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Podcast: Delighting in the Ten Commandments (Jen Wilkin)

March 29, 2021 by: Crossway

This article is part of the The Crossway Podcast series.

Finding Joy in God’s Law

In this episode, Jen Wilkin discusses a well-known yet, according to Jen, often misunderstood and misapplied section of Scripture: the Ten Commandments. She explains why the Ten Commandments are more interesting and more applicable than we might think, what’s wrong with the way we often talk about the law and the dangers of legalism, and what it really means to take the Lord’s name in vain.

Ten Words to Live By

Ten Words to Live By

Jen Wilkin

Jen Wilkin invites readers to rediscover the Ten Commandments—ten words often misunderstood, forgotten, or ignored—and helps believers delight in the life-giving wisdom they hold for all whom Christ has set free.

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Topics Addressed in This Interview:

01:31 - More than a Checklist

Matt Tully
Jen, thank you so much for joining me today on The Crossway Podcast—again!

Jen Wilkin
Thanks for having me on.

Matt Tully
Today we’re going to talk about the Ten Commandments, but before we get into that, my guess is that there are probably some people listening right now who might already be thinking, Huh. An interview about the Ten Commandments. I know where this is going. This feels a little bit simple. We’ve all heard this before. Tell them why they might be wrong about that.

Jen Wilkin
I do think that there is a temptation to look at the Ten Commandments as this checklist where most of us get somewhere between a C and an A, depending on the life that we live. And, of course, like any other portion of Scripture when we spend time meditating on it, it just begins to grow in its depth and in its application. I would say in a lot of the circles that I inhabit, there’s been so much conversation about grace—which we really, really need—but also sometimes at the expense of conversation about law. What do we do with the law? I think we can look at the Ten Commandments as something we’ve given a passing thought to and feel like, Okay, I’m good there. And also Jesus, so I’m good there. Instead we should be thinking, Wait a minute. How do these actually impact my life today? How did they impact the way that the community of Israel functioned? What are the implications for how the church functions today? So I think just both that individual question of application and then also that corporate question: How might the church function as it should if we really saw these not just as something to think about, but something to live according to so that we might look like the children of God?

03:26 - What about Grace and the Danger of Moralism?

Matt Tully
My experience, even in my own life, has been that it’s easy to think of the Ten Commandments as, on the one hand, they’re this historical thing that we should know about, they’re in the Bible, and they’re obviously important in the Bible. We maybe have a sense that they should inform how we live because they feel so universal. And yet, then we also are wrestling through, But the New Testament seems to say some things about the law, and what about grace? What about Jesus? He almost replaces them in some way. Have you ever struggled with that dynamic?

Jen Wilkin
I hear it articulated a lot. In fact, it’s fascinating to me that we’re almost to a point where if you talk about obedience to the law at all, someone cries legalism immediately. I was in a conversation even a few weeks back where we were talking about the Wisdom Literature, and the statement was made by one of the people in the conversation, Well, we have to be careful when we talk about Wisdom Literature that we don’t stumble into moralism. I thought that was so revealing. Here are these important books of the Old Testament, and then there are passages in the New Testament in the book of James, that are telling us, essentially, how to live God’s way in God’s world, but we’re afraid to talk about them because people will think that we’re moralists.

Matt Tully
Where do you think that comes from, that sensitivity—maybe over-sensitivity—to this boogie man of legalism? What’s behind that?

Jen Wilkin
I think that we know that the law is bad when we are unbelievers. The law is the reason that we stand condemned before God because we’ve failed to keep it. So, as it relates to our justification, the law is a heavy burden that crushes us. But, what we often forget is the follow through to the question of our sanctification. How does the law function in our sanctification? The thing that hung over us as a heavy, unbearable burden before now lies beneath our feet as the path of righteousness. It becomes for us, ironically, or, in an unexpected way, actually a means of grace. So it’s not opposed to grace in the life of the believer, it actually helps us, graciously, to know what pleases God and shows us the character of the God that we’re trying to please. And not because we’re going to earn. It’s not about earning any kind of favor. That’s what the legalist wrongly believes. I think the funny part about that is people think that legalists are the best at obeying the law. But legalists are actually law-breakers because they break the first command, for example, by placing the law as a god before God himself; they break the second command because they fashion themselves into law abiders who are actually comparable to God himself; and then they break the third command by taking the Lord’s name in vain, you could argue, by taking this law that illustrates his character and using it in a way that doesn’t illustrate his character at all.

