The first chapter of
THE TEN COMMANDMENTS: What Do Two Tablets Reveal About the Life of the Spirit and the Way Toward God?
A book by Peter Zelinski.
Learn more at www.PeterZelinski.com.
3. Preface
A reading of the table of contents might suggest that this is a
crazy book about the Ten Commandments. As you are about to
see, the commandments are not covered in numerical order. Not
every commandment gets a dedicated chapter. One chapter is
dedicated to a commandment (the “zeroth”?) that isn’t even one
of the Ten.
Examining the commandments individually and in order from
one to ten is a logical and fruitful way to explore them—but it’s
not the approach that this book takes. Indeed, the very premise of
this book, as Chapter 1 explains, is that the Ten Commandments
can be thought of as a map. That map covers a lot of terrain, and
there are fresh discoveries to be made by approaching the familiar
landmarks from different directions.
4.
5. Contents
Preface 1
1 A Moral Map of the Universe 5
The Ten Commandments point to a deeper pattern.
2 The Commandments and the Rules 15
Extract the “rules” from the Ten Commandments to see that the actual text is
richer than just rules.
3 The Zeroth Commandment 18
The Ten Commandments have levels. The highest of these levels is God.
4 What is the Difference Between a False God and an Idol? 27
A false god is a person. An idol is a thing.
5 The First Commandment (How Do You Know Your god is God?) 33
The Living God is transformational. We should expect this transformation.
6 The Second Commandment (Idle Worship) 46
An otherwise good and healthy thing has become an idol when we revere it fearful-
ly, or pursue it in lieu of seeking God.
7 The Sixth Commandment (The Killing Field of the Mind) 53
To set the heart free from rage, turn away from rival gods.
8 The Seventh Commandment (Beguiled at Heart) 65
To get free of an adulterous heart, ask, What is the idol I worship? To get free of
the sins of the second tablet, give your heart to the commands of the first tablet.
9 The Fifth Commandment (The Parent Trap) 75
Honoring your parents means ceasing to worship them, as well as ceasing to reject
them. A proper regard for one’s parents is the way by which blessings flow.
10 The Fourth Commandment (Time Enough for God) 84
For one day every week, let go.
11 The Third Commandment (God is There) 94
God is paying attention. Know that this is true.
12 Regurgitate the Fruit 101
What the commandments do not tell us.
13 How Shall We Regard the Commandments? 109
There is still something we haven’t seen.
6.
7. Chapter 1
A Moral Map of the Universe
The Ten Commandments point to
a deeper pattern.
What did God really give to Moses when he gave him the Ten
Commandments?
We can see in the Bible that God had much more to commu-
nicate to Moses than just these ten points. The book of Exodus
includes a long dissertation to Moses from God. The books of Le-
viticus and Numbers add more. In all of what God spoke here,
there are lots of commands—hundreds of them.
Yet this opening part, this first volley of commands, comes in
a set of ten. That number alone seems to convey something about
the nature of this set. “Ten” is a number we see as foundational to
the way God made our bodies. We find the number in our fingers
and toes, and we in turn have made the number foundational to
the way our counting system works. The quantity ten suggests
that there is something similarly foundational in this first set of
commands. God went on to make their separateness even more
apparent by choosing these special ten for inscription onto the
well-known tablets of stone.
Further, these commands do come first, near the beginning of
the Law that was dictated by God. This fact seems significant, too.
God seems to be beginning with the basics. In the very first words
8. 6 The Ten Commandments
of the Law, God presents the most basic point of all—a statement
of just who he is.
“I am the Lord your God,” he says in Exodus 20:2, “who
brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bon-
dage.” In other words, here is the God who acts decisively within
human lives, human geography, and human history. Here is a real
and specific God, who has something real and specific to say.
The Ten Commandments are the next words the Creator
speaks. They feature a directness, conciseness, and breadth of
scope that separate them even from the rest of what God had to
say across the many biblical chapters that follow.
He was already losing part of his audience. The people of Israel
had been listening in, but at this point they retreated, leaving
Moses alone to hear all of the rest of the Law. After hearing the
Ten Commandments, the chosen people felt that they could listen
to no more.
