Ten out of Ten

With Jen Wilkin you always know what you’re getting. Every sentence is backlit like a quality tablet, and most us can read her magazine columns and books without the use of a dictionary.

Also, from first to last paragraph you have evidence that she’s a mother, home-maker, and Sunday School teacher who embraces her Bible, her church, her family, and her audiences in one huge, irresistible hug.

Take the opening words of her latest book: Ten Words to Live By: Delighting in and Doing What God Commands (Crossway, 2021):

“This is a book about the law of God in all of its life-giving beauty. In the church today there exists a great forgetfulness about the role of the law in the life of the believer. This book is an exercise in remembrance”—which, I’d add, no one will easily forget!

The Ten Words are, of course, the Ten Commandments given to Moses on Mount Sinai to serve the Israelites as they left behind pagan Egypt and entered pagan Canaan. They were assured that obedience to these ten guides would result in life and blessing. As Wilkin reminds us, they comprise the moral law of the Old Testament, undergirding its civil and ceremonial laws.

Then, with a typical Wilkin grin, she points out that although the ten commandments are perhaps the best-known example of moral law, few people can actually recite them. Most Americans can much more easily list the seven ingredients of a Big Mac. Or, going back a few years, name all six members the Brady Bunch.

When the ten commandments aren’t forgotten, they are often wrongly perceived, suggests Wilkin. They suffer from a PR problem. They are seen by many as the obsolete utterances of a thunderous, grumpy God to a disobedient people, neither of whom seem very relatable or likable. Because so many of us have trouble seeing beauty in these commandments, forgetting them comes easily.

So Wilkin sheds her distinctive light on ten explanatory segments that include undivided allegiance, undiminished worship, untarnished names, the role of unhindered rest, and the importance of honoring elders, life itself, marriage, property, and reputation.

Also, a firm avoidance of covetousness, which she believes hides in the heart, and should rather be connected to the contentment that confirms that God has given what is good to all of us. 

      Wilkin points out that these ten areas of concern range from “Don’t do it,” to “Don’t say it,” to “Don’t even think about it!”

She is particularly firm on the issues of dual allegiance—what James 1:8 refers to as double-mindedness—idolatry in any form. Wilkin insists: “We are made in the image of one God, to bear the image of one God.” 

She observes that our modern-day idolatry tends to be a “both-and” arrangement. I need God and I need a spouse. I need God and I need a smaller waist size. I need God and I need a well-padded bank account. And so on. We have to bury our “both-ands,” says Wilkin.

Respectfully and methodically, she nudges us toward her tenth area of concern, those words that summarize the pattern of Christlikeness and stir in us a longing for the kingdom to come. The words, as she puts it, that convict us, shape us, and give us hope. Words that steady and strengthen us on the narrow path that leads us home; and where we find our delight, day and night, in the law of the Lord (Ps. 1:2).

        A delight similar to that which, I suspect, many readers will take in Wilkin’s book itself—a deeply-felt exploration of of the ten best known yet widely undervalued pathways to health and healing in the whole of the Bible.