Thou Shall Not Eat Rotten Bananas

A friend of mine related this story to me about her attempt to teach an ornery 5 year old neighbor boy about the Ten Commandments. She began by asking if he’d ever heard of them, and he said no.  “OK, good, a clean slate”, she thought.  While not the most attentive pupil, he listened as she explained 1-5.  As she paused before going on to #6, he was able to wrestle control of the lesson. With an aloof tone, and rolling eyes he boldly blurted out,  “Oh, everyone knows #6, it’s don’t eat rotten bananas, or play with broken toys, just throw them out!”  End of Bible teaching for the day, you can’t argue with that kind of wisdom.  After I stopped chuckling, I got to thinking about God’s Top 10 List.  While it evolved into the weighty LAW, it began as a gift of grace to the people of Israel.

Hearken back with me to the days before the commandments were the law of the land.  The Hebrew people had been living in Egypt for at least 400 years, and for a number of those years, they were slaves to their hosts.  God, working through his man, Moses, freed them from oppression, and led them to the land he had promised. Now, consider the mindset of these folks.  The strong beliefs and traditions that their ancestors had held, had become diluted in the river of paganism. It was a wishy-washy religion, at best, and worse yet, they had developed a slave mentality.  None of them had ever known what it meant to be a nation governing and caring for themselves, they were, and had always been slaves. God couldn’t let a group like that just walk out of Egypt with no direction, they simply weren’t prepared.  So, in his love, he established the basic rules for his beloved children to follow.  These were not meant to be harsh or restrictive, but rather to encourage them to be focused; on their families, the care of their possessions, common sense tenets of behavior and most of all centered on Him.

 King David sings of the joy he finds in God‘s law when he says, “The boundary lines have fallen for me in pleasant places; surely I have a delightful inheritance.” Psalm 16:6. Loving and serving God isn’t about merely keeping the law, instead the loving “fences” he has built around us are meant to keep us safe, joyful and in relationship with him.  So throw out those rotten bananas, it’s for your own good!