Recently, the whole idea of posting The Ten Commandments in the public schools in Louisiana and Oklahoma has caused a great deal of angst among many pagans and degenerates.
How dare anyone force their religion upon anyone, much less all those innocent little children.
But, do those doing all the clamoring even know what The Ten Commandments even say?
Probably not.
Therefore, in an effort to give a reprieve to those having mild strokes over the thought that something religious and/or absolute be propped up alongside all the secular religiosity and humanistic relativity currently taught in the public schools, let me take these commandments one at a time and explain just what all the skeptics and naysayers are freaking out about.
The first commandment deals with recognizing the one, true God to the exclusion of all others.
“You shall have no other gods before me” (Ex 20:3; Dt 5:7).
This commandment, as well as all the others, was given shortly after Israel had left Egyptian captivity and were on their way the Promised Land, where all kinds of polytheistic recognition and practices filled the landscape.
God made it clear to Moses that only He was the Creator and sustainer of all that exists, and God did not want His chosen people interacting or compromising with those who did not know God.
Instead, they had created their own deities after the creatures they worshiped, both on earth and the spirit realm.
The reason for such a stricture was that by intermixing with the pagan element and the false, if not occultic, spirituality that it brought to the table was that they would eventuate in being “barbs in your eyes and thorns in your sides, and they shall trouble you in the land where you dwell” (Num. 33:55).
Bad theology, in other words, leads to bad ethics, morals, and civics.
Ultimately, bad theology leads to demon worship, and certain spiritual death of any kind of relationship that a person might have with God.
Hence, the first commandment would lay the foundation for all the other commandments in the sense that if a nation or a people wished to thrive on the earth, then it and they must recognize or worship God, alone, and none else.
Why this causes so many, today, to writhe in anger is quite simple: they hate God and absolutely refuse to see Him as absolutely supreme and good in all that He does.
They, just like the pagans that the Jews were going to confront upon entering the Promised Land, cannot tolerate the idea that God has revealed Himself through His commandments, as well as in nature.
Therefore, if anyone comes along and challenges the hatred and intolerance of those who claim to be nothing but love and tolerable, it makes nearly every pagan or unregenerate person lose their minds.
But, God states right up front, that in order for a people, a family, or nation to live right and avoid the “thorns” and “troubles” inherent in practical atheism, paganism, and the occult, then that people, family, or nation must recognize, acknowledge, and worship the only God, who has revealed Himself both in them and the rest of the created order.
Disobedience only results in misery, mayhem, and death, or something that every nation has seen or is seeing right now, as they wallow in the syncretistic cesspool that they have created by equating God with the vanity of their false deities.
