PERHAPS THE MOST IMPORTANT ONE OF ALL

     Everyone knows about the Ten Commandments. Most everyone would assert that they are vital and basic for insuring a civil society. A judge in Alabama recently lost his job because he refused to remove a monument he had erected on federal grounds on which the Ten Commands were engraved. His was not the first legal battle on this issue nor will it be the last. The Ten Commandments are sacrosanct in this land of ours, a country we call Judeo-Christian but which, in reality, is neither. We are all sorts of religions and practices and beliefs, even non-beliefs. And the reality of which is if we each followed what we profess our faith professes, we would be much better off as a country and as a world. Just imagine what our world would be like if we Judeo-Christians lived out the Ten Commandments!

     Herein lies the problem. While most every Christian knows about the Ten Commandments, we would be hard-pressed to find one in ten Christians who knows them, who could in fact recite them from memory, let alone know where to find them in the Bible. The odds on the latter are probably one in one hundred. So while we assert that the Ten Commandments are the basis for knowing right and wrong, for the actual living out of our faith, we really do not know what we are talking about because we truly do not know what the Ten Commandments are, let alone know what they mean.

     Worse yet, even if we do know them, we do not keep them. Perhaps we keep most of them most of the time. But we are to keep all of them all of the time. Keeping seven out of ten, for instance, while admirable, is not what is demanded. My guess is that the most important Commandment of the Ten is the one we keep the least: keeping holy the Lord’s Day. I would assert – I just did – that this is the most important Commandment of the Ten because it is our failure to keep this one that enables us to be so lax in not keeping the other nine.

     Simply put, we do not keep the Sabbath holy, the Lord’s Day, not in the manner it is prescribed in Scripture. The Lord’s Day is to be a day of rest and prayer and no more. No work, no shopping, no gardening, no running here, there and everywhere. It is simply to be a time to gather with our faith community to worship, fellowship and learn and then go home and rest and relax – and take time to ponder the other Nine and how we can better fulfill them the rest of the week.

     But we do not do this. Our Sundays are just as full as our Tuesdays and Thursdays. The Sabbath Rest is a thing of the past, the long, long ago past. And we’ve been suffering from its lapse for far too long. We have almost come so far that to assert that we must go back and make the Lord’s Day what it is meant to be would be foolish, if not impossible. But I would claim that if we do not begin to do so, if we do not try to reclaim this day for what it is meant for, nothing will change. It will only get worse. Our lives will become fuller and more hectic and more out of control and we will not be able to even keep half of the Ten. And then what?

                                                                             W.J.P.