Day 47: 10 Commandments & Only One About Me

Matthew 1; Exodus 20-21; Proverbs 9

 God's  goodness is much more freely given than his punishments.  It is like the blessings from him outweigh the curses, even though his anger and wrath would be crazy scary.  It is interesting that if a person rejects God, he will punish them for 3 or 4 generations (a long time), but if a person obeys him and loves him, he will bless them for thousands of generations (a lot longer time). Those differences should be evidence that God wants to bless us so much more than he wants to punish us.

The first three commandments have to do with our relationship with God.  The fourth, is concerning ourselves, and the last six all deal with interactions with people.  It is awesome how focused these are.  The first ones come first because our relationship with the Lord is and should be the first thing in our lives.  God so often becomes priority number 2...5...9.  Something that has been brought up over and over is just how important God needs to be in my life. The Lord needs to be numero uno. That is, more important than my husband, my family, my career, my money, my reputation. Then, there is the one lonely commandment about ourselves—and that is about resting, not being greedy and working overtime, or spending too much time toiling in our lives and not enough time cultivating relationships with family and friends.  That one little commandment often blows up into a million because we are the center of our world. We get frustrated when things don't go OUR way, when life is painful to US, when we don't get what WE want. God just doesn't want us to be greedy or overworked. Then the majority of the commands have to do with working with others, how to treat them and how not to treat them, because this is where we spend most our time—with people.  How we treat others will reflect our heart and our relationship with The Lord. The largest number of commands are about others...either we really need help figuring out how to handle other humans, or God wants to make sure that we do treat one another with kindness and love.