Author: Bryan Richardson

Re:Verse passage – Matthew 28:18-20 (day three)

“I am with you always.”

If a person sets out to speak to his neighbor according to a pre-conceived series of talking points with a pre-determined goal, chances are life with that neighbor will not grow very dear. That’s because people aren’t pre-fab slabs of protoplasm that respond predictably to meticulously applied stimuli. Revealing Christ to people requires less flow chart and more flow. Difficult questions, surprising twists, painful honesty, personal weakness—these all must remain on full display if you are to speak to someone about your own faith. That’s not good salesmanship. But Jesus is not a product. He’s the teacher of an eternal kind of life. And that’s why he says you will rely not on a set of principles, but on him. He never left you his notes, because he never left you at all.

Re:Verse passage –Matthew 22:35-39 (day three)

“You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”

“The Lord our God, the Lord is one”—and he exists as an eternal fellowship of three persons; he cannot exist otherwise and still be God. God created us in his image. To be human, then, is to bear in our being certain characteristics that we share with God. This commandment, both in its original iteration in Leviticus, and as quoted by Jesus here, in addition to the implicit ways in which it appears throughout scripture, indicates that life in fellowship with others is one of those characteristics marking the image of God in us. We cannot reject fellowship with others and still remain the fully human creatures God intended us to be. To fail to pay attention to your neighbor is not self-preservation, but the beginning of the extinction of the human race, yourself included.

Re:Verse passage –Exodus 20:17 (day three)

“You shall not covet…anything that belongs to your neighbor.”

Your neighbor is the one whose life draws near to yours in ways it doesn’t draw near to another’s. You each have the ability to encourage each other’s well-being and happiness. In fact, your neighbor is the best hope you have for being cared for in this life. And you are your neighbor’s best hope. Your taking issue with that particular ecology might be evidence for how much distance you’ve longed to put between your neighbor and yourself. The Bible sure spends an awful lot of time and energy pointing out how to structure life with neighbors for this to be the minor factor of life that many often take it to be. If your neighbor isn’t for you, who else have you got? The Bible would seem to say, “Very few.”

Re:Verse passage – Exodus 20:16 (day three)

“You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor.”

It’s not uncommon that other people in your life would become useful to you in the same way that chess pieces are useful to a Grandmaster surveying the board. But regarding someone as useful and regarding someone as valuable are not the same things. When you regard a person as useful, you will think nothing of placing on that person all the responsibility and culpability from which you want to escape. If on the other hand, you regard a person as valuable, you will know that he or she is the very one who can build the kind of life with you in which you help one another grow in character. You will destroy a person you regard as useful. A person you regard as valuable will save your life.

Re:Verse passage –Exodus 20:15 (day three)

“You shall not steal.”

It’s not uncommon that people would cloud the meaning of this commandment, just a little. And a little is all it takes to produce a larcenous kind of life. It’s a short step from the belief that this commandment exists to protect your personal property, to the belief that you deserve to own as much as you can. By that reasoning, the more you acquire, the more security God owes you. But this commandment doesn’t protect your stuff from others. It is rather meant to protect others from you by forming your heart in such a way that you become a giver instead of a taker. The eighth commandment sets only two ways of life before you: If you’re not giving, you’re taking. Giving protects others; taking endangers them.

Re:Verse passage – Exodus 20:14 (day three)

“You shall not commit adultery.”

Children are the most vulnerable beings on earth. Other creatures will survive and thrive on instinct. A child will survive and thrive to the degree she is formed in spirit, mind, body, and social context. Marriage—for all of the attention paid to communication, sex, Mars, Venus, love language, etc., etc.—is a vocation ordered to the creation and raising of children. A mother and a father form the body and the character of a child, and whenever there is a disruption of that order, the child’s life bears the imprint of that disruption. Every family knows disruption in one form or another due to the general depravity of man. This commandment does not say, “Thou shalt not be fallen.” That’s now out of our hands. But it does say, “Mind the things you can indeed control.”

Re:Verse passage –Exodus 20:13 (day three)

“Thou shalt not kill.”

The word translated “kill” is often—very often—translated “murder” instead. That makes it easier to digest. Who of us would murder someone? Of course, people do indeed commit murder, but that occurrence is, predominately, far-removed from all but the most violent strata of our society, and although arguments abound for the classification of abortion as murder, that’s not the legal reality in which we currently live. The broader word “kill”, though, which the original language would convey—what do you do with that? You might immediately envision exceptions to the commandment: capital punishment, warfare, etc. The problem is that exceptions tend to multiply. If you thought about exceptions in light of the commandments, though, instead of thinking about the commandments in light of exceptions, how would that change the way the you live, if at all?

Re:Verse passage –Exodus 20:12 (day three)

“Honor your father and your mother.”

After establishing the necessity of a rightly-calibrated life with God, the Ten Commandments locates a society’s robustness in the family system. One could imagine a law code that teaches societal order by starting with something other than family: “Honor the state” or “Honor the king” or “Honor the traditions” or even “Honor the religious precepts.” None of these other things, though important and influential, brings to human life what “father and mother” brings. Contained within that construct is nurture, biological attachment, shared history, and mutual formation of the inner life (adoption’s highly-cherished status arises precisely from the willingness to extend love despite the absence of biological attachment). Principles or codes or offices establish ideology, not character. Only the parent-child nexus will produce societies with the empathy that makes peace and progress possible.

Re:Verse passage – Exodus 2:8-11 (day three)

“You shall not do any work.”

Some work needs to be left undone. The work you leave unfinished creates a space for someone else to think, to speak, to act. When that happens, continued work becomes a shared engagement instead of a solo project, shaping character in ways that isolation cannot. Work done in isolation invites pride, while shared work cultivates humility. Isolation encourages denial of painful flaws, while shared work necessitates honest conversations. Isolation propagates your own weaknesses, while shared work builds robustness. Isolation convinces you of your indispensability, while shared work reveals to others your worth. Heeding this command results in a less lonely work space.

Re:Verse passage – Exodus 20:7 – (day three)

“Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain.”

There’s a difference between magic and prayer. Magic relies on mechanistic recitations of formulas whose only purpose is get done exactly what you want to get done. Prayer is a kind of life in which you and God have access to one another, and the purpose of that life is not to get stuff done—though that might indeed occur—but to transform you into the kind of person who lives like God lives. In which of those contexts are you speaking about God and to God? The answer to that question will tell you whether you are using the name of God in vain.