St. Thomas Aquinas, concerning the order of the Decalogue, wrote, “the end of human life and society is God. Consequently it was necessary for the precepts of the decalogue, first of all, to direct man to God.”^[1] The decalogue begins with our end because the goal of human life and action is God. Man’s happiness, beatitude, perfection consist in this: God. God is the beginning and the end of human life.

Here I wish to reflect on the first three commandments with this principle in mind. In this way, the moral life is unlike reflection on human excellence in the venerable Greco-Roman philosophical traditions which thought of ethics as the cultivation of human perfections without any thoroughgoing reference to the divine.^[2] Man is not made to be as excellent as he is capable of becoming apart from God, but man’s excellence consists precisely in being conformed to and united with God. Morality is thoroughly theological in character.

The point of departure for the moral life is the revelation of God in his creative and saving acts in history. “I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery” (Ex 20:2). God’s redeeming action – his election and covenant with Israel – bound them to himself. He who is the proper end and goal of all man’s happiness became a particular people’s Redeemer and Lord. By means of the people of Israel, as we have seen, the nations will be called to return to their Creator and Redeemer through the promised Messiah.

“You shall have no other gods before me” (Ex 20:3). This proscription of idolatry should be read as an exposition of the Commandment’s prologue. The God who redeemed Israel from slavery and proved victorious over the false gods of Egypt will not suffer his covenant people to return to false deities, deceptive diversions from their true and lasting happiness.

So, too, with the second commandment: “You shall not make for yourself a carved image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. You shall not bow down to them or serve them” (Ex 20:4–5a). These twin proscriptions against idolatry take their logic from the revelation of God to Israel through Moses’ encounter at the burning bush. In Exodus 3, Moses is confronted with the mystery of a bush that burns and is not consumed. There, he receives the revelation of the divine name: “I AM WHO I AM,” “YHWH, the God of your fathers, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob” (Ex 3:14, 15).

Much ink has been spilled trying to grasp the meaning of this Name. Allow me to quote a contemporary theologian at length, summarizing the varying senses one could take from this divine revelation:

One can take Exodus 3:14 to say something ontological: ‘I am he who alone has the fullness of being and who gives being to all others,’ or something ethical and fiduciary: ‘I am he who always will be and therefore will be faithful to Israel,’ or something apophatic: ‘I am the one who cannot be known due to my transcendence.’ These various significations are not opposed to one another and are in fact compatible. They are ways of thinking about the internal content of the personal name of God, YHWH, which is given to Israel alone. Israel is given to know personally he who alone truly is, the Creator of all things. God will be faithful to Israel in virtue of his abiding perfection, power, and perennial life. God remains hidden and unknown in his transcendence, incomprehensible and impossible to master, even for Israel, who lives in covenant with him.^[3]

The relevant point for our consideration is this: idolatry in any form is proscribed (especially in the form of making graven images) because the God who has revealed himself to Israel is qualitatively different from the gods of the nations. As Israel sang on the far side of the Red Sea: “Who is like you, O LORD, among the gods? Who is like you, majestic in holiness, awesome in glorious deeds, doing wonders?” (Ex 15:11). The God of Israel is the sovereign creator, transcendent in holiness, and wonderfully near to his people by his covenantal love. They must not mistake their God for anything besides this: the one God of all who redeemed them from slavery in Egypt and who lovingly dwells in their midst.

The third commandment follows from this. “You shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain” (Ex 20:7). Israel, in covenant with the one God, was given an unrivaled privilege among the peoples. They were handed the divine Name. From henceforth, the Name of God is bound up with this people. Of course, the immediate context of this command is oath taking: “taking the Name in vain,” means uttering the Name in a way that is insincere, failing to fulfill an oath sworn in the Name of God. Beyond that, taking the Name in vain refers to the entire life of Israel: they bear the Name in vain by breaking covenant, by failing in any of the points of the Decalogue. Israel is God’s son (Ex 4:22), and this requires them to live up to the family name, to be faithful to God’s covenant in all that they do.

Before moving ahead, it is worth saying one more thing about this third commandment. What is implied in God’s gift of his personal name to Israel? If nothing else, it implies that a relationship has been established between God and his people. God has given himself to Israel, he has allowed himself to be “invoked” by the nation. In the words of Ratzinger, “he is handing himself over to men in such a way that he can be called upon by them.”^[4] To take the Lord’s name in vain, then, is a profound ingratitude for God’s gift of his name and his covenant with Israel.

