God blesses those individuals and nations who honor the Sabbath, setting it apart as holy unto Him. We cannot expect revival to come to our hearts, both individually and corporately, if we stubbornly refuse obedience to this clear instruction from our Lord.

Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy. Six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is a sabbath of the Lord your God; in it, you shall not do any work, you or your son or your daughter, your male or your female servant or your cattle or your sojourner who stays with you. For in six days the Lord made the heavens and the earth, the sea and all that is in them, and rested on the seventh day; therefore the Lord blessed the sabbath day and made it holy.
Exodus 20:8-11

The Importance of the Sabbath with “Many Words”

When a person wants to communicate something, they use words. When they are communicating something simple and uncontroversial, and there is broad agreement among communication partners, fewer words are usually chosen by the one communicating. But, when there is controversy, or when the speaker knows that the listeners are inclined to disagree with Him, the speaker will often use more words, especially if that speaker cares about you coming to His point of view and seeing things the way He sees them. The presence of more words indicates that the audience either has a knowledge gap (where they do not understand the command), a belief gap (where they do not believe the command), or a volitional gap (where they are unsure how they are to apply it). Thus, the more words a communicator uses on a particular idea, the more it allows us to see how difficult that idea is to receive from the listener.

With that, God appears to be relatively terse when giving His ten commandments. The most important statements ever uttered, the foundation of all law, occupy few words on a page. So few, in fact, they could be chiseled onto stone tablets and given to God’s people to remember them forever. In this sense, God did not speak complicated concepts that you and I have trouble understanding. Like Mark Twain, it is not the commandments we fail to understand that haunt us, it is the ones we do understand that have become our accusers.

When God uttered words like: “Do not murder,” or when He said: “Do not commit adultery,” or when He said “Do not steal,” He was communicating straightforward and common-sense commands that any thoroughgoing pagan could rightly say yes and amen to. In the Hebrew, each of those commands is only 2 words! Which lets us know that there should be broad agreement about them. In fact, every society on earth that has ever existed has believed that murder is wrong, that you should not sleep with another man’s wife or husband, that honoring father and mother is the basis for a healthy society, and we could go on and on.

In this way, most of the ten commands are pretty short. Just a few words or phrases. For instance, 5 commands could be sent as a single tweet without upgrading to the blue check mark… 6 out of the 10 commandments only use 85 words combined! That is, commands 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, and 10 use only 85 total words to describe the entire foundation of the second table of the law, how man is supposed to relate to man, which should let us know something about them. The way we honor one another comprises simple, common-sense concepts that all societies on earth have generally agreed with. That does not mean we obey these commands, but at least we understand them, believe they are good and right, and struggle along trying to enact government, officers, and laws to uphold them. Only the most morally depraved and insane societies in history, like the one we are living in, have championed death, adultery, and the breakdown of the home. May God have mercy on this godless culture to which we are exiled.

However, regarding how we must relate with God, two commands are relatively short (1 and 3), and two are pretty long (2 and 4), demonstrating simple agreement concerning two of them and a hearty struggle for the other two. Take, for instance, the first command, which is only 5 words in the original Hebrew, and the third command comes in at a whopping 6 words, making them direct, to the point, and obvious statements for all who believe in God. In this way, it should not surprise us that these 2 short commands are much less controversial to the average believer than the two longer ones. This is simply the way language works. When God said, “You shall have no other gods before me.” there is not a single Christian who is genuinely bought and paid for by Christ, who will object! When the Scriptures say do not take the name of the Lord your God in vain – some Christians may disagree on the degree to which this applies (e.g., can we lawfully say “gosh, golly, goodness gracious, etc.), but concerning whether we should honor the Lord’s name as holy – all believers generally agree and will say yes and amen. But when it comes to the second and the fourth commandment, you arrive at the epicenter of Christian rebellion.

What do I mean? I mean that the most controversial of the Ten Commandments, the ones that most Christians are not only willing to disobey but willing to offer a thousand justifications for their disobedience, are the two that are the longest, which should not be a surprise to us at all. The second commandment alone has more words than the entire second table of the law. The fourth command has more words than 9 out of the 10 commandments combined! Why are there so many words in these two commands?

I think the answer is simple. Out of all of the things God told us to do, the easiest for us to rebel against are the laws dictating how we are to worship him. “Do not murder?” oh yes and amen. “Do not kill babies in the womb?” you betcha. But do not make an image of anything in heaven above or earth below… “well… That is not what that means.” We ignore that God gave us these additional words because He loves us and knows our hearts are wicked. He knew that we would have a propensity for misunderstanding, and instead of noticing where God is doubling down and adding increased clarity to assuage our sinful conscience, we double down and make all kinds of excuses, saying these things no longer apply to us. We do it on the command to make no graven images and on the command to make the Sabbath day holy above all other days.

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