Staying Safe

What are some of the ground rules for the way we live?  Think about some of the things your mom taught you as you were growing up:  play fair, be nice, don't talk back, eat your vegetables, always wear clean underwear, clean up after yourself, don't take things that don't belong to you, keep your promises, work hard, do your best, don't hit your sister or pull her hair... oh, I think that last one may have been just for ME...

Continuing our study of Exodus, and this week we covered chapter 20... the ten commandments.  God called his children into the wilderness so He could meet with them and give them some rules for living.  This is important for MANY reasons, but one of the main ones is that the Israelites had spent 400 years in Egypt.  They had become immersed in Egyptian culture, which included polytheism, and they had probably forgotten much of what had been passed down about Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.  God is again setting them apart, and now He is giving them guidelines for living:

1. Make Me your FIRST love & your FIRST priority,
2. Treat others with respect. 

#1 is part of the Shema, a Jewish prayer of blessing, and we see it several times in Old Testament scripture:  "Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength...." (Deut 6:5) and then Jesus completed God's thought and added "... and love your neighbor as yourself." (Mark 12:30)

The theme of the lesson today is how the commandments affect our relationships, first with God and then with others.  It's an easy concept to grasp:  as we love the Lord and let Him direct our lives (and thoughts, desires, motives, etc) it will spill over and affect the way we treat others.  We will be kind and gracious and patient and gentle... and we see them thru the eyes of Jesus.  While that may be easy enough to understand, it's not always so easy to implement.

We talked about God's law as being guidelines, boundaries, parameters, guardrails, etc and we think of them in terms of keeping us SAFE.  So I tend to picture a great big yard with a little fenced-in square in the middle.  But I've changed my thinking on that.  Instead, I see it as Masada...

Having just returned from Israel, the image of the fortress at Masada is fresh in my mind.  Sitting in the Judean wilderness 400 feet above ground, it's an impressive structure that was first Herod's citadel and then became a haven for the Jewish people when the Romans invaded in 70 AD.  From the top, you can see for MILES and the view is gorgeous:  The mountains are majestic and in the distance you can see a beautiful sea... but upon closer inspection you see there is a treacherous drop, those mountains are barren and rocky and that sea is salty and dead.  Things aren't always what they seem...

So that's how I choose to picture life outside God's guardrails.  It might look good, but He knows what it REALLY is like.