Exodus 20
McGeeCHAPTER 20THEME: The giving of the Ten Commandments; the effect of God’s visit; instructions concerning the altarIn chapter 20 of Exodus we have the giving of the Law. The Ten Commandments are given first but they are only part of the Law. Instructions pertaining to the altar are also given; the Law and the altar go together. The Law revealed that man is a sinner and needs a Savior. There must be an altar upon which to offer the sacrifice; there must be the shedding of blood for sin. You have a mirror in your bathroom, which is a picture of the Law, and there is a basin underneath the mirror. You do not wash yourself with the mirror; it only reveals the dirt. Just so, the Law is the mirror that reveals our sin. And beneath that mirror there is a wash basin. There is a fountain filled with blood Drawn from Immanuel’s veins, And sinners plunged beneath that flood, Lose all their guilty stains.
Exodus 20:1
THE GIVING OF THE TEN COMMANDMENTSThe first part of the Law given to Israel was the Ten Commandments which was a moral code. God says, “I brought you out of Egypt and the house of bondage, and upon that basis I want to give you My law.” Israel asked for the Law and God obliged them and He gave them the Ten Commandments first. Several things need to be mentioned as we look at the Ten Commandments. The first one is the “new morality.” The new morality goes back before the giving of the Law. In fact, it came right out of the Garden of Eden when man first disobeyed God. The new morality existed before the Flood and after the Flood. Today it is far from new. We love to think that we are sophisticated and refined sinners. We are notwe are just crude sinners in the rawnatural sinners. The Ten Commandments put before us God’s standards. No man can play fast and loose with the Ten Commandments and get by with it. On Blackwell’s Island there was a graveyard for criminals. On one grave was a marker which read, “Here lies the fragments of John Smith who contradicted His Maker, played football with the Ten Commandments, and departed this life at the age of thirty-five. His mother and wife weep for him. Nobody else does. May he rest in peace.” That grave marker revealed a man who tried to defy the law of God. No person can play football with the Ten Commandments and escape the punishment of God. Often times the charge is made against those of us who preach the grace of God that we do not have a proper appreciation for the Law. We are charged with despising it, rejecting it, and actually teaching that because we are not saved by the Law, it can be violated at will and broken with impunity. This is not true at all. On the contrary, every preacher who teaches the grace of God and has a true perspective of the nature of salvation by faith, realizes the lofty character of the Law. Paul answers the problem in Rom_6:1-2 which says, “What shall we say then? Shall we continue in sin, that grace may abound? God forbid. How shall we, that are dead to sin, live any longer therein?” If you think you can continue to live in sin and break the Ten Commandments at will, then, my friend, you are not saved by the grace of God. When you are really saved, you want to please God and want to do His will which is revealed in the Ten Commandments. Therefore I think every preacher of the grace of God has a respect and reverence for God’s Law. We say with the psalmist, “O how love I thy law! it is my meditation all the day.” What is the Law? Someone has defined it as the transcript of the mind of God. That is a defective definition. The Law is the expression of the mind of God relative to what man ought to be. There is no grace or mercy in the Law at all. The Law is an expression of the holy will of God. The psalmist in Psa_19:7 says, “The law of the LORD is perfect, converting the soul: the testimony of the LORD is sure, making wise the simple.” The Law requires perfection on your part. I have never met anyone who has measured up to God’s standard. The Law is not some vague notion, and it does not have anything to do with good intentions. It requires perfect obedience, for the Law of the Lord is perfect. The Law of the Lord is right. Our notions of right and wrong are colored by our environment and by the fact that we have a fallen nature. The Law is a revelation of God. God has drawn the line between right and wrong. How do you know what is right? God tells us what is right.
This present generation who wants freedom so badly is questioning what is right. “Why is it wrong to steal?” they ask. They do not mind stealing. But they like the commandment “Thou shalt not kill” because they say it is wrong for the government to commit murder by executing criminals. How inconsistent this crowd is! How ignorant they are of the Law. Why is it wrong to lie or to steal?
Because God says it is wrong. You may say, “It is for the good of mankind.” Of course it is. The Law would be a wonderful thing if man could keep it. Man cannot keep the Law, however, and the jails, the locks on the doors, and the fact that you have to sign ten pieces of paper to borrow money from a bank because they do not trust you, are all testimony to this fact. There was a day when a man’s word was his bond, but that is no longer true today. The Law is a norm for human conduct.
