Yeshua Explored
22/8/2022
Sinner’s Charter
Are the ten commandments for today?
Previous articles are still available on the Premier Christian radio website – https://www.premierchristianradio.com/Blogs2/Yeshua-Explored – (until they finally pull the plug!)
It’s a strange name for a book (and a serious of articles), perhaps even mischievous and misleading. I agree, but then when have I ever gone for safe titles? It’s a book with a premise, an uncomfortable one, that considers those two tablets dragged down by Moses from Mount Sinai displaying words carved into the stone of such significance that God Himself read them out to a transfixed, but slightly trembling audience. This text is known by us as the Ten Commandments, an idea that has proved foundational to the processes that have driven Western civilisation … until now!
Today, I suggest, the “Ten Commandments” have become a Sinner’s Charter, a set of rules that may have started out as imperatives but, instead, now seem to have become skewed. It has all gone topsy-turvy, a flip in polarity of morality, governed not just by a relativistic atmosphere that brings us fake news and professional fibbing, but a 180 degree switchover, where right becomes wrong and wrong becomes … well let’s do it anyway because, frankly, does it really matter?!
Let’s face it, the breaking of the “Ten Commandments” form the basis of our entertainment industry, whether through movies, song or video games. You’d be hard pressed to find an “entertainment” where either, most or all of the “Ten Commandments” aren’t spectacularly broken. Murder, adultery, robbery, blasphemy, dodgy worship (celebrity culture), lies and envy. They are all there in full splendour on a silver or flat screen or through speakers and headphones at your convenience. Just swipe your card to enter the world … of possibilities. It is very telling that the only “entertainments” where this is not so (or to a lesser degree) are to the offerings for our children (though that seems to be changing, looking at some of the latest Disney ‘output’). We are keen to preserve their innocence yet, when we decide they are “adult” enough … welcome to our sophisticated world where we feed ourselves on ever-more ingenious ways of breaking God’s laws! Welcome to the Sinner’s Charter.
Who is this book for? Although there is something for everyone within these pages, to both provoke and inspire, the journey that unfolds has been written for those who follow the Messiah, Jesus, the man who Moses spoke of (Deuteronomy 18:15), who would come to develop and deepen our understanding of God’s laws, particularly these Ten Commandments. By doing so, he created a bridge between the “Old” and “New”, forming one complete story of God’s dealings with mankind, a story that is just as relevant today than it was to those Hebrews at the foot of Mount Sinai, where it all began …
“The reason we have 17000 pages in our law books is because we cannot follow 10 lines on a tablet made of stone” Ravi Zacharias
The story begins next week …
This is an extract from the book, Sinner’s Charter: Are the ten commandments for today?, available for £5 at https://www.sppublishing.com/the-sinners-charter-260-p.asp
