Fire on the Mountain, Commandments Nine and Ten: Hosanna to the Son of WHO???

This week we finish a long journey through the Ten Commandments — the Ten Words that God spoke from Sinai, the moral law that has shaped the conscience of Western civilization and, more importantly, the conscience of every person who has tried honestly to live before God. We landed on the Ninth and Tenth Commandments, and it was not comfortable. But it was, in the end, more than we could have hoped for.

The Ninth Commandment — "You shall not bear false witness" — plants us first in a courtroom. Ancient Israel conducted its legal proceedings at the city gate, and the testimony of witnesses was the engine of justice. To lie under oath was to corrupt the whole system, to weaponize the court against the innocent. The commandment still stands against perjury, bribery, and the manipulation of truth for personal gain.

But the commandment reaches further than any courtroom. We are all witnesses. The way we live speaks about God — truthfully or falsely. When a marriage is kept faithfully through hard years, it testifies to the covenant faithfulness of God. When it is abandoned for convenience, that testimony is reversed. Our lives are always saying something about the character of the God we claim to worship. The Ninth Commandment asks: is what your life is saying true?

Thomas Watson, the seventeenth-century Puritan, put it sharply: the slanderer, he wrote, "murders three at once — he kills himself, for God hates the backbiter; he kills the person he slanders; and he kills those who listen." The sins of the tongue — slander, gossip, the whispered word dressed up as a prayer request — are not minor infractions. They are acts of violence. And behind them all, Jesus tells us, is the father of lies himself, for whom lying is a native language.

The Tenth Commandment goes deeper still. "You shall not covet." All the other commandments regulate action. This one reaches into the chamber of desire and shines a light there. Covetousness is the insatiable craving for what God has not given — or the love of good things treated as ultimate things, which is idolatry. The pattern is as old as the garden: she saw, she desired, she took. That sequence — seeing, wanting, seizing — is the engine beneath every other sin in the Decalogue. Address the desire, and you address the root.

This is the complex nature of the devilish assault on the human soul. It’s often referred to as “the world, the flesh, and the devil” - the enticing world around us, the sinful desire within us, and the demonic, tempting darkness beneath us. And “the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life” conspire together with those other three to dominate us and enslave us to unrighteousness, destroying us and those around us.

Paul, trained as a Pharisee and accomplished in keeping the external law, testified that this was precisely the commandment that broke him open. He could restrain his hands. He could govern his tongue. But the commandment against coveting reached into a place no external religion could follow, and there he found not righteousness but ruin. "I would not have known what sin was had it not been for the law," he writes in Romans 7:7. The law did not save him. It showed him what he was. And that revelation was, in the end, a gift — because it drove him to the one who could actually do something about it.

That’s what the word of God, that is the Law, always does. It is the terror of the bad news that paves the way for the beauty of the good news.

The Man on the Roof

And so we turned to 2 Samuel 11 — to a story that is almost unbearable in its clarity. It is spring, the time when kings go to war. But David stays home. One evening, he walks onto his roof, and he sees a woman bathing. She is beautiful. Something moves in him that has nothing to do with love.

He saw. He coveted. He sent for her. He committed adultery. When the consequences arrived, he engineered a cover-up — recalling her husband Uriah from the battlefield, hoping the man would sleep with his wife and muddy the question of paternity. But Uriah, with an integrity that stands as a quiet rebuke throughout the whole chapter, refused to go home while his comrades slept in open fields. So, David had him killed. He arranged it with cold precision: place Uriah at the front, then pull back. And covered it all up as men with power and prestige and connections are capable of doing.

Count the commandments broken.

David coveted - the tenth. He committed adultery — the seventh. He stole — the eighth. He murdered — the sixth. He constructed an elaborate deception — the ninth. He despised the authority of God and his word — the fifth. In a single dark season, David descended through the entire second table of the law, breaking every single commandment.

Who did that? David. The man after God's own heart. The giant-killer. The author of the Twenty-Third Psalm. What he should have been doing, he did not do; what he ought never to have done, he did.

And then the prophet Nathan came to the palace and told a story — a rich man who seized a poor man's single beloved lamb to feed a guest. David's anger burned. "The man who did this must die!" And Nathan said four words:

"You are the man."

No rank protects you from that sentence. No achievement, no legacy, no number of psalms written. When God's word speaks, the cover is torn away. And here is the terrible mercy of it: Nathan's rebuke was an act of grace. God could have left David in his delusion. Instead, he sent a prophet to say: I see you. I know. Come out of the darkness.