We can understand their reaction. We still hear a rumble of
the power that they heard then, even when we merely read an
English translation of those commandments silently to ourselves
off of a plaque or billboard, or off of the printed page. There is
something in those words. There is a mantle of knowledge that
even the believer is reluctant to shoulder. There is a revelation so
bright in its purity that our minds blink against peering into it
directly.
Imagine how much God wanted to give his children. Imagine
what he would have wanted those Israelites to know—what un-
derstanding he would have wanted them to carry in their
thoughts and keep in their hearts, so that they could walk with
him in fellowship and confidence as his stewards over creation.
Now, imagine what gift of knowledge and insight that same un-
changing God wants his children today to have.
The Ten Commandments were, and still are, the core of this
9. A Moral Map of the Universe 7
gift of instruction. More than just speaking to what is basic, the
Ten Commandments convey something structural. They provide
us with a glimpse, and perhaps only a glimpse, at the deep girders
that give form and support to the nature of the created world we
know.
I have a simple idea I want to share. I will introduce it in this
chapter and develop it over the course of the chapters to follow.
That idea, the premise of this book, the germ I hope to infect you
with, is this:
The Ten Commandments are far more than just a list of rules.
They have far more to teach us than simply what we should
and should not do.
To begin a deeper exploration of the Ten Commandments, a logi-
cal starting point is one of the most iconic facts about them—
something almost everyone knows.
That is, the Ten Commandments were inscribed on two tab-
lets. Not one tablet, but two.
The choice can only be significant. God could have fit all of
the commandments onto one piece of stone, if this is how he
wished to present them. The Creator of the universe presumably
could have controlled the font size.
Jesus came.
He changed the destiny of mankind. His death and resurrec-
tion were the turning point of history, the turning point of
creation. They were the turning point of my life, too.
Jesus also taught. This was not necessary to his mission of re-
deeming sacrifice. He could have died and risen without saying a
great deal at all. Yet he devoted the last few years of his life on
earth to teaching human beings how to live. His teachings are
recorded in the gospels. They include various commands—many
10. 8 The Ten Commandments
of which seem like new commands, because they do not appear in
the Law that was given to Moses. Yet Jesus affirmed the Law that
was given to Moses, saying in Matthew 5:17 that he did not come
to change anything about it. What are we to make of this appar-
ent discrepancy?
In one scene that was also recorded in Matthew’s gospel, Jesus
was asked to identify which command was the most important.
He answered that two commands are the most important. First
comes “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all
your soul, and with all your mind,” then, he said, the second is
“Love your neighbor as yourself” (Matthew 22:36-39).
Neither of these two commands appears in the Ten Com-
mandments.
However, they do appear beneath them.
Look again at the two tablets. We hazard the guess that they di-
vide the commandments symmetrically, into two sets of five. This
is an assumption. The Bible omits this detail, never stating how
many commandments are on either stone. However, the five-by-
five framework will prove rewarding, yielding up riches through-
out this book. Part of the reason why the even split seems valid is
the way it aligns with the words of Christ quoted above.
To see this, consider the first set of five. It includes, “You shall
have no other gods,” “You shall not make an idol,” “You shall not
take God’s name in vain,” and so on.
Now consider the second set. It includes, “You shall not mur-
der,” “You shall not commit adultery,” “You shall not steal,” and so
on.
Notice the difference: While the first set of five focuses on
God, the second set of five focuses on other people. This follows
the same pattern as Jesus’ words. Asked to state the Law, Jesus
gave it in its most distilled form.
He said to love God with all your heart, soul, and mind. When
11. A Moral Map of the Universe 9
he said this, he was summarizing the first set of five, or the first
tablet.
He said to love your neighbor as yourself. When he said this,
he was summarizing the second set of five, or the second tablet.
But Jesus also showed us more. He ranked his own two com-
mands, placing one ahead of the other. The second of these two
commands from Jesus is clearly vital—so vital that he answered a
question about which one command is most important by citing
two commands together. Yet by including the ranking, Jesus re-
vealed something new. He revealed that the first tablet of the Ten
Commandments is superior to the second.
To be fair, even given the five-by-five split, we don’t know how
the two tablets made this division. One clear detail the Bible does
provide highlights the inaccuracy in most of our popular imagin-
ings of the tablets. Namely: On the real tablets, the text covered
both sides. See Exodus 32:15.
