Why a sermon series on the Ten Commandments, of all things? What I’d like to suggest today is that these ancient commandments are not just a list of rules, not just a list of ‘don’t’s, but when you look at them more deeply, they are a statement of God’s unconditional, unwavering, unmerited love for us human beings, and in turn of his loving purposes for our lives, which haven’t fundamentally changed in the last 3,000 years. Because human nature hasn’t changed, and neither has God. He is still as faithful today as he was when he led the Israelites out of slavery.

In the Book of Deuteronomy, chapter 6, just after it has repeated the Ten Commandments and the great commandment to love God, it then says: “In the future, when your son asks you, ‘What is the meaning of the stipulations, decrees and laws the Lord our God has commanded you?’ — tell him: ‘We were slaves of Pharaoh in Egypt, but the Lord brought us out of Egypt with a mighty hand.” [6:20f, NIV]. In other words, explaining the laws doesn’t start with a list of rules and instructions, but instead with a story of who we are and what God has done for us.

It’s a story to repeat from generation to generation, because it remains the fundamental story of God’s people even for those who hadn’t experienced slavery and the exodus first-hand.

This week it’s 80 years since the D-day landings, which were a pivotal moment in the liberation of Europe during that formational period that we still refer to as ‘the War’. But as it’s been 80 years, those who actually took part in the landings are now almost all gone, along with almost everyone else who was an adult during the War. But we recognise that, nonetheless, what they did changed the course of history, and the story needs to be repeated because it helps explain why we have the kind of society that we do, in the West.

Growing up, I of course heard lots of stories about life in occupied Denmark during the War, and one of the experiences that was clearly important to people there was that of sitting around the radio in the evenings, with the blackout blinds drawn, trying to find the right frequency so that they could hear a Danish broadcast from the BBC, from across the North Sea, so that they could learn the truth about what was really happening in the War. The Nazis of course would not permit people to know the truth, and so they kept jamming the signal and the frequency had to be changed. But when people could tune into the right station, they could hear the truth, and they could know what to do as well, through coded messages for the Resistance.

Now, cast your minds back to the Israelites in Egypt. It must have been a deeply bewildering experience. There had been all these abnormal disasters that we refer to as the plagues, and then one night they had got up and left; they had nearly drowned but then walked through the sea and come to the desert, where they had nearly starved but then bread, manna, appeared out of nowhere, and when they were thirsty suddenly water sprang from a rock; they had been attacked by foreign armies but fended them off seemingly through supernatural intervention; and at the centre of it there had been this strange figure of Moses. Even he seemed overwhelmed with the whole thing. And then as we heard, they had gone to Mount Sinai to await a message from heaven [Exodus 19:16-20:3]. In the midst of their confusion comes a revelation, the truth about what’s really going on, and it starts not with an instruction, but with a statement: “God spoke all these words, saying, ‘I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery. You shall have no other gods before me.’”

It's a declaration of love. In fact, some prefer to refer to these statements as the ‘Ten Words’, not Ten Commandments, because the text doesn’t mention anything about commandments, but it does say that ‘God spoke all these words’ – words which are just as much a statement of who God is as they are what we must do, although they certainly are that as well.

So, why do we need these Ten Commandments? In our Gospel today Jesus pointed out just two Great Commandments from the Old Testament: love God, and love your neighbour [Mark 12:28-34]. Isn’t that all we need? Well, let me make my case for why we need this to be fleshed out a little more. When I hear the first Great Commandment: ‘you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength’ – to me, that sounds completely overwhelming. I wouldn’t even know where to start, and having given this my all, I presumably wouldn’t have any energy left for the second Great Commandment: ‘You shall love your neighbour as yourself.’ Meanwhile, if I started with that one then there’s a risk that it’s a bit too simple, that I can let myself off the hook because I haven’t thought about all the ways that I could be loving my neighbour. We need something more concrete, so we can know where to begin, and when it’s gone wrong. So, Jesus doesn’t just leave us with this, but as we’ll hear in future weeks, time and again he points us back to the instructions found in the Ten Commandments and applies them to the concrete situations that we might face in our lives.

The Commandments are traditionally thought to have been written on the two stone tablets that Moses brought down from Mount Sinai, and so we talk about the two ‘tables’ of the law, one table about love for God: the first four Commandments – and another table about loving our neighbour: the last six. Although in reality they are deeply interconnected. And the claim I want to make today is that when we get the First Commandment right, then we can make a start on the rest; that when love for God takes root in us, then living in accordance with God’s law and God’s character becomes an expression of who we simply are, and they begin to require less will-power; that far from taking away our focus from loving our neighbour in this world, what loving God actually does is taking our focus away from ourselves, and it enables us to not always put ourselves first but to love our neighbours as ourselves. The First Commandment is an antidote to ego-centrism. It’s the starting point of making our relationships more personal and less transactional. Because our relationship with God is not transactional: it’s motivated by God’s sole initiative, his one-way love for us, his act of liberating us, which we could never deserve or fully reciprocate.

For Jesus, the motivation for following the Commandments always has to be in the heart. It has to be love. And notice that the Commandments begin and end not with our actions but with the attitudes of our hearts: ‘You shall have no other gods’, and at the end: ‘You shall not covet your neighbour's house’, in other words don’t envy anything that someone else has or is. The first and last commandment provide the frame, and everything in between is then about how having the right or wrong attitude towards God and towards our neighbour leads us to do the right or wrong thing, leads us either to behaviours that promote wellbeing or behaviours that destroy others and our relationships with them and our own character.

So, how do you know if you have other gods, or whether you really are loving God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength? That’s where the next three Commandments come in, on the first table of the law, and we’ll begin to look at those next time.

But today, what I want to leave you with is best expressed by the apostle John, in his First Letter: ‘We love because he first loved us’ [4:19]. We love because God loved us first. Hundreds of years after taking the Israelites out of slavery, he showed his love for the whole world even more clearly when he sent his Son, Jesus Christ, to live for us, to die for us, and to rise again for us. And loving God in response to his love is the starting point for a love-filled life.