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After we as mankind refused to let God’s life come into us in the Garden of Eden, it wasn’t long before we forgot what God had taught us about His purpose for us and how we were to live on this earth.  But now God is about to reveal His mind to man in such a way he won’t ever forget it.

By miracles, He brings Abraham’s children to the desert mountain known as Sinai.  In an awesome display of thunder, lightning, and the quaking of this huge mountain, God shows these “children of Israel” that He is the God who created them and is worthy of their utmost respect.  To begin this mind-altering process in man, God calls Moses up on the mountain, and, with His torch-like Hand, begins to engrave letters into the rock.  Moses watches in awe as ten commands are burned into the side of Sinai.  God then with His finger cuts the outline of two tablets separating them from the rest of the rock bed.  Moses, watching the smoking tablets, begins to read them:  “You shall have no other gods before Me…” (Exodus 20: 3).  Ten such commands reveal how God thinks about Himself, about man, and how He expects us to treat Him and those He has created.  God tells Moses to take them to the people at the foot of the mountain. He wants men to know how He thinks, and, because He wants them not to forget it, He’s written it down.

The effect of this Sinai experience will be world-changing.  Now, for the first time, the mind of God has been summarized and written in stone.  Anytime man reads these words he is inspired to be all he was created to be.  He longs to walk in these precepts.

But he can’t.

Though he is stirred to his depths in wanting to obey these commands he simply cannot do it indefinitely. There is something inside him that will not let him walk these out.  It is difficult to describe, but he finds that when he wants to obey these good laws evil is always present (Romans 7:19-23), and at least some of the time he yields to this evil, which resists the rule of God.  Try as he might, he simply cannot always obey these ten commands.  It almost seems to him as if they were designed to keep him from obeying.

While it is not true that God built these commands with an inherent power to make man disobey, it is true that they were given to reveal to man the deeply rooted selfishness which now controlled him.  They were put together for the purpose of making man see that he had fallen from the position he originally had with God (Romans 3:19-20).  The commands were to open up to man the depravity deep within him that kept him from being a vessel through which God could express Himself.  This would create a sense of desperation that would cause us to admit we were not fulfilling our destiny.  This desperation was designed to stir us to look for a Deliverer.  Someone Who could forgive our failures and restore us to what God intended us to be.  And that is precisely why God gave to us!  As the Bible states it,

“The law was our schoolmaster to bring us to Christ.”

(Galatians 3:24)

Every experience of man from Moses to Jesus was designed to show us we could not possibly be what God had created us to be without this Deliverer.  We needed someone to both pay our debt to the Father (the one perfect life we had stolen in the Garden), and to deliver us from the “old man” (the mixture of our bodily desires with the selfishness now resident within us).

To put it simply:  We just needed Jesus.  We still do (Ephesians 2:12).

Think about it; because if you don’t, someone else will do your thinking for you—and for your children!  And you won’t like what that brings to you.  I’m Don Pinson; this has been Think About It.

(This message has been taken from our book Why God Birthed America.  You can order a copy of Why God Birthed America at HERE)