A (43). The preface to the ten commandments is in these words, I am the Lord thy God, which have brought thee out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage.

A (44). The preface to the ten commandments teacheth us, that because God is the Lord, and our God, and Redeemer, therefore we are bound to keep all his commandments.

Throughout our study, we will be combining the questions that simply ask for a memorization of the biblical text in the answer, with the first question about what is required by each commandment.

Of the first answer (to Question 43), these are the words of Exodus 20:2, and I should say something here both to show unity in the covenants but also unity to the Bible. One of the skeptical objections of the modern so-called “Higher Critic” is what was known as the JEPD Theory, or Documentary Hypothesis. And without getting into all of its dreadfully boring and discredited ideas, one of its arguments was that Genesis opens off with two different names for God. In Chapter 1, the author gave us Elohim (אֱלֹהִים), whereas in Chapter 2 we begin to see the name LORD, or YHWH (יְהוָֹה).

But there is no mystery to this at all. Elohim is the general name for “God,” which can even be used for pagan deities and even men of renown. Greek has the same feature with the word theos (θέος). Do we find this to be weird? English does the same. So do we every time we attempt to speak about the subject. The word “God” and “gods” are settled by context. The argument against it will always assume it. On the other hand, the name YHWH is the covenant name for God. In this name, He reveals Himself through Moses to His own people that He has gathered. So He had said earlier at the burning bush,

“God said to Moses, ‘I AM WHO I AM.’ And he said, ‘Say this to the people of Israel: ‘I AM has sent me to you.’ God also said to Moses, ‘Say this to the people of Israel: ‘The LORD, the God of your fathers, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, has sent me to you.’ This is tmy name forever, and thus I am to be remembered throughout all generations” (Ex. 3:14-15).

We will divide the lesson we are to learn from the preface into two parts: 1. that grace precedes law for God’s people; and 2. that grace binds God’s people to obedience. 

Grace Precedes Law for God’s People

Moving back to the form of Exodus 20 and the place of verse 2: 

“I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery.” 

This kind of introduction was typical of covenant treaties in the Ancient Near East. A great king would remind those lesser chiefs and their tribes who he was. And he would also tell them the great thing he had done for them. In such documents there were usually five main parts: 1. Name of the great king; 2. historical prologue; 3. stipulations (commandments); 4. sanctions (blessings or curses); 5. administration (covenant continuity). Note that the Decalogue has the first four, though not the fifth.1 The book of Deuteronomy actually contains all five in that order. One last thing should be said about the similarity between these ancient documents and the form of this covenant in the Bible. First the great king wins his battle, and then a covenant is made with those now in his debt.

As our Creator, God already has full authority to tell us to do whatever He pleases. But there is a different kind of ground that the world knows nothing of. Only the people specially called by God to the mountain know this. This ground forms the kind of obedience that is motivated by grace. To the people of God, it is not only the Creator who gives law but our Covenant Lord.

Grace preceded law at Sinai. Last time, we briefly mentioned the view known as Republicationism. This is the view that the law at Sinai included a republication of the kind of covenant that God made with Adam: conditional. To be fair, the advocates of that view are not saying anything like Dispensationalism did: namely, that the Old Covenant was entirely a “Chapter 1” where the way of salvation was founded on obedience, whereas the New Covenant is the “Chapter 2” where justification is by faith alone. Although proponents of Republicationism want to maintain their Reformed orthodox credentials and agree that there is a basic unity of the covenant of grace, they argue that a “works principle,” analogous to Adam in Eden was “the basis for Israel’s inheritance of and continuance within the land of Canaan.” So while Israel was under the covenant of grace, the works principle served as a kind of “historical evangelical use of the law,” just as Israel was a type of the church, and Canaan was a type of the saints’ eternal rest. Galatians 3:15-22 can be cited as a powerful proof text for this view, as Paul seems to play both of those sides in that passage (i.e. continuity with the Abrahamic promise, yet discontinuity between the “works principle” and the inheritance of life). And in the law itself, they point to passages like Leviticus 18:5: “You shall therefore keep my statutes and my rules; if a person does them, he shall live by them: I am the LORD.”

Although it would be anachronistic to cite an author from an earlier century writing “against it,” still, Brakel wrote:

“The objective for the issuance of the moral law, however, was not that it would be a condition of the covenant of works, but a rule of life for the partakers of the covenant of grace, who, on the basis of Christ’s satisfaction, are justified and the recipients of salvation.”2 

In other words, one cannot criticize an appeal to the moral law on the ground that such would constitute any reversal in redemptive history. The people of old had a moral law given to them after they had been redeemed from Egypt.

Another place to see this is in the chapter immediately before. There we learn that God gives his law to Israel within the context of having already saved them.

“You yourselves have seen what I did to the Egyptians, and how I bore you on eagles’ wings and brought you to myself. Now therefore, if you will indeed obey my voice and keep my covenant, you shall be my treasured possession among all peoples, for all the earth is mine; and you shall be to me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation (Ex. 19:4-6).

So the preface assumes redemption. God has already saved. There is nothing left to be done to finish the work of salvation. If there was, Israel would surely fail at it!

Grace Binds God’s People to Obedience

That word “bind,” or BOUND in the answer itself, can seem like a threatening word. “So we are ‘bound’ again under law?” someone might ask. But this is not the “binding” of a convict under the guilt of the law; it is rather the bonds of love, or as the Heidelberg Catechism puts it: gratitude. We have used the imagery of the courthouse and then the “house” of God’s adopted family, the former representing justification and the latter sanctification. A central verse for this concept would be Romans 12:1-2, where Paul makes his transition from the doctrine of that Epistle to its practical application. First, let’s see what he says and then draw some inferences about the place of law in the Christian life:

“I appeal to you therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship. Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect.”

