Frustrated Leaders: As Ten Commandments Tablets Shatter

As Christianity 201 became my primary blog, I have found myself writing more original devotional articles for it over the past few years. This is one from last week.

There’s a bad Sunday School joke that goes something like, “Who in the Bible broke all ten commandments?” The answer is Moses, when he returned from the mountain and exasperated over the sin of the people sent the tablets crashing to the ground.

But we’re getting ahead of ourselves.

First of all, the giving of the commandments in a physical form does not mean that this is the first time God establishes moral and behavioral boundaries of the people of Israel. The website Life Hope and Truth states,

…The answer is found in a fascinating statement God made about Abraham, recorded in Genesis 26:5: “Abraham obeyed My voice and kept My charge, My commandments, My statutes, and My laws.”

This is significant because Abraham was born hundreds of years before Moses received the law on Mount Sinai!

In order for Abraham to obey God’s commandments, statutes and laws, he had to know what they were. This means that Abraham was taught the laws directly from God or from others (or possibly both). God was not giving Moses a brand-new law on Mount Sinai. He was merely giving a codified, or formal, version of His law so that it could be used to govern the emerging nation of Israel…

The article then goes on to illustrate instances of such laws existing prior to Moses.

Let’s pick up the store in Exodus 19 and Exodus 20

^NIV.Ex.19.20 The Lord descended to the top of Mount Sinai and called Moses to the top of the mountain. So Moses went up ²¹ and the Lord said to him, “Go down and warn the people so they do not force their way through to see the Lord and many of them perish. ²² Even the priests, who approach the Lord, must consecrate themselves, or the Lord will break out against them.”  …

^NIV.Ex.20.1 And God spoke all these words:

² “I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery.

³ “You shall have no other gods before^[a] me.

⁴ “You shall not make for yourself an image in the form of anything in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the waters below. ⁵ You shall not bow down to them or worship them; for I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God, punishing the children for the sin of the parents to the third and fourth generation of those who hate me, ⁶ but showing love to a thousand generations of those who love me and keep my commandments.  …

It’s verses 4-6, which we call the second commandment — see the post from last month where we break them up into commandment 2a and 2b — where we want to focus. It’s reiterated in verse 22

²² Then the Lord said to Moses, “Tell the Israelites this: ‘You have seen for yourselves that I have spoken to you from heaven: ²³ Do not make any gods to be alongside me; do not make for yourselves gods of silver or gods of gold.

Then, for nearly a dozen chapters, God gives Moses instructions for worship, and also some amplification of the “big ten” commandments given. But then he tells Moses it’s time “get down to earth” because there’s trouble stirring.

^NIV.Ex.32.1  When the people saw that Moses was so long in coming down from the mountain, they gathered around Aaron and said, “Come, make us gods who will go before us. As for this fellow Moses who brought us up out of Egypt, we don’t know what has happened to him.”

² Aaron answered them, “Take off the gold earrings that your wives, your sons and your daughters are wearing, and bring them to me.” ³ So all the people took off their earrings and brought them to Aaron. ⁴ He took what they handed him and made it into an idol cast in the shape of a calf, fashioning it with a tool. Then they said, “These are your gods, Israel, who brought you up out of Egypt.”…

^…7 Then the Lord said to Moses, “Go down, because your people, whom you brought up out of Egypt, have become corrupt…

^…15 Moses turned and went down the mountain with the two tablets of the covenant law in his hands. They were inscribed on both sides, front and back. ¹⁶ The tablets were the work of God; the writing was the writing of God, engraved on the tablets.

¹⁷ When Joshua heard the noise of the people shouting, he said to Moses, “There is the sound of war in the camp.”

¹⁸ Moses replied:

“It is not the sound of victory,
    it is not the sound of defeat;
    it is the sound of singing that I hear.”

¹⁹ When Moses approached the camp and saw the calf and the dancing, his anger burned and he threw the tablets out of his hands, breaking them to pieces at the foot of the mountain.

Moses returns to see the people breaking the second commandment which was cited above. And he is livid. In his anger and frustration he shatters the “big ten,” which we’re told God Himself engraved.

It’s a very Moses thing to do. In his anger he will later strike a rock he is told to simply speak to, and that particular act of anger costs him entry into the promised land.

But here’s my point.

Before I started writing this, I gave it the title, “As Ten Commandments Tablets Shatter.” I was thinking about Moses and what the people did in his absence. But I was also thinking about pastors and church leaders today.

