The Ten Commandments Explained

Few documents have shaped civilization more and been read less carefully. The Ten Commandments are quoted in courtrooms and carved into monuments, invoked by people who could not list six of them, and dismissed by others as relics of a harsher age. Scripture presents them differently from both caricatures. Spoken by God Himself at Sinai, written "with the finger of God" on two tables of stone, they were given not as a ladder for earning heaven but as the covenant charter of a people already redeemed.¹ Their preface makes the order plain: "I am the LORD thy God, which have brought thee out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage."² Grace first, then law. Deliverance first, then obedience. Read in that order, the commandments become what they were always meant to be, a portrait of the life that fits God's character.

The First Table: Duty to God

The first four commandments govern the relationship between man and his Maker, and they move from the inward to the outward.

The first commandment claims the throne: "Thou shalt have no other gods before me."³ It forbids not merely the worship of rival deities but the enthronement of anything, career, family, appetite, self, in the place that belongs to God alone.

The second governs the manner of worship: no graven image, no likeness, no bowing down to what hands have made.⁴ The God who speaks is not to be worshiped through forms of our own devising, for images shrink Him to the measure of the imagination, and He will be known through His word rather than through our craftsmanship.

The third guards His name: "Thou shalt not take the name of the LORD thy God in vain."⁵ The commandment covers perjury and profanity, but it reaches further, to every use of God's name that is empty, careless, or self-serving, including religious speech that borrows His authority for our purposes.

The fourth sets apart His day. "Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy" grounded rest in creation itself, one day in seven consecrated to God.⁶ Christians have differed about how this commandment carries into the present age, meeting as the church does on the first day, the day of the Lord's resurrection, and Paul cautions against judging one another over days.⁷ What has not changed is the principle beneath it: time belongs to God, work is not our master, and worship is not an option to be squeezed into the margins.

The Second Table: Duty to Neighbor

The remaining six commandments govern human relationships, and Jesus summarized them in a sentence: "Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself."⁸

The fifth establishes the home: "Honour thy father and thy mother," the first commandment with promise attached.⁹ Authority learned and respected in the household is the seed of every rightly ordered society.

The sixth protects life: "Thou shalt not kill," a prohibition of murder grounded in the image of God that every person bears.¹⁰ Jesus traced the commandment inward to its root, teaching that unrighteous anger and contempt stand under the same judgment.¹¹

The seventh protects marriage: "Thou shalt not commit adultery." Here too the Lord refused to leave the commandment at the surface, locating adultery first in the look and the intent of the heart.¹²

The eighth protects property and labor: "Thou shalt not steal," which forbids every form of taking what is not ours, from theft to fraud to the withheld wage, and implies the dignity of honest work.

The ninth protects truth: "Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour." Born in the courtroom, it extends to every word by which a neighbor's name can be wounded, the slander, the half-truth, the convenient silence.

The tenth moves wholly inside: "Thou shalt not covet."¹³ No court can try it, for its scene is the heart. It forbids the desiring gaze at what God has given another, and in doing so it unmasks the logic of the whole law, for every outward sin on the second table begins as covetousness within. It was this commandment, Paul confesses, that killed his self-confidence: "I had not known sin, but by the law: for I had not known lust, except the law had said, Thou shalt not covet."¹⁴

What the Law Can and Cannot Do

Here the Ten Commandments must be allowed to do their deepest work. Measured honestly against them, no one stands. Jesus pressed the law to the heart, and at the heart everyone is guilty; "there is none righteous, no, not one."¹⁵ This is not a defect in the law but its design as a diagnostic: "by the law is the knowledge of sin."¹⁶ The commandments are a mirror, and a mirror shows the dirt without washing it. "By the deeds of the law there shall no flesh be justified in his sight."¹⁷

That is why the law, rightly heard, drives a person to Christ. Paul calls it "our schoolmaster to bring us unto Christ, that we might be justified by faith."¹⁸ The Lord Jesus kept the law perfectly, the only man who ever did, and then bore its curse in the place of lawbreakers, "being made a curse for us."¹⁹ "Christ is the end of the law for righteousness to every one that believeth."²⁰ The commandments cannot save, and were never given to save; they were given to show why a Savior is needed and, once He is received, to show what love looks like in practice.

The Commandments in the Christian Life

For the believer, then, the Ten Commandments are neither a discarded relic nor a ladder still to be climbed. They are the family code of a redeemed people, the shape of gratitude. "If ye love me," Jesus said, "keep my commandments," and John adds that His commandments "are not grievous."²¹ The order of Sinai still holds: grace first, then law; out of Egypt first, then obedience. The person who tries to reverse that order will find in the commandments only condemnation. The person who comes through Christ finds in them something else entirely, the good and searching wisdom of a Father teaching His children how to live, and can say with the psalmist, "O how love I thy law! it is my meditation all the day."²²

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Scripture quotations are from the King James Version.