God. Real. Right.

Obviously this commandment is inspired by the sixth commandment in Deuteronomy 5 and in Exodus 20. “Do not murder.” The clear basis of that commandment, all the way from Genesis 4 (Cain) and Genesis 9 (Noah) to the bloody judgment of Revelation 16:3-6, is that human life is created by God with a special significance related not just to function and personal enjoyment, but to the fact that every human being carries the image of God.
Saturday night’s debate was particularly revealing regarding this issue. In response to Rick Warren’s question regarding adoption, Senator Obama replied that we should address the number of orphans by providing better public health policy. Think about what “better public health policy” means. Senator McCain said we should make adoption easier.
The contrast between those answers is the same as the contrast between what makes “every child a wanted child” sound so appealing, and what makes it in reality so brutally calloused against the value of human life.
John 10 makes it inevitable that Christians hold life in such high regard. If life is not our highest value then whatever else is supposed to be our highest value will fail. It is not possible to hold freedom as a basic value without regarding the value of human life even more basic.

This commandment is another way of summarizing the first two of the Ten Commandments, in Deuteronomy 5 and Exodus 20. Those two commandments, “no other gods” and “no graven images” can also be summarized to mean, “there’s only one God, and you’re not Him.”
Psalm 103 also poses the contrast, with God ruling over everything forever, and men passing away so abruptly and completely that they leave no more permanent mark than a flower after it has withered away and the ground has filled over the very small hole it had made.
Brian Bates accidentally commented on this observation during KCBI’s morning show when he observed that if he had known that God was not fazed by some wrong motivations in his earlier life, it would have changed his understanding of how capable God was and is of changing him.
The everyday aspect of this commandment is that while everything about God is dead serious and profoundly important, the stuff about us as people is not so much.
Whether I succeed at something or not is not so important. Whether I look good is not so important.
Whether I live out God’s goodness and mercy is hugely important. But that importance is not about me, but about His goodness and mercy.
Examples of the second half of this commandment abound: Gorbachev dismantles the Soviet Union then disappears to a retreat on the Black Sea never to be heard from again, at least as a world leader. The mighty president of Pakistan, Pervez Musharraf, today resigns as president to become predictably anonymous for the rest of his days. Even buildings make the point. Reunion arena, highly touted at its completion in 1980, is now scheduled to be torn down bit by bit over the next year until it is only a memory. To add insult to injury, consider this: city managers decided it would be cheaper to spend $6 million to tear down that $27 million structure than to allow it to continue to exist!
So in obedience to this commandment, I will worship God and laugh at myself!

Eschew obfuscation.

I actually saw this bumper sticker on a car several years ago. It is a perfect irony! Admittedly, this commandment is not specifically about a Christian worldview. But it is critically important as one of the fundamentals for me to follow in doing the the program.

So I’ll be giving a prize to whoever calls in first with an explanation of this commandment’s meaning!

Because I will begin hosting Live from Criswell with Barry Creamer this week, my posts just this week will be about the purpose behind the program.
My purpose is to challenge Christians to follow Jesus more deeply, both in how we think and how we live. My hope is that by growing more authentic followers, we can have a better impact on the normal people around us. To that end, I plan to be transparent, to create an interesting and fun environment for listeners, to use current events and odd stories as illustrations, but always to promote the necessary and essential truths of the Christian worldview.
The problem is that most of us don’t have a clear understanding of what that worldview entails. So I’ll be posting two commandments each day to explain that worldview, until we’ve covered all ten.
There is one bonus commandment. I will post it first (right at 5:00). It is a corollary to the overall goal of the program. That is, it relates to the importance of having, maintaining, and building an audience. It’s just for fun and actually I’m only posting it as something of a vocabulary test for the proud, or as a puzzle of interpretation for students, or as a challenge for anyone willing to figure it out. It actually is my favorite bumper sticker of all time!
Next week, I’ll get back to regular posts, including on science and free will!