Ethics 6: The Ten Commandments (2)

Note: For new readers, welcome! I greatly recommend you start back at the beginning of this series so that this makes sense. Just go to the search bar and type in "ethics" and all the ethics articles will pop up.

Alrighty, I'll be finishing up my speedy overview of the final five commandments. Before I begin however, I would like you to go read "What Is Right" because I think it would be good to refresh your mind on the questions discussed. We have this "gut feeling" of what is right and wrong. God put that into us. But as you'll see, he also gave these rules to us.

6. You shall not murder.

This one is quite straightforward. I mean, we just know that murder is wrong! God tells us that murder is wrong, but even before that, we knew.

7. You shall not commit adultery.

Again, this is one of the solid base rules given to us by God that is embedded into our soul. We know that it is "wrong" to commit adultery and so since God was making these laws for His nation, he wanted it to live by the morals that they knew.

8. You shall not steal.

Again, stealing is wrong. We know that. God tells us that.

9. You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor.

This is sort of like lying. To "bear false witness" is falsely telling what happened...or simply lying. We know that lying is wrong. God is telling His nation that lying breaks this commandment.

10. You shall not covet your neighbor's house; you shall not covet your neighbor's house; you shall not covet your neighbor's wife, nor his male servant, nor his female servant, nor his ox, nor his donkey, nor anything that is your neighbor's.

This one has a lot of words. However I'm sure you can see that God is telling us

You shall not covet anything that is your neighbor's.

What about the word "covet"? Well, to put it in pretty basic terms, it refers to being jealous of other people. Why "neighbor"? Well, this is more a cultural thing. In our day and age, this could be thought of as "friend's". I'm not saying that it's okay to covet your neighbor's things, I'm simply stating that sometimes the words used in the Bible have to be brought into context of the time period and the culture when it was written.

Alrighty, that'll wrap it up for this short sub-sub-series and I'll be back with more on laws on Tuesday/Wednesday! Thanks for reading.

~Caleb