Matt Tully
Jesus made that point with the Pharisees and the scribes in the Gospels. He talked about people ignoring the weightier matters of the law in favor of these small things. I want to get back into that in a little bit, but one of the things you say in your book that I thought was really interesting and maybe, again, a little bit surprising is you call the book itself “an exercise in remembrance.” What do you mean by that?

Jen Wilkin
In the second articulating of the Ten Commandments that’s found in Deuteronomy, you get this little retelling where Moses is telling the people, On that day at Sinai you were terrified, and you asked me to go talk to God in your place because you believed that you would die if you had to interact with him face to face. There’s this whole fear of the Lord language about how Israel felt. And then you hear from God—you get his side of the story at that point in Deuteronomy. Rather than God saying, Why were they afraid of me? All I wanted was relationship with them, God says, Oh, that they would have feared me always, that they would have remembered this (Deut. 5:29). I think that when we forget the Ten Commandments, we are forgetting the fear of the Lord—the right, reverent honor that is due to the Lord. God has given these commands to us to show us what pleases him, and those who love him will want to please him—a joyful obedience out of gratitude.

Matt Tully
I think in previous generations, especially when looking at the full sweep of church history, the Ten Commandments were something that many, many Christians memorized and studied, even at a very young age. You're a mom—you’ve got kids; it seems like that kind of thing is not as common among American evangelical families today as it once was. Why do you think that is? Why are the Ten Commandments so often viewed as this sort of—I don’t know—not that important to study or to understand?

Jen Wilkin
I think, actually, the example that you’ve given frames up the problem pretty clearly. I would say that the previous generation of parents leaned more toward authoritarianism, and our current generation of parents leans heavily toward relationship. There is a dominating sense that rules prohibit relationship. I hear it in so many conversations that I have with young parents. There’s a lot of wanting to give children grace—or, at least, what we call grace. Sometimes it’s just because we don’t want to follow through on the penalty because it feels like, Oh, if I punish them, then they won’t like me. It will take away from relationship. And so we withhold the rules because we think that they are going to tear down the relational capital that we have built with our children. But the reality is that rules don’t actually prohibit relationship, they’re the basis for healthy relationship. If the pendulum has swung heavily toward the relational component of parenting, then that can be the blind spot that we’re dealing with. I think that for a generation of parents who have swung that direction because they think of parenting as authoritarian, they’re more likely to regard the Ten Commandments as something that they don’t want to be top of mind for them because it will actually make them dislike God instead of wanting a relationship with God.

Matt Tully
Yeah, they want to protect their kids’ view of God, but in doing so, they’re actually short-circuiting their view.

Jen Wilkin
And again, we come back to the question of moralism. In my current role at my church, I have responsibility for our children’s area. There has been, in recent years, a concern about not teaching moralism to children. Well, by all means, let’s not make them moralists; but we do actually want them to be moral. And so, when we think that moralism is our only option, we overlook the fact that morality actually has a synonym that is important for us to understand. Morality’s synonym is Christ-likeness. We would be foolish to withhold from our children a picture of morality, because morality is saying, This is the way; walk in it. So, I think that factors into it. I don’t think it’s so much that people don’t like the Ten Commandments—they get it, they’re in the Bible, all Scripture is God-breathed and profitable—but they’re just not sure what to do with them because they’ve heard so much anti-law speech, which is appropriate with regard to our justification. So then, of course, I think the follow-up question, as it relates to the children’s ministry question, is, I don’t know if children are saved or not—I’m a Baptist, so bear with me for a moment—we don’t know if children are saved or not, so what if we give them morality and they never see Christ? But there are absolutely ways to speak of what is moral and right and point people to Christ at the same time. There would have to be.

Matt Tully
Scripture models that for us, but often it feels like we lack the nuance that Scripture itself is calling us to. I want to get into some of those particular passages in the New Testament that can be a bit challenging for Christians to understand. There are passages that seem to suggest that, maybe on a surface level or with a simple understanding, that maybe the law is not relevant for Christians today. For example, in Romans 5:20 Paul writes, “Now the law came in to increase the trespass, but where sin increased, grace abounded all the more.” And then in a later passage, Romans 6:14, Paul writes, “For sin will have no dominion over you, since you are not under law but under grace.” Again, many Christians read those verses as saying that the Bible itself is, in some way, pitting law and grace against one another. What would you say to that?

