Playing with a full deck Teresa Koch

By Teresa Koch

Another name for the Ten Commandments is Decalogue, from the Greek for “10 words.” The coming of Jesus the Word did not abolish, but fulfilled the “10 words”; his two Great Commandments summarize and broaden the 10 … and he told us to follow them.

The Decalogue’s strange, fixed ordering of commandments One through Ten can seem an obstacle to interpreting or remembering them, but it is really a map for understanding and memorizing if you think of it visually.

Written by God on two stone tablets, the Ten Commandments have two divisions. The first tablet is how we relate to God, and the second is how we relate to each other. The Great Commandments of Jesus correspond to, summarize and expand upon these two tablets. And with both tablets and the Great Commandments, the second flows from the first.

Breaking the Decalogue down even further, we can group them with the numbers “3-1-3”: three commands for God, one for his natural representatives and three pairs.

God our Creator is the foundation of reality; get that wrong and we fail in all that follows — so how we relate to God comes first and anchors the first tablet. Only God is God, authority for the Decalogue and one to whom we owe worship as a matter of justice. Violation of any commandment violates the First by putting something above him.

The Second Commandment forbids violence against God in our words; the Third reminds us to put the physical world and the time we have in the light of eternity.

(Mt 22:35-40; cf., Deut 6:5, Lev 19:18)

To honor father and mother, God’s natural representatives on earth, is the “first commandment” and anchor of the second tablet. This mirrors the First Commandment on the first tablet. Parenthood is a divine office to give life and blessings to children, and parents will be judged by God for the execution of that office. To understand how God shares his authority with parents, and how we are to honor that authority is to understand how all genuine authority on earth operates.

Then follow three pairs, founding overtly sinful acts in the sins of the heart:

Pair Five & Eight: While murder and lying are not exactly interchangeable, murder is an attempt to erase the person just as a lie attempts to destroy the truth. Jesus connects these in John 8:44, calling Satan both a liar and a murderer. This pair reflects the Second Commandment’s admonition to reverently use the holy name of God in accord with that very holiness. Words and truth are, literally, vital.

Pair Six & Nine and Pair Seven & Ten parallel the Third Commandment requirement to order all our goods in the light of eternal life. Covetousness views another’s goods as a loss to oneself: a form of the envy that introduced death to the world. It causes dis-integration of the human person and breaks bonds of kinship and community. In these pairs, it is easy to see the relationship between the sin of the heart and the actions born of it. And since coveting persons is worse than coveting stuff, the person pair comes first.

The two tablets of the Decalogue are the diastole and systole of the heartbeat of God and man, called to beat together. We love because God loved us first.

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