(The view expressed in this blog are my own and should not be taken as inspired in any way.)
Deuteronomy 21:18–23, “If a man have a stubborn and rebellious son, which will not obey the voice of his father, or the voice of his mother, and that, when they have chastened him, will not hearken unto them: Then shall his father and his mother lay hold on him, and bring him out unto the elders of his city, and unto the gate of his place; And they shall say unto the elders of his city, This our son is stubborn and rebellious, he will not obey our voice; he is a glutton, and a drunkard. And all the men of his city shall stone him with stones, that he die: so shalt thou put evil away from among you; and all Israel shall hear, and fear. And if a man have committed a sin worthy of death, and he be to be put to death, and thou hang him on a tree: His body shall not remain all night upon the tree, but thou shalt in any wise bury him that day; (for he that is hanged is accursed of God;) that thy land be not defiled, which the LORD thy God giveth thee for an inheritance.”
The Ten Commandments were based on the fact that the Lord, Israel’s God, had saved them from slavery in the Land of Egypt. These commandments can be seen as in inverted “T”. The top of an inverted “T” is like “l”, this first part of the commandments refer to our relationship with the Lord. The first commandments tells us that there is only room for one God in the world. There is only one Creator and He must be respected as superior to every other imitation “god”. Moving down the inverted T we find that the second commandment tells us that it is wrong for us to assume that God is similar to anything that He has made in creation. If we assume that our God is like something that is inferior to His Almighty Self then we will begin to reduce our understanding of Almighty God. The third commandment informs us that we must never use the Lord’s Name to justify anything that is inconsistent with His pure and perfect nature. The fourth commandment is to remind us that the Lord made His creation perfect and that He made it in six days. At the end of the sixth day, the Lord God was exactly the same as He was at the beginning of the first day. His creation is entirely distinct from Himself and He left nothing of Himself in Creation. This is the beginning of all false religion. If we believe that God place a part of Himself in His creation then He was reduced at the end of the process. This leads to a belief that we can, by our own efforts, find part of God in His creation and evolve into a superior kind of person, this is entirely false. God is always God and we are always His creatures, made in His image, but unable to evolve into a higher species. The fifth commandment is at the junction of both the upright part of the inverted “T” and the horizontal. It belongs to our relationship with the Lord God and, as the rest of the horizontal section, our relationship with each other. We can never get our horizontal relationships right unless we get our vertical relationship right. The fifth commandment, in essence, reminds us that the Lord God created an ordered world. If we want to have peaceful and productive relationship in the Lord God’s perfect world we must accept that order. For every person this is represented by our parents, who play the role of teaching us how to understand, appreciate and submit to the Lord God. If we are unwilling to accept any part of the Lord’s perfect plan for our lives then we are worshipping another god. This section is an extension of Deut 13:6–11, “If thy brother, the son of thy mother, or thy son, or thy daughter, or the wife of thy bosom, or thy friend, which is as thine own soul, entice thee secretly, saying, Let us go and serve other gods, which thou hast not known, thou, nor thy fathers; Namely, of the gods of the people which are round about you, nigh unto thee, or far off from thee, from the one end of the earth even unto the other end of the earth; Thou shalt not consent unto him, nor hearken unto him; neither shall thine eye pity him, neither shalt thou spare, neither shalt thou conceal him: But thou shalt surely kill him; thine hand shall be first upon him to put him to death, and afterwards the hand of all the people. And thou shalt stone him with stones, that he die; because he hath sought to thrust thee away from the LORD thy God, which brought thee out of the land of Egypt, from the house of bondage. And all Israel shall hear, and fear, and shall do no more any such wickedness as this is among you.”) If their own children were encouraging others to worship a false god, who doesn’t control an ordered world then Israel was to put to put the health of nation above their own personal desires. The section ends with a command not to use the Law for the satisfaction of personal vengeance. If a person was executed for sinning against the Lord then they were to be buried with respect and not left there for his enemies to gloat over his rotting corpse.
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