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THE COMMANDMENTS
 Part I 
Commandments I, II, III Our Duty to God 
 
nathttp://mycatholicfaith-n.blogspot.com 
 
The Commandments of God
Part 1
 
The Commandments - I
 
Commandments I, II, III Our Duty to God 
EVERY man knows that there is such a thing as right and wrong. He may be mistaken aboutwhat is right and what is wrong. But he does know there is a difference. When it comes to thepoint of an action and he decides to do the right thing he is following his conscience. That isto say he has decided that one course of action is right and the other course is wrong.
THE MAKER’S INSTRUCTIONS
IT is clear enough though that we cannot simply rely on “conscience” to give the rightanswers. During World War II,
Arthur T Harris more commonly
known as
 Bomber Harris’
 conscience told him it was right to wipe out millions of innocent Germans, women andchildren, the elderly, the sick and infirm, by his indiscriminate and hideous fire bombing of German cities. (e.g. Hamburg, Dresden etc.)
(Sir Arthur T Harris Bt. 1892-1984)
 President Harry S Truman’s (1884-1974) conscience told him it was right to annihilate over amillion innocent Japanese souls, in the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, when he droppedatomic bombs on them in 1945.Your conscience or mine says that those acts were vile evil murder. These are flagrant knownexamples. But there are plenty of cases where men judge quite differently about the sameaction. We have to ask: Has God given us any principles to go on? He made us. He knowshow we ought to live. What we want are the Maker’s instructions. We are bound to followour conscience. But our conscience must be rightly informed.
THE LAW OF LOVE
WHEN Christ was asked what was the greatest commandment of the law He answered:
Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with thy whole heart and with thy whole soul and with thywhole mind. This is the greatest and the first commandment. And the second is like to this:Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.
(Matt. xxii.)So the test of all morality is love. Our biggest difficulty is that the love of ourselves may keepgetting in the way of our love of God and our love of our neighbour. And so we should keepasking God to teach us to love Him and to help us love one another. True love of God andtrue love of our neighbour is a gift from God; it is what we call Charity.The great test of love is whether we do what God wants us to do.
 If you love Me keep My commandments.
(John xiv. 15.)It is all very well to feel a sort of rosy glow. But that is not enough. We show our real love bydoing what God wants us to do, by trying to please Him. And since He made us and knowsPage 2 of 7
 
The Commandments of God
Part 1
 what is best for us, in doing what He wants we are in fact doing the best thing for ourselves.“In His will is our peace” said a great poet.
GOD’S PLAN FOR USWE should not consider the Ten Commandments of God as a sort of set of rules that Hehas made up just to test us.
They are in fact the plan of life for us. They are the way inwhich God has designed us to live.The Ten Commandments were given by God to Moses the leader of His chosen people. Butthey were no new thing even then. They are written in the “heart of man” in the sense that wecan discern them for ourselves. But because of that flaw in our nature inherited from our firstparents we can get a very twisted notion of what is the law of God. That is why you findmankind going off into strange perversions like the worship of false gods, idols, humansacrifice, and the like.And so God in the Ten Commandments gives us on His own authority the natural law - thelaw which is part of our nature. The Ten Commandments are as follows:“I am the Lord thy God, who brought thee out of the land of Egypt, and out of the houseof bondage.1. Thou shalt not have strange gods before Me. Thou shalt not make to thyself any graventhing, nor the likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or in the earth beneath, nor of those things that are in the waters under the earth. Thou shalt not adore them nor servethem.2. Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain.3. Remember that thou keep holy the Sabbath day.4. Honour thy father and thy mother.5. Thou shalt not kill.6. Thou shalt not commit adultery.7. Thou shalt not steal.8. Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour.9. Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s wife.10. Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s goods.”
(This is a summary of the Commandments as given in the Bible (Deut. v. 1-21.) The Protestant (e.g.Church of  England, Anglican, etc., etc.) numbering is slightly different. They divide the First Commandment as givenabove into two and so the Protestant Third Commandment will be our Second, their Sixth will be our Fifth, etc.Our Ninth and Tenth Commandments are the Tenth Commandment only in the Protestant version. It is a small point, the content is the same, only the numbering is different.)
 This and the following text will not attempt to be a full treatise on the Commandments. Weshall simply mention the main points briefly in each one.
FIRST COMMANDMENT
 COMMANDMENTS 1, 2 and 3 are concerned particularly with our duties towards God.What must be our attitude to God? We must love Him because He is supremely good, andbecause He is infinitely good to us. We must believe Him. We must trust Him. And anythingPage 3 of 7
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