So the first three commandments set Israel’s compass in order. The goal and center of Israelite society is God, the God who redeemed them and covenanted with them at Sinai. They will be a people ordered around the worship of the one God, the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.

Early Christian Distinctives and the First Three Commandments

Before considering a contemporary application of these commandments, we should begin a Christian reflection on the first three commandments of the Decalogue by describing some of the pressure that Christian theological commitments made on these commands. In particular, we will consider the radical nature of the early Christian witness to the one God in the Roman Empire and the reinterpretation of the one God of Israel in view of the coming of the Christ and the Spirit.

Christianity, Judaism and the Roman Empire

The ancient society into which the gospel was born was a “world full of gods.”^[5] Early Christians, along with their Jewish compatriots,^[6] were adamant that fidelity to the one God meant repudiation of all the idolatrous practices of the Empire. This, of course, was no easy task, for religion in the ancient world was not something isolated from the other spheres of human life. It was not the private concern of individual citizens, separate from the apparently “neutral” sphere of the political. Instead, “religion” in the ancient Roman world was a whole way of life. Allow me to quote Larry Hurtado at length to give a better sense of the religious atmosphere the early Christian community found itself in:

In the Roman Empire what moderns call ‘religion’ was virtually everywhere, a regular and integral part of the fabric of life . . . Members of Roman households, the family and their slaves too, gathered daily to reverence the household [god]. Residents of a given city might be expected to take part in periodic expressions of reverence such as processions and sacrificial offerings to the guardian god or goddess of the city. Even in ordinary activities such as giving birth, or eating, or travelling, in the meetings of guilds and groups, or in the formal meetings of a city council, people typically offered appropriate expressions of reverence to the relevant divinities. For example, at many such occasions a ‘libation’ of wine might be made, that is, a bit of wine spilled out in honor of the tutelary deity of the occasion. At the highest and widest level, there were also deities identified as guardians and the ultimate bases of the empire itself. In short, from the lowest to the highest spheres of society, all aspects of life were presumed to have connections with divinities of various kinds. There was really nothing like the modern notion of a separate, ‘secular’ space of life free from deities and relevant ritual.^[7]

Into this milieu, early Christians offered the bold proclamation that “there is no God but one” (1 Cor 8:4) and rejected the religious practices of the empire as “idolatry.” Of course, the Jewish people had always made such a claim, but their status in the ancient world was of one distinct, peculiar nation, but no real threat to the empire. Unusual, surely, but tolerated as one unique national/ethic group among many.^[8]

What made Christians unique was that, largely through the evangelistic efforts of the apostle Paul, gentile (non-Jewish) members of the society began repudiating their former religious veneration of the gods without becoming Jewish. That is, as members of their non-Jewish ethnic groups, they repudiated the worship of the empire as “idolatry.” This was understood as a cancer, a genuine threat to the glue that held the Roman Empire together. Remember, this could not have been a “private religious belief” held by early Christians. Because of the ubiquity of pious obligations in the life of the Roman Empire, there was no such thing as private repudiation of the gods. To confess that there is no God but one is to immediately become a social outcast. It was to commit the worst kind of impiety towards your family, city, empire.

This commitment to monotheism was one major cause of the sporadic but at times vehement persecution of the early Christian community. Those early Christians who were persecuted at first sporadically and locally and later in an empire-wide fashion were given an “out” from torture or death by the simple appeal to curse Christ or offer a prayer to the gods.^[9] The heroes of the early church are those men and women who refused these temptations and paid for it with their blood. To become a Christian in the early centuries meant, very seriously, to utter a resounding “no” to the surrounding culture of idolatry. Joseph Ratzinger wrote of this early Christian commitment with the following words: “It is only too easy for us to regard the Christian refusal, even if it meant the loss of one’s life, to take any part in the cult of the emperor as a piece of fanaticism appropriate to an early period; excusable, perhaps, for this reason, but certainly not to be imitated today.”^[10] To this line of thinking Ratzinger urges that this is precisely what is demanded by the Christian confession of the one God, shared with the Jewish people. It is an inherent “no” to all rival claimants to our ultimate allegiance. “Thou shalt have none other gods but me.”