Depending on whose statistics you read, in North America 1,200 or 1,500 pastors resign (quit) from ministry each month. While conservatives are busy arguing about women in ministry, it’s probably a good thing some of those women are in place, because the mostly-men pastoral workforce is abandoning ministry in droves.

There are a number of reasons, but I’m sure one of them is frustration over the lack of spiritual dedication among the parishioners. Or, as Moses observed, a flagrant disregard for the will of God.

So figuratively, over a thousand each month are throwing the tablets up in the air and letting them crash to the ground while literally, they pack up of their church office library and dust off their resumés and begin to look for another career path.

Vocational ministry life can be frustrating. I write that even as a member of my immediate family prepares to enter into a greater level of vocational pastoral commitment. I am sure that like Moses, I would get exasperated by what I would see and would want to toss the tablets up in the air as well.

In North America, October is designated as “Pastor Appreciation Month,” however if people were serious about appreciating their pastor, they would, to use an archaic word, “harken” more to the things about the ways of God that he or she is trying to teach the congregation. Yes, they should live a certain way because it’s what God desires and what God requires, but there should also be a recognition that the very reason this person has been set apart for career ministry is to teach them such things with the expectation that they will follow.

Otherwise it’s all just empty words and meaningless worship.

Are there “ten commandments” violations that you see that would cause your pastor/rector/priest to want to toss the stone tablets in the air?

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Related:

• April, 2015 – How Christ Kept All Ten Commandments
• February, 2016 – The 613 Commandments
• February, 2019 – Will We Be Judged by The Ten Commandments Standard?
• March, 2020 – The Ten Commandments Expressed as Forms of Stealing (see especially the graphic image)
• September, 2021 – What Was the Law Prior to The Ten Commandments? (this is a different one from the link in the above article)

 

 

People Tend to Forget

This morning was the second of two sermons I got to do back to back.   This one had a lot of scripture in it, so taking my cue from Ed Dobson’s sermons at Mars Hill, I got Ruth to read all the scripture.

I wanted to tie in with Communion Sunday, but found out later it was also Remembrance Day (that’s Veteran’s Day for y’all Stateside) Sunday.  So the message was called People Tend to Forget.

We began by asking the question, “Why do we always read those same words from I Cor. before the communion starts.”   One answer we came up with is that the account in Luke 22 makes the disciples look really, really bad!   One minute Jesus is talking about giving His life for them, and the next minute they’re arguing among themselves which one is the greatest.  (v. 24)

That led to a discussion about how some of the Bible’s spiritual high points seem end with a crash a few verses or a chapter later.

Exodus 14 has the Israelites crossing the Red Sea safely while Pharoah’s army is drowned.  Exodus 15 is their worship and celebration service.   Think Pentecostal worship on steroids.

And chapter 16?   They’re complaining about the food and wishing they were back in Egypt.  Yeah.  Back in Egypt.   For real.

Then we looked at Elijah’s defeating the prophets of Baal at Mount Carmel.   (Well, actually it was God, but you know what I mean…)   Both of these O. T. stories were things we’d looked at briefly last week, but this time we pressed further.

Now remember, this guy just played a major role in one of the most dramatic spiritual warfare encounters of all time.   Where is he at a chapter later in I Kings 39?

Scared silly over a threat from King Ahab’s wife.   Running off into the desert.   Moping.   Wishing he was dead.   No, really, he says that, ‘I wish I was dead.’  This is either ironic or pathetic, depending on your view.

And then there’s Jonah.

Jonah is sent to tell Nineveh to repent. They do. That’s good news, right? Well, not for Jonah. His message was framed as “Nineveh is about to be destroyed,” and their world doesn’t look too kindly on prophets who get it wrong. So when God changes his mind on the destruction of the city, Jonah’s all out of sorts. Check out Jonah 3: 6-10.

The hero of “Jonah and the Whale” in chapter 1 – sorry, great fish – who is also the hero of “Jonah’s Preaching Converts and Entire City” in chapter 3 becomes the less impressive story of Jonah and the Plant in chapter 4. God can’t help but tell him that he’s put more passion and energy into mourning the death of a worm-eaten shade tree than anything concerning the salvation of the Ninevites.

And that was only the first half of the sermon.

Here’s a key scripture:

^{Judges 2: 8(NIV)} Joshua son of Nun, the servant of the LORD, died at the age of a hundred and ten. ⁹ And they buried him in the land of his inheritance, at Timnath Heres in the hill country of Ephraim, north of Mount Gaash.

