Do you remember when you were little and you liked to pretend you were a cowboy or a firemen? Well for a few moments I would like for you to pretend that you are a doctor. I have just come into your office and I tell you that my stomach is feeling a little queasy and I have a little bit of a fever. Tell me your diagnosis.

Okay time’s up. You probably diagnosed the flu. Right? Good diagnosis. Now I come in with shortness of breath and a tight chest and my left arm is hurting What is your diagnosis now? Time’s up, again. If you guessed heart issues, I want you as my doctor.

Now what would you call all of the things that I was describing to you as I sat in your office? The queasy stomach, the tightness in my chest, the fever are all symptoms. Now as a doctor, do you treat the symptoms or do you treat the root cause of the symptoms? Hopefully you answered that you would treat the root cause, whether it is my heart or the flu or whatever is at the bottom of my symptoms. I am not a doctor but I think that is what they do. Which I believe is the right thing to do.

Okay, enough pretending, let’s get to the real world. When God came to this earth and chose a group of people to show the rest of the people on this planet who He was, He gave them ten words to follow. Today we would know them as the Ten Commandments. In Exodus 19, He told them through Moses that “if indeed you would obey my voice and keep my covenant, than you shall be a special treasure to me above all people; for all the earth is mine. And you shall be to me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.” God spoke through Moses and said in a sense that these people would display Him to all other people. So that when they saw them and how they acted the other people would say “Oh! That’s what God looks like.”

That is where the ten words or commandments come in. They were a covenant between God and a people. Can we even wrap our heads around that? God making a covenant with created beings. The one who spoke all things into existence wanting to be in covenant with us. Wow! Most people look at the Ten Commandments as a set of rules that we have to live by. A set of rules to ruin our fun and run our lives. Wrong.

They were given to them because He loved them and wanted to protect them from themselves. As I have said before in other articles for this column, nothing that is in the scriptures was written to harm us. God cares for all He has created and these Ten Commandments prove it.

Now, I want you to think about something. When you go to the doctor and have symptoms, the doctor treats the root cause, not the symptoms. Well, for years the church has been treating the symptoms rather than the root cause. We talk about adultery or stealing or not honoring our parents. These are the symptoms of a root cause. And that root cause is failing to adhere to the first commandment and that is not putting other Gods before Him. We have found many ways and things to replace God as number one in our lives, which I believe dishonors God. If we were to put God first in every aspect of our lives, at our jobs, in our marriages, at school, in the marketplace, I do believe the last nine would take care of themselves. The greatest issue we face today is not mere moral failure; it is the failure to honor God. Go to the root — it will take care of the symptoms. May God bless you as you seek after Him.

Phillip D. Beck is pastor of Central Community Church, Transfer.