By: Richard Roper
www.lettersfromadarkenedroom.com
Book: Building Jerusalem & other Letters from a Darkened Room Paperback
Understanding the Current chaos through the lens of the Ten Commandments
‘And did those feet in ancient time
Walk upon Englands mountains green:
And was the holy Lamb of God,
On Englands pleasant pastures seen!
And did the Countenance Divine,
Shine forth upon our clouded hills?
And was Jerusalem builded here,
Among these dark Satanic Mills?’
So wrote the poet and mystic William Blake (1757 – 1827) in the first decade of the nineteenth century in his most well-known work. Put to music by Sir Hubert Parry in 1916, ’Jerusalem’ is sung by such varied groups as the Women’s Institute and the Labour Party, as well as being England’s unofficial national anthem. Blake was not dreaming of a distant and ancient middle eastern city when he wrote the lines, he dreamt of something much grander, much loftier, both mystical and rooted in the earth, he wrote of ‘the holy Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God,’ the place where God and man dwell in harmony, as described in the twenty first chapter of the Book of Revelation by the Apostle John. What then is this Jerusalem of which we sing, this holy Jerusalem and can it be ‘builded here, Among these dark Satanic mills?’ As it happens, we do not need to look far, the answers to these questions can be found up and down and all over our land, so long as we can recognise them.
Go into any parish church or chapel in England, so long as it is not a modern one, or one that has been overly modernised and look at the walls at end of the nave, next to the entrance to the chancel or perhaps behind the pulpit, occasionally behind the altar, you may find a large wooden board on which is painted the Decalogue, the Ten Commandments of Moses. Displayed for all to see and read, the laws of God which the Prophet received among the smoke and thunder on Mount Sinai. Read them closely, or think about them long and they are intimidating, measure yourself against them and you quickly become aware of your abject failure. Consider them in the light of today’s world and you might think them archaic, anachronistic, relics of a time gone by, fit only for some museum of religion. How different they are from today’s spirituality of yoga, mindfulness and meditation; these ten laws seem like nothing but dark shackles on the human spirit. But consider them carefully and you may begin to see them in a different light, for within them they do not hide esoteric mysteries for self-fulfilment and enlightenment – as some see religion and spirituality – but the necessary groundwork and seeds for growing a healthy society. This is spiritual wisdom for physical, earthy, human life lived in community; heavenly wisdom for earthly use. It is the manual for loving God and loving your neighbour as yourself in bullet point format.
The first three commandments place God first and foremost; He is demanding His place in your life. ‘ Thou shalt have no gods before me…Thou shalt not make any graven image…Thou shalt not take my name in vain.’ This is the foundation on which everything else must be built, if you don’t lay the foundation well you might as well build on the sands of the seashore, there will be no strength to what you build, it will be washed away on the first tide. Recognise where you have come from, who made you and the whole creation, understand that you and He are intertwined and that life has more dimensions than what you can simply touch and feel. Do not give your heart to that which is less than the almighty and transcendent.
The fourth command mandates rest, a rhythm of Sabbaths, one day in seven, four per lunar month; you should cease from your labour – you, your entire family, all those who work for you, even your animals. Labour is important, it is by the sweat of our brow that we eat our meat – but labour is not everything. Rest is not only for our bodies but also for our souls, our mind and emotions, our relationships and our environment. Rest is healing and regenerative, a necessity for our well-being.
The fifth commandment lays down the importance of family structure. Family is the biological and social structure into which we are born and raised. It is the place of our nurture and flourishing and the core of our identity. From our parents we receive not only our physical, genetic composition but also the nurture that shapes the clay into the person we become. Family not only forms and fixes us as people, it places us within our community both now and in time, linking us to all who are around us and all who have gone before us. A good family is both a place of security from which we can live as individuals and a fundamental unit of wider society.
The sixth commandment, ‘Thou shalt not kill,’ has until recently been the least controversial of the 10. It has under-written the concept of the sanctity of human life – a protection for all of us, and most of all the weak of society. But today that concept is being eroded and chipped away as activists seek to deny personhood to the new born, the elderly and the sick, to pave the way for post-birth abortions and euthanasia of the sick and the elderly. ‘Thou shalt not kill’ lays down a social marker that at root we are all equal, that the powerful cannot ride roughshod over the lives of others; it is the sine qua non, the absolute bedrock for living in society, that your neighbour respects your right to live.
