We’ve talked quite a lot in the past about the importance of the Ten Commandments for believers, and that’s quite clear. I don’t want you to miss Exodus 20:2: ‘I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery.’
So, salvation is the context. They have been saved, and some of them had not just been saved from physical slavery, but had also been saved from slavery to sin—they were believers in the Lord. But others among them did not believe this. And the purpose of these Ten Commandments, when those guys were reading and hearing them, was to convict them of sin—to make it clear to them that they had sinned against the living God.
They might have, before hearing these Ten Commandments read, thought that they were fine—thought that they had no sin before the Lord—thought that simply because they were part of the Israelites, that they were safe. Just because they’d been rescued from slavery in Egypt, that they were also safe from the wrath of God.
The purpose of these Ten Commandments then, for those unbelievers amongst the Israelites—those who perhaps presented as believers, but in reality were not believers—was to convict them. (That’s also the purpose of the thunder, and the lightning, and the trumpet, and the mountain in smoke—that caused them to tremble with fear because of their conviction of sin as much as everything else.)
And we need to make sure we’ve gone through the same experience—not immediately assuming that we’ve seen the full extent of our sin.
Now, I don’t need any of you who are already believers to become Christians all over again—that’s counterproductive. And yet, on the other hand, if I can get you to the stage where you are repenting more deeply than you ever have, more convinced of the extent of your salvation, then that will be a very good thing.
See the sinfulness of sin, as well as the marvellousness of the extent of the salvation that the Lord has brought.
So, do go through the Ten Commandments regularly in order to do that. For unbelievers, you need to be convicted of sin to become a Christian for the first time—if you’re not a believer, if you’re not truly saved, if you’re not truly born again, one of the means by which you will see your need to cry out to God for salvation—for help—will be seeing your sin through the law.
But, on the other hand, those of you who have already been saved—myself included—we also need to see that we have not kept the law as we should have. What this will do is deepen, for us, I hope, is our sense of just how far we have fallen short of the glory of God without the intervention of the Lord Jesus Christ, and just how much we need—not only the Lord Jesus, who has kept the law in a way that we never could and never have—but also the fact that Jesus died as a lawbreaker, so that we could be forgiven of our lawbreaking…
He was a substitute. He was being punished with all the curses of a covenant-breaking man, so that we could be forgiven for our covenant-breaking. He was suffering those curses instead of us.
