Most people can name about four of them. Murder, stealing, adultery, and — after a pause — “something about your parents.” We have argued about posting them in courthouses while letting them fade from memory, which is roughly like fighting over the frame of a painting nobody looks at anymore. So before we ask whether the Ten Commandments still apply, let us do the neglected thing and actually read them. They live in Exodus 20, and they begin in a place that surprises people: not with a demand, but with a rescue.
I am the LORD thy God, which have brought thee out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage. Thou shalt have no other gods before me. Exodus 20:2–3
Read the order of operations carefully, because it is the key to the whole chapter. God does not say, “Keep these ten rules and I will rescue you.” He says, “I have already rescued you — now here is how free people live.” The commandments were given to a people standing on the far shore of the Red Sea with Egypt behind them. Grace came first. It always has. If that ordering interests you, it is the entire argument of What Is Grace?
The first table: God first, God only, God’s name, God’s day
The first four commandments face upward, and they move from the inside out. No other gods claims the heart’s throne room: whatever you trust most, fear most, and sacrifice for most is functionally your god, and the Lord declines to share the post. Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image (Exodus 20:4) goes further — even the true God must not be shrunk into something we can manage. Few of us own a silver idol, but plenty of us keep a pocket-sized god of our own design, one who conveniently dislikes all the same people we do. The second commandment forbids him too.
The third guards the Name: Thou shalt not take the name of the LORD thy God in vain; for the LORD will not hold him guiltless that taketh his name in vain (Exodus 20:7). This covers more than rough language. It covers using God as a garnish — invoking Him to bless our schemes, swearing by Him casually, wearing His name as a label while living unlabeled lives. His name is not a brand. It is a Person’s.
And the fourth: Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy (Exodus 20:8). Christians differ in good conscience about how the sabbath carries over to the Lord’s day, but do not let the debate hide the gift: the God who made you commands you to rest, which means rest is not laziness — it is obedience. In a century that treats exhaustion as a credential, one day in seven of holy unproductivity is nearly an act of defiance. The scriptures gathered at Bible verses about the sabbath are good company for learning it again.
The hinge: honour thy father and thy mother
The fifth commandment stands at the joint between loving God and loving people: Honour thy father and thy mother: that thy days may be long upon the land which the LORD thy God giveth thee (Exodus 20:12). It is the first commandment with a promise attached, and it is wider than childhood obedience. It means speaking of your parents with respect when they are old, providing for them when they are frail, and forgiving them where they failed — for some readers that last part is the hardest commandment on the list, and I do not say it lightly. Honour does not mean pretending the wounds are not there. It means refusing to let the wounds write your character. A society that despises its parents is sawing through the branch every generation sits on; the promise of long days in the land is not a bribe, it is a description of how stable civilizations work.
The second table: life, marriage, property, truth
Then come four commandments of almost shocking brevity. Thou shalt not kill. Thou shalt not commit adultery. Thou shalt not steal. Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour (Exodus 20:13–16). Sixteen words in English, and on those sixteen words rests everything we mean by a decent society. Every human life is sacred, because every human bears God’s image. Every marriage is sacred, because covenant is the load-bearing wall of the family. Property is respected, because a man’s labor is part of his life. And truth is owed to our neighbor, because community runs on testimony the way lungs run on air — poison the air and everyone suffocates together, a thing our own age of manufactured outrage and cheerful slander is demonstrating at scale.
Notice that nobody seriously argues these four have expired. No one wants to live on a street where murder, betrayal, theft, and lies are considered lifestyle choices. The people who say the Ten Commandments are obsolete still lock their doors. Their hands know what their arguments deny.
