NASCAR and the Ten Commandments
My mother attended a small church in South Carolina, where the Sunday service began promptly at 11 a.m. and ended precisely an hour later. If the pastor was overwhelmed by the Spirit and his sermon began to run long, parishioners would fidget in their seats and glance at their watches. They joked that they loved the Lord, but they loved NASCAR, too, and they needed to get home, have lunch and get settled in front of the tube to watch the races.
NASCAR races are typically run on Sundays, and are most often held in states that contain a large proportion of Bible-believing folks. Texas, for example, hosts a stop on the NASCAR circuit and recently passed a law requiring that every public school classroom must display the Ten Commandments. The law is set to take effect in the coming school year.
The Ten Commandments are viewed as the bedrock of Judeo-Christian values. It’s easy even for non-Christians to get behind most of the commands: don’t murder, don’t steal. Even “honour your father and mother” seems like a healthy concept. No doubt legislators in Texas, Louisiana and other states that are preparing similar laws are committed to ensuring that the precepts contained in the Commandments are impressed on the youth of the nation. As Moses, who brought the Commandments down from Mt. Sinai, told the Israelites, “These commandments that I give you today are to be on your hearts. Impress them on your children.”
Christians believe that their salvation comes from grace, not from the Law. The Jews had 613 clear commandments in the Old Testament that prescribed correct behavior and clearly defined unacceptable acts. Jesus didn’t abolish all those laws or say that they no longer mattered. But modern Christians don’t feel obligated to follow ancient laws regarding unclean food, how to deal with mildew or the correct way to sacrifice a goat. Jesus’ sacrifice on the cross and New Testament teaching show that belief in Christ’s atoning death is essential–not a series of laws.
So what do we do with those Ten Commandments? They are a prescription for ideal moral behavior, except for maybe a couple of items that seem a bit out of place in the 21st century. One is the prohibition on making graven images. This was important to the Israelites 3,000 years ago, when they were surrounded by other religions that fashioned their gods out of wood and stone. The other confounding commandment pertains to the Sabbath. That’s the 7th day of the week, a day of rest. The Lord was very clear on its importance. Indeed, in Exodus 35:2 Moses says “Whoever does any work on it is to be put to death.” Serious stuff.
So what are the children in Texas or Louisiana or Arkansas to make of this? Stores everywhere are open on Sundays, millions of Americans work on the seventh day of the week. Moses told his people that they couldn’t even light a fire in their homes on the Sabbath. And yet, in May the Texas House of Representatives passed the Ten Commandments bill on the Jewish Sabbath. Maybe that didn’t count, since most of them were Christians and honor the Lord on Sundays. Sunday is also the day that the Texas Motor Speedway held the NASCAR cup series. But nowhere in America is it described as a mandatory day of rest. It might be the day when most Christians go to church, but a lot of them go to work on that day.
Do we get to choose which of the Commandments we follow? Just the most obvious ones, like not murdering someone? How exactly do we honor our parents? And what about “misusing the name of the Lord?”–or what the King James Version of the Bible referred to as ‘taking the Lord’s name in vain’. In recent decades that commandment has primarily been interpreted merely as a ban on swearing, as opposed to a to a mandate to respect and revere the Lord. If the Ten Commandments are so important that they should be placed in a fourth grade classroom, shouldn’t the people who advocate this also abide by them? At the very least, they might want to go a little beyond the pious action of posting a Biblical treatise on the wall and devote time to exploring what is really meant when the Lord says “you should have no other gods before me.”
Jesus reserved his most pointed criticism for the Pharisees, who were the religious leaders of his day, the people who told others how to act and judged their behavior. The Pharisees believed that laws equalled piety. They were all about the rules. They were wrong.
petermaize 