Jen Wilkin
I would say that Jesus says, “If you love me you will keep my commandments” (John 14:15). In the epistles of John, John says repeatedly, “and this is love, that we keep his commandments” (1 John 5:3). Actually, I think what we’re seeing relates to my old hobby horse about Bible literacy: if we only pull these certain passages out and we are not mindful of the other passages that are saying something else, then we can gain an unbalanced view of what the role of the law is. I believe that John and Jesus in the passages I just mentioned are referring to our sanctification. If you love God, then you are already one of his children, and so the law becomes a blessing to you and a marker that you are one of his children. But for those who are in opposition to God, the law is always going to be their enemy because it will constantly show that they are law breakers. I would also say that if you pay attention to the patterns of speech in the New Testament, you find that the language that is used—and actually in the Old Testament as well—the language that is used to describe those that are opposed to God is the language of the lawless man, the man who is without law. So, lawfulness, then, would be understood to be a marker of those who want to serve and please the one true God. I do think it’s important for us to think about the difference between the law’s role in our justification and in our sanctification, but also to keep in view that the law, even in the life of the believer, does point out our sin to us still. It did so with no hope of restoration when we were unbelievers, but in the life of the unbeliever it is a gracious thing to us that the law still reveals to us how we might be falling short in pleasing God and how there still remains in us sin to be confessed and repented of and turned from.

14:36 - Bible Literacy and the Law

Matt Tully
You mentioned Bible literacy as a hobby horse of yours, so I wonder if you could hop on that horse for a minute and connect it to that. Bible literacy seems to be part of the issue because we sometimes don’t know how to read our Bibles rightly to make sense of things that perhaps on the surface feel like they are slightly in tension or contradictory. Unpack that a little bit for us. What do you mean by Bible literacy and why is that relevant here?

Jen Wilkin
Many of us have sort of deferred our understanding of the Bible to a second-hand source. Depending on what preacher is your favorite or what theologian is your favorite, you may have inadvertently been exposed to an emphasis on a particular idea that is not representative of the amount of emphasis that the Bible places on it. That’s not the fault of the person that you’re listening to. One of the things that I will probably run the risk of as I pass on into the shadows of time is that people might read the things I wrote and think that all I cared about was sanctification and the three-fold use of the law, or all I cared about was the attributes of God, or all I cared about was Bible literacy.

Matt Tully
People reduce things down, in a sense.

Jen Wilkin
Yes. Any person who sets out to teach the Scriptures prays and hopes, but realizes that it’s probably not a very likely hope, that the listener has a grasp of the story of the Bible from beginning to end; that they have a first-hand understanding of how often the Bible speaks about law and grace, or where, or in what ways. All any of us can do in the time that the Lord gives us to serve the church is to say, In this time in which I’m living, where has the emphasis been placed on the wrong syllable, and how might I try to course-correct for that? And then let me teach what’s true also, as my general overarching hope. So, I think that when people don’t have a sense of where, as one of my friends talks about it, the hot spots are in the Bible—what are the things in the Bible that get talked about a lot and then what are the things that get talked about occasionally—then we can tend to latch onto something and think it’s the most important thing, when actually the Bible is not talking about it with the level of importance that we have placed on it.

Matt Tully
It’s interesting how when people, as you said, are trying to address the things that are not being rightly understood in the current culture or context that you’re in, ironically, that can lead to the same thing happening again where because they are addressing a specific thing that needs to be addressed right now, the next generation reads them without understanding that broader context that was at play there. How have you thought about that personally in your own ministry and work where there are things that you see right now that you feel need to be addressed broadly, but then also trying to be true to even the emphases or the focus of Scripture itself and what it’s making important? Have you had to wrestle through that at all in your own ministry?

