Where God communicates His will it is my duty to not just be quiet, but to desire obedience unto His word and to lovingly follow as a sheep following my Shepherd. Both the 2nd and 4th Commandment have become provocative in our Reformed circles, and they should not be. This is a case where our forefathers were not necessarily “more holy” than us, but they were in this situation without a doubt wiser.

I am going to do my best not to make our walk through the commandments boring and/or monotonous. Whenever you start a long journey it is best to mentally prepare yourself for the length. I often joke that in a former life I was a long-haul truck driver because I can get in a car and zone out and make a ten-hour drive feel like a half-hour. However, not a lot of people are like that (ask my kids). The hope is by the time we get to the Tenth Commandment you have not completely checked out and are not pulling a Roberto Duran chanting NO MAS! NO MAS!

My goal is to help you see the beauty of Christian ethics. It is where our faith meets real life. We need to understand that it is worth the effort to examine what God would have us to do and to be, because as we seek to obey the Lord we will begin to experience a devotional peace in which by submitting ourselves to Jesus and confessing that as we see the wisdom and attractiveness of the way He has ordered His creation with more clarity, our hearts will be tied to Christ as a wife is to a husband. There is a lot to be said for that type of loyalty. Fidelity to our confession of faith matters. Our belief that there is no hope outside our Redeemer is worked out in what we do when we make decisions and act in the world. While it may seem as if that kind of moral principle is really for the second table of the law, the first table is just as practical for our day-to-day.

Let’s go ahead and get to our catechism questions for this morning as we start to get into how that works:

Q. 49. Which is the Second Commandment?

A. The second commandment is, Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth: thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them: for I the Lord thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me; and shewing mercy unto thousands of them that love me, and keep my commandments.

Q. 50. What is Required in the Second Commandment?

A. The second commandment requires the receiving, observing, and keeping pure and en­tire, all such religious worship and ordinances as God hath appointed in his word.

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