Christian Distinctiveness and Christology

So much for the early Christian distinctives vis a vis the empire. What of their distinctives with certain of the Jewish people? Are not the Christians guilty of breaking the first of the Decalogue with their devotion to Jesus?

It is indeed precisely here that the inter-Jewish^[11] debate around the status of Jesus played out in the early decades during and after his earthly ministry. As Joseph Ratzinger points out in his Jesus of Nazareth, the divide between Jewish followers of the Messiah and those who rejected Jesus revolves entirely around his person, the claims he made for himself and later the Christian community made for him.^[12] Trinitarian doctrine, as it developed over the centuries after Christ, is only present in seed form in the early decades of the Christian community. It is, nonetheless, doubtlessly present, and it did not appear to the first Jewish followers of the Messiah that anything like a compromise of the first commandment was occurring in their worship of Jesus as God’s only Son.

For the purpose of brevity, I will take just one example from early Christian literature. It comes from the pen of the Jewish Roman citizen of Tarsus whom we know as St. Paul. He was, he tells us elsewhere, schooled in the discipline and doctrine of the Pharisees – a Jew as zealous and faithful as you could imagine. He would, we presume, pray the Shema prayer/creed from Deuteronomy 6 daily: “Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God is one Lord.” Herein was contained the basic commitments of the Jewish faith: monotheism (there is only one God) and election (the one God is “our God”). Let us hear, then, how this early Jewish follower of Jesus rephrased this ancient Jewish prayer in his epistle to the gentile followers of Jesus at Corinth. It comes in the context of his teaching on conscience in the Christian community with respect to eating foods that were offered to Roman gods:

Therefore, as to the eating of food offered to idols, we know that an idol has no real existence,” and that “there is no God but one.” For although there may be so-called gods in heaven or on earth—as indeed there are many “gods” and many “lords”— yet for us there is one God, the Father, from whom are all things and for whom we exist, and one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom are all things and through whom we exist. (1 Cor 8:4-6, emphasis added)

Do you see what he’s done? In the words of Larry Hurtado, here “the ancient Jewish confession of the uniqueness of the one God [the Shema] appears to have been adapted and widened, so to speak, to accommodate Jesus as a second distinguishable figure who, nevertheless, is uniquely linked with the one God and with a corresponding universal role.”^[13] Much more could and should be said about the development of the doctrine of the Trinity, but these brief remarks may suffice for our purposes here. Now to a reflection on the Christian significance of the first three commandments.

Christ and the First Three Commandments

No Other gods: The First Commandment

When the Lord Jesus taught his disciples to pray, he began, like the Decalogue, by drawing their attention to God. The first three petitions of the Lord’s Prayer concern God: “Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed by thy name. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.” The prayer follows the pattern of the Decalogue – directing the disciples to the love of God and then the love of neighbor. To utter this prayer with a sincere heart is to begin obeying the first of the Ten Commandments. To have no other gods means at the very least to call upon the one God in praise, to trust in him for aid and protection, and to offer ourselves to him in worship. The Lord’s Prayer teaches us to honor the Lord first.

One major contemporary application of this commandment is the significance of the virtue of hope. The modern crisis of unbelief has been described by one recent interpreter as a “crisis of Christian hope.”^[14] What does this mean? In essence, this statement means that the present-day despair of spiritual goods is essentially a giving up of the human journey towards fulfillment in God. It is, to put it rather bluntly, a giving over to the Pauline notion of “eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die” (cf. 1 Cor 15:32). We have rejected the greatness of man, man’s perfection in union with God, and have traded it for despair.

It would be a mistake to think of this as cause for looking down our Christian noses on those naughty atheists and agnostics in our society. For we, too, have largely given up the arduous journey toward God. Our vision for the Christian future largely rests in attaining temporal goods. No, no, we are not like our agnostic neighbors who seek the vapid pleasures of eating, drinking and being merry. We simply delay the same small-souled desires for “heaven” where we wish to do just the same! We’ve given up on our true destination for all the ancillary goods of the Christian hope: no more sorrow and pain, reunion with loved ones, etc. Notwithstanding all these important (but secondary) goods, the Lord’s Prayer, like the ordering of the Decalogue, sets our moral compasses in order: God is man’s happiness, all of life should be ordered to him.

