Congregation Shema Yisrael

anokhi Adonai eloheykha asher hotzeitikha maeretz mitzrayim mibeit avadim -Exodus 20:2 (Heb)

I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery. -Exodus 20:2 (NIV)

This verse from Exodus 20 is largely thought of as part of the preamble to the Ten Commandments, written on the stone tablets by God Himself and brought down from Mt. Sinai by Moses (twice, actually). Most people are familiar with these commandments, which form the core of the Torah and the basis for both the Jewish and Christian understanding of God’s requirements for a redeemed people. What is less obvious is the actual order of the commandments and amazingly, what is a commandment and what is not. What does that mean? I’ll explain.

In Judaism, it is thought that the Torah (the Five Books of Moses) contain 613 commandments for the Jewish people who, after all, were the sole guardians of monotheism and worshipers of the one true God for thousands of years. Abraham, Issac, and Jacob were worshiping the God of the Universe when the Gentile nations were mired deep in pagan idolatry (lest the Gentile Christians of today are tempted to feel even the smallest bit of superiority because they “have Jesus”). Standing at the foot of Mt. Sinai 3500 years ago, 6 million people, including the entire body of the Children of Israel, as well as the “mixed multitude” who joined with their God and left the Land of Egypt, said these words:

kol asher dibber Adonai na’aseh -Exodus 19:8 (Heb)

We will do everything the LORD has said -Exodus 19:8 (NIV)

This is the voice of 6 million people, answering as if they were a single person, completely accepting the Sovereignty of the God of the Bible; the God of Abraham, Issac, and Jacob; the God who created everything just by speaking a Word. What you may not recall though, is that the people accepted God with complete totality and faith before ever hearing even a single Word of Torah! So much for being under the Law. However, this isn’t the first time someone has completely and wholeheartedly accepted God’s Sovereignty over the Universe and over his individual life.

Abram believed the LORD, and He credited it to him as righteousness. -Genesis 15:16 (NIV)

David’s commentary on Abram’s (Abraham’s) act of faith is recorded in Psalm 106:31 and Paul’s commentary can be found in Romans 4:22 (though please read the larger context and not just the individual verses…I’m a big supporter of context). Accepting God as God requires an act of faith, not an agreement to a stated list of conditions and requirements. Although the redeemed community is bonded to God by covenant, we, as did the Children of Israel at Sinai, accept God, not because we agree or disagree with a collection of rules, but because God is God. We acknowledge first that He is Ruler and Lord of all things, including us, before any other act. In fact, this acknowledgement is an absolute requirement and without it, nothing else in the Bible would make sense to us.

Think about it another way. As a believer, have you ever had any sort of critical thoughts for your unbelieving neighbors? As a Christian, have you ever been concerned that your next door neighbor doesn’t go to church on Sunday? As a Messianic, have you ever silently chided your next door neighbor for mowing his lawn on Saturday (Shabbat)? Have you ever wanted to beat your head against a brick wall because, no matter how much you try to explain God’s love, or Messiah’s (Christ’s) plan of salvation to the atheists in your community, they just throw it all back in your face and laugh?

It’s amazing that so many believers register such tremendous emotional angst under these circumstances. Why should your unbelieving neighbors honor anything you have to say about God if they don’t believe? Awareness of God requires at least some small desire to listen to God as God. To accept all that the Bible has to say about God and about Messiah Yeshua (Christ Jesus), there is a very important prerequisite: You have to know there is the one God and believe He’s “the boss” of everything.

I’m going to back up a minute and suspend everything I’ve just said in mid-air. We’ll return to these points in a bit, but let’s go back to the Ten Commandments as a list for a moment. Here’s the Ten Commandments as most Christians see them:

1. I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage. You shall have no other gods before Me.
2. You shall not make for yourself a carved image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth; you shall not bow down to them nor serve them. For I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children to the third and fourth generations of those who hate Me, but showing mercy to thousands, to those who love Me and keep My Commandments.
3. You shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain, for the Lord will not hold him guiltless who takes His name in vain.
4. Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy. Six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is the Sabbath of the Lord your God. In it you shall do no work: you, nor your son, nor your daughter, nor your male servant, nor your female servant, nor your cattle, nor your stranger who is within your gates. For in six days the Lord made the heavens and the earth, the sea, and all that is in them, and rested the seventh day. Therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and hallowed it.
5. Honor your father and your mother, that your days may be long upon the land which the Lord your God is giving you.
6. You shall not murder.
7. You shall not commit adultery.
8. You shall not steal.
9. You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor.
10. You shall not covet your neighbor’s house; you shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, nor his male servant, nor his female servant, nor his ox, nor his donkey, nor anything that is your neighbor’s.

This is taken from Exodus 20:2-17 (NKJV) and represents the Ten Commandments in the form most commonly accepted by today’s church. It may surprise at least of few of you reading this that the list I’ve just presented isn’t the only organization for these commandments. I’ve taken the following from Wikipedia:

As you can see, there isn’t universal agreement in terms of how to “split up” the commandments. While the majority of Christian denominations see “You shall have no other gods before me” as the First Commandment, the Catholic and Lutheran churches include “I am the Lord your God, You shall have no other gods before me, You shall not make for yourself an idol”. The Orthodox have the same First Commandment as the Catholics, though moving “You shall not make for yourself an idol” to the Second Commandment position. However, it’s the Jewish (Talmudic) interpretation that is the most interesting.

I am the LORD your God.