The seventh commandment, ‘Thou shalt not commit adultery,’ protects and strengthens the marriage relationship and the family by re-inforcing the need for sex to be kept between married couples. As well as protecting the marital relationship it also protects the family structure and the health, prosperity and well-being of its members. Families where the couples are faithful to each other are materially more prosperous and emotionally and psychologically healthier and stronger than those where sexual infidelity and divorce have weakened or broken that bond. Adultery and divorce are particularly problematic for women and children as they often bring poverty and poor life prospects in their wake – making the effects of divorce a multi-generational problem. As such the law not to commit adultery is one that protects the wife and her children in particular.
‘Thou shalt not steal,’ continues the theme of laying down marker points for the construction of a good society. Here the principle of private property is set out, what is mine is mine and what is yours is yours. As well as protecting the weak from robbery by the strong, the concept of property is the foundation of building prosperity in society. Property enables the owner to use the resources at his disposal and to keep the production of his labour. It thus enables the accumulation of wealth and the building up of a prosperous and strong people.
The first eight commandments have covered the place of God, work, family and property, the ninth and tenth consider the civic practice of justice and the civil virtue of self-restraint. The ninth law is ‘Thou shalt not bear false witness.’ Truth-telling, especially as it concerns matter of dispute between neighbours or law, is to be paramount. There can be no justice where there is no regard for the truth, without justice there can be no peace. A society without justice, and therefore without peace, is a broken society. The tenth and last commandment is different from the others in that it concerns not an action but an attitude. To covet is to enviously or greedily desire, to covet something which belongs to someone else is to store up wrongful desires in your heart. From the desire too often plans and actions will follow which disrupt the peace of the community. Covetousness brings strife between neighbours and breeds all kinds of wrong-doing. Self-restraint is the virtue that covers our coveting and maintains communal peace.
Though written for the construction of a good society the Laws are couched in terms of individual responsibility, ‘thou,’ the second person singular. They are for the individual to implement, though part of a larger community we do not lose our worth as individuals. It is up to us as individuals to build the society in which we are to live. We are building from bottom up, not conforming to a top-down model imposed on us by a ready built State apparatus. This model of society will not work if too many do not enact its precepts.
Understanding the Ten Commandments in this way, one can see can see how today’s Marxist inspired political movements are diametrically opposed to the Law of Moses. Explicitly atheistic they set aside the first three commandments, with a ’queer’ understanding of sexuality they disavow the fifth and the seventh. Holding property to be theft and advocating large scale state control of economic production (by coercive regulation) and distribution (by high taxation), they downgrade the fourth, eighth and tenth. Through abortion and euthanasia laws the sanctity of all human life set out in the sixth is set aside. Does the ninth law, not to bear false witness, still stand in the new revolution? One might hope so, but in a politicised, ideologically inspired revolution it is very easy for ‘justice’ to be twisted to the will of the powerful. The very term ‘justice’ has had its meaning changed in recent years, no longer is it the impartial arbitration and settlement of disputes between parties, ‘justice’ is now used as a code word for political levelling and radical egalitarianism. Sad to say but the ninth cannot be taken for granted in the new era. The old ways are being completely abolished and with it the hope of the New Jerusalem; William Blake would be weeping if he were alive today.
Peace between neighbours, strong families, a regular rhythm of work and rest, respect for life, property and justice – all built on the strong foundation of God, are the principles laid before us for a long, healthy and prosperous life in community. These principles were laid out some 3500 years ago but are as relevant today as when they were first revealed, we turn against them only to our peril. At the end of his days, as he looked out over the Promised Land that he was never to enter, Moses read the Law once more to the people of Israel. He divided the people into two camps and declared the benefits of following the Law to one camp and the inevitable perilous consequences of failing to abide by them to the other. On the one hand it was life to the full, to the other distress and death. Moses told the people to choose and the same choice is ours. Let us choose life.
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