Under the covenant that Jesus inaugurated by the sacrifice of Himself, our Lord has removed the curse and burden of the law from us. We rest in His obedience rather than our own. Furthermore, He has given to us the Spirit of life that produces His fruit within us, fruit of love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control, which are characteristics that naturally fulfill the law. Again, as Jesus said, the law has not been abolished; it has been fulfilled. 

Diving back into Exodus for the third and final time, we begin with the Ten Commandments. Together with the Apostles’ Creed and the Lord’s Prayer, this passage has a long history of being used to disciple and catechize new believers into the faith. Indeed, the great Reformer Martin Luther said, “Although I’m indeed an old doctor, I never move on from the childish doctrine of the Ten Commandments and the Apostles’ Creed and the Lord’s Prayer. I still daily learn and pray them with my little Hans and my little Lena.”
With much to cover as we attempt to tackle the back half of Exodus this year, you will not find an exposition of each of the Ten Commandments in this sermon. I did such a series back in 2019 (where I also preached through the Apostles’ Creed and Lord’s Prayer). Instead, because the Ten Commandments are a summary of God’s law, we will discuss the purpose of the law for us today as Christians.
A Recap of Exodus 1-19
Before beginning our study through the second half of Exodus, let us take a quick moment to recap the previous nineteen chapters. Although Genesis ended with Joseph’s family settling into the very best of Egypt’s land, Exodus opens by telling us that a new Pharaoh enslaved the people of Israel, and after four hundred years in Egypt, the LORD raised up and sent Moses to the king of Egypt. While this story is quite familiar to most of us, let us take care that we remember it according to what the Bible actually says. The Israelites cried out to God to be delivered from their slavery but never to be taken out of Egypt. Since we know that many worshiped the Egyptian gods, it should not surprise us that they did not actually want to leave Egypt; they just wanted to be freed from their slavery.
Yahweh, however, told Moses from the beginning that He was bringing them completely out of Egypt and into the land that He promised to their ancestors. Even though the LORD always had the intention of bringing the Israelites out of Egypt entirely, He commanded Moses to only request their temporary journey into the wilderness to sacrifice and hold a feast to God. This continued with each of Moses’ speeches to Pharaoh throughout the outpouring of the plagues. His message to Pharaoh is almost always: “Thus says the LORD, ‘Let my people go, that they may serve me’” (Exodus 8:1). He never demands of Pharaoh the permanent exodus of Israel, even though that is exactly what God promised to do. The LORD purposely kept the demand for Pharaoh’s obedience low so that Israel’s exodus would be all the more glorious whenever God used the hard-hearted Pharaoh to accomplish it. And that is precisely what Yahweh did, bringing them out of Egypt as conquerors and drowning Pharaoh and his chariots in the sea.
In chapters 16-18, the LORD brought Israel through the wilderness, testing them along the way. Although we saw the first signs of trouble with this exodus generation as they grumbled and complained, God continued to work His wonders, giving them water from a rock and the bread of angels to eat.
Finally, in chapter 19, Yahweh brought Israel to Sinai (also called Horeb), and before He commanded them to prepare for His descent upon the mountain in glory, which is where the chapter concluded, He gave to them the very heart of the Old Testament. In order to properly understand the Ten Commandments and all of God’s law, we must keep these words in mind:
Thus you shall say to the house of Jacob, and tell the people of Israel: ‘You yourselves have seen what I did to the Egyptians, and how I bore you on eagles’ wings and brought you to myself. Now therefore, if you will indeed obey my voice and keep my covenant, you shall be my treasured possession among all peoples, for all the earth is mine; and you shall be to me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.’ These are the words that you shall speak to the people of Israel.
EXODUS 19:3–6
That is the heart of the God’s covenant with Israel. God rescued the Israelites from slavery in order to make them His treasured possession, a kingdom of priest, and a holy nation. They were saved by God so that they could then live as God’s people. But they were also rescued to become a kingdom of priests. Priests, after all, were called to stand as mediators between God and men. The LORD did not lay claim upon the nation of Israel alone but rather the entire earth, and Israel was to be His nation of priests, mediating between Yahweh and all the other nations. Indeed, He chose Israel as a holy nation in order to also make them “a light for the nations, that my salvation may reach to the end of the earth” (Isaiah 49:6).
A Summary of the Law
After declaring His purpose for their deliverance from that very mountain and after three days of consecrating themselves, God now gives to His people the Ten Commandments. Although the LORD gave many more laws and commands to the Israelites, which we will study in the coming weeks, these ten were especially significant, which is testified by God speaking them directly to the people rather than through Moses and by their being etched into stone and kept in the Ark. They received this special treatment because the Ten Commandments serve as a succinct summary of God’s expectations for His people. In many ways, the remainder of the laws served to provide specific application and explanation to these ten.
