Sometimes I’m amazed about how few people know about and commandments. Polls have shown that only 49% of Christians 44% of Catholics could name only four of the Ten Commandments.
The 10 Commandments are just as Porten to you today as they were centuries ago because commandments are God’s method for liberating us to experience blessings we could never imagine possible.
God gave the ten commandments for the personal well-being of his people. In Exodus 29:2, God said, “I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery.” God had already redeemed his people and brought them out of slavery. And now that they were out on their own, he was getting in the rules that would govern their lives.
Many people believe the Old Testament teaches. The law saves us in the New Testament teaches us we are saved by grace. that is not true. In the New Testament, there is law as well as grace. When you become a true believer, it doesn’t mean you have no law it means you serve under the new law that God gives. In the old testament, he can law did not say people. That was impossible. No man could be saved by keeping the law, because no man could keep the law. You find Grace in the pages of the Old Testament. You find God’s grace in Genesis 3 after Adam and Eve sinned, when God killed an animal, and took the skin and covered Adam and Eve. You see grace and faith in Genesis 115:6 when Abraham “believed in the Lord and he reckoned it to him as righteous.” We are saying the same way whether in the Old Testament or the New Testament. Every person is saved by grace, which is appropriated through faith. God gave a law, not you save his people, but you teach them how to live.
The law was given to serve as a foundation for the nation of Israel. There are three essentials for any nation. A nation has to have a common people, a common land, and a common law or constitution. God had already given the Israelites, a common people when he called Abraham out of Ur of the Chaldeans. They were headed to the common land, the land of Canaan. But what they needed to find them together what is the constitution, a law. That’s what we find in the beginning of Exodus 20.
And last, but not least, God gave the law to remind the people of their own sinfulness. Did God believe the Israelites were actually going to keep the law? Of course not. That’s why God instituted a sacrificial system with the understanding that they would need forgiveness. The book of James says the law is like a mirror that shows us how dirty our lives really are. In the book of Galatians, Paul refutes, the.Judaizers, who thought the law was what saved them. Paul said no. He explained, “ The law have to come our tutor to lead us to christ, so that we may become justified by faith” -Galatians 3:24. A tutor, and Paul’s day was a slave who would walk the child to school. And Paul is saying that the law is like a tutor and attendant, who leads us to Jesus Christ.
The law doesn’t save us. It reminds us of how much we need God’s forgiveness and salvation.
From Pity to Praise 