No Idols: The Second Commandment

What, then, of the second commandment? The proscription against idolatry may appear at first glance to be characteristic temptations of ancient civilizations and no longer strictly relevant to us. Yet to answer this question we must know first what an idol is, and how we may be tempted to worship it. In a certain respect, our felt distance from the world of this commandment owes to the triumph of Christ over the Roman empire. David Bentley Hart wrote that for the early Christians, “[the prohibition of idolatry] was not simply a prohibition of foreign cults, but a call to arms, an assault upon the antique order of the heavens – a declaration of war upon the gods. All the world was to be evangelized and baptized, all idols torn down, all worship given over to the one God who, in these latter days, had sent his Son into the world for our salvation.”^[15] And Christ won the battle – where are the ancient idols now?

In truth, however, the powers have not been done away with entirely. Not until the final resurrection. Until then, we struggle against those same powers behind the ancient idols: greed, vainglory, lust, power, etc. The gods have been overthrown, shown to be mere idols and works of men’s hands. How much more tragic now that we return to them? Egypt has been destroyed and spoiled, the gods have been shown to be sham pseudo-sovereigns, why do we now pine – like the Israelites of old – to return to the land of slavery? We will have time to reflect on the idols of our age when we explore, especially, the second table of the Decalogue, and thus we will leave off on our reflections of the second commandment here.

Do Not Take the Lord’s Name in Vain: The Third Commandment

What are we to make of the proscription on taking the Lord’s Name in vain? How are we liable to break this commandment today, and how might we go about fulfilling it?

Let us recall that for Israel, receiving the divine Name implied their duty to honor the whole covenant. It’s first application would be the avoidance of any insincere uses of the divine Name in oaths, but its wider application is to the whole of the Israelites’ life before God. To give his Name to Israel meant for God to establish his covenant relationship with them, to make himself “invocable” by his people. By giving them his Name, God had become within Israel’s reach.^[16] Calling upon the Name of the Lord becomes shorthand for Israel’s fidelity to their covenant God.

When John the Evangelist records Jesus’ identification with the God of Abraham (“before Abraham was, I am,” Jn 8:58), the giving of the Name comes to a climax. “In him—this is what the evangelist means by this idea—God has really become he who can be invoked . . . This name is no longer just a word at which we clutch; it is now flesh of our flesh, bone of our bone.”^[17] In giving Jesus the Name above every name (Phil 2:9–11), God handed his mysterious, covenant Name to his Son.^[18]

What did Israel do with this privileged access to the divine Name (symbolizing the whole of their covenant relationship with God)? As Paul cites the prophet Isaiah, in Israel’s covenant infidelity, “the name of God is blasphemed among the gentiles because of [Israel]” (Rom 2:24). They perpetually took God’s Name in vain. Indeed, the Roman world was no better off, it was even worse. They received the Name of God incarnate into their midst. What did they do with him? He was “cut off,” handled utterly “in vain,” as nothingness, put to death. What do we do with him? We who have received his Name in baptism, how often do we take his Name in vain? How often to we break fidelity to his covenant love by denying his Name in word and deed? To reflect Christianly on the third commandment is to be brought to our knees. God has handed himself to us in Christ, and we have so often received him in vain.

Conclusion

“In our end is our beginning.”^[19] Our beginning and end is God, and these first three commandments function as something of a lighthouse for our moral pilgrimage. We are all too easily drawn off course by false claimants to our allegiance; that is, by false gods.

For the Christian reflecting on the Ten Commandments, the mystery of the Trinity deepens the significance of our commitment to the first three commands. To confess the first commandment and at the same time to offer worship to Jesus is to say something profound about the nature of the one God – i.e., that he is, mysteriously, one and yet more than one. The second commandment teaches Christian people to abhor all lesser powers and to confess that all dominion belongs to the crucified and risen Lord. The third, in turn, exhorts us to faithfully receive the gracious gift of God’s own Name Incarnate – his eternal Son.

We have failed in the first three commandments, broken covenant with the one God. What, then, shall we do? Joel, the great prophet of “the day of the Lord,” offers to us God’s own answer:

Yet even now,” declares the Lord,

“return to me with all your heart,

with fasting, with weeping, and with mourning;

and rend your hearts and not your garments.”

