“When he finished speaking with Moses on Mount Sinai, he gave him the two tablets of the testimony, stone tablets inscribed by the finger of God.” (CSB – Read the chapter)

In one of the funnier scenes from Mel Brooks’ History of the World Part 1, Moses (played by Brooks himself) comes down the mountain with the holy tablet of the Law. Except, unlike in the Exodus story, he is carrying three tablets instead of two. He announces that he has brought the people these fifteen commandments from the Lord. Then he drops and breaks one of the three tablets. Thinking on his feet, he quickly corrects himself to announce that he has brought the people these ten commandments from the Lord. Everybody knows about the law tablets that Moses brought with him down the mountain. Here is where we first learn about them. Let’s talk about what’s going on here.

This past summer, the Governor of Louisiana signed a law that will require every public classroom in the state to display the Ten Commandments. Some religious conservatives celebrated this as a major victory for the preservation and communication of the worldview ideals that played the most significant role in the founding of our nation. Most of the political, cultural, and even theological left immediately bemoaned the decision as an obvious effort to establish a Christian theocracy, and promised to challenge the law in court until it was overturned.

My own thoughts on the matter fall somewhere in the middle of things. On the one hand, I think it is absolutely true that the Judeo-Christian worldview was the primary shaping philosophical foundation for our nation. I remain equally convinced that apart from committed efforts to maintain that worldview as the dominant philosophical and theological force in our nation, we will not be able to long maintain what the Founders achieved. Unfortunately, that is not a worldview that is held in many of the leading sectors of our culture. It is not taught in our schools much if at all. We are raising – indeed, we have already raised – a generation who doesn’t understand the fundamental ideas that gave rise to our nation in the first place and without which the freedoms we enjoy cannot be maintained. No other worldview has demonstrated the ability to sustain freedom and equality for all people over a long term other than the Christian worldview. The legislature of Louisiana understood this and sought to do something about. The Governor agreed and that’s how our system of government was designed to work.

On the other hand, I’m not sure this was or will be proved to be the most effective means of achieving this goal. Public classrooms often have lots of things on the walls around the room. In my experience, students don’t tend to pay much attention or remember most of them. Simply putting up a poster featuring the Ten Commandments (likely shown as five “Thou shalts” on each of two stone tablets) won’t do much to preserve and communicate the Judeo-Christian worldview. If they really want to achieve that goal, it will take a great deal more effort including working favorably comparative lessons on that worldview versus other worldview options into the required curricula for students at each level of public education in the state. But, because we are officially a non-sectarian state (which I am entirely convinced is a good and right state of affairs) with religious liberty guaranteed in our founding documents, this will have to be done in a way that doesn’t establish Christianity as some sort of a state religion.

That’s all an only loosely related digression to our focal verse here, but I say it to demonstrate the power this one verse has had over our cultural and political imagination as a nation. We can hardly picture the Ten Commandments without these two tablets in mind. When we talk about something’s being written in stone as a nod to its permanence, this is why. This set of physical objects were to be a constant reminder to the people of the foundational commandments God gave them as part of the covenant He invited them to make with Him.

Moses even says here that they were inscribed with God’s own finger. To which our natural inclination is to ask, “Really?” Well, maybe. Commentators are split. Some more conservative commentators take it as a matter of course. Moses said that God inscribed them with His finger, so therefore, God must have inscribed them with His finger. It’s possible that Moses’ original audience thought in those terms. But it is also likely that they understood this to be an anthropomorphized description of God for the sake of emphasizing that these commands were from Him, not merely made up by Moses. As another book I have been slowly working my way through lately explores at length, though, the worldview of that day would have had little trouble believing that God manifested Himself physically before Moses and actually did literally inscribe these tablets with His own finger. And, given that this idea is mentioned at least two more times that I can think of sitting here, I don’t know that we need to reject that idea entirely. After all, if we believe God created the world and everything in it, what is inscribing a couple of stone tablets with the Ten Commandments to Him? We shouldn’t argue against this being a supernatural event just because we tend to come at the text with a demythologized mindset.

In any event, along the way of history, these two tablets have become one of the main symbols of Christianity in the eyes of the culture today. They have taken on an almost talisman-like status in the minds of some folks. If we can only have a picture of this symbol of the Christian worldview on display on our public buildings, that will be enough to remind people of the kind of nation we are (or at least once were in the minds of the folks pushing this kind of thing). That will help to pull us back from the moral brink we are standing on. That will help save us from destruction and the judgment of God because of our great sinfulness. Or so the thinking sometimes goes.

Will it work? Who knows, but probably not. Again, simply displaying a picture without intentionally teaching a worldview isn’t ever going to accomplish very much. Having a picture on display while actively teaching a different worldview that contradicts what the authors of this particular law in Louisiana had in mind will result in students coming away committed to the one that is being taught to them, not the one that is represented by a display somewhere in the back of the classroom where they never see it.

To all of this let me add the reminder that as followers of Jesus, we are not beholden to the Ten Commandments like the people of Israel were. Putting so much emphasis on them, while perhaps good from a moral and even cultural jurisprudential standpoint, isn’t nearly as important as teaching our children about Jesus’ command to love one another after the pattern of His own love for us. It is true that all of the Ten Commandments are reinforced in the New Testament in one way or another, but they are all subsumed there underneath the greater authority of Jesus’ one command for His followers to keep. What’s more, it is that command to love one another that has had the more profound role in shaping cultures since the church exploded into existence than the Ten Commandments.

It would perhaps be more important, not to mention more helpful in achieving the goal at which this law seems to have been aimed, not to get into a needless and distracting fight over a particular poster, but rather to teach students that the Founders of this nation believed that there is a source of moral law that is higher than any single nation. Because this higher source exists who sets out a moral framework that all people are expected to follow, there are some standards whose authority goes beyond what legislatures can enforce or deny. In the same vein, this higher moral authority grants rights to people that lie outside of what a government can extend or refuse to its people. This understanding resulted in the enshrinement of a set of fundamental rights that have endured longer than any other set of fundamental rights a nation has recognized. In fact, that is the right language for what we have here. Our government does not grant these rights, it merely recognizes them and refuses to abrogate them for any reason. They aren’t ours to grant. They exist independently of that.

The battle we are facing in our culture right now is a most fundamentally a worldview battle. If we treat it as merely a political or a cultural battle, we will be fighting the wrong fights in the wrong directions. If we treat Christianity like merely a cultural artifact that needs to be preserved for reasons of political positioning or even just nostalgia, it will never become more than that. Well, Christianity as a cultural artifact isn’t what we need. It certainly won’t save us. It won’t even have the kind of impact on our culture that we seek. So, let’s dispense with fighting pitched battles over things that won’t change, much less even affect, the cultural tide, and let’s get down to obeying the command of Jesus and teaching the next generation what is really right and true.