V. Thou Shalt Not
1
Gerald Stanley Lee: All of the Ten Commandments but one tell people, not what they must do, but what they must not do. "Remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy" (Exod. 20:8) does not begin with a "Thou shalt not"; but it ends with one, and the only positive command that the Jews possessed in their great sacred classic was the fifth: "Honor thy father and thy mother" (exod. 20:12). This is the one which they have notably kept, - the one without a "Thou shalt not" in it.
The Ten Commandments are the epitome of Jewish history. With the negatives left out, they are all prophecies. "Thou shalt steal," "Thou shalt commit adultery," "Thou shalt kill." In telling the Jews what not to be, Moses gave the most masterful synopsis of what they were - of what we would have been - that the world has ever seen. One of the great series of triumphant, godlike paradoxes which ended at last in a cross - it shall be remembered as part of the triumphant knowledge and the most strenuous hope of men, that the redeeming nation of the earth, laboring under its nine "Thou shalt nots," was a nation whose hymn-book was written by an adulterer, whose system of ethics was founded by a murderer, improved and given its most perfect expression by one of whom the world cannot forget that he had great riches, in his sayings about poverty; or that he had one mistress to every four proverbs, in his sayings about life. A nation so covetous for its own brothers that we have sat at their feet and borrowed from their brains - to be covetous against our brothers. A nation so idolatrous that the conduct of its worship could but be assigned to the descendants of the priests of the Golden Calf; and yet a nation of whom it must always be said that there has never been a time in history when a Jew would not rather have given up all that he had and all that he was rather than give up being the son of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob, and beginning his prayers with the beautiful title for God that was woven of his fathers' names (Exod. 4:5).
He [the Jew] has kept the commandment without a "Thou shalt not" in it. He has always kept it. There is nothing he will not do to keep it - except keeping the other commandments; an exception that he shares with a world which has learned almost everything from the poor Jew's sins except not sinning them - a world which did not even have the "Thou shalt nots" to sin against.
Ever since the Bible commenced with pointing out the fruit that could not be eaten, prohibition has been the one invitation that the human heart was sure to accept, and the profound failure of the Ten Commandments in the Jewish nation was the nine negatives. The first form of the Hebrew conception of duty - that is, the typical human conception of duty - was No. There are promises, but the promises are given to those who will not turn to idols, and those who will not marry the Philistines. The Beatitudes of the Old Testament are "Blessed are the ones who will not."
There has never been a people in the wide world who started their national life with so definite an idea of what they were not to do. The Old Testament is as largely a book of prohibitions as the New Testament is of invitations. The prophet preaches "If you do not," and the prevailing tone of the gospel is "If you do"; and with prophets anointed to go from place to place making inspired objections, Jehovah was known by what he would not allow, his servants by what they avoided, and even the positive blessings are the rewards of negations; the evolution of a series of righteous acts thus inevitably becoming in Jewish history the evolution of a series of last resorts. Duty is the Alternative.
And yet the negative tone of the Ten Commandments was supremely logical. The field of vision was the wrong. There were nine things the children of Israel were doing that they ought not to do. There was one that they had better continue to do. The Commandments addressed themselves to the point.
A negative is but the rudimentary form of a positive, and there is a latent affirmative throughout all the Mosaic tendency. But the Ten Commandments were not negative merely because of the low plane of spiritual life among the people. Moses had commenced his career by saying that he could not be a prophet, and the negative was the instinctive and necessary approach of his spirit to the truth. Fifteen hundred years of Hebrew history are stamped with the individuality of one in whom the love of God was wrought out as an imperious obligation to do other than he would.
The austerity of the Decalogue was Moses' sternness toward the tenderness in himself. For not out of a mighty aloofness from sin, but out of a mightier intimacy with its awful will, had this leader of Israel struggled to the top of Sinai and under the eaves of the heavens written the desires of his heart. Lying at the feet of the Most High, striking with a burning pen across every desire the terrible, beautiful "Thou Shalt Not," he was prophet of the struggle, prophet of the struggle with himself, writing commandments out of his conquered sins, - weary commandments, - too spent with victory to sing, too dread of defeat to sing - the infinite No, and silence. And thus as the first and necessary stage of the divine affirmative, No shall stand - the eternal symbol of the sublime, unwilling inspiration of the human heart.
Only the No had been lived, and only the No could be prophesied.
VI. Thou Shalt Not
2
THE men that Christ addressed needed prohibitions quite as much
as the freed slaves at the foot of Sinai. It was the achievement of
the spiritual experience called the Old Testament that the
Beatitudes did not read as Moses would have made them:
"Unblessed are they that mourn not, for they shall not be
comforted." (cf. Matt. 5:4)
"Unblessed are they which hunger and thirst not after
righteousness, for they shall not be filled."
"Cursed are the unmerciful, for they shall obtain no mercy."
When Peter was taking his denials back, and the nails were being driven through his hands, there were no mighty "Thou shalt nots" echoing over the pain he had longed for; nor was there a voice calling to his cross, "Unblessed are ye when men shall not revile you and persecute you for my sake."
"Simon, Simon, son of Jonas, lovest thou me?"
In the darkness and the swoon:
"THOU KNOWEST THAT I LOVE THEE."
The boast of a dead face.
But Peter would not have died for the Decalogue - for nine things he could not do and one that he must. Jesus did not say, "If you do not come unto me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden, I will not give you rest." (cf. Matt. 11:28)
The soul had lived beyond the No, and thus while the Man of Galilee was wont to tell a man to love his wife, Moses had been wont to put the case, "Thou shalt not commit adultery." And in Exodus, "Love thy neighbor as thyself" is "Thou shalt not kill," a statement not only failing to be the best means of teaching the son of Abraham to love his neighbor as himself, but not even the best means of keeping his neighbor alive.