Jen Wilkin
Definitely. My hope has always been that whatever ministry I have to the Church is an overflow of my ministry in the local church. And that’s my first responsibility, far and away, is that when I am teaching that women’s Bible study at my church on a weekly basis, that’s where we can do all the hard work of, I want you to know this; I want you to know where the emphases lie. But often the things that move from my local church ministry to a Church platform are the emphases that I’ve seen that maybe need to be highlighted. And so there is always that thought of, Oh, I wonder if people are going to understand that I’m actually a Bible teacher. That’s my thing. I’m a Bible teacher. I may talk about other things, but that’s really my thing is to just say, ’Here, take and read’ and to give people tools to be able to read it better themselves. But in the course of that, there are observations and patterns that I see. Sometimes they may be more unique to my own setting in the Bible belt, or in an area that’s suburban and has a lot of families that, at least on the surface, are a maintenance of the nuclear family. But, I do think that I would not want to speak into situations that I don’t know, and so you place these things out there with an open hand and pray that they’re useful and that people have—this is a big hope—the critical thinking skills to know how to take the meat and spit out the bones from what you’re giving them.

Matt Tully
I know this is a broad category and it’s hard to generalize at times, but how would you assess the Bible literacy of the American church in general?

Jen Wilkin
I think we’re in a full-blown Bible literacy crisis. I am careful to use the term Bible literacy instead of Biblical literacy, not because I don’t think both terms are useful, but because Biblical literacy is something people can sometimes lay claim to in the sense that they know about the Bible. Bible literacy is saying, Do you read your Bible? Could you pass a simple pop quiz over factual information? So, think of it like when you were in high school English class and you were reading The Odyssey. Could you pass a pop quiz over what the names of the people were and what happened in a particular chapter? That is the piece that we are just missing on a grand scale. People are eager to talk about interpretation; they are obsessed with talking about application; but many of them have done none of the work of comprehension—just being in the Bible learning what it says, thinking about how one section of the text connects to the one that came before and points to the one that’s coming after, asking questions like, If this chapter weren’t in the Gospel of Matthew, what would the Gospel of Matthew be missing? Just some simple questions. One of the things that’s been really interesting to see start to appear over the last several years is push-back around the idea that we should be literate readers of the Bible, because it sounds to some ears like we’re talking about Gnosticism, like you have to have some special knowledge to be able to read the Bible. But really, the request is not that you would become a literature professor in your study of the Bible. It’s that you would read the Bible as you read any other book—just paying attention to the normal things that you would pay attention to reading any book. That’s what’s interesting to see begin to develop because I think it’s revealing what we would all probably acknowledge to be true, that we don’t just have a Bible literacy crisis; we have a literacy crisis.

21:53 - The Deceitful Heart and the Law

Matt Tully
At least in my experience, but also talking to other Christians, they have resonated with this feeling that we all know the human heart is deceitful—our own hearts are deceitful. When it comes to that issue of distinguishing between legalism or moralism on the one hand, and morality and lawfulness on the other hand, it can sometimes be hard to assess our own hearts and our own motivations when we think about our call to obey God’s law as Christians. We can easily trick ourselves into thinking that we’re doing something because of our relationship with Christ rather than for our relationship with Christ. How have you thought about that? Have you ever wrestled with that deceitfulness of the human heart?

Jen Wilkin
Yeah, and I think that’s what Jesus is getting at in the Sermon on the Mount when he takes the law and he presents it from his perspective. He’s saying you can do the right things, but you can do the right things for the wrong reasons. And the right things done for the wrong reasons are still the wrong things. I would qualify that to say that given the choice between doing the right thing for the wrong reason and doing the wrong thing, it is still better for society as a whole if people do the right thing, even if they haven’t yet developed the right motive. But, in the believer, because the Spirit indwells us, I think that we cannot fairly say that we have no recognition of the wrong motive. Initially we may not, and I think that the Spirit is kind to show us only what we can bear in the increment in which we can receive it, which is why over the course of our lifetimes we keep discovering new ways that we have exercised wrong motives even when we had right behavior. But I do think that the Spirit does convict us in the inner man. Those of us who were legalists in our former lives now do have to battle the temptation to obey because it will curry favor, maybe not with God, but with others who will look at us and go, You’re just so amazing. You’re so holy! I do think that for that person there can be years of mixed motives because the Spirit is still at work purifying our motives. Let’s take the sixth commandment, for example. It is still better to not murder, even if you wanted to, than it is than to say, Well, I had to get my motives right before I decided not to kill somebody. The Ten Commandments have formed the basis for most modern law codes in just about every civilization. At least, every one that I know of will acknowledge that murder is wrong and that stealing is wrong—why? Because they’re bad for the community. Motive matters. It matters in the life of the believer, certainly. That’s the whole game. But for the unbeliever, it matters that morality be present in society. On one level, I want people to not murder because they love God. On another level, I want people to not murder whether they ever love God or not. So it’s good for the children of God to embody this and to value this and to vote according to this. We should be thinking about how we can influence the culture around us according to God’s good law because it’s not just good for the family of believers, it’s good for everyone. That’s the second use of the law, to us the language of the catechism. It’s a rod; it shows us how to measure what is good for people and what is bad for people.

