Our family dog, Mentor, is a fair sized animal; she reaches a bit over my knees when she’s walking beside me. Yet, Houdini like, she can disappear with the greatest of ease. Despite her size, she can squeeze through the tiniest hole in the fence and escape from our yard. You wouldn’t believe how small the opening can be. We once swore she was jumping over the fence rather than going through it, It wasn’t until we found tell-tale tufts of her hair caught in the edges of a small opening that we realized that she was going through, and not over, the fence.
We are now very diligent about ensuring she can’t escape. My weekly work of cutting the lawn includes a very close inspection of the borders of our property. I keep a careful eye out to see whether or not she has tried to forcer her way through the fence, and any possible escape routes are immediately closed up. There is, after all, no point in making things easy for her, especially when she can squeeze through the tiniest of openings.
Just as our dog can easily sneak through a wee little hole, we humans can get into trouble with the tiniest opportunity. Temptation doesn’t have to big big, bold and surrounded by shiny lights; it can appear in the most innocent and innocuous way yet still get us into big, bold trouble. An unkind word here, a few grapes eaten before getting to the cash register there, and before you know it, we’ve managed to get out of the ‘Nice’ column and find our names moved over to the ‘Naughty’ side of the paper.
God has this all figured out. God knows that it doesn’t take much for us to get into trouble and that we’ll jump at the smallest opportunity to go astray. So God gave us the smallest possible list of things to do in order to keep from wandering off onto the naughty column. If it’s so easy for us to get into trouble, it would appear that God took pity on us and made it equally easy for us to stay out of trouble with a little list known as the 10 Commandments.
The 10 Commandments are an easy, logical path to staying in God’s good book. For the most part they involve treating God and our fellow humans with respect. Honour God and your parents; don’t steal; don’t kill; don’t let yourself be tempted by what’s not yours. When you think about it, It’s a pretty simple recipe for success.
Still, as simple as it is, folks still get it wrong, so God simplified things even further. Through Jesus, God taught us that all we have to do in order to be good people is to love one another and to treat one another as we would like to be treated. In one simple law, God shrank the 10 Commandments down to just one.
It’s pretty easy to get into trouble. The tiniest opportunity can lead us far, far away from doing what is right. God loves us so much, He makes it pretty easy to stay away from bad behaviour. Just treat God and your fellow folks the way you would like to be treated. It’s that simple.
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