A few observations: (1) Paul uses the imagery of the public worship of the Jew, yet instead of a substitutionary animal being offered up, one’s body is put forth. (2) Since everything he had just argued in Romans 1-11 eliminates one’s own works as the ground or instrument for legal righteousness, this kind of offering must be a response, signified by the words “therefore” and “by the mercies of God,” and so we conclude that this belongs to sanctification and not justification. (3) Although law is not mentioned in verse 2, we have already proven in Question 39 that “The duty which God requireth of man,” namely, “obedience to his revealed will,” came to mean the law of God. So what image should we have of the offering and the law in the latter house? Paul’s imagery is that of what he calls “spiritual worship.”

It is important to understand that God’s gracious covenant relationship to us never undoes or modifies His Lordship over us. Just as there is a First and a Third Use of the Law, without contradiction—one shows us we cannot be justified by it, the other informs our sanctification with it—so just as surely, without contradiction, there is a life under His Lordship that is sola gratia. Again, the answer to Q44 says that “because God is the Lord, and our God, and redeemer, therefore we are bound to keep all his commandments.” The New Testament carries forward this as covenant promise:

“that we, being delivered from the hand of our enemies, might serve him without fear, in holiness and righteousness before him wall our days” (Lk. 1:74-75).

Just as God freely binds himself to the people, taking upon himself the ultimate conditions of the covenant, so the people now respond to grace in being bound to obey. Here people see a contradiction between obedience and grace, or more broadly, between law and grace. We may look carefully at Exodus 19:4-6 and ask, “But if he has already saved Israel, and if the commandments are going to be a guide to life after salvation, then why does he use such conditional language? Why the ‘IF’? If they obey his voice, then they will be his people? But I thought he already made them his people by his grace.” In that very place in the New Testament where the Apostle Peter appropriates the language of Exodus 19 to the fulfillment of the kingdom of priests, the church, he says,

“but as he who called you is holy, you also be holy in all your conduct, since it is written, “You shall be holy, for I am holy.” And if you call on him as Father who judges impartially according to each one’s deeds, conduct yourselves with fear throughout the time of your exile, knowing that you were ransomed from the futile ways inherited from your forefathers, not with perishable things such as silver or gold, but with the precious blood of Christ, like that of a lamb without blemish or spot” (1 Pet. 1:15-19).

Peter borrows from Leviticus 11 as well there. Grace is not in tension with holiness. Grace calls forth holiness. Grace guarantees holiness. One more place to see this is in Ephesians 1, at exactly another point where the critics of God’s sovereign grace would pit this salvation against holiness. We willl hear: “If God chooses and settles salvation from eternity, then it doesn’t matter how we live!”

False! Paul says, “even as he chose us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before him” (Eph. 1:4). Election is for holiness. So the election of Israel was for their holiness to the Lord.

So what do we do with the “If … then” language of the narrative of the covenant, if it is by grace? Hodge solves this in a rather ingenious way. He stands in the mainstream of the Reformed tradition by holding to one covenant of grace, in which the “special covenant which God formed with Abraham” is being “renewed at Mount Sinai,” and yet he distinguishes between “the spiritual children of Abraham” and the merely physical children. He could base this upon passages like Romans 9:6-8.3

Stated in this way, there is still one covenant of grace, but that the promise to Israel that they would inherit the land was conditioned upon obedience. In other words, it was never the eternal salvation of any soul that was achieved by their own obedience. This conditionality refers to the temporal dimensions of the covenant promises. No one is saved by our performance, but there are all sorts of things in this world that are effected by our performance. 

Grace does not eliminate moral cause and effect. And we will see, most clearly about the second and fifth commandments, that this is still true today. This idea of conditionality within the gracious covenant does not go away in the New Covenant age. But at least this does resolve our dilemma about law and grace. It is actually a false dilemma. When the Apostle says “you are not under law but under grace” (Rom. 6:14), he is speaking specifically about the ground of our relationship to God, not the totality of our relationship to God. He is not declaring Christians to be lawless people! It is not that we will have no law in our lives. It is that we will live by faith.

We should close with the words of Matthew Henry, in his commentary upon Exodus 20:2, which captures in a short space, what we have seen here:

“The preface of the Law-maker: I am the Lord thy God, v. 2. Herein, 1. God asserts his own authority to enact this law in general: "I am the Lord who command thee all that follows." 2. He proposes himself as the sole object of that religious worship which is enjoined in the first four of the commandments. They are here bound to obedience by a threefold cord, which, one would think, could not easily be broken. (1.) Because God is the Lord—Jehovah, self-existent, independent, eternal, and the fountain of all being and power; therefore he has an incontestable right to command us. He that gives being may give law; and therefore he is able to bear us out in our obedience, to reward it, and to punish our disobedience. (2.) He was their God, a God in covenant with them, their God by their own consent; and, if they would not keep his commandments, who would? He had laid himself under obligations to them by promise, and therefore might justly lay his obligations on them by precept. Though that covenant of peculiarity is now no more, yet there is another, by virtue of which all that are baptized are taken into relation to him as their God, and are therefore unjust, unfaithful, and very ungrateful, if they obey him not. (3.) He had brought them out of the land of Egypt; therefore they were bound in gratitude to obey him, because he had done them so great a kindness, had brought them out of a grievous slavery into a glorious liberty.”4

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1. cf. John Frame, The Doctrine of the Christian Life (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R, 2008), 401.

2. Brakel, The Christian’s Reasonable Service, III:60.

3. Hodge, Systematic Theology, III.19.1

4. Matthew Henry, Commentary on the Whole Bible (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishers, 1991),