25:50 - The First Commandment: Undivided Allegiance

Matt Tully
Let’s jump into some of the commandments. We can’t talk about all of them in detail, obviously, but we’ll pick a few out, and maybe even some that might feel the most straightforward. But I think as you helpfully said right when we started, as we dig into the text of Scripture, we often find there’s a lot more to it than we realize. So, the first commandment—one that you summarize as “undivided allegiance.” I think it’s one that seems so basic and obvious. And yet, one thing I’ve always noted is that in the Bible you see the story of Israel and they constantly disobey this first commandment—you shall have no other gods before me—and it feels to us like such an obvious thing like, Duh! How could you do that? They’ve seen him do these wonderful, miraculous works in their midst, he delivered them out of Egypt, and yet they continually turn to these other gods around them. Help our listeners to understand this. Obviously, we’re not typically, in an American context, tempted to worship other idols or statues, at least in the way that Israel often did. So, how does this commandment speak—and even confront—us today?

Jen Wilkin
Well, the context matters for how this command is stated. I think that we’ve heard the first command out of context so much that it does seem simplistic. But when you place it in Israel’s history, you recognize that this is an idea that, although it’s certainly present from Genesis 1, that 400 years of slavery in a polytheistic land would have obscured for them. This is monotheism being clearly articulated at the outset. It obviously serves as an umbrella command for all of the ones that follow. If you get this one right, you’re way more likely to get the rest right. They all proceed from this one. It is a statement of there is one God.

Matt Tully
Which would have been very counter-cultural.

Jen Wilkin
Very counter-cultural, and they're going to need it. The reason it’s reiterated in Deuteronomy is because now they’re heading into Canaan, which is also polytheistic. They’re in the inbetween space with just coming out of polytheism, and they’re heading into polytheism. The books of Genesis and Exodus—actually, the whole Pentateuch—is written to give Israel roots and shoots to say, This is where you came from, and this is how you will grow in the land that I am giving you.

Matt Tully
Did you come up with that—roots and shoots?

Jen Wilkin
No, I think I’m ripping it off from J. M. Boice, but I would have to go back and check the commentaries. Listen, if I say anything profound, you can know I stole it. Speaking of the Ten Commandments—stealing. So, here they are at this pivotal moment where they need to understand that there is only one God. And I think that’s what we miss because what the ten plagues have just done is they have been set up to topple specific gods in the Egyptian pantheon. Heqet is the frog goddess of fertility. There was the death penalty in Egypt if you kill a frog. So, what does God do? He slays frogs in the thousands. There are heaping and stinking piles everywhere. You can’t avoid them. You’re going to have to shovel them out of your home. So, each of the ten plagues is saying, There is no god but Yahweh.

Matt Tully
This is a great case study in the value of biblical literacy because you’re not going to know that otherwise. I’ve read those before and you can feel like, This feels so random—frogs. Why are there frogs everywhere? What’s going on with that? But there actually is a real significant reason for that.

Jen Wilkin
Absolutely. You get to the end of the ten plagues, which happened fifty days before the Ten Commandments are given. You’ve got ten plagues of death, and then at Sinai ten words of life that the God who has just made this massive statement is actually capable of backing it up, and they know it. They’ve seen it with their own eyes. If ever there should have been immediate belief and obedience, it should have been at Sinai. They say, Yes, we will do everything that you have told us to do. And you’re like, Oh! Please stop saying more things you’re going to look back and regret! And then I think the other key thing for us to remember is that when we look at Old Testament stories, our tendency is to ask, How am I like Moses? or, How am I like Aaron? But the best place that we can place ourselves in those stories is to ask, How am I like Israel? I want to say, You guys are morons! Pull it together! That’s usually the seat that I’m sitting in. So why does God have to say, There are no other gods? Because the human heart is always looking for something else to worship, but in a particular way. If you look at the history of the nation of Israel, what they don’t do is get rid of Yahweh and worship Baal. They keep Yahweh, and they add Baal.

