Can We Thrive without God’s Law?

Most of America knows that the Supreme Court of the United States has ruled that the Ten Commandments are no longer required to be displayed in any government courthouse. This landmark decision has been covered exhaustively by the media, but what does the ruling mean?

A courthouse is where laws are enforced. The Ten Commandments represent God’s moral law, which never shifts or changes. It is as fixed as the law of gravity. If you defy that law, it’s like stepping off a high building. You can deny that the law affects you, but there are consequences to be paid. The Ten Commandments are eternal laws designed by God to keep society from destroying itself.

Despite this, many sand-blasting companies have ground away those Commandments, as well as God’s name, wherever they were engraved in courthouse marble or concrete.

What a telling picture of the state of our society. These unchangeable laws were originally engraved in stone by the finger of God. Now they are being erased from stone by the law of man.

Some Christians are saying, “What’s the big deal? We are not under the law. Why should this be an issue?” No, we are not under the Hebrew law, meaning the 613 additional commandments added by Jewish rabbis. But every Christian is under the authority of God’s moral law, which is summed up in the Ten Commandments.

Other believers claim, “We don’t need these displays of the Commandments. All that’s really necessary is for us to have them written in our hearts.” That’s not what God’s Word says. Consider the very visible presence God intended for the Commandments as they were delivered to his people.

“These words which I command you today shall be in your heart. You shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, when you walk by the way, when you lie down, and when you rise up. You shall bind them as a sign on your hand, and they shall be as frontlets between your eyes. You shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates” (Deuteronomy 6:6-9).

If you don’t want God in your midst, he doesn’t simply go away. The Bible offers warning after warning on this matter. Why did God judge Noah’s generation by sending a flood? It all happened because of lawlessness.

We must pray for people to turn back to the Lord and honor his law once more.