Week 4 Exodus 20
The Ten Commandments (10Cs) are interesting because they’re really the keystone feature of a plan the Lord had for re-engineering Israel.
Israel had lived in perpetual servitude as Egypt’s under-class and had no resources for building a successful nation so the Lord gave them the 10Cs as the foundational handbook charting the route forward.
On the surface they seem to be a straightforward list of dos & don’ts. It looks like if I slavishly and robotically don’t do the don’ts and do do the dos then I’m in compliance. But it turns out that robotic compliance is pretty much just a First Level Success. A success for sure…but a fleeting one. More like a rest stop on the way to the next level. I think people figure the 10Cs are dumb and legalistic but the laws are only dumb and legalistic if I stop at the Dumb Legalism Stage.
That’s because one of the (unwritten) rules of the 10Cs is that they start on the outside of me and then they can either stay out on the surface or – over time – they can begin to percolate (a gradual process of leaching from outside to inside).
That’s likely what the Lord was getting at in the NT when he said it was good not to murder some guy. But on the other hand if I hated him being alive then there was more percolating in need of doing. Successful 10C assimilation seems to assume a kind of transformative osmotic diffusion.