Matt Tully
Right. It’s Yahweh plus.

Jen Wilkin
Yeah, Yahweh plus, that’s right. So, if we’re asking the question how does the first commandment hit me today, we have to ask, What’s my Yahweh plus? What is the thing that I need that if I didn’t have it, I would wonder if the universe was shifting off of its axis? Is it something financial? I’ll out myself in this. For me, it is almost always that I don’t want anything bad to happen to someone in my family. I can’t imagine losing a child. I don’t know how I could reconcile that with a good God. And I say this as a person who knows it’s possible. I’ve seen other people do it. But in my most honest moments, I think that is my God plus (fill in the blank). And we all have something like that, and it will be the work of a lifetime to continue to keep God as God, with no other rivals.

Matt Tully
As you look at the American church, are there any other things that you think are common idols that we can, again, maybe not even see as idols? That’s the danger of this kind of stuff is we don’t even fully realize, or have a hard time acknowledging in our own minds, that we are adding these things to God. Are there any other things that come to mind as common idols that you’ve observed?

Jen Wilkin
There’s a whole list of them, and they all end with -ism at the end. One of the ones that’s made headlines recently that was only talked about minimally in the last ten years or so is Christian nationalism, where politics become our both-and: I need God and I need my party or my platform. I think that individualism is another one: I need God and I also need to be really in charge of everything. Obviously, these things aren’t compatible with one another, but we tell ourselves that maybe they can be. Materialism, consumerism, progressivism. There’s any number of them that you could list, just things that we say, Oh no, this is where the sweet sauce is . . . and then also, God. I can make this kind of relate to God. If God gives me more stuff, then I can honor God with it.

33:41 - The Third Commandment: What’s in a Name?

Matt Tully
Yeah, we kind of baptize those things. Another commandment that I think sometimes Christians can struggle to fully understand, or maybe we have an understanding of it but it can be a little bit simplistic, is the third commandment: “You shall not take the name of the LORD your God in vain” (Deut. 5:11). Maybe someone’s listening right now and they’re thinking, Well, I’m doing good on that one. That’s pretty easy. I don’t swear with God’s name, so therefore, I got that one down at least. Is that really all this command is about?

Jen Wilkin
Oh man, I wish it were. I know that there are people who won’t even use—this is fine if this is your conviction—they won’t say OMG in a text, or they have to say OMGosh or something because it’s so ingrained in them. That’s the house I grew up in. I seriously thought that if I were ever to say one of those statements, that the ceiling would open wide and lightning would just fry me right on the spot. And it’s not a bad impulse to have. We don’t want to be flippant.

Matt Tully
Is that one of the applications of a command like this?

Jen Wilkin
Absolutely. These surface applications that we often tick the box on are not wrong, they’re just not all. And I think that’s what Jesus is showing us in the Sermon on the Mount is that you can have the mentality of the Pharisee—which is that the bare minimum compliance is all that is required—or, you can delight in the law and meditate on it day and night and discover an expansive obedience. When we start to look at the expansive obedience to the third word, we begin to think about things like, Okay, don’t take his name in vain. What is the significance of a name in the Bible? You look at the way names are used. Like, Jacob’s name means “he supplants” or “the deceiver.” And then you look at Nabal. Nabal’s name means “perverse fool.” And there are also positive examples like Joshua, names that meant something that were an indication of the character of the one who bore them. That’s not our typical naming convention in the United States.

Matt Tully
Now it’s like, this sounds a little fresh and different, we looked it up online and it’s not very common, and I like that.

Jen Wilkin
Yeah. Like, I’ve never hated someone who was named this. I think the closest we come to this is when we name a child after a family member who was treasured. You say, Oh, you’re just like your Granddad. We want to almost transfer or imbue those character qualities into a future generation. When we think about the name of the Lord, what we should understand is that the name of the Lord signifies the character of God and the sum total of the character of God. Everything that is true about God is present when we say the name of God. So, when the New Testament says that you’re baptized in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, you’re baptized into the character of, or according to the character of. When we pray, In Jesus’s name I pray, we say that like an incantation. And actually, I think that’s a way that we can use the name of the Lord in vain is if you’re like, I’m just going to rubber stamp the end of this so that then God will have to do whatever I said in the parts that came before. He’ll know that I prayed right.

