Greetings Nate

Sorry that email attempt didn’t go through, I filled in the comment information as tongue-in-cheek since I was commenting on a bible reference. I usually don’t post email address to avoid spam harvesters. I’ll send you a personal email to avoid the spammers if you would like to email me directly. Sorry about the unobvious attempt at humor

I have to agree that the people who are protesting are a bit misguided in the battle that they are fighting.

The essential message of the 10 commandments was directed to the jews who were freed in Exodus. It was part of their covenant with God for freeing them. It layed down the law for them to follow so as to be ‘free of sin’ and enabled a relationship with God for them. There were many other rules and ritual sacrifices for the people to follow in order to ’stay clean’ and be in ‘good standing’ with God. If any of the rules were broken, the penalty was usually death in order to convey the holiness of the rules in maintaining God’s relations.

The New Testament changed the standing of the people. God sent the Christ to free the jews from the law and to avail His grace to the gentiles(non-jews for those not familiar with the term). Thus, the gentiles were never required to follow the 10 commandments. This is not to say that one should *not* follow them as a suggestion, just that its [the law] importance to salvation is eliminated. Christ’s sacrifice wipes out the need to suffer the penalty of death for sin. Thus was the purpose of the ritual sacrifices, to ‘clean the sin’ of the jewish people.

So to conclude this somewhat long post…

The 10 commandments do not equal salvation. In the grand scheme of things God intended to let them fall by the wayside. The people should let the monument go and stop wasting their energy.

The references are as follows:
In Exodus 34:10-28 God made a covenant with the jews and laid out the laws to follow for their salvation at the time. But if you look at John 3:16-18 you can see that belief in and acceptance (and receipt) of the Christ Jesus is the path to salvation.

So to reiterate, yes the poeple are misguided, but not idolators. They view the event as a direct attack on the word of God. They are attempting to show their devotion to God by defending the word of God through protesting the monument’s removal. Until its removal, I would risk to speculate that those people would only think about the monument in passing.

I believe that they feel internally, if they do not protest, then they would have to question their devotion to God’s word. For to let a monument of God’s word be forcably removed without a single protest would reveal that no one cared about the word of God. It is easy to judge people but difficult to empathize with their actions. You have to look deeper than black-and-white (no pun intended).

However, strip away the monument of the 10 commandments and the essential message of the bible is far from diminished.