There’s no doubt that society’s move away from God in favor of secularism and self has had a detrimental effect on the culture. The “unprecedented level of chaos and conflict” is what drove Dr. Robert Jeffress, senior pastor of First Baptist Church in Dallas, Texas, to look deeper into the role that God’s moral law plays in creating a well-ordered, flourishing society, and why following the Ten Commandments are essential to mending our culture and country.
He recently sat down with the Washington Times’ Higher Ground to discuss his findings, which are outlined in his new book “The 10: How to Live and Love in a World That Has Lost Its Way.”
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“No one, regardless of their political or religious beliefs, would deny we’re in a mess right now as a nation and a world. I mean, with all of the political, the moral, the spiritual division, something has desperately gone wrong,” Dr. Jeffress recently told the Washington Times’ Higher Ground. “I believe that at the heart of the chaos in our world today is that we have forgotten God. We think that we know better than God knows about how to run our lives, how to run our country, how to run our businesses. And the result has been absolute chaos.”
According to Dr. Jeffress, this problem has been decades in the making, starting in the 1960s when secularists set out to ban public expressions of faith, citing “separation of church and state.” These efforts to deny America’s Judeo-Christian heritage and render the Ten Commandments irrelevant have left America without its moral compass. And the consequences have been devastating.
“For a long time, the last 60 or 70 years, we have tried to destroy our Christian foundation as a nation while enjoying the benefits of what our forefathers believed and accepted as true. Now that we don’t have that any longer, we had no basis to say right is right and wrong is wrong without the Ten Commandments,” Dr. Jeffress explained. “I wrote this book, ‘The 10,’ to go back to God’s most basic teaching on how to live our lives. They are 3,500 years old, these commandments, but they’re just as relevant today as the day God gave them to Moses on Mount Sinai.”
In fact, Dr. Jeffress says the relevance of God’s moral law to society is evident throughout the entire Bible — including the New Testament.
“The moral law transcends the testaments. You find them expanded on, repeated and expanded on in the Sermon on the Mount that Jesus gave,” he noted. “Jesus wasn’t throwing out the moral law. He was explaining the true meaning and implications of it. The Ten Commandments were not a checklist of what to do to get to heaven. None of us can keep that code. But they are a guide how to live our lives.”
Indeed, Dr. Jeffress says the Ten Commandments are not limited to Christians, but are “the guardrails that keep society intact.” Without them, there is simply no objective standard for how people should behave.
“[The Ten Commandments] don’t get you to heaven individually, but they do produce order in your society and in your families. And I think without them, you witness exactly what we have right now. Why not steal? Why not commit murder? Why not commit adultery?” Dr. Jeffress concluded. “There has to be an objective standard and that’s the standard God gives us.”
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Marissa Mayer is a writer and editor with more than 10 years of professional experience. Her work has been featured in Christian Post, The Daily Signal, and Intellectual Takeout. Mayer has a B.A. in English with an emphasis in Creative Writing from Arizona State University.