Matt Tully
It’s like the stamp that gets the prayer to God, but that’s all it really does. Help us understand that. What is going on when we say, In Jesus’s name that we pray?

Jen Wilkin
I think what we should be thinking is, Lord, according to your character, let this be done. I think that that’s not always top of mind for us. We can use the name of the Lord in simplistic ways, or in magical ways, instead of in ways that are thinking about this idea of bringing his character to bear. “At the name of Jesus, every knee shall bow” (Phil. 2:10). Why? Because in him the Godhead was pleased to dwell—the fullness of deity. When it comes to this third command, then the implications become massive because that means that anything that I say—certainly my words, but actions speak louder than words, as the saying says—any way in which I misrepresent the character of God, as one who bears the image of God, could be seen in some way to be breaking the third command. I think that it is good to keep the focus on speech. I think it doesn’t hurt anything to do that. It certainly could keep us busy for a lifetime just trying to obey according to the way that we use our words. But I think you could also, since out of the overflow of the heart the mouth speaks, we would be remiss to not recognize that any speech pattern that is dishonoring to the Lord is pointing us not toward speech work that needs to be done so much as toward heart work that needs to be done.

38:35 - The Sixth and Seventh Commandments: Sin Is Crouching at the Door

Matt Tully
In your experience as a Bible teacher, which of the Ten Commandments, would you say, is most misunderstood?

Jen Wilkin
I would say . . . you’re going to make me narrow it down!

Matt Tully
Or maybe one that is often misunderstood, if it’s hard to pick just one.

Jen Wilkin
I think probably the one dealing with murder because it’s it’s usually the one where we’re like, Okay, I’ve definitely broken the third command; you’ve convinced me that I haven’t fulfilled the first and the second; but I haven’t stabbed anybody, so I’m still doing okay.

Matt Tully
It’s kind of a black and white idea right there.

Jen Wilkin
I don’t even know that most people realize that what Jesus is doing in the Sermon on the Mount is pointing explicitly to the Decalogue.

Matt Tully
Sometimes we don’t see that connection.

Jen Wilkin
And the reason he’s doing it is because he knows how we are. He starts with the sixth commandment, and then he follows it right up with the seventh because really, it’s those two. When you were asking which one is the most misunderstood, I don’t want to choose because those are the ones that we feel we can measurably demonstrate that we’re innocent.

Matt Tully
Remind us of what the seventh commandment is.

Jen Wilkin
The seventh commandment is “You shall not commit adultery” (Deut. 5:18). Right out of the gate, he just lights us up on those. He says something that is actually a little confusing at first blush. He says, I’m saying to you that you may not have murdered someone, but if you have been angry and contemptuous—that’s the sense of that word raca—then you’re guilty. And then he says with adultery, If you’ve committed lust, you’re guilty. And so what some have drawn from this is that anger is the same thing as murder; or lust is the same thing as adultery. That’s not true. I do think there is a point at which those sins can become so magnified that they can be as damaging as the actual act. But, the Bible says, In your anger, do not sin, so it’s possible to have that responsive anger and then not linger on it and let it turn into the next thing—contempt—which, then, is the pathway to murder. But, what he’s pointing to is he’s like, You’re looking at the end result and saying you’re innocent. I’m telling you that you’re already on the path. If you think about it, that is exactly what God says to the very first murderer, Cain, in Genesis 4. He says, You better deal with your anger.

Matt Tully
Sin is crouching at the door.

Jen Wilkin
Yeah. Sin is crouching at the door. He says, Why are you angry? And what does Cain do? He asks the question that is underlying the great commandment. He says, Am I my brother’s keeper? The Great Commandment says, and Jesus Christ says, Yes! You are! And if you are, then you would guard against anger because anger threatens your brother. Maybe not in the moment, but it certainly will if you nurse it. And you know what lust does? Lust threatens your sister. Maybe not in the moment, but the second that it turns from noticing that someone is beautiful to lingering on the thought and entertaining it. So he’s making the appeal that if we would deal with these sins at their root, then maybe we wouldn’t have murderers, and maybe we wouldn’t have adulterers because rather than see people as disposable or consumable, we would see them as made in the image of God.

