Excerpts from
The Ten Commandments The Master Key to Life by Emmet Fox Order in Adobe PDF eBook or printed form for $7.95 (+ printing charge) or click here to order from Amazon.com for $13.99 (or less) Book Description The master key to life -- a universal guide to all that matters in making life more satisfying. On the surface, the Ten Commandments are a great guide by which to live ones life. Moses having been educated to the highest levels in Egypt had the knowledge, then after meeting the priest (and his 7 daughters) in the wilderness was trained more in the spirit. Both the knowledge and the spirit went into these writings so that the most simplest understading of these were good, but also that those with great knowledge and spirit could ascertain the deeper meaning of the commandments. Emmet Fox brings out the deeper meanings in a scientific, but yet spiritual way that is truly a profound joy to read. FOREWORD DR. Emmet
Fox, the modern mystic, has the knack of
taking profound spirit-ual truths and explaining them in a simple way so
that all can understand and use them in their daily lives. Under his inspired
handling, the Bible comes to life, and what was sometimes dull and uninteresting
or obscure suddenly takes on new and vivid meaning. There have been many people
whose lives have been filled with new beauty and interest and joy through his inspired
words. Consequently,
there has long been a demand for copies of his sermons and lectures by Bible
students and seekers of Truth who have received healing and help through them.
Indeed, in response to this insistent demand, Dr. Fox promised to put into book
form especially his interpretation of the Ten Commandments, and the present
volume fulfills that promise. It represents a series of sermons which were delivered to
many thousands of persons in the Manhattan Opera House, The Ten
Commandments, as Moses gave them, set the stage for the rest of the Bible, and
when spiritually understood form a master key to the Bible and to life. There
is no problem that cannot be solved, nor any aspiration that cannot be
fulfilled when once the underlying meaning is absorbed and made a part of one's
life. God is always ready when we are, and in this book, Dr. Emmet Fox shows
how to get that divine contact which will bring a freshness and newness to
every department of your life. ―HERMAN WOLHORN CHAPTER 1 WHAT MOSES MEANS TODAY WE are
considering one of the most important sections in the Bible, a section which is
certainly not neglected, because the Ten Commandments are taught everywhere,
in It is
still true today that the people stand afar off from the thick darkness where
God is, but I am glad to say that that darkness is rapidly passing away. All
over the world, the main body of the people is getting the Truth about the
Omnipresence and Availability of God. They do not call it that as a rule.
However, they are learning and beginning to feel that God is something that we
have with us every day, in the most prosaic and ordinary things. God is not
just an abstract idea up in the sky, having no meaning in everyday life. That
concept is going. All kinds of people, all over the world, are beginning to get
the sense of God as a present, dynamic, real power for harmony, for healing,
and for freedom. There is
nothing in the world more thrilling than the Bible, particularly our Bible in
English. There is no literature in the world which comes within a thousand
miles of it for literary power, for graphic presentation, for dramatic expression,
for knowledge of human nature, and for human psychology, as it is the fashion
at the moment, to call it. Yet, I
wonder how many people have read these two chapters, let us say, within the
past year. How many would be astonished at the tremendous drama and human
psychology they would find there, if they would read them. Books and
magazines and articles, alleged to be psychology, are pouring off the presses.
The very word "psychology" would sell an old sin at the present
time. Yet here at home on the shelf, in the Bible, is the most powerful, practical
psychology ever written. The book
of Exodus, part of Chapters 19 and 20, is not only one of the most important
sections of the Bible, but also one of the most dramatic. I call it a section
because it is part of two chapters which belong together. The chaptering in
the Bible is not logical. The chapters, as we have them, were not made by the
authors, but at a much later date—later than the Middle Ages. The authors knew
nothing about our chapters. The works of these men were cut up for convenience
in handling and reading, just as you might take a long ribbon and a pair of
scissors and snip the ribbon off into separate yards. The verses also are quite
modern. They were made somewhere about the beginning of the seventeenth
century. And, of course, they are a very convenient device for reference. Now, this
section deals with what we call the Ten Commandments, and is one of the key
sections of the Bible. The Sermon on the Mount is another, and the first two or
three chapters of Genesis are another. This
section really sums up the whole Bible teaching. If we thoroughly understand
it, then we have the gist of the whole Bible. We have the underlying principle
that we can apply to understanding any part of the Bible, and that is the
scientific way to approach the Bible. It is one
of the most important sections for us because it teaches us the laws of life, and it is
only when we understand the laws of life that we become masters—masters of our
own conditions. Divine It is sad
to think how much good will and hard work have gone into Bible study in the
past with so little result. I have known people who worked like Trojans on
their Bible, not for a year, but for forty or fifty years, and at the end of
that time, they did not have the slightest inkling of the real Bible message.
