Video Transcript
Emily: An important lesson we learn at a very young age is that, in some situations, what we don’t do can be just as important as what we do.
Edmund: In God’s loving plan for us, He created us for goodness. He desires for us to learn to choose the good and avoid evil. God has written this law on our hearts. We call this natural law, because we can come to understand it through the use of our reason.
Emily: But sometimes our thinking can be flawed, or we can be misinformed. So God revealed the law so that we can know it clearly.
Edmund: You may remember that in the Old Testament there were many laws and guidelines for God’s people.
Emily: Yes–the book of Leviticus is filled with long lists of particular rules for worship and the life of the Israelites.
Edmund: Exactly. God has been gathering His people throughout salvation history. And after God used Moses to gather His people Israel and save them from Egypt, God’s people needed new guidelines for how they would live together and worship as a community.
Emily: But the 10 Commandments are different. These new laws are responses to God’s loving goodness.
Edmund: These laws are part of the covenant God made with His people. These laws, carved in stone, were so important that they were kept in the Ark of the Covenant and carried with the Israelites everywhere they went.
Emily: Many of the commandments start with “Thou shall not…”. But, the commandments aren’t just a bunch of “No’s.” They are warnings from God that choosing sin makes us less loving and less free. The Commandments are ways we need to say no to the slavery of sin so we can say yes to freedom. And since we have the freedom to choose between good and evil, we have the ability to love God and others with our choices and our actions.
Edmund: So, sin is an act that contradicts our nature. It wounds us because we are not made for sin. Because we have freedom, we are capable of acting contrary to our true nature—contrary to what is good and true and will lead to our fulfillment.
Emily: God did not create the laws of the Ten Commandments as an arbitrary exercise of power. The law is based on His wisdom. Like a loving Father, He points out the path that will lead to true happiness and warns us against acts that will harm us.
The 10 Commandments can be seen as 3 commandments that concern our love of God, and 7 that concern our love of neighbor. The Ten Commandments are an expression of natural law. But the Catechism reminds us in paragraph 2071 that the Commandments, “Although accessible to reason alone, have been revealed. To attain a complete and certain understanding of the requirements of the natural law, sinful humanity needed this revelation.”
Edmund: God loves us first, and invites us to His life of love. He outlines what this life of love looks like through the 10 Commandments. By giving us the 10 Commandments, God clearly defined what sin is, or what actions are sinful and evil. So following God’s commandments is how we give a response of love to God and neighbor. It’s a moral obligation we have as human persons.
Emily: It’s important to know that the commandments speak of obligations in grave matters, and also imply obligations in matters which might be lighter. For example, the commandment “you shall not kill” speaks about the grave sin of murder, but it implies avoiding other ways we might harm people, such as gossiping.
Edmund: The 10 Commandments are true for all time. Jesus does not do away with any of the commandments.
Emily: In fact, Jesus elevates the Commandments. He shows us how to love the way God loves. God gives us the gift of His Holy Spirit through Jesus so that we can have strength to live life in the Spirit, the life of love. We see what this life is like in Jesus. Jesus gives us a new commandment when He says “This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you.”
Edmund: The 10 Commandments are a great gift we have been given by God. They help us clearly know what to avoid and how to love. They’re not a list of arbitrary no’s, but a blueprint for a life of love and happiness. Because of this, we should rejoice and be thankful that, through the Ten Commandments, God defined sin and how we can live in a relationship with Him and one another.
