The Decalogue and Confession

Lent has long been considered a good time to take stock, to confess our sins before God. And the Ten Commandments (see previous post) are sometimes recommended to help us prepare for confession. As I encouraged my congregation to prayerfully reflect on the Ten Commandments for this purpose I asked them to remember this: When we ask ourselves, “have I kept this law?” the question is fundamentally not “have I done anything that contravenes it?”

Much more basic are these questions:

• Do I believe what these commandments imply about the nature of reality? Do I trust God?
• Do I want to keep these commandments? Do I love to do God’s will?

Because if I am merely interested in not getting on the wrong side of the law or if I try to earn brownie points with God, I have completely and utterly misunderstood what this is all about. Christ delivered me and so I need not fear God’s judicial punishment or earn his favour. Christ lived the perfect life here on earth. I want to follow him and so I want to read and reflect on the Ten Commandments in order to learn about my God, to trust him more, and to live as a human made in the image of God, as a child of my heavenly Father, and as a disciple of Christ. And I pray that God’s Spirit would enable this.

And so, e.g.,  when reflecting on the last commandment I want to “learn how to make distinctions between desiring that which is wholesome and good and beneficial for both people and nature and that which only feeds a hunger for more than we need.” (Janzen, Exodus, 238) I want to ponder the question why it is that we have more than some and less than others which leads me to two other questions: what does God want me to do with the resources he has given me and what might he want to tell me by not giving me someone else’s resources?