Stealing, lying, and adultery are wrong because God says they are wrong. The Law never enforces itself. The Law-giver must have power. God enforces His laws with a tremendous impact. Take the law of gravitation, for example. You can go up as high as you want to but you had better not turn loose. The law of gravitation is in operation and you cannot reverse it. You may think you can, but in the long run you will be the loser. Many people think they can break the Ten Commandments right and left and get by with it. That reminds me of the whimsical story of the man who jumped off the Empire State Building in New York City. As he went sailing by the fiftieth floor, a man looked out the window and said to him, “Well, how is it?” The falling man replied, “So far, so good.” That is not where the law of gravitation enforces itself. Fifty more floors down and the man will find out, “So far, not so good.” The interesting thing is that a law must be enforced to be a law and therefore God says in Eze_18:4, “…the soul that sinneth, it shall die.” The Law must be enforced and the breaker of the Law must pay the penalty. There is another viewpoint that needs to be corrected and that is the confounding of law and grace and putting them into one system. Putting law and grace into the same system is to rob the Law of its majesty and meaning. There is no love in the Law. There is no grace in the Law. Grace is robbed of its goodness and glory when it is mixed with the Law. Grace is stripped of its wonder, attractiveness, and desire. The sinner’s needs are not met when law and grace are bound together. The Law sets forth what man ought to be. Grace sets forth what God is. The majesty of the Law is something that we do need to recognize. The Law reveals who God is and the vast yawning chasm between God and man. Paul asked the question in Gal_4:21, “Tell me, ye that desire to be under the law, do ye not hear the law?” You had better listen to what the Law says because man has been weighed in the balances by the Ten Commandments and has been found wanting. You do not measure yourself by others. It is very easy for the man on Mt. Whitney to look down at the man on the ant hill and say, “I am higher than you are.” The man on Mt. Whitney, however, did not make it to the moon, or to heaven either. You just do not measure up to God’s standard. The Law also reveals who man is and his inability to bridge the gap between himself and God. Rom_3:19 tells us, “Now we know that what things soever the law saith, it saith to them who are under the law: that every mouth may be stopped, and all the world may become guilty before God.” Paul says in Rom_8:3, “For what the law could not do, in that it was weak through the flesh, God sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh, and for sin, condemned sin in the flesh.” The fault does not lie in the Law but in us. The Law is a mirror, as we have already seen, that reveals man in his sinful condition. Many people look in the mirror and think they are all right. This reminds me of the fairy story in which a queen looked in her mirror and said, “Mirror, mirror, on the wall, who is fairest of them all?” She wanted the mirror to say that she was, but the mirror told the truth and said she wasn’tsomeone else was fairer. And the interesting thing today is that a great many folk look at the mirror (the Ten Commandments in the Word of God) and they say the same thing, “Mirror, mirror on the wall, who is fairest of them all?” The difference is that they answer their own question and say, “I am.” They think they are keeping the Law. My friend, you need to look in the mirror more closely and let the mirror do the answering. The Law never made a man a sinner; it revealed the fact that man was a sinner. The Law was given to bring a man to Christ, as we have seen. It was our schoolmaster to take us by the hand, lead us to the Cross, and tell us, “Little man, you need a Savior because you are a sinner.”
Exodus 20:3
THE TEN COMMANDMENTSNow let’s look at the Ten Commandments. They are divided into two different major divisions. One part deals with man’s relationship to God, and the other part deals with man’s relationship to man. God is condemning polytheism, which is the belief in more than one god. There is no commandment against atheismthere was none in those days because they were too close to the creation and the original revelation of God. The atheists began to appear during the time of King David, and they were called fools. Psa_53:1 says, “The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God….” Today the atheist can be a college professor and considered to be a brain and an intellectual, but God says he is a fool. There are many atheists today because we are so far from our origin, and men are not willing to accept the revelation of God in His Word. God told Israel, “Thou shalt have no other gods before me.” God instructed the nation in this manner because in that day it was mighty hard for man to keep balanced. In that day it was popular to worship many gods. Today it is popular not to worship any god. My, how the pendulum of the clock has moved! The important thing to note in this verse is the fact that God is condemning polytheism. Paul elaborates upon this subject in Rom_1:21-25 which states, “Because that, when they knew God, they glorified him not as God, neither were thankful; but became vain in their imaginations, and their foolish heart was darkened.
Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools, And changed the glory of the uncorruptible God into an image made like to corruptible man, and to birds, and fourfooted beasts, and creeping things. Wherefore God also gave them up to uncleanness through the lusts of their own hearts, to dishonour their own bodies between themselves: Who changed the truth of God into a lie, and worshipped and served the creature more than the Creator, who is blessed for ever. Amen.”
Exodus 20:4
Some people may feel that this passage does not apply to us today. Col_3:5 tells us that “…covetousness …is idolatry.” Anything that you give yourself to, especially in abandonment, becomes your “god.” Many people do not worship Bacchus, the cloven-footed Greek and Roman god of wine and revelry of long ago, but they worship the bottle just the same. There are millions of alcoholics in our country right now. The liquor interests like to tell us about how much of the tax burden they carry, when actually they do not pay a fraction of the bill for the casualties they cause by their product. A lot of propaganda is being fed to this generation and large groups of people are being brainwashed. Whether or not folk recognize it, they worship the god Bacchus. Other people worship Aphrodite, that is, the goddess of sex. Some people worship money. Anything to which you give your time, heart, and soul, becomes your god. God says that we are not to have any gods before Him.
Exodus 20:7
Using the Lord’s name in “vain” means in the way of blasphemy. This is very prevalent in our day and age. But His commandment still stands. It is wrong to use God’s name in vain because He is God and He is holy! It also reveals a lack of vocabulary. Many people cannot express themselves without using profanity. A man who was wonderfully converted several years ago in Texas once told me, “When I was converted, I lost over half of my vocabulary!” And this is what he meant. Now the fourth commandment:
Exodus 20:8
The Sabbath Day was given to the nation Israel in a very unusual way. It was a covenant, a token between God and the children of Israel. We shall see that in Exo_31:13-17. The exact day, in my opinion, is not important. After all, the calendar changes that have been made make it impossible for us to know whether our seventh day is our Saturday or not. I do not think it is. But that is beside the point because, as far as we are concerned, it makes no difference what day we observe. We keep what we believe is the first day of the week. It may or may not be. But we recognize the first day of our week because our LORD came back from the dead on that day. All of this will be dealt with later on in the Book of Exodus. Next we come to the section of the commandments which deals with man’s relationship with man. It begins in the home.
Exodus 20:12
A father and a mother should be worthy of the honor of their children. We will speak more of this commandment later. The sixth commandment says:
Exodus 20:13
This verse is used by many people who are opposed to a particular war. Many young men have talked to me about it. They say, “You should not kill; therefore, you should not be a soldier.” The commandment “Thou shalt not kill” was not given to a nation; it was given to the individual. One man should not kill another. No one should go to any country on his own, and kill. “Thou shalt not kill” has nothing to do with soldier service or with the execution of a criminal. A nation is given an authority to protect human life by taking human life. “Thou shalt not kill” is a commandment to the individual and it is speaking of murder, which our LORD said comes from angerand we are not even to be angry with our brother. The seventh commandment says:
Exodus 20:14
We are living today in the middle of a sex revolution. Sex is certainly not new, but it is still adultery when it is committed outside of wedlock. God makes this very clear. Man may think he has changed this commandment but he has not. This commandment still stands. The eighth commandment says:
Exodus 20:15
The point I would like to make here is that if you are permitted to commit adultery, then you should be permitted to steal and so forth. This whole package goes together. If one is all right to indulge in, then all should be right; if one is wrong, then all are wrong. The ninth commandment says:
Exodus 20:16
Bearing false witness against your neighbor is lying. The tenth commandment says:
Exodus 20:17
Covetousness, according to the apostle Paul in Col_3:5, is idolatry. This is one of the great sins of the present hour. God condemns killing, adultery, stealing, bearing false witness, and covetousness. We will have an occasion to look at the Ten Commandments in a different way later on.
Exodus 20:18
THE EFFECT OF GOD’S VISITGod has given the children of Israel the moral code which is the Ten Commandments. However, there is more to the Law than the moral code. God will also give them that part of the Law which deals with social legislation. He will also give them instructions concerning an altar and the building of the tabernacle. The Book of Leviticus gives in detail the service of the tabernacle. It is all part of the Law. It all goes in one package. When the Israelites saw the thunder and lightning, they were afraid and backed away from the mount.