Doesn’t quite sound like a “commandment”, does it? It seems more like a personal identifier: “I am God”, as if God were introducing Himself before launching into speaking the Ten Commandments. Why would traditional Judaism interpret this statement as a commandment? Why do I think they’re right? Remember what I said about that important prerequisite to accepting all of the requirements and commandments of God? First, you have to accept that there is a God, that God is One, and that the specific God of the Bible, the God of Abraham, Issac, and Jacob; the God of Moses at Mt. Sinai, is the one and only God. This requirement even comes before accepting Him as Your God. If you don’t believe He exists and you don’t believe He is Sovereign of the Universe, nothing else follows. It is the very first commandment that all redeemed people accepted to become redeemed, whether we realized it or not. 6 million people standing at the foot of Mt. Sinai realized it, understood it, believed it, and accepted it as the First Commandment:

anokhi Adonai eloheykha

I am the LORD your God.

There are actually two statements packed into that portion of Exodus 20:2, and the second statement can be viewed in two different ways. The first is I am the Lord and the second is I am your God. This is my interpretation, but I think I can support it. The first part declares that God is God, independent of what you, I, or anybody else believes. God’s existence and ruler-ship over the Universe and everything in it isn’t dependent on whether we believe or not. The second part, I am your God can be taken two ways: The first way is that God has ruler-ship over people, whether people accept it or not. The second is that God is addressing His audience, the Children of Israel, and saying to them (and by inference, to us) “I am YOUR God” specifically. Taken together, God (my interpretation) is saying:

1. I am God, the God of the Universe, who created everything and rules everything.
2. I am God, who has the right to rule over your life, whether you believe I exist or not, because I created you.
3. I am YOUR God, because I chose you to be my treasured, splendorous people.

Yeshua (Jesus) agreed (of course, he did) when he defined the first of the two most important commandments (the entire text is in Mark 12:28-34):

“The most important one (commandment),” answered Jesus, “is this: ‘Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one”. -Mark 12:29

The Jewish people were and are the chosen of God. The mixed multitude and we Gentile believers are grafted into that choosing when we accept Him, just as they accepted Him at Mt. Sinai. In that sense, the Mt. Sinai experience of the Jews and the “salvation” experience of Gentiles accepting Yeshua (Jesus) is the same act. Rabbinically, each Jew throughout the ages and to the present day, is to consider himself or herself as having personally been present at Mt. Sinai to accept God as God and to accept God’s Torah. Gentiles are grafted into that “standing at Mt. Sinai” event when we personally accept the yoke of Messiah (Christ) upon ourselves and declare Him Lord of our lives.

Any non-believers reading this will probably balk at point 2 in my list above: “I am God, who has the right to rule over your life, whether you believe I exist or not, because I created you”. If you’re an atheist who doesn’t accept that God exists and therefore, doesn’t accept any of the commandments of (from your point of view) a non-existent God, you don’t accept the right of said-God to have any authority over you whatsoever (of course, if He really doesn’t exist, you have nothing to worry about). Now there’s the rub. The painter has complete “authority” over the painting and the sculptor has complete “authority” over the sculpture. Their creations aren’t required to agree to anything for their creators to “rule” over them. If God (the ultimate Creator) wants to blow the top of Mount St Helens right off, He has the right to do it because He created it (Oh wait…He already did that). Mount St. Helens, as an object and as a created thing, doesn’t have to “agree”. At the final judgment, God will judge between all the peoples of the Earth, redeemed and unredeemed alike. At that point, we will all believe and we will all be judged by the only One who has the right to Judge. So what does acceptance of God as God get us? Silly question? Maybe not.

The difference for we who are redeemed is that, by accepting God, we accept not only all that He is over the Universe and over us, but we accept whatever conditions and requirements he has of us and our day-to-day lives. Period. What are those conditions? As of Exodus 19:8, the 6 million people who had “signed on the dotted line” didn’t know yet. They accepted Him, just as I said, but had not yet received those “conditions and requirements” for their lives. This is called Torah or “the Teachings”. In the larger context, it’s called “the Bible” (any teaching from God, from a single sentence, to the entire canon of the Bible can be considered “Torah”).

That means how we live our lives on a day-to-day basis isn’t really up to us anymore. Sure, we have free will, which means we make choices all of the time, but it’s really the same choice: To obey or disobey God. Period. The Bible contains the specifics of how to obey God and defines what it is to disobey God. Even Paul said:

What shall we say, then? Is the law sin? Certainly not! Indeed I would not have known what sin was except through the law. For I would not have known what coveting really was if the law had not said, “Do not covet..” -Romans 7:7 (NIV)

Once we accept that God is God (the First Commandment), that He is Our God, the God of our lives, then we automatically accept everything that follows in His teaching; His Torah. If the Torah; the Word, seems too abstract for us, remember that “the Word became flesh and dwelt among us” so that we could see a perfect, living, human example of how to live a life in complete obedience to the God of our lives. We study Yeshua (Jesus) to understand Torah; God’s teachings. We study Torah to understand Jesus; our living Lord, Teacher, and Master. We study it all to understand who we are as disciples of the Master and Children of God. The number one requirement for all that to happen, is that we first accept I am the LORD your God. Period. He is God. He is God of the Universe. He is God of us. He is YOUR God and He is MY God. We belong to HIM.

I am the good shepherd; I know my sheep and my sheep know me, just as the Father knows me and I know the Father, and I lay down my life for the sheep. I have other sheep that are not of this sheep pen. I must bring them also. They too will listen to my voice, and there shall be one flock and one shepherd. The reason my Father loves me is that I lay down my life, only to take it up again. No one takes it from me, but I lay it down of my own accord. I have authority to lay it down and authority to take it up again. This command I received from my Father. -John 10:14-18

Once we acknowledge that He is the shepherd, we are His. Listen to His Voice. He is God.