so that there are verses and verses written just to explain how to live by those laws. The Ten Commandments took on a life of themselves. The rules to explain those Laws determined what a person did and how they did it. What you could actually do and not do on the Sabbath – how many steps you could take, how much you could carry.

This is not what God intended when He gave those Laws to His people. They became legalists and lost the meaning and spirit of the laws. The Laws became more important than the people. Trying to obey those Laws to the letter was virtually impossible.

God saw what His people were doing and came up with another way. Following rules was not going to gain His people salvation. In the process, they had forgotten about a relationship with Him. His answer came in the person of Jesus Christ, His Son. Keeping the Ten Commandments is still an important guide to how we are to live today, but our redemption is not based on how well we keep the laws. We will fail God. We will covet things that other people have. We will be tempted to make gods of other things. We will even be legalistic about some things and forget about the person God wants us to love. What God did is what’s important, not what we do. And we are reminded each Advent of what God did—sent His Son to die for us.

Lynn Odom is married to Dave and hopefully by the time you read this will have a new grandson.