Today's readings are Exodus 20.1-24 ( http://www.gnpcb.org/esv/search/?q=Ex.+20.1-24 ) and Luke 4.1-15 ( http://www.gnpcb.org/esv/search/?q=Luke+4.1-15 ).
I saw a very discouraging church sign recently. "Feeling bad? Take two tablets. The 10 commandments." Yes, I'm afraid it had a period after the sentence fragment. Yet that wasn't the most discouraging feature of the sign. When we read God's commands in Exodus 20 we find remarkably few promises of God's blessing, and all those promises are contingent upon our obedience to God's commands. When I'm feeling bad, all I have to do is look at God's commandments to feel worse. Start out at the beginning. Have no other gods besides the one true God. What is a god? A god is anything that you serve, that rules your life, that makes a difference in the way you would act and think. Every day we find we have innumerable false gods clamoring for our attention. We do serve those false gods, time and time again. Do we need to go farther? What about misuse of the name of the Lord? Remember that God's goes by many names, which all describe his character and attributes. Do we mistrust God? Do we claim our goodness and doubt God's goodness? Do we call people and things other than the Lord our God awesome?
Let us not take the ten commandments to make us feel better. Let us take them to convict us of sin, to restrain evil, and to show us what is pleasing to God. Let us take God's law in all its force to show us the unfathomable gulf between man and God.
Feeling bad? God's commandments should make us feel bad. Want to be good? Look to Jesus, who is the righteousness of God incarnate and who has become sin for us so that we may become God's righteousness. Observe how Jesus fought Satan by using the Scripture. Watch how he overcame the devil on our behalf. And see that he came back into society after his temptation, teaching and preaching by the power of the Holy Spirit. Are you trusting in Christ? If you are, the power of the Holy Spirit is living in you, making you God's righteousness in Christ. Remember Jesus, the cure for the commandments which were written against us.
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