Having finished the topic of the sacraments in the mini doses to reflect on the education of faith in our children, and to continue with an organized structure, I consider that a topic that we are interested in considering is that of the commandments of the law of God.
The commandments are a central point of the Christian faith and the point that most distances are many since it is very difficult for human beings to be told what is good for us and what is harmful to us. We prefer to live according to our opinion, even if it is to our detriment, but “scabies with pleasure does not itch.”
The first of the commandments does not appear in the Book of Exodus, in the tables of the law, but in the Book of Genesis, when God forbids Adam and Eve to eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.
Much has been written about the blessed tree, and no one knows for sure what fruit it bore, but tradition has taught us something that does not appear in the sacred book and certainly was not: they were not apples.
What is obvious to me is that it was a poisonous fruit. Why else would God have prohibited it? Do we as parents prohibit what is good for our children or what is dangerous and harmful?
In fact, the human being had been created by God to lead an eternal life, until he ate from the wrong tree and by doing so death entered the world, so we know that it was a poisonous and deadly fruit, – with reason our Father forbade them to eat from it – which affected both the man and the woman, because they both ate from it, and it altered not only their immortal condition but also their genetic load, which they had not yet transmitted to any offspring, making them From that moment on, both will contribute genes that lead to death for their descendants. Perhaps if only one person had eaten the forbidden fruit, one of the genetic loads would have been saved. We will never know.
Why was there a poisonous tree in Paradise? It is logical. If there had not been something harmful to the human being, would he have been able to choose to disobey God? Obviously not, he would have only been able to act according to the will of God, which is good for man, and, therefore, he would not have had the most important gift after life, which is freedom (Adam and Eve did not need faith, since they knew God in person, they saw him, heard him and surely could touch him).
So the existence of the tree of knowledge, of good and evil in the center of Paradise, something harmful to human beings and, therefore, prohibited by God, was His way of giving us the ability to choose between obeying Him or not. , to make us free.
Since then it has been systematically demonstrated that disobedience is part of human nature, as soon as we have the capacity to choose.
It is not until centuries later, and with a good number of humans swarming the earth, at least the known part, that God sees the need to give us a script on how to behave. For a psychologist, the commandments are exciting, since they consider not only human behavior (thou shalt not steal), but also affections (thou shalt love God above all things), motivation (thou shalt not desire other people’s goods) and thought (thou shalt not have bad thoughts), that is, it addresses the human being as a whole, something that although it has been studied by philosophers, from science we had to reach the 20th century – more than 3,000 years after the commandments were written, and after an arduous battle, so that scientific psychology would admit something more than what is strictly observable (behavior).
It is surprising that a little more than 1,000 years before the birth of Jesus, in a town that did not seem to stand out for a high level of culture and philosophical reflection, could develop in such a short space and in such a concrete way ten points that they considered so global and so certain human nature. How could they know? Moses may have written them alone, but I believe that Someone must have dictated them to him.
The commandments are a Decalogue of conduct, they tell us what to do and how to live to achieve full Life, but everything that is expressed in the negative is clearly considered coercive and by extension everything that tells us how to act tends to be valued as rejectable. We don’t like being told how we should do things. So since Moses made the commandments known to his people and since thanks to Paul of Tarsus (following the doctrine of Jesus) he opened the possibility of being so to all of humanity, we have been fighting either to try to fulfill them or to try to deny them (some more emphatically than others), which in reality is a battle against ourselves.
In any case, it is advisable to know them, since only then will we be able to choose with Divine criteria what is best for us.
Just as God forbade Adam and Eve from eating from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil because it was bad for them, the commandments are our Father’s way of telling us how to live properly.
Anyone who stops to reflect even superficially on the commandments quickly comes to the conclusion that it is not bad to break them because it is a sin (I hope I don’t offend anyone by using a word that is considered taboo today), but that not keeping them is bad for you and that is why God included them in the tables of the law. In the same way that “killing” is not a crime because it is in the criminal code, but it is in the criminal code because it is a crime.
Over the next few weeks, we will reflect on each of the 10 commandments. However, I am going to allow myself to review them in the reverse order to which they were presented and in which they are usually considered. The reason is very simple, but if you don’t already guess it, you will find out in 10 weeks.