They were nearly all rigid fundamentalists. They missed the whole beauty of
the Bible. They just took it literally, and were left at the end of their Bible
study with what they had started with, and nothing more. They started with the
belief in a rather terrible, very severe, limited God, Jehovah, who was going
to save a few people and send the rest to eternal torment; and they finished up
with that, after literally learning the Bible by heart. But in
this section, we get the underlying principle for understanding the whole
Bible. To begin
with, notice which book it comes in. This extraordinary treatise on human
nature and how it works, and how to find God, does not come in the book of Genesis
or Numbers or Proverbs. It comes in Exodus. What does the word
"Exodus" means? It means an exit, a going or a getting out—getting
out of trouble. An exit is
a way out, and with trouble, the idea is to get out quickly. The book of Exodus
deals with the getting out of limitation, which means the getting out of evil,
because all evil is limitation of one kind or another. It shows us how to get
out of our own limitation—our weakness, and fearfulness, and stupidity, and
sin, and sickness—and become the wonderful thing that God intended us to be. The Bible says
that we have dominion over all things—and we have—but we can only have that
dominion when we learn the laws of life and apply them. There is no dominion
without it. For
instance, we are, to a large extent, masters of electricity today because in
the past we studied the laws of electricity and applied them. Men like Edison,
Marconi, Ampere, and Faraday did not sit down and hatch up some dream out of
their own minds. No, Faraday, for example, got bits of wire and magnets, and
twirled them about, and studied their action and learned the laws governing
them. We have
the automobile today because people like Boyle studied the action of gases, and
what happened with compression and expansion. And this knowledge was applied
by people like Benz and others. They studied the laws appertaining to these
conditions, and applied them. The result is that for a comparatively small sum
today you can get a vehicle which Julius Caesar could not have got for the
whole So if we
want health, if we want happiness, if we want true self-expression, if we want
divine freedom, then we have to learn the laws of the human soul, and the laws
of psychology and metaphysics. We have to learn them and apply them—simplicity
itself. Not easy, but simple. These laws
are explained in the Bible. The Bible
was written by men who had extraordinary knowledge of these laws. They got it
through inspiration—as we can when we know how. Moses in
particular knew these laws extremely well. He was one of the greatest souls who
have ever come upon the Earth planet. He was a man of extraordinary
understanding and knowledge of God and of man. He was born with that potentiality,
having earned it when he had been on earth before. Then, he was born again into
the conditions which enabled him to use and develop those faculties. Just as a
person today, who is doing his very best to gain a knowledge of God—not for any
ulterior motive but for its own sake—a person who is trying to understand God,
and life, and what he is here for, and trying to live as well as he can; the
next time he comes here, he will be born into circumstances which will give him
every opportunity of getting a much fuller and higher knowledge early in life. Moses had
done that, and so he came into the world where he could best develop and do a
useful work, where he could be useful to people—because we are not developing
unless we are useful. We do not get spiritual development by going off by
ourselves and saying, "I will save my own soul, and the rest of the world
can go hang." That does not give any kind of spiritual development. It
will merely make you unhappy and self-centered. In order to develop spiritually
you must be doing something useful for other people, something unselfish. In
the old phrase, you must be doing your duty in the state of life in which you
happen to be called. No spiritual development will ever come with neglect of
duty. What we call our duty—and is our duty—is the opportunity to
express the spiritual understanding we have, and thereby to get more. Moses, of
course, is one of the great historical leaders of the human race. He is one of
those people who have really made history, and the story of his birth is
extremely important and significant, spiritually as well as materially. You
know the story. He was born in Well, the
king's daughter went into the river, and she saw this little basket, and she
opened it, and the child cried. Being human, her heart was touched. Who could
resist the cry of a small child? She immediately looked around, and out came
the sister; and you know the rest of the story, how the sister was sent to
fetch a woman to take care of the child, and she brought Moses' own mother. Now there
is one remarkable text here. Pharaoh's daughter says to the wo-man: "Take
this child, and nurse it, and I will give thee thy wages." You are
Pharaoh's daughter, you know. You probably did not know it but you are. In the
Bible sense, you are Pharaoh's daughter as soon as you become interested in
metaphysics, as soon as you reach out for the Christ truth. At that point you
are Pharaoh's daughter. You are saving the infant Moses. The infant Moses here
is that higher thing in you that draws you to this teaching, to this Truth. And
so, you take the child and nurse it and bring it up. What leads you to do that?
The power of God in you. We do not
go to God. God brings us to Himself. "You would not have sought Me had you
not already found Me." "We love Him because He first loved us."
