Metaphor 19 - The Second Copy of the Ten Commandments

In fact, one of the things that may distress us about a teenager demanding a set of rules is that we know that the rules will always be incomplete, and the incompleteness maybe what the teenager is really after.

We are told to love God with all our hearts, all our minds, all our strength, and our neighbor as ourselves. And the first thing we ask is "Who is my neighbor?"

We desire to find incompleteness and limitation in the law, because, however incomplete it already is, it still is a good metaphor of the personality of God. And in our current state, we can't stand God, and he can't stand us.

And that last is the reason why God added law to revelation in the first place. Like any good depth psychologist, God wants to make what is unconscious, conscious, and what is latent, explicit.

The Tablet of Stone that the ten commandments were inscribed on became a second copy as soon as Moses brought it down from the mountain. Moses angrily broke the first copy when he found that his people had already broken the first commandment by making an idol (a conception of their own minds.)

The purpose of the law is to show us that we can’t stand God, and, unless something is done, God will not be able to stand us.