Theopedia

Ten Commandments

— “On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets.” (Matt. 22:40)

The Ten Commandments, also called the Decalogue (“ten words,” from the Hebrew of Exod. 34:28 and Deut. 10:4), are the summary of the moral law God gave Israel at Mount Sinai, written on two stone tablets and recorded in Exodus 20:1-17 and again in Deuteronomy 5:6-21. The first four commandments govern duty to God, the remaining six duty to neighbor, which is why Christ could summarize the whole in two commands: love for God and love for neighbor (Matt. 22:37-40).1 The Decalogue is not a body of law unique to Israel’s civil life; it restates, in ten specific precepts, the same moral law originally written on Adam’s heart before the Fall.2

Confessional Definition

The 1689 Second London Baptist Confession of Faith opens its chapter “Of the Law of God” by grounding the Decalogue in creation rather than in Sinai alone: God gave Adam “a law of universal obedience written in his heart,” binding him and all his posterity “to personal, entire, exact, and perpetual obedience.”3 “This law, so written in the heart, continued to be a perfect rule of righteousness after the fall,” and God delivered it again at Sinai “in the form of the ten commandments, and [wrote it] in two tables; the first four commandments containing our duty towards God, and the other six our duty to man.”4

The confession then distinguishes the Decalogue from two other bodies of law given to Israel through Moses. God also gave “sundry typical ordinances,” a ceremonial law of sacrifices and rites “prefiguring Christ,” which is “abrogated” by his coming.5 He likewise gave Israel “sundry judicial laws” that “expired together with the state of that people,” though “the general equity of them” may still apply.6 The moral law, by contrast, “doth for ever bind all, as well justified persons as others, to the obedience thereof,” and this obligation is not loosened but strengthened by the gospel: “neither doth Christ in the gospel any way dissolve, but much strengthen this obligation.”7

This distinction carries a real implication for believers. They are not “under the law, as a covenant of works, to be thereby justified, or condemned,” yet the law remains “of great use” to them: it shows them “the sinful pollutions of their natures,” restrains “the corruptions of nature,” and, as “a rule of life,” directs them to walk “as becomes those who have been redeemed.”8 Bavinck frames the same point against a purely Lutheran reading of the law: where Lutheran theology treats the law’s continuing use for believers as necessary only “since and insofar as believers continue to be sinners,” so that the law itself “expires” once faith and grace fully arrive, the Reformed hold the law to be “everlasting,” “inscribed on Adam’s heart” and “again engraved on the heart of the believer by the Holy Spirit,” so that “in heaven all believers will live according to it.”9 What changes at conversion is the law’s power to condemn, not its claim as a rule of righteousness; the confession states that “the law is not contrary to the gospel of grace, but does sweetly comply with it.”10

Biblical Basis

Both givings of the Decalogue open the same way: “I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery” (Exod. 20:2; Deut. 5:6). The commandments are framed as the terms of a covenant already established by grace, not a ladder Israel climbs to earn God’s favor. Christ’s own summary of the law, “You shall love the Lord your God… and your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets” (Matt. 22:37-40), matches the Decalogue’s own two-table structure and shows that the Ten Commandments were never intended as isolated rules but as the outworking of a single principle of love. Paul makes the same point about the second table specifically: “the commandments… are summed up in this word: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself’… love is the fulfilling of the law” (Rom. 13:9-10).

Historical Development

Neither Exodus 20 nor Deuteronomy 5 numbers the individual commandments, which has produced three main numbering traditions, all agreeing that the content divides into ten precepts but disagreeing on where the divisions fall.11 The Jewish tradition takes the words “I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt” (Exod. 20:2) as the first commandment in its own right, an act of self-identification rather than a mere preface. Since this addition would leave eleven, not ten, sayings, the Jewish reckoning then combines what other traditions treat as the first and second commandments (no other gods, no graven images) into a single second commandment, since an idol is simply a false god.11

Augustine, followed by the Roman Catholic and Lutheran churches, agreed with the Jewish tradition in combining the prohibitions on other gods and on graven images into a single first commandment, so that Exodus 20:2 is read as an introduction rather than a commandment. To preserve the number ten, this tradition then splits the tenth commandment against coveting into two, reading its prohibition on coveting a neighbor’s wife and its prohibition on coveting a neighbor’s house, servants, and property as separate precepts.11 Calvin rejected this division as a comparatively late development, unknown “in a purer age,” and objected that it effectively erases the prohibition on images from the Decalogue by folding it into the first commandment, when Scripture “distinctly set [it] down… as a separate commandment.”12

The Reformed and other Protestant traditions instead keep the prohibitions on other gods and on images as two distinct commandments (first and second) and treat the whole of the tenth commandment’s prohibition on coveting as a single, unified precept. Calvin defended this arrangement as the one best suited to Christ’s own two-table summary of the law, observing that the question is “not as to the number of the parts, but the method of dividing them,” and that believers should hold their preferred division “with full freedom of judgment” rather than treating it as a matter for contention.1

Objections and Responses

If the ceremonial and judicial laws given at Sinai have expired, why should the Ten Commandments still bind Christians? The confession’s answer turns on what kind of law each is. The ceremonial law was made up of “typical ordinances” that pointed forward to Christ and were fulfilled, not merely repealed, when he came; the judicial law governed a particular nation’s civil life and expired with that nation’s polity.5 The moral law summarized in the Decalogue, by contrast, is not a temporary institution given through Moses at all: it restates what God had already written on Adam’s heart at creation, so its obligation rests on the fact that God is Creator and Lawgiver, a relation that does not expire.7 The fourth commandment’s own Sabbath observance raises questions of its own.

Doesn’t Paul’s teaching that believers are “not under law but under grace” (Rom. 6:14) mean the Ten Commandments no longer apply? The confession draws the distinction Paul is making there: believers are not under the law “as a covenant of works, to be thereby justified, or condemned,” since no sinner is justified by law-keeping; but the same law remains in force for them as “a rule of life,” informing them of God’s will and their duty.8 Freedom from the law’s condemning power is not freedom from its claim as a standard of righteousness.

Related Doctrines

References

  1. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. Henry Beveridge (Edinburgh: Calvin Translation Society, 1845-1846), book 2, chap. 8, sec. 11-12, 316-362. ↩ ↩2

  2. Charles Hodge, Systematic Theology, vol. 3 (New York: Charles Scribner and Company, 1873), chap. 19, “The Law,” 257-463. ↩

  3. The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 19, “Of the Law of God,” para. 1. ↩

  4. The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 19, para. 2. ↩

  5. The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 19, para. 3. ↩ ↩2

  6. The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 19, para. 4. ↩

  7. The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 19, para. 5. ↩ ↩2

  8. The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 19, para. 6. ↩ ↩2

  9. Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, ed. John Bolt (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), chap. 22, “The Spirit’s Means of Grace.” ↩

  10. The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 19, para. 7. ↩

  11. Hodge, Systematic Theology, 3:270-272. ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  12. Calvin, Institutes, book 2, chap. 8, sec. 12, 317. ↩