David did not harden himself. He confessed his sin. Years later, reflecting on his great sin and attempted cover-up scheme (as if God, who is present everywhere and sees all things, the One before whose eyes all things are known, could be fooled), David wrote a song about his agonizing expedition into lawlessness.

For when I kept silent, my bones wasted away
    through my groaning all day long.
For day and night your hand was heavy upon me;
    my strength was dried up as by the heat of summer.

The song didn’t end with that nightmare of suffering in body and soul. That’s good news. Nathan didn’t stop at, “You are the man.” When David responded, “You’re right. That’s who I am. I repent”, Nathan continued, “The Lord has forgiven you….” Nathan preached the Law that exposed David’s sin. And Nathan also preached the gospel that God had forgiven it.

That’s why the lyric continues -

I acknowledged my sin to you,
    and I did not cover my iniquity;
I said, “I will confess my transgressions to the Lord,”
    and you forgave the iniquity of my sin.

Psalm 32 wasn’t the last song he would write about those days, the undeserved mercy given to him, and the grace that’s available to us all.

He also wrote Psalm 51 — five of the most nakedly honest sentences in human literature. "Have mercy on me, O God, according to your unfailing love... For I know my transgressions, and my sin is always before me." He brought no merit, no résumé, no record of prior service. He brought his brokenness. And he discovered something that every sinner must eventually discover: that there is a righteousness which is not earned but given, not achieved but received, not found in the self but credited from outside.

"Wash me, and I will be whiter than snow….A broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise…create in me a clean heart O God and renew a right spirit within me. Cast me not away from Thy presence, and take not Thy Holy Spirit from me. Restore unto me the joy of Thy salvation, and renew me with Thy free Spirit.”

Friends, there is more mercy in God than there is sin in us. The righteousness of God is a gift greater than the unrighteousness of our sinful souls. The blood of Jesus washes away every stain from every repentant sinner.

Hosanna to the Son of David

Fast forward several centuries. Passover week has just begun. A stranger is riding into Jerusalem, and exuberant crowds are hailing his arrival. They spread their cloaks on the road and cried out a name that ought to stop us cold: "Hosanna to the Son of David!"

That name. How?

How can the Messiah bear the name of an adulterer and a murderer?

How do we sing his Psalms?

How do we treasure his prophetic words?

How does any of this hold together?

Matthew gives us the answer in the very first chapter of the New Testament, right there in the genealogy most readers skip: "David was the father of Solomon, whose mother had been Uriah's wife." The scandal is in the family tree, unretraced and unretracted and unredacted. The Messiah enters human history through the wreckage of human sin — not in spite of it, but through it. Because he came to carry it.

The man on the donkey rides into Jerusalem, heading toward a cross. He does not merely diagnose our sin, as the law does. He bears it. He absorbs it. He takes on himself the full weight of every false word, every covetous desire, every cover-up, every violation of every commandment — and it dies with him. What the law was powerless to do, God did by sending his own Son. The law pointed at David and said, "You are the man." The gospel points to Jesus on the cross and says, "He is the substitute."

Paul takes a breath after Romans 7 — after all his reckoning with the law's exposure of his sin — and opens Romans 8 with the most liberating sentence he ever wrote: "There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus." Not reduced condemnation. Not condemnation for the really serious sins, but not the smaller ones. No condemnation. David's broken prayer — "Wash me, and I will be whiter than snow" — is answered, definitively and permanently, at Calvary.

Palm Sunday is not simply a triumphal parade. It is the beginning of the answer to every honest prayer ever prayed by someone who knows they have nothing to bring. The crowd's cry — "Hosanna!" — means "Save us, we pray." It is desperation dressed in the clothing of triumph. And it was exactly right. We lay our robes in the dust because Christ must clothe us with his robe of righteousness.

We all stand somewhere in this story. We have coveted what is not ours. We have covered up what we are. We have borne false witness — with our words and with the lie of our lives. We are sinful. And we’d be eternally lost were it not for God’s mercy greater than our sin.

You see, the Son of David — who came through the very wreckage of human sin to enter our world — has come for exactly such people.

Hosanna. Save us, we pray. There is therefore now no condemnation.

This post is drawn from yesterday's Palm Sunday sermon, the final message in our series on the Ten Commandments. The sermon text, along with the full series, is available on our website.