Matt Tully
The fundamental disposition towards the other person is shared.

Jen Wilkin
Yes.

42:33 - Literary and Literal Interpretations of the Law

Matt Tully
Some people, as you kind of said, can take these verses as meaning that there really are no degrees of sin, or there’s no difference between different sins that we might commit. But you’re kind of saying that’s not necessarily how we should read this?

Jen Wilkin
No. I think Jesus is using a lot of literary devices, which we would recognize in a normal conversation. But I think because it’s the Bible and because it’s Jesus, we’re like, Oh, I’m supposed to just take everything he says at face value. That gets pretty tricky when you get to the part about dismemberment, you know? If your right eye offends you, gouge it out. And if your right hand offends you, cut it off (Matt. 5:29–30). And so, if ever there were someone we wanted to read literately, it’s going to be the words of Jesus because he’s invested in exploring how he says things in a way that is memorable and impactful. So, he’s employing all kinds of literary devices. He uses hyperbole and poetry—he’s fluent in word usage.

Matt Tully
What would you say to someone who hears that and to them they start to get a little bit nervous when someone says that kind of thing? They start to worry, Well, you’re just sort of reinterpreting things in a way that maybe better suits how you want to view things. You don’t want to take that dismemberment comment because you aren’t willing to go as far as what Jesus would actually call us to consider going. So, this idea of taking things in there literary sense is a slippery slope.

Jen Wilkin
Well, a lot of people do want to say that. They think it sounds liberal, like you must have a liberal agenda and you actually don’t believe in inerrancy or inspiration if you say those kinds of things. I would say that I actually believe that the Holy Spirit chose a medium that abides by certain rules, which I would say he’s the origin of as well, and then used it in the most effective ways possible. Why wouldn’t we just read the book that is most important to us according to the same basic assumptions that we would read other books?

Matt Tully
Is part of it, do you think, that in doing it that way and acknowledging that being the right way to read Scripture, we’re sort of acknowledging that there is a level of interpretation that is required? Whereas, if we could read the Bible as this very straightforward, very plain type of document, it feels maybe a little bit more easy to grasp and a little bit more easy to nail down rather than having to bring in history and culture and literary forms that are maybe subject to some debate.

Jen Wilkin
For sure. I do want to be really quick to emphasize that I am not by any means dismissing a plain reading of the Scriptures. You should be able to open your Bible and read it and receive real help without having received instruction in how to read it. But, with that, I think there should be a growing curiosity of, Is there some way I could read this and glean more from it? I think that’s why we’re given people who have the gift of teaching. If the gift of teaching were not needful, it would not be given. And so, a person who wants to learn the Scriptures understands that they are accessible, and yet they might be more accessible with help from those whom the Lord has gifted to help us to see. It’s a both/and, but I think you’re getting at it. People hear it as an either/or: You mean to tell me that I can’t sit down and read my Bible and understand it? I would never say that. Can you understand it more and more cohesively with the help of those who are further along than you are, or who maybe the Lord has gifted in a particular way? Yes, you can! And I’m wondering why you wouldn’t want that if that’s something that has been made available to you through the body of Christ.

Matt Tully
It’s interesting that it can even, in some ways, betray a misunderstanding of the fact that Scripture itself has been translated. Most of us are not reading the original Greek and Hebrew, and so we’re already depending on people doing hard work of study and research, helping us to read our Bibles in English.

Jen Wilkin
And there’s that well-worn phrase about letting Scripture interpret Scripture, which that, on the surface, seems like a really simple thing to say. But to gain the level of familiarity with the Bible that then enables you to implement that skill, I believe it’s the work of years. We could give ourselves the timeline that we need. God is not wondering why you’re not excellent at this yet. He understands the learning curve and all of that, but like the rest of discipleship, this is a discipline. It is something that we devote ourselves to, and it does actually require work. I think that is the biggest disconnect that I can find is that for whatever reason, people have been told that the Bible should require no work to be understood. And like all aspects of following Christ, this one, too, will require us to take up our cross.

Matt Tully
Jen, thank you so much for taking the time today to talk with us a little bit about the Ten Commandments and help us to hopefully understand just a little bit better what God designs for them to do in our lives.

Jen Wilkin
I’m so grateful for the opportunity. Thanks for having me.

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