by Marinam

Created on: September 08, 2008   Last Updated: August 03, 2010

God reveals in the Bible’s Exodus 20 all basic rules to be a person with good moral character in the 10 Commandments.  God Almighty is the original author/teacher of good morals with the 10 Commandments and God proves this to be true by all the examples of people’s lives that did or did not keep the 10 Commandments throughout the Bible.

The first Commandment says that a person should not have any other gods (false gods) before God Almighty. To have another god before our true God is totally unacceptable to God and God’s sentence for this offense is foretold as a severe punishment in the Bible. (Exodus 20:1-3). Another god can be anything from something that keeps a person from worshipping the true God properly like when a person has “the love of money, pleasures, animals, or any other thing or being on this Earth which is not personified as God Almighty.”

In the second Commandment God says that to make a statue out of any physical material such as wood, stone, gold, etc. and worship these statue then as a false god,  will cause God to bring a curse on this person which will last from his/her generation to the next generation. (Exodus 20:4-6). In the Old Testament when Abraham was gone to write down the 10 Commandments, the Israelites had lost faith in God and made a golden calf to pray to, which is a practice they had learned while they were in Egypt. God’s punishment for this betrayal was that thousands of them lost their lives and the rest of them had to wander in the desert for many years before God let them enter the Promised Land. To never lose faith in God is what the moral of this Commandment is teaching us because we know what happened to the Israelites who were not patient enough to keep trusting in God through Abraham who was God’s friend and servant and then received the punishment they deserved from God.

The third commandment makes it clear to not "take the LORD your God in vain, for the LORD will not hold him guiltless who takes His name in vain" (Exodus 20:7). To avoid saying anything detrimental about God because God says He “will not hold anyone” who overlooks this Commandment guiltless is the moral of this Command.  Here one needs to think about the language one uses in private or in public and exclude any words that are not wholesome to be said about God or anyone or anything else because God knows all the words that come out of each person’s mouth and we are never

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