Sunday, July 23, 2006

Excerpt from Erwin Raphael McManus

The following is an excerpt from Erwin Raphael McManus’ book entitled: an {unstoppable force}.

The Ten Commandments are not heaven’s standards. They are not the standards by which the angels live. They are not God’s attempt to pull us up beyond the human into the spiritual. The Ten Commandments are the lowest possible standard of humane living. Stop and consider what they demand of us. Maybe it would help if we just rephrased them in everyday language. Here goes: “Hey, could you stop killing each other? Oh, yeah, by the way, could you not steal each other’s stuff? And it would be really helpful if you wouldn’t lie to each other, either. And here’s a thought, could you not take other people’s husbands and wives and just, sort of, like, keep your own?”

Upon reflection, these are unreasonable, right? How could anyone be expected to live up to these? Only God could do that, right?

Why don’t we get it? Anything below these standards is choosing to live like an animal, a barbarian. The Ten Commandments don’t call us to the extraordinary spiritual life; they call us to stop dehumanizing one another. The law is the minimum of what it means to be human. The reason the law condemns us is not because of our inability to live up to an extraordinary measure. We couldn’t even pass the test with a D. When God gave Moses the Ten Commandments, he was establishing a nation for himself. God was giving them the tools to form an ethos that, through honoring him, would result in the nurturing and elevation of the human spirit.

Can you imagine a nation in which simple things like honoring your parents actually happened? A nation in which people were honest and upright in their business endeavors? Can you imagine a nation in which you could leave your possessions outside and no one would take them? In which you could leave your wife with a friend and he would not take her? Can you imagine a society in which no one is slandered, gossiped about, or falsely accused? And that’s without even looking at the first four commandments.

God gave us a map for a healthy society, and the map was not a picture of the ideal but a definition of the minimum. The same was true for the church. God was establishing a new people, a new nation. In the same way, he established a basis from which this new culture would draw its ethos. In a word, it could be summarized as grace. Grace deals with the generosity of God, his gracious work in the hearts of those who would turn to him. Yet many times grace is misunderstood or even cheapened at times. Grace has been seen as the liberty to live beneath the law rather than the capacity to soar beyond the law.”

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