Page 40 - Biblical Ethics Course

(a) God’s initiative and universal interest. “You yourselves have seen what I did” (Exodus 19:4). The ground of the
Ten Commandments (Exod. 20:1–17; Deut. 5:6–21) is what God has already done for Israel.

Ethics of the Decalogue.

1. Duties to God. (Exo. 20:3-8)
Loyalty to Yahweh alone.
 The first commandment asserts God’s supremacy, forbidding worship of other gods.
 The second, his spirituality.
 The third safeguards the oath in court and marketplace.
 The fourth asserts God’s claim on human time, with humanitarian overtones.

2. Duties to Man. (Exo. 20.12-16)
 The fifth protects the order of primitive society.
 The sixth, seventh, and eighth, the sanctity of life, marriage, and property (on which life might depend).
The ninth commandment protects an individual’s good name.

3. Duties to self. (Exo. 20;17)
 The tenth forbids undisciplined desire.

As in the Decalogue, the text begins with an historical reminder of God’s own action. Israel was now a free
people because of God’s initiative of redemptive grace and promise-keeping. Whatever moral demands they
now faced could never be more than a response to what God had already done for them. The priority of grace
over law was not a NT discovery or revolution but was built into the nature of divine-human encounter from the
beginning. It was an explicit part of the covenant with Israel and remains a fundamental principle of biblical
ethics as a whole. Whatever ethical demands follow must be set not only in the light of the immediate historical
act of redemption, but also in the context of God’s universal goal.

(b) Israel’s identity and moral obligation. Having laid this dual foundation, Exodus 19:6 goes on to spell out the
role and mission of Israel in two phrases, which echo elsewhere in the OT and are also applied to the church in 1
Peter 2:9: “You will be for me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.”

(i) Priestly. A priest in ancient Israel was someone who stood between God and the rest of the people. He was a
mediator in both directions. Right at the start of their historical journey, God sets their ethical agenda in the
context of their mission in the midst of the nations (the same thrust is found in Peter’s application of the
priestliness of the people of God, 1 Peter 2:9–12).

(ii) Holy. This word has the sense of distinctiveness and difference. Israel would be a nation as other nations, but
they were to be holy—different from the rest of the nations (Lev 18:3). The outworking of this characteristic
affected every dimension of Israelite national life, whether religious, social, economic, political, or personal. This
is most clearly seen in Lev 19, a chapter full of practical laws for daily life, all under the heading, “Be holy
because I, the LORD your God, am holy” (Lev 19:2). Holiness affected more than the ritual area of life. It dictated
all areas of life.

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