Return to the Lord your God,

for he is gracious and merciful,

slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love;

and he relents over disaster. (Joel 2:12-13)

Notes

1. Aquinas, ST I-II, Q. 100, A. 6, resp. ↑
2. This may well be a debatable point with respect to the ethical reflections on offer in the Greco-Roman world. If so, I would still submit that the degree of emphasis on the theological character of the moral life is something unique to Christian/Jewish ethical thought (one might later add Muslims to this category as well). ↑
3. Thomas Joseph White, The Trinity: On the Nature and Mystery of the One God, (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University Press, 2022) 57. ↑
4. Joseph Ratzinger, Introduction to Christianity, trans. J.R. Foster and Michael J. Miller, (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2004), 134. ↑
5. Keith Hopkins, A World Full of Gods, cited in Larry Hurtado, Destroyer of the gods: Early Christian Distinctives in the Roman World, (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2016), 44. ↑
6. Larry Hurtado has an incredibly insightful discussion of the anachronism of speaking of “Christians” and “Jews” as strict antitheses in the first century AD. “Especially in the early years of the young movement that became ‘Christianity,’ therefore, I repeat that we should not imagine two fully distinguishable religions called ‘Judaism’ and ‘Christianity.’ Instead, in this very early period, we are dealing with a new religious movement that emerged initially within the ancient Jewish tradition and as a distinctive form of that tradition.” Hurtado, Destroyer of the gods, 67. ↑
7. Hurtado, Destroyer, 47. It may be a very interesting line of inquiry to ask whether or not the whole idea of the ‘secular’ really was the invention of Christians in the first place, especially as the early apologists tried to defend the place of the Christian community in the Roman society apart from the pervasive religious cult. In effect, these apologists may have been saying something like, “there should be a space in civilization for us to exist apart from any obligation to participate in the religious cult of the empire.” Presumably, something similar to this is going on in the Christian “invention” of religious liberty (cf. Robert Louis Wilken, Liberty in the Things of God). ↑
8. Even if “pagans” could have become proselyte Jews, thereby repudiating their family and more broad social obligation to the imperial cult, this was understood as, in effect, a change of ethnic status and therefore not an affront to the empire. Certainly not as much of an affront as the unique Christian claim; namely, for gentiles to repudiate the imperial cult without ceasing, thereby, to be members of their ethnic heritage. See Hurtado, Destroyer, 55. ↑
9. See Hurtado, Destroyer, 20-36. ↑
10. Ratzinger, Introduction to Christianity, 112. ↑
11. The phrase “inter-Jewish” here is meant to emphasize the Jewish character of the Christian faith. It is, and always will be, Jewish in its roots. One should be cautious against the tendency to anachronistically read back into the early Christian movement the later Jewish-Christian dichotomy (this is not to deny that some kind of distinction should be made, just that the distinction emerged over time as a result of certain segments of the Jewish people rejecting the Messiah). Indeed, theological reflection on the relationship between Israel and the Church has undergone a rather radical re-assessment in recent years. See, for example, the important framing of this question by Joseph Ratzinger, Many Religions – One Covenant: Israel, the Church and the World, trans. Graham Harrison, (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1999). ↑
12. Ratzinger unpacks this distinction by means of his interaction with the contemporary book by Jacob Neusner, A Rabbi Talks with Jesus. See Joseph Ratzinger, Jesus of Nazareth: From the Baptism in the Jordan to the Transfiguration, trans. Adrian J. Walker, (New York: Doubleday, 2007), pp. 99-127. ↑
13. Hurtado, Destroyer, 72. ↑
14. Benedict XVI, Spe Salvi [Encyclical Letter on Christian Hope], The Holy See, November 30, 2007, §17, https://www.vatican.va/content/benedict-xvi/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_ben-xvi_enc_20071130_spe-salvi.html. ↑
15. David Bentley Hart, “God or Nothingness,” in I Am the Lord Your God: Christian Reflections on the Ten Commandments, ed. Carl E. Braaten and Christopher R. Seitz, (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2005), 57. ↑
16. Ratzinger, Introduction, 134. ↑
17. Ratzinger, Introduction, 135. ↑
18. See Christopher R. Seitz, Figured Out: Typology and Providence in Christian Scripture, (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2001), 131-144. ↑
19. T.S. Eliot, “East Coker,” Four Quartets, (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1971), 32. ↑