Today I want to explore the motivations behind why the Christian church would want to abolish the 1st Commandment of God.
But first, a quick crash course into the history of early Christianity is necessary.
It’s no secret that Christianity began as a strictly Jewish movement.
It was all about Israel waiting for their Mighty Deliverer to come who finally arrived in the form of Yeshua of Nazareth.
And of course, it’s no secret that this Yeshua who proclaimed Himself the Messiah was Jewish.
He was born to Jewish parents in the Holy Land.
He was circumcised on the 8th day per the Abrahamic Covenant.
ALL of His first disciples were Jewish.
And after His death, resurrection and ascension, the early church was dominated by Jewish believers.
However, soon after, gentiles started to be included in this new movement.
And then through the intense missionary efforts of the Apostle Paul, their numbers really swelled.
At around 100AD, the number of gentiles in the Yeshua movement reached critical mass to the point where they exceeded the number of Jewish believers.
By around 150AD, these gentiles had assumed powerful positions of authority within the Church.
As a result, an unfortunate turn of events began to occur.
An attempt to minimize Jewish influence within the church began to rear its ugly head.
Now let’s fast forward to the early 300’s AD where we meet a fellow named Constantine who is now the ruling Emperor of Rome.
Understand that while Jerusalem was the original center of Christianity, this authority was later transferred to Rome which was the center of the gentile world.
Now this Emperor Constantine fellow declares Christianity to be the official religion for the Roman Empire thus giving birth to what we know today as the Roman Catholic Church.
Now there was one interesting caveat attached to Constantine’s ruling.
Christianity was to be for gentiles only!
Jews were by law forbidden to participate in Christianity unless they renounced their Jewish heritage and its accompanying traditions. (and you wonder why Jews have negative feelings towards Christianity)
So there you have it in a nutshell.
It was the Roman Catholic Church who declared the “10 Commandments” to be the founding pillar of this bastardization of the original Christianity they had created.
However, they had a not so little problem.
They just couldn’t use the “10 Commandments” as they were.
Because that 1st Commandment was just too damn Jewish!
Understand that the now fully gentile church by the time of Constantine wanted to completely eradicate any form of “Jewishness” from their Christian faith.
They wanted to destroy any idea, thought, or principle that had any element of Jewishness in it.
And in their anti-Semitic madness, they attacked God’s Holy Word.
If they had kept God’s original “1st Commandment” or 1st Word (as I’ve already taught you), it would have been a major problem for their anti-Jewish agenda.
So what they did was break up the original 2nd Commandment into two halves.
They made the first half which says “Thou shall have no other gods before me” into the 1st Commandment and they made the second half which says “thou shall not make unto thee any graven image” into the 2nd Commandment.
So technically, the church only has NINE commandments now.
What a joke!
Let’s take a good look at the REAL “1st Commandment”.
“I am Adonai your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the abode of slavery.”-Exodus 20:2
It makes it crystal clear that God gave these 10 commandments along with hundreds of others ONLY to Israel (not gentiles), whom He saved from Egypt.
You also have to understand that historically speaking, when the church doctored up God’s Word, the masses were NOT permitted to read or even own a Bible during this period of history.
Hence, whatever the church at this time decreed became the truth.
Deleting any reference to Israel from the original 10 Commandments cemented the idea that Christianity was NOT for the Jewish people.
So the takeaways from all of this is this.
First, the phrase “The 10 Commandments” is a purely manmade term used to refer to the 10 Words of God in Exodus 20.
The 10 Words of God need to be restored by putting the 1st Word back into the list of 10.
Second, we need to be aware that due to an intense anti-Jewish agenda in the church dating back to even before Constantine, many portions of Scripture have been rendered in a biased manner.
Substituting “Command” for “Word” is just one small example of the gentile nonsense that has gone on in the early Christian church.
We’ve got a lot to untangle moving forward.
There is a possibility you are incorrect in this. It may have started that way with the division of the First Commandment but somewhere your # 2 got tossed out and in my experience growing up Roman Catholic that is not taught at all which is evident by the use of statues. Today’s Second Commandment is “Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord in vain.”
Hi there! Thanks for your comment. Slight variations aside, you can rest assured the research I did is solid and has been cross referenced with other Torah scholars. Thanks for reading.
I agree with Richoka about the division of the 1st and 2nd Word.
The trouble the catholics did was remove the 3rd because it went against their worship of statues, so to keep 10, but still toss out the reference to Yehovah and His people, they split the last about coveting into two parts.
The ironic part is that this is the only Word that is essentially hidden from sight, you cannot observe covetousness. And yet what has the Roman catholic organization been known for over their years but covetousness
Thanks for shedding even more light on this Sandy!
Excellent work Rich, although I disagree with your statement that YHVH was only speaking to Israel. Scripture clearly states that there was a mixed multitude at Mt. Sinai that agreed with the covenant.
Hi there! I think we’ve been in touch before. Right. I 100% agree with you. In my mind, when God says Israel, I am referring to BOTH the ethnic Hebrews (by blood) AND the mixed multitude who joined themselves to Israel and thus became ONE with Israel. The whole body of Israel consisting of both “Jew and Gentile”. And I don’t believe this has changed today. We’re 100% in agreement on this point. Thanks for reading and shalom!
I think there’s another reason for this change. Agreeing with God that HE is Yehovah our Elohim means we are making HIM our authority and we’re coming under HIS submission. And, HE is the one who has to deliver us out of our slavery. We all have to be delivered – which the God of the Wilderness must take us through our own wilderness journey in order to transform us – and, most don’t want that. Most want a god that can conform to our likeness!