Without doubt it was one of Bathsheba's charms that she was Uriah's wife; but David killed Uriah because Bathsheba was beautiful and the Decalogue was not. If, like the soul of Christ, the sixth commandment could have seemed to love David back, if it could have been positive, if it had been something that could have set his pulses beating and drawn him to itself, it would have saved the murder of Uriah; but the sixth commandment was a Not-something. David had to break it to learn what it was. Like death, it had a hollow voice, and to sin or to die is to pass into the land where it speaks, and learn the concealed affirmative.
The sturdy saints of the Old Testament learned the Commandments by breaking them. Through positive experience God wrought his Great Negations into history, and made the way across crime and penitential psalms to The Great Assertions.
The Old Testament would be the most discouraging book in the world to read without knowing that a new one followed it. The Bible is the evolution of an emphasis; its beauty through all the Mosaic influence being the strenuous and terrible beauty, the sublime consciousness, of the Infinite No, until at last it breaks forth in the most beautiful words that were ever sung - the Infinite Yes - the prophecy of Jesus the Christ. Peter and Paul and John saw afterward. They reaffirmed the affirmed. But Isaiah, singing out of his broken life and his broken nation to the people of the "Thou Shalt Not", is the most heroic spirit in the annals of men, because he sounded the victorious affirmative that has become forever the courage and the destiny of human life.
VII. Thou Shalt Not
3
IT is a fundamental criticism upon the Ten Commandments that they could not be chanted; that the Israelites sang about Jehovah and what he had done, but they did not sing about what he had told them to do - and that is why they never did it. It is the eternal symbol of ethics, - the conception of duty that cannot sing must weep until it learns to sing. This is Jewish history.
Nothing could be more characteristic of the Hebrew than the way he left Egypt. He did not know where he was going; he knew from what he must get away, and from the beginning he comes to his morality somewhat as he came to the Red Sea, expecting not only a force to drive him into righteousness, but a miracle to help him through with it. The Ten Commandments could not be more exuberant than the inspired experience of the great Sinai leader, and could not but breathe forth in their very form the sublime unwillingness and the bare victory with which they were wrought out.
The fact that Moses was not allowed to enter the Promised Land is one of the revelations of the Old Testament. He was not a Canaan prophet. He was an out-of-Egypt prophet; and it will always be the indictment of Israel that they were willing to live so many years in the Promised Land upon the inspirations of one who was not allowed to enter it - a primary prophet, inspired with a timely ignorance and a timely truth, whose message it was to tell all men that they must not be what they were, but whose greater message will ever be that prophets must not be what Moses was. And while it is but the charity of the historic sense to place every great soul in the frame of his time, and love him for the long heroic generations that he must have lived beyond his brothers; and while no vaster soul shall ever be held accountable for the degraded ways in which little men have used his inspirations to stop the world; it is but a tribute to him who first took the shoes from off his feet (Exod. 3:5) and walked on holy ground before the presence of the Lord, to hold his great name strictly within that beautiful fitness in which God gave it to the world. To the children of the Christ shall Sinai rest forever under the shadow of Nebo [Deut. 34:1, from which Moses saw the Promised Land], nor may we ever forget that, by the decree of God, the prophet of the wilderness belongs to the Wilderness himself.
Hero of the Eternal No - we can almost see him now, standing on the Moab hills, with the pathos of the shut-out years pressed down upon his mighty spirit, trying to look with shaded eyes through the great cloud doors of heaven upon the land that was the promise of the people that he loved. Brave First Listener - with the old Jehovah voices sounding dim and far, with the ache of those unconquered cities in his heart, turning back to Nebo to lie down with God. The silence folds him - with no children near; the winds, the low-voiced winds, beautiful wanderers from the haunts of men, come gently where he is, and with unseen hands touch the softened commandment face; and the Sunset comes and looks, and the Night, and there is One to watch.
So comes to pass the wonderful never-coming-back that men call death - the lonely death that, like his lonely life, God kept for a beautiful secret to himself (Deut. 34:5-6).
by Gerald Stanley Lee (1862-1944), New York: The Century Co., 1896
Contents
Part 1
INTRODUCTION
I. THE PAGAN EMPHASIS
II. THE EMPHASIS OF LIFE
III. THE EMPHASIS OF THE IDEAL
IV. THE HAGAR NATION
Part 2
V. THOU SHALT NOT
VI. THOU SHALT NOT
VII. THOU SHALT NOT
Part 3
VIII. THUS SAITH THE LORD
IX. MILK AND HONEY
X. I AM THAT I AM
XI. THY GENTLENESS HAS MADE ME GREAT
Part 4
XII. DEEP CALLETH UNTO DEEP
XIII. WHO GIVETH SONGS IN THE NIGHT
XIV. WHEN THE PEOPLE SAW THE MOUNTAIN SMOKING THEY STOOD AFAR OFF
Part 5
XV. "WHERE WAST THOU WHEN I LAID THE FOUNDATIONS OF THE EARTH?"
XVI. CURSE GOD AND DIE
XVII. DOTH NOT WISDOM CRY AND UNDERSTANDING PUT FORTH HER VOICE?
XVIII. VANITY! VANITY! ALL IS VANITY
Part 6
XIX. THE SHADOW CHRIST
XX. THE SHADOW CHRIST
XXI. THE SHADOW CHRIST
XXII. THE SHADOW CHRIST
XXIII. THE SHADOW CHRIST
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