Sin and the Ten Commandments

The ten commandments are not arbitrary laws that God gave to the Israelites, they have a very important goal. That goal is peace. The greatest problem of primitive societies, as well as modern ones, is internal violence. The ten commandments are not so much laws as they are a very astute exposition upon the nature of human desire. Human desire is by nature imitative, or as Rene Girard puts it, mimetic. The ten commandments recognize this. Commandments six through ten explain what happens when human desire becomes distorted, or more specifically when humans desire through the eyes of someone/something other than God/Jesus. Here Rene Girard discusses the ten commandments from his book I See Satan Fall Like Lightning.