Notice then how they begin:
And God spoke all these words, saying, “I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery. You shall have no other gods before me.
Of all the wondrous things that we could consider within those first three verses, we should certainly note the pronoun being used. The LORD uses the second person singular, you. The original audience was Israel, God’s people, who were standing around Mount Sinai hearing God speaking to them from the smoke and fire and lightening. Yet in the midst of this great congregation, God spoke directly to each Israelite. The laws were given to the whole nation, but each person bore the responsibility for obeying them.
Yet God did not solely speak to those ancient Israelites. He etched these words into stone to symbolize their permanence and inspired Moses to write them into a book called Exodus. He even repeated them in Deuteronomy. Indeed, God speaks these words to all His people throughout history. They are still very much rules for governing life in the community of God’s people, yet the responsibility of obedience does not fall upon the collective unit but rather each person. If you have ever desired for God to speak a direct message to you, hear now what God says, “You shall have no other gods before me.”
Indeed, whenever we speak about God’s law and about how He expects His people to act, we can turn to the Ten Commandments because they served as a sort of constitution for what life among the community of God’s holy nation was meant to be. The beauty of this vision only requires a moment’s imagination to grasp. Who would not want to live in a community where people served the LORD with all their heart, soul, and might, where they exalted His name instead of their own, where they worked hard for six days but rested in God and one another on the seventh day, where parents and the family unit were held in honor, where life was sacred, where spouses were always faithful in both body and heart, where falsehood was unthinkable, and where everyone rejoiced in the possessions of others as much as they would their own? Such a place would rightly be called heavenly. Indeed, obedience to the Ten Commandments is heavenly because in heaven all submit perfectly to God’s will. On the other hand, the breaking of these laws both leads to hell itself and to a hellish existence here. Sin, after all, is lawlessness, and a lawless society is a dystopic society.
Through obeying God’s law, Israel was meant to display a savor and aroma of heaven to the rest of the nations on earth. The Old Testament narratives, however, is filled with accounts of the Israelites falling into disobedience, of their constant failures to measure up to God’s standard. Indeed, the New Testament writers confirm that such obedience is utterly impossible. No one can fulfill the Ten Commandments perfectly, constantly, and genuinely. As Moses, the giver of the law, died before entering the Promised Land, so too will all perish who attempt to enter eternal life through their own obedience.
What then is the purpose of the Ten Commandments today? Do they serve no other purpose other than to heap condemnation upon our heads as we continue to disobey them? Question 15 of the New City Catechism is of great help here:
Q. Since no one can keep the law, what is its purpose?
A. That we may know the holy nature and will of God, and the sinful nature and disobedience of our hearts; and thus our need of a Savior. The law also teaches and exhorts us to live a life worthy of our Savior.
In the catechism’s answer, we are given three purposes that the law of God serves. First, that we may know the holy nature and will of God. This means that the law has a purpose in teaching us about God. Particularly, it reveals two aspects of God: His nature and His will.
The law reveals God’s nature because His law is a reflection of Himself as the Lawgiver. This is why when preaching through the Ten Commandments I aimed to show how each displayed an attribute of God. For example, the First Commandment’s decree of exclusive worship reflects God’s holiness, that there is none like Him.
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The western world’s gnostic separation of the human person into a good soul and a bad body has manifested itself in the postmodern transgender movement. This radical, ultimately anti-humanistic form of dualism drives an arbitrary wedge between a person’s physical, biological sex and their so-called gender. To honor their “true” or “authentic” internal sense of gender, no matter how nebulous or confused it may be, many people today, an alarming number of them children, will hire surgeons to mutilate their body so as to bring it into conformity with their “soul.”

Most American Christians are aware that it is an ancient heresy to say that Jesus was man but not God (Arianism); less are aware that there were just as many heretics who promoted the opposite error: that Jesus was God but not man (Gnosticism). The reason Gnostics denied that God became fully man in the incarnation is that they held a low view of matter in general and flesh in particular. For Gnostics, matter and flesh were not products of a good creation that fell; the creation of matter and flesh was itself the fall.
         Although there are very few full-blown Gnostics in the church today, many Americans hold to a soft dualism that sees the soul as good and the body as bad. It is because of that theological misunderstanding that many Christians imagine that when we die, we become angels: that is, pure souls. Although Christians affirm in both the Apostles and Nicene Creeds their belief in the resurrection of the body, a suspicion of the flesh persists.
