When we see the 10 Commandments in terms of a marriage contract to Israel, to love the lord with all their heart, we will get a clearer understanding of God’s heart.
We need to see the correct perspective of all the 10 Commandments and understand a Ketubah. Many people live under an incorrect Old Covenant view of God. God did not set out a set of rules to restrict them but a relationship to free them.
The children of Israel were slaves for 430 years. They had a 430-year heritage of slavery. 430 years of their opinion not mattering .430 years of getting up every day and making bricks, seven days a week 12 hours a day, 365 days a year. Day in and day out and now they are being invited into a totally different kind of relationship.
They had no human rights. What were the 10 Commandments all about? It was about helping a group of slaves learn how to be human again. God was trying to teach a group of people how to live in the true freedom of a relationship with him in order to develop a culture that the whole world would look at and what they have and want it.
That relationship with God was to be an example for the whole world. It was a wedding proposal; God was proposing marriage to a group of people.
God would respect their basic dignity not like pharaoh who would just do whatever he wanted to them. He would take from them, make them work harder. There must have been all sorts of things that the various pharaohs did over that 430-year period.
The 10 commandments were not originally laws and rules and restrictions to control them, but to bring them into a completely different understanding of relationship. It was a whole radical shift from 430 years of slavery.
When God told them thou shall not steal. They were not thinking God is giving us a rule here restricting us. They were actually thinking about the last 430 years that people had just taken whatever they wanted from them, including their women and everything else they took from them in Egypt. Now God is saying you can’t steal, it was a totally new culture. Nobody can just take things from you anymore. It was empowering them to bring them into a totally new understanding of Covenant relationship.
All they knew was slavery and now God is saying you shall take a day off. Can you imagine what they felt? They did not have a day off in 430 years and he is actually commanding them to have a day off.
Keep the Sabbath holy, we think of religious stuff, rules, laws, this was freedom for the children of Israel. He wanted to remind them of their identity and value. Their identity didn’t come from how many bricks they made because that was all that they were useful to the Egyptians for, making bricks.
Their whole identity as slaves was making bricks and God was saying you are not slaves anymore. I want to give you a day off because it is not about works, it is about relationship.
Thou shall not lie. You don’t have to lie anymore for fear of the Egyptians. In this new culture we actually need to have integrity in our dealings with each other. They were no longer slaves. It is not good to lie, because then no one will want to relate or deal with you, so that you have relationship and trust for one another.
God was not trying to make people good with a set of rules. He was trying to make people free by understanding that integrity of the relationship he wants them to have.
The Ten Commandments is not God proposing conditions for his love. This is what a lot of people think, God wants me to love him, but I can only do it, if I keep the rules, keep his commandments.
You don’t propose marriage to someone you don’t already love. God loved them and he wanted a relationship with them, so he established the ketubah (the marriage contract), the proposal to have relationship with the people.
His whole goal was to bring freedom to a group of people who were in slavery. He wanted to free them from what had bound them up.
God was not offering them a list of how too’s. It was all about enjoying their relationship with him now. And Joshua understood it, that is why he would stay in the presence of God and not leave the tent of meeting.
Because of their slave mentality the children of Israel didn’t get it.
God was not saying that you have to marry me, whether you love me or not.
He was expressing his love so that we would come back and reciprocate that love. God wanted to create a relationship out of freedom. So, God’s laws, were a confirmation that he wanted them to have the best sort of life, as a demonstration of that relationship.
Relationship establishes relationship. We never establish a relationship with rules, we establish a relationship with love and then the boundaries maintain it, they keep that relationship safe. It was a totally different concept for them.
Exodus 20:1 first line of this whole contract. I am the Lord your God, have no other gods before me. The words in Hebrew are anochi Jehovah elohim.
God wanted to create a culture where everyone had the basic dignity of the image of God. A culture so good the whole world would want to have it. So, he is establishing a community of people who will be a light to the Gentiles and one day bring forth Jesus the Messiah.
He desired to establish a culture with certain values in place that the whole world would want because they are going to see what God is like in the context of relationship.
So, the first word of the 10 Commandments is the word anochi- four Hebrew letters. Aleph, nun, chet, yod.
Four letters, the Hebrew language was originally a picture language. So, aleph is a picture of an ox head going into a yoke. Therefore, it represents authority. So, the first word of the marriage contract with them is authority, first letter.
Nun is the picture of fish multiplying and has to do with multiplication- increasing.
Chet is a picture of a fence or hedge. it means to protect or to separate, like a boundary fence. So, the idea of boundaries is in the first word. The idea of multiplication and authority are in the first word of this ketubah.
Yod is a picture of a hand, an upraised hand. It is the first letter of the word Judah which means praise, upraised hand, to praise or submit. So, you put all these things together.
So, the word Anochi means- your authority is going to increase inside the hedge of praise and submission. I am the Lord your God have no other gods before me.
So why would you want to have any other gods when you have that? What was God saying in the ketubah? I am the Lord your God who is choosing to bless you with freedom from slavery not because of anything you’ve done but because I love you and I want all the people of the world to know that I am a loving God, welcome to being a human being again, that’s the first line of the 10 Commandments.
As we come into the intimacy of experiential marriage with the Lord. We will come into a oneness of spirit and soul, having one heart with the Lord, where we experience and partake of His divine nature, enabling us to be taught by the Holy Spirit, and understand the heart of the Father.
We cannot just read the bible in its English version, with our religious understanding of what those words mean. We must experience God through personal encounter in the context of marriage, and then he reveals the mystery that has been hidden.
But the children of Israel were scared of God, because he is a consuming fire, but they did not understand the function of fire. But God married them anyway and eventually divorced them, that is why God hates divorce, he has experienced it (Jeremiah 3:8).
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