The tenth: coveting in the age of the infinite scroll
The last commandment is the strangest one, because it is the only one no police force could ever enforce. It legislates the interior:
Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour's house, thou shalt not covet thy neighbour's wife, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor any thing that is thy neighbour's. Exodus 20:17
In Moses’ day, coveting your neighbor’s house at least required walking past it. We have improved on that. We now carry a device that delivers a curated procession of other people’s kitchens, vacations, marriages, waistlines, and salaries directly into our hands, refreshed endlessly, optimized by very smart people to keep us scrolling — and the engine under the hood is covetousness, monetized by the minute. The tenth commandment is the only one with a trillion-dollar industry dedicated to its violation. I do not say throw your phone in the river. I say know what the machine is doing to you, and starve it on purpose: thanksgiving is covetousness’s natural predator, and contentment — see the scriptures at Bible verses about thanksgiving — cannot be bought, which is exactly why nobody advertises it.
And the tenth commandment has one more job: it is the one that catches everybody. You may never have stolen or perjured, but no one reaches Tuesday without coveting. Paul said this commandment was the one that found him out — I had not known sin, but by the law: for I had not known lust, except the law had said, Thou shalt not covet (Romans 7:7). Hold that thought; we will need it at the end.
Jesus’ summary: love is the spine
When a lawyer asked Jesus to name the greatest commandment, He did not pick one of the ten. He gave the two on which all ten hang:
Jesus said unto him, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets. Matthew 22:36–39
This is not a replacement; it is an X-ray. Love is the spine, and the ten commandments are the vertebrae. The first table shows what loving God looks like in practice; the second shows what loving your neighbor looks like with its sleeves rolled up. Anyone who claims to love God while ignoring His day and His name has not understood the first commandment, and anyone who claims to love his neighbor while eyeing his neighbor’s wife has not understood the second. Love without law goes soft and shapeless; law without love goes cold and proud. God never offered either one alone.
And Jesus pushed deeper still. In the Sermon on the Mount He said plainly, Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets: I am not come to destroy, but to fulfil (Matthew 5:17) — and then He traced each commandment back to its root under the skin. Murder, He taught, begins in the heart’s contempt long before it reaches the hand (Matthew 5:21–22); the man who never threw a punch but feeds his anger daily is standing closer to the sixth commandment than he thinks. And adultery:
Ye have heard that it was said by them of old time, Thou shalt not commit adultery: But I say unto you, That whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already in his heart. Matthew 5:27–28
So much for keeping the commandments by merely avoiding felonies. Jesus moved the fence from the action to the heart, which raised the standard from “difficult” to “impossible” — and He did it on purpose. If a private war with anger or lust is your daily reality, I have written practical help in How to Overcome Habitual Sin; you are not the only one fighting it, whatever the silence in the pews suggests.
The law as schoolmaster: where the ten lead
Which brings us to the law’s deepest purpose. Yes, the commandments restrain evil; yes, they map the good life; but their sharpest work is diagnostic. The law is a mirror — it shows you the smudge on your face, and no one ever washed his face with a mirror. Paul gives the law a wonderful title:
Wherefore the law was our schoolmaster to bring us unto Christ, that we might be justified by faith. Galatians 3:24
The schoolmaster in the ancient world was the servant who walked the child to school — firm grip, fixed destination. That is what the ten commandments do for an honest reader: they take you by the hand, show you that you have kept none of them perfectly for so much as a week, and deliver you to the door of the only One who kept them all. Jesus loved the Father with all His heart, honored His parents, never lied, never coveted — and then bore the lawbreaker’s penalty so that lawbreakers could go free. If that exchange is new to you, stop here and read How to Be Saved; it is the most important page on this site.
Do the Ten Commandments still apply? They still tell the truth about God, still tell the truth about you, and still point — every one of them — to Christ. For the believer they are no longer a ladder to climb but a portrait of the family likeness, and the Holy Spirit’s whole project is painting that likeness into you from the inside; I have described how in The Fruit of the Spirit, Explained. Read the ten slowly in Exodus 20, gather the scriptures at Bible verses about obedience — and if you want to find out how many of the ten you can actually name now, our Bible quiz will tell you the truth in love.