I know it’s a little cheeky to replace “commandments” with “pretty great ideas,” but my entire goal with this Treehouse project is to pry you loose a bit from the “chiseled in stone, forever and ever, amen” perspective that pervades so much conversation about faith and to see if I can share what I hope may be some fresh insights.
So let’s talk about Moses and the giving of the Ten Commandments (Exodus 20), but let’s not do it from our projected image of God. In other words, because we are finite and the world operates on us willy-nilly, and therefore we often function out of anxious self-concern, we may imagine God to be like us — blaming and judgey, distancing and “othering.” Those are too often the eyes through which we imagine God and read and interpret scripture. We project our understanding of power onto God, assuming God wants what we want.