¹⁰ After that whole generation had been gathered to their ancestors, another generation grew up who knew neither the LORD nor what he had done for Israel. ¹¹ Then the Israelites did evil in the eyes of the LORD and served the Baals. ¹² They forsook the LORD, the God of their ancestors, who had brought them out of Egypt. They followed and worshiped various gods of the peoples around them. They aroused the LORD’s anger ¹³ because they forsook him and served Baal and the Ashtoreths. ¹⁴ In his anger against Israel the LORD gave them into the hands of raiders who plundered them. He sold them into the hands of their enemies all around, whom they were no longer able to resist.

People really do tend to forget…

Here’s another key scripture:

^{Isaiah 46: 9(NIV)} Remember the former things, those of long ago;
I am God, and there is no other;
I am God, and there is none like me.
^10a I make known the end from the beginning,
from ancient times, what is still to come…

^11b …What I have said, that I will bring about;
what I have planned, that I will do.

The message ended up talking about Communion again.   Some major points:

Our fellowship, our communion is with God through Jesus Christ.

We don’t celebrate communion to remember what was, but we celebrate communion to remember what is.

We celebrate communion because Christ is in us, and because of who we are in Christ.

Wednesday Link List

The links are back!   Here are some highlights of my past seven days online…

• The upper picture is another classic entry from the classic photo site, Shorpy.com; which I’ve mildly colorized.    It’s an auditorium in Ocean City, NJ set up for a revival meeting sometime in the time period 1900 – 1910.   Click here or  on the image all the way through for a full size image.  (It’s my computer desktop this week!)
• Donald Miller explains why, for now, the movie based on the Thomas Nelson book Blue Like Jazz isn’t happening.
• Elsewhere in film production, City on a Hill, the people who brought you the Alpha-Course-alternative known as H20 have brought Kyle Idleman back to host  a new series titled Not a Fan.
• Bill Mounce wades into the subject of accuracy in Bible translations in the first of a weekly series.
  
• Randy Morgan gives you an inside peek into the world of pastors, and how and why the whole guest speaker thing occasionally happens.
• Okay, that fun, but maybe it was a little superficial; so do this instead:  Click on Randy’s home page, and scroll back to September 13th and then check out his five-part series on his visit to the local AA (Alcoholics Anonymous) chapter.   Long, but worth it, especially if you have family or personal history with AA.
• 

  Link list links

  Preparing for the upcoming Eighth Letter conference in Toronto, Matt at the blog, The Church of No People, delivers his pressing message for the church in North America.

• It’s 7-pages long, but Christianity Today gets into depth on the church’s relationship with sex offenders.
• CNN boldly goes into a full scientific explanation for what happened when Moses parted the Red Sea.
• A repost of a classic poem asks the question What would He say, if He should come today?    Also at Christianity 201, the Love Chapter from I Corinthians rewritten for kids; and something borrowed from David Hayward, aka Naked Pastor.
  
• Following in the tradition of Russell D. Moore — who this week deals with a tough dilemma — and inspired by the Desiring God video series, Randy Alcorn is inviting questions at Ask Randy; but the deadline is today, Wednesday the 22nd.
  
• Zach at Take Your Vitamin Z linked this week to this New York Times article which is self explanatory:  Deciding Not To Screen for Down Syndrome.
  
• Seen something online you think should be here next week?   Try to get to me by noon on Tuesday.
  
• Well…choosing a cartoon for this week’s list was no contest after Abraham Piper reminded all of us of this classic:  Solomon’s ideal woman as reflected in Song of Solomon interpreted literally; just as it appeared all those years ago at The Wittenburg Door.

How’s The Traffic Where You Live?

I think this one proves that Ben Bateman who draws Mankind Toons, must live somewhere nearby.

I once heard Rob Bell say, “We have two seasons in Grand Rapids, winter and construction.”   Click on the cartoon itself to see more of Ben’s work.   (You can donate online to support Ben’s craft using all major credit cards.)

It’s not to late to promote your favorites… Vote for your favorite podcast or sermon audio. Yeah, I know, this would have drawn more traffic on a Monday than on a weekend.   So…if you’re reading this on a Monday — or any other day — feel free to leave a comment letting the world know who you like to listen to.

Truth In Advertising

Found this at the blog, Digging The Word.

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…Okay, so it’s originally from Sacred Sandwich.