What are we to make of this fact?
There are two possible implications of this detail. One is that
the full text of the Ten Commandments was spread across all four
faces of stone, rather than the two front faces we typically im-
agine. Throughout this book, we will tend to assume this four-face
picture of the tablets. Because the first set of five commandments
appears to contain a subset that is smaller still (see Chapter 3), it
seems logical to imagine each of the sets of five being further di-
vided between two faces of stone. We will use the phrases “first
tablet” and “second tablet” as synonyms for “first set of five com-
mandments” and “second set of five commandments.” However,
there is an alternate picture of the tablets that we will mention
here, and explore further in Chapter 12.
Specifically, instead of the compete set of Ten Command-
ments stretching across four faces, what if each single tablet
contained the compete set? That is, what if each individual tablet
12. 10 The Ten Commandments
had the first through fifth commandments on one side, and sixth
through tenth commandments on the other? The two tablets
would therefore be identical copies.
Most of us have had the experience of signing a legal contract.
Typically, there is a copy for each party to the agreement. God
gave the Law as part of a covenant. While scripture does not men-
tion anything about redundancy between the tablets, scripture
doesn’t preclude the possibility either. Perhaps the existence of
the two tablets was meant to show that there was one copy for
humanity, another copy for God.
Part of the difficulty people have with acknowledging the worth
and power of the Ten Commandments is the view that the com-
mandments’ relevance has passed. Also, in the simple, direct, and
unqualified way in which they are stated, the commandments
seem impossibly rigid. People who are indifferent to Jesus see the
contents of the two tablets this way, but plenty of people who love
Jesus see the commandments this way as well. Thinking of the
Ten Commandments as nothing more than rules just reinforces
these perceptions. If we are to have rules to live by, goes the think-
ing, then certainly we need rules that cover more ground and have
more flex in them than these ones.
The Ten Commandments have appeared out-of-step in this
way for quite a long time. Indeed, the account in the book of Ex-
odus suggests that human beings have seen the core of God’s Law
as being too stodgy and too old-fashioned from the very begin-
ning. When Moses carried the two tablets down from the
mountain to rejoin the Israelites, he discovered that the latest
modern and fresh practice the people had found was to gather in
worship before a golden idol.
Moses’ brother Aaron was leading this practice.
“Oh, come on, Moses,” Aaron might have said. “You were up
on that mountain a long time. The people were getting antsy.
13. A Moral Map of the Universe 11
They needed something tangible to worship for a while, just for
something to do, just to tide them over.”
Moses smashed the tablets in frustration (Exodus 32:19). It
seemed impossible to him that a people so determined to write its
own law could ever conform to something as absolute as the Ten
Commandments.
Looking in defeat upon the shards of stone and feeling just as
broken as the tablets, Moses might well have asked, “God ... how
is this ever going to work?”
In case you don’t know the Ten Commandments like you know
your own hand, the text appears in full in the next chapter. You
might mark that chapter for reference while you are reading this
book.
Again, there are two sets of five. The first set is about God. The
second set is about people.
However, the fifth commandment is different from the first
four. The first four relate to worshiping or revering God. Com-
mandment five doesn’t seem to deal with God directly. It says,
“Honor your father and mother.”
Does this break the pattern? Not quite.
Consider this commandment. In our lives, our parents are the
first powerful authorities—the first authorities that each of us is
called to trust. We cannot choose our parents. Instead, our paren-
tage is the beginning of the particular individual circumstances
that God has chosen for us. Honoring our parents is an extension
of honoring God—the God who made each of us a particular per-
son with a particular life to live.
Consider also the tenth commandment. This one, too, is dif-
ferent from the four that precede it. Commandments six through
nine all relate to actions we take, things we “do” to other people—
including murder, adultery, theft, and slander. Commandment
ten is not about something we do, but something we feel. “You
14. 12 The Ten Commandments
shall not covet,” it says.
Does this break the pattern?
Also no. This one, too, conforms to the pattern of the two tab-
lets. Recall that the second tablet is about loving other people.
The beginning of not loving other people is when we presume
that we “unfairly” lack the possessions, station, or circumstances
we want, and that this justifies harming other people in order to
obtain what we deserve. Rather than being inconsistent with the
command about loving other people, this commandment gets to
the throbbing heart of that basic command.
