Are the Ten Commandments still relevant today?

Many Christians say that the Ten Commandments are not relevant today, but what does the Bible have to say?

For the Ten Commandments to be relevant, they need to give meaning to our lives; they should have a purpose and significance. For the Ten Commandments to be relevant, they must be integral to being a Christian.

Jesus summarised the Ten Commandments in this way: 

“You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments hang all the Law and the Prophets” (Matthew 22:37-40)

At first glance, some might not see the Ten Commandments as all about love, but this is precisely what Jesus says. He is not saying they have lost their relevance. He is telling us love is essential to the Christian and that it is the underlying principle of the Ten Commandments. If love is relevant, the Ten Commandments are relevant, particularly to Christians. 

Is love relevant? Is Jesus relevant? If the answer to both of these questions is yes, then ht Ten Commandments are relevant.

Jesus’s example of a self-sacrificing life demonstrates the highest form of love. He kept the Ten Commandments perfectly and thus demonstrated what it meant to be a genuinely loving person. He gave the Ten Commandments, He kept them, and it was because we have all broken the law that He died (“for sin is the transgression of the law”1 John 3:4, KJV). 

If the Ten Commandments were not relevant God could have done away with the Ten Commandments before Christ had to go through all His suffering. 

Jesus was “wounded for our transgressions,” “bruised for our iniquities” (Isaiah 53:11), and He will have physical and spiritual scars for all eternity (Zechariah 13:6) because the Ten Commandments are unchangeable and eternal. This makes true love unchangeable and eternal.

When we look at the definitions of love available to us today, they are very nebulous. Some say it is an intense feeling of affection, while others say it is when you have great interest and pleasure in something. So, someone can say they love football and then say they love their children. Same word, but different forms of love. 

What is love? Feelings are not the best indicator of love because they come and go.

Elena Ceausescu was the wife of the Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu. She was officially named “the best mother of Romania.” All Romanian children were taught they needed to love her, and they were led to believe that she loved them.

Under the communist rule of the Ceausescu couple, poverty, starvation, and persecution were the norm for Romanians. Meanwhile, Elena and her husband lived in luxury and relative ease. Consequently, civil unrest and a political uprising culminated in their executions.

Just before Elena and Nicolae were shot, she defended her actions and attempted to save herself by declaring, “I raised you like a mother.”

I think we’d all agree that there was no genuine self-sacrificing love.

The Ten Commandments are relevant today because they define the love that Jesus spoke of in Matthew 22: 37-40 and help us to understand the love that was revealed on the cross. 

The Ten Commandments provide an unchangeable definition of love that is not based on feelings but principles. For those who want to love God truly or want to genuinely love their fellow man, the Ten Commandments are incredibly relevant! 

The first four of the Ten Commandments tell us how love is expressed between God and man and vice versa. The last six explain what love between our fellow man is and further demonstrate how God loves us. 

We would not know how to love God with all our heart, soul, and mind if we did not have the definition of the Ten Commandments. We would not know how to love our neighbour as ourselves either. 

We might think we love, but when we use the Ten Commandments’ definition of love as God does, we will see how incredibly deficient we are. Most of the time, our love is selfishly motivated and inconsistent, but God’s love is entirely self-sacrificing and faithful. The love of the world relies on emotions, which come and go, but God’s love is based on principles that remain consistent. 

Jeremiah 31:3 says, “The Lord has appeared of old to me, saying: “Yes, I have loved you with an everlasting love; Therefore with lovingkindness I have drawn you.” Then, in Malachi 3:6, God says, “For I am the Lord, I do not change.” 

The love expressed through the Ten Commandments is the same love that God has always had and has always wanted us to have towards Him and others. To change one aspect of the detail of the Ten Commandments is to attempt to change what real, God-like love is.

Despite all the negative feelings that Jesus must have felt (e.g. a sense of betrayal, fear, loneliness, and sorrow) at Gethsemane and on the cross, He still went ahead and died for us. Why? Because true love transcends feelings and circumstances. The same love described in the Ten Commandments is the same love that held Him on the cross. 

It is a love that made us more important than His own desires (2 Corinthians 5:21) (commandment one); it is a love that is willing to have His body mutilated and character misrepresented, that He may restore us to the image we were originally made in (2 Corinthians 3:18) (commandment two); it is a love that allows Himself to be labelled a fraud and cursed, that He may give us the name of the heavenly family (Ephesians 3:14-15) (commandment three); it is a love that rests in the grave with the wicked on the Sabbath, so that we can find true rest in our life (commandment four). This is true love.

If the Ten Commandments were so relevant to Christ, the One Christians follow, they ought to be as relevant to us.

In the lonely, unloving world we live in today, the love defined in the Ten Commandments is perhaps the most relevant thing we can study as Christians. They reveal the character of God, who is love (1 John 4:16).