DWQA QuestionsCategory: Divinely Inspired MessengersYou repeatedly teach that you do not tell people what to do. If so, what is the true story of the Ten Commandments?
Nicola Staff asked 6 years ago
You have been told before that Moses was a quite crafty salesman, and he used his leadership skill to advantage in being a convincing prophet figure. The entire episode was an exercise in persuasion, using the word of God to cow his people into accepting constraints from divine injunctions to limit their behavior in reasonable, logical, ways that would be a healthier lifestyle and reduce the chaos and turmoil and consequences of excesses when people live without such rules. So he was using his wits and following divine inspiration to be a forceful figure with his followers, to rein them in, and this was his best effort to provide an iconic representation of a divine message, to make this an impressive display to convince his people of their wrongdoing and to change their ways under the threat of incurring God’s wrath. This was a clever move to create the stone tablets, because their very solid nature was convincing as it conveyed the importance and the gravity of the situation and represented a visible miracle to those who believed the story. So it is true that Moses was divinely inspired and that Moses implemented the inspiration to create stone tablets with Commandments engraved upon them. They are not a strict interpretation of divine injunctions, as that would be overstepping our role. But they were correct in reflecting some concerns of the divine about ongoing human conduct in terms of actions causing irreparable harm or severe damage to others, which has severe karmic consequences and is not divine to begin with. So the idea of this being a mandate from a vengeful God with consequences was a sales job on the part of Moses to put this in a package with as much force as possible because he did this out of desperation. If you consider that his people were heavily corrupted by spirit meddler attachments at that point, and that this was the cause of the widespread debauchery and the myriad problems of people getting further out of control, losing self-discipline, and preying on one another, and falling into depravity, this called for desperate measures. And the inspiration was given to be a force for good and this he carried out in his own way. But it was effective in leaving an impact that has stood for all time. It is not a perfect message, and it is out of date, and to the sophisticated eye and ear can be seen on its face to be inadequate to cover the full array of human issues that would need to be considered for any code of conduct. But the reason it falls short is because it is from a time and place of limited knowledge and a situation that was becoming quite desperate.