Jon Collins

God's commands will always point God's people towards even more life than you're currently experiencing and avoiding the diminishment of your life.

In its simple form, it reads, You will not make for yourself an idol or any likeness of what is in the skies above or on the land beneath or in the waters underneath the land.

The moment you image Yahweh by something in your mind first and then give a physical expression to that by something you make, you are reducing the incomprehensible transcendent reality.

The Lord has taken you all, the Israelites, and brought you all out of the iron furnace.

So Egypt is described as a furnace for melting down metal.

And this is a very subtle reference to Israel is to imagine themselves as the molten image of God.

If humans are God's image that don't make images, be the image of God to each other.

If you want the closest representation that will get you closer than anything else, look into the eyes of your neighbor, your coworker, your family member.

And you will see a reflection of the mystery and purpose of God that you will never encounter in a bronze bowl.

Yeah, that's right.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So the 10 commands are some of the most famous verses in the Bible.

I guess they fit that category of the most recognizable but not the most understood.

parts of the Bible.

On one level, they're just 10 words from God of what humans should do or not do.

So in that sense, it feels straightforward.

And it tends to feed into a perception that people have about the Bible as a divine rule book or behavior manual.

So what we started with was looking at the theme of God telling people what to do in the Bible, which goes back to

In the Genesis scroll, the word command appears for the first time in the Garden of Eden story.

Then it appears again in the story of Noah and the flood.