         Thankfully, this gnostic, anti-biblical demonization of the flesh was dealt a decisive blow 1600 years ago in Book XIV, chapter 3 of The City of God. Although Virgil seemed to teach, in Aeneid 6, that the body weighs down the soul, Augustine insists that the Christian
faith teaches something very different. For the corruption of the body, which is a burden to the soul, is not the cause but the punishment of Adam’s first sin. Moreover, it was not the corruptible flesh that made the soul sinful; on the contrary, it was the sinful soul that made the flesh corruptible. Though some incitements to vice and vicious desires are attributable to the corruption of the flesh, nevertheless, we should not ascribe to the flesh all the evils of a wicked life. Else, we free the Devil from all such passions, since he has no flesh. It is true that the Devil cannot be said to be addicted to debauchery, drunkenness, or any others of the vices which pertain to bodily pleasure—much as he secretly prompts and provokes us to such sins—but he is most certainly filled with pride and envy. It is because these passions so possessed the Devil that he is doomed to eternal punishment in the prison of the gloomy air. 
If flesh were the seat of evil, then none of the angels could have fallen. There are sins that rise up from the flesh, but they tend to be less wicked and corrupting than pride and envy, which rise up from the soul (see Mark 7:14-23). Indeed, it is more often the soul that leads the body astray than vice versa.
         No, Augustine explains in chapter 4, “the animal man is not one thing and the carnal another, but both are one and the same, namely, man living according to man.” In fact, he continues in chapter 5, it is wrong “to blame our sins and defects on the nature of the flesh, for this is to disparage the Creator. The flesh, in its own kind and order, is good. But what is not good is to abandon the Goodness of the Creator in pursuit of some created good, whether by living deliberately according to the flesh, or according to the soul, or according to the entire man, which is made up of soul and flesh and which is the reason why either ‘soul’ alone or ‘flesh’ alone can mean a man.”
         Those who are aware that St. Augustine played the central role in formulating the doctrine of original sin might be surprised to find Augustine here defending the body from its detractors. To be fair, Augustine, who went through a gnostic (Manichean) phase before embracing Christianity and whose pre-conversion years were marked by sexual promiscuity found it necessary to adopt a celibate lifestyle for himself and did sometimes speak in a disparaging manner of the flesh. Still, nowhere in his writings does he equate original sin with sex, nor does he treat the body as inherently fallen. Just as original sin tainted body and soul alike, so Christ’s atoning work on the cross restored body and soul alike.
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True faith is grounded in Christ’s work alone, not in anything we do. Yet, let me be clear: there is no pardon of sins without repentance (Luke 13:3; Acts 17:30). Repentance proceeds from faith; it does not precede faith. The cause of our pardon is Christ through faith. If repentance preceded faith, then our work of repentance would seem to be part of the ground for God to pardon us, which Scripture doesn’t teach.

The faith that is unto salvation is a penitent faith and the repentance that is unto life is a believing repentance. — John Murray,Redemption Accomplished and Applied, p. 119.
Repentance is a critical teaching of the Word of God. We are called to proclaim it in the name of Christ Jesus everywhere (Luke 24:47). Yet a question arises: must people repent of their sins and show a changed behavior, that is a changed life, before God grants justifying faith—faith that is the instrument by which God reconciles a sinful person to himself? Or does repentance follow faith? Which comes first—faith or repentance? And how do we know?
How Should We Define Repentance and Faith?
The Westminster Shorter Catechism has a helpful, biblically-based definition of repentance:
87. What is repentance unto life?
Repentance unto life is a saving grace, whereby a sinner, out of a true sense of his sin, and apprehension of the mercy of God in Christ, does, with grief and hatred of his sin, turn from it unto God, with full purpose of, and endeavor after, new obedience.
The Heidelberg Catechism gives a good biblical definition of true faith:
Question 21. What is true faith?
Answer: True faith is not only a certain knowledge, whereby I hold for truth all that God has revealed to us in his word, but also an assured confidence, which the Holy Ghost works by the gospel in my heart; that not only to others, but to me also, remission of sin, everlasting righteousness and salvation, are freely given by God, merely of grace, only for the sake of Christ’s merits. 
Repentance is turning from sin to obedience. Internally, it is a hatred of sin and a motivation to live in gratitude and love by obeying God’s commands. Externally it is changed conduct. Saving faith is a gift of God in our hearts leading us to trust him alone for our forgiveness, righteousness, and salvation, only because of what Christ has done for us. 
So, which comes first—faith or repentance? The answer is faith precedes repentance; it is a fruit of saving faith—not the other way around. A person is reconciled to God (justified) by faith alone, not by faith plus works. Yet, faith without repentance is not saving faith. Let me explain by considering what the Bible teaches.
The Bible Contains Various Passages regarding the Need for Repentance
The book of Acts records examples of the apostolic call to repent, believe, and be baptized; the call goes out in various combinations and order. In Acts 2:38,
Peter said to them, “Repent and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins, and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit.”
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