So: The Ten Commandments consist of two sets of five, with
one member of each set standing distinct from the other four.
Also, as we have established, one of the sets of five is superior
to the other.
Where else have you seen two sets that fit this description?
Answer: On your own body. Within your own hands.
A person’s two hands have two sets of five fingers. In each set,
one of those fingers (the thumb) is clearly distinct from the other
four. And one of the hands is also dominant, in that almost every-
one is either right- or left-handed. In short, there is a recurring
pattern here, and a detailed one at that. Your own hands conform
to the same pattern as God’s Law.
Imagine what this suggests about how much the Law and hu-
manity belong to one another, and how closely they both conform
to something deeper. There is something more to these com-
mands than just ten rules, even handy rules at that. We perceive a
divine shape that lies close to God’s heart. The form of our bodies,
the form of the Law—the same form. While we cannot under-
stand this spiritual geometry directly, we infer the presence of a
substructure within the common profiles of these things that God
holds dear.
Do the Ten Commandments seem old-fashioned? The Ten Com-
15. A Moral Map of the Universe 13
mandments are also modern.
Commandment four says that on one day out of every seven,
we are to let go. Commandment four says to rest.
What could the desert people who first received this com-
mand have thought? They had little to do but wander, and little to
occupy their attention. They could just as well have given every
third or every second day to God. (Their food at this time was the
manna they picked up from the ground.)
Yet now comes our harried, networked, on-the-go, overfilled,
“information” age. Many people rarely give themselves one waking
hour of peace, let alone one whole day. We know that “downtime”
or “unplugging” is what we desperately need. Any self-help book
could be expected to make this obvious point. We know this, but
still we don’t give ourselves this rest, in part because we have scat-
tered our attention and obedience across such a wide pantheon of
busy little authorities that we feel too fragmented to be able to
stop. Meanwhile, out of the mouth of God, across three millennia
of intervening history, comes this command that speaks specifi-
cally and directly into the state of our spiritual suffering today.
I have watched the Ten Commandments become more relevant
and fresh. They were silly to me at one point in my life. Now they
are profound.
Arguably, it was not the Ten Commandments that changed
during this time. It was not the Law that moved.
For a sense of how to imagine the Law of God, think of the laws of
physics. Think of the law of gravity. The Law of God exerts the
same kind of pull. Just like physical laws, God’s law is fundamen-
tal to the fabric by which the world is made, by which we are
made. We cannot break the law of gravity or the Law of God the
way we can break a human rule. Like Icarus in Greek mythology—
16. 14 The Ten Commandments
the one who built his own wings—we can apply our ingenuity and
devices and likely manage to stay aloft against the pull of the Law
for quite a long time. But Icarus fell, and we too will come back
down. The Law is absolute, and as we will see in this book, it even
resembles physical laws in that it has cause-and-effect relation-
ships that are definable and predictable. We cannot break the
Law. We can only break ourselves against it.
What, then, are the Ten Commandments, if they are not
merely a set of rules to follow? What did God give to Moses?
Answer: The Ten Commandments are a map.
Our understanding of the laws of physics is a map in just the
same way, charting the most basic principles that define the phys-
ical universe. The Ten Commandments chart a different set of
principles, absolutes that are similarly assumed beneath the most
basic blueprint of the world.
The Ten Commandments are a spiritual map. They are a mor-
al map.
They are a map of the shape of the moral universe, telling us a
great deal about who we are, where we are, and the route by
which our spirits can be transformed.
The Ten Commandments are a map that was given to a lost
and wandering people. The Ten Commandments describe the spi-
ritual terrain to be crossed as we make our way, each one of us,
back to God.
End of Chapter 1
17. ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Peter Zelinski is a husband, dad, and magazine professional living
in Ohio. When he was in his mid-thirties, he began to believe
something he never took seriously before—that God had lived on
earth as a human being. The Ten Commandments, Zelinski’s first
book, was published about five years after that awakening. To
read more of the author’s writing on the Ten Commandments
and other topics, find his blog at www.peterzelinski.com. To re-
ceive new blog posts for free via email, send an email message to
subscribe@peterzelinski.com.