Exodus 20:20
The Law presented a very high standard. The Law of the Lord is perfect. It demands perfection. If you are trying to be saved by keeping the Law, you will have to be perfect. If you are not perfect, you cannot be saved by the Law. I thank God that under grace He can take a poor sinner like me and save me. Grace reveals something of the goodness and wonder of our God.
Exodus 20:21
It is important to see why God appears in just this way to the children of Israel. I think it is evident that God wants to impress upon them that He is the living God. Remember that they were reared in Egypt with idols all around themand they were and are idolatrous, as we shall see. They are worshiping the creature rather than the Creator. God is moving closer to these people than He ever has before.
Exodus 20:24
INSTRUCTIONS CONCERNING THE ALTARGod has given Israel the Ten Commandments. Now along with the commandments God gives instructions for an altar. An altar is used for sacrifice. This altar speaks of the Cross of Christ and the blood that He shed. This altar is the one they built before the tabernacle was made. Apparently everywhere they journeyed they made one like this. There is no mention of presenting a sin offering on this altar. The peace offering reveals that man needs a sacrifice that will reconcile him to God, and that Christ did make peace by the blood of His Cross. The burnt offering speaks of who Christ is; it speaks of His worthiness and ability to save. This altar was to be made of earth and was the place upon which the Israelites were to sacrifice burnt offerings and peace offerings. The sin and trespass offerings were given to Israel later.
Exodus 20:25
There is an important lesson in this verse. God wanted them to build a plain altar of stone with no engraving. Perhaps an engraver would want to make the altar appealing, attractive looking, and very beautiful. The moment a tool is put to stones, it is polluted. God rejects it. Today we have gone way past “engraving” in our churches.
We have come to the place where we feel that everything connected with worship should be beautiful. We want soft music, dim lights, and beautiful colors. We want the sermon to be given in very low tones and in a dignified manner, as flowery as possible. Well, we’ve been through such a period. And we have found that liberalism has emptied our churches. There is nothing wrong with an attractive place to worship.
I am for soft lights, beautiful music, and flowery speaking. But when any of these things obscures the message of the Cross and takes attention away from the Lord Jesus Christ who died on that Cross, then God is offended. God does not want this to happen. When Paul went to the city of Corinth, you will recall, he found the Corinthians to be quite philosophical. Many of the heathen priests connected with the heathen religions tried to identify with all the sins of Corinth. When Paul arrived, these secondhand philosophers wanted to argue, discuss, and appear intellectual. These Corinthians were going in every direction. Paul had a similar experience in Athens. He tells these Corinthians, “For I determined not to know any thing among you, save Jesus Christ, and him crucified” (1Co_2:2). Friends, if “Jesus Christ and him crucified” is left out of the message, I do not care how high the steeple is, how loud the church bell is, how beautiful the sanctuary is, how soft the music is, or how educated the preacher isit is not a church and, as far as God is concerned, it is polluted.
Exodus 20:26
Many people would like to build nice lovely steps up to the altar. That would be very convenient. In that day a man wore a kind of a skirt and to climb steps he would have to lift that skirt and his nakedness would be revealed. God says, “I do not want to see your nakedness.” That which speaks of the flesh God cannot use. Let me make this very personal. Anything that Vernon McGee does that is of the flesh, God hates and will not use. God does not want a display of the flesh in anything that has to do with His work. We need to guard against this type of thing. It disturbs me when people see only the preacher and do not see the One he is trying to present. I personally do not like anyone to tell me that I preached a beautiful sermon. The last thing I want to do is preach a beautiful sermon. I want to preach about a beautiful Savior and when people hear me preach, I want them to say, “Isn’t Jesus wonderful!” I have had very few real compliments since I have been a minister, but one I remember well. When I was a pastor as a student in Georgia, I used to preach in a church on the side of a red clay hill. One morning after the message everyone left but a country boy. He wore high yellow shoes that buttoned all the way, and he waited around, as timid as could be. Finally he came up to me with tears in his eyes. He took hold of my hand and said, “My, I did not know Jesus was so wonderful.” He wanted to say something else but he was too choked with emotion; so he turned and walked out of the little church.
That church today is in the middle of a city, but in those days it was in the middle of a cotton patch. I watched that country boy walk across the cotton patch, and said to myself, “Oh God, let me so preach that people will know that Jesus is wonderful.” That was a compliment and I have not had many like it. We do not need the display of the flesh in the ministry, in the pulpit, or in church work. We need to preach Jesus Christ and Him crucified.