Father, help us to follow your commands.
I'm not going to look at the actual 10 Commandments this week, as I'm sure you know them. So I thought I'd have a quick look at why we need laws at all!
Laws influence our lives. The original idea behind laws was to protect the population, and those outside the law (outlaws) were given no rights. They could be hunted, persecuted and even killed without repercussion. They weren't given any form of trial. To be branded an outlaw was a serious thing.
Basically laws define what we can and can't do. They define how we live in relation to our neighbour. But like everything, people tend to go to one extreme or the other. There's those who don't bother with law X, and there's others who will try to bend law Y to their own advantage. Most people do it. To some people going faster than the speed limit says is OK, to others 'borrowing' small things from work is not stealing. Unfortunately we all tend to have our blind spots and own definitions of right and wrong.
Unfortunately laws have become very complex. Everything has to be judged at trial and the clauses and sub-clauses get longer and more complicated each day. But at first God started out with 10 basic laws. They can be broken down into two main categories; obeying God and living in harmony with your neighbour.
God's Laws are perfect and unbiased towards any one person or group of persons they applied to the king as well as the slave. But people quickly found out that laws can be a powerful force for their benefit if only they could write some laws themselves. Just look at Isaiah 10: 1,2 for an example of this.
By Jesus' time laws defined how far you could go, which is not the attitude that God wanted. For example God said keep the Sabbath holy, and quickly men defined what could and couldn't be done as a result. They added bits about not doing particular jobs, how far a person could walk, even to the extent of not helping someone who was sick, etc. They'd gone into minute details of a particular subject, but it that what God intended? Not really. Jesus summed it up perfectly when he reduced the laws to ,"love God, and love your neighbour". If you follow both with all your ability then you can't go far wrong. God laid down his law through Moses. The choice is up to us; do we want to do what God wants or do we want to be branded outlaws?
Why did God give 10 commandments? Off the top of your head, how many can you remember?
What happened to those who broke the laws?
In New Testament times the Scribes and Pharisees had defined many laws, such as healing on the Sabbath and the washing of hands. Why did Jesus break them?