It is the power of God in you that is doing it. God gives you the spiritual
idea and says to you, "Take this child." It is a
baby, you know. When we get the spiritual idea it is a baby. When it grows up
with us, we will not be here any longer. We could not live on this plane. As
soon as the spiritual
idea grows up in us we will go and never come back—we have moved from the
kindergarten up to high school. But it is
a baby, like the Christ child born in the stable, another way of putting the
story of the Wonder Child. So God gives us this child. It is feeble and it is
crying, and He says to you and to me, "Take this child, and nurse it, and
I will give thee thy wages." We have to nurse the infant Moses. We have to
nurse the Christ child. Now, how
do we nurse a child? By giving it nourishment. And how do we nourish the infant
Moses? By prayer and meditation. Otherwise, the child will starve, and our
chance for spiritual development will be gone for a long time. It will come
again, but not for a long time. The child will starve. However, if we take the
child and nurse it, we shall get our wages, and our wages shall be freedom,
peace of mind, harmony, true place, understanding, and the fellowship of God
Himself. These are the wages of prayer. Of course, we know the wages of sin is
death. And so the
Bible says, "Take this child, and nurse it." There is really nothing
else we can do for a baby but nurse it. The cleverest doctor who ever lived
could not turn a small baby into a grown-up man in three months. All you can do
is nurse it, and that is all you can do for the infant Moses. Nourish it. You
nourish it with your daily prayer and meditation and by the right thought all
day long, not fussily pouncing on every thought, but by knowing in a general
way that the Presence of God is with you, and refusing to give power to error.
Take this child and nurse it and God will give you your wages. The king's
daughter adopted this child, we are told in
this version, and Moses grew up as the adopted son of
the king's daughter. That meant that he was one of the most important people in
the kingdom. Now, of
course, according to modern ideas, the fact that he was adopted did not make
him of royal blood—but those are modern ideas. What one might call the pure
studbook of royalty or aristocracy belongs to We have
quite a national feeling in So Moses,
having been adopted by the king's daughter, had every possible privilege, as
though he were the king's actual grandson; and, as a matter of fact, many
people have always thought that he was. Well, he was brought up and educated
along Egyptian lines and he joined the priesthood. In the ancient world, if
you wanted to amount to anything you had to be either a soldier or an
ecclesiastic. The
ancient world did not very much respect anybody else. If you were a merchant or
a businessman or a farmer or a mechanic, you were a useful person and all that
sort of thing but you did not amount to anything. To command respect all over
Asia and to some extent in Moses was
a studious person with extraordinary spiritual leanings—that was what led him
into that opportunity—and being the adopted son of Pharaoh's daughter, he was
trained for the priesthood and he worked himself up to the highest ranks. In
the New Testament we are told that Moses was learned in all the learning of the
Egyptians. In those days, learning was kept a profound secret for certain
reasons, and as you worked up to the various ranks of the priesthood, you were
told certain things. When you got halfway up, for example, you were taught
geometry. Geometry was considered a valuable secret. It was used for
mensuration and for putting up the pyramids and very many other things. But
always remember that in the ancient world, the word "geometry" also
meant what we call metaphysics. What we call metaphysics was taught the
students of Plato, Socrates, and Pythagoras, and it was taught by all the
ancient leaders. How much they could get over to their followers was another
matter. However, they put up these barriers to learning for the general public.
They thought it was necessary. But remember
that the real barriers to spiritual understanding are within ourselves. There
is a limit to what anyone of us can learn—not a limit of time but a limit of
our mentality. If we are not ready for a spiritual truth neither Moses nor
Jesus Christ Himself could give it to us until we are ready for it. The object
of our prayers and meditations is to make ourselves ready for more
understanding; and when we are ready it must come. Always it is a question of
degree. The knowledge always comes when the consciousness is ready. Now, why
was Moses born in those particular circumstances at that particular time?
Because they correspond to his mentality. When Moses was born as that little baby,
he had that mentality. He had, of course, lived before. He had studied these
things, he had given his time to them, and, above all, he had tried to practice
them. The only
thing you have of spiritual knowledge is what you practice. What you read in books
you do not have. What you speak to others about you do not have. It is what you
practice that you incorporate in the subconscious, and it is with you for the
rest of this life and for future lives too. You can only take with you what you
incorporate in the subconscious mind. All the rest you have to leave behind—all
the things on the bookshelves and all the things you may have studied. It is
what you practice that stays with you. So Moses
had practiced these things in previous lives and therefore had prepared himself
for this extraordinary opportunity. Being the person he was he was naturally
drawn into the succession to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob. He followed on
from them. He was
trained in When you
study the Egyptian books you are struck by the number of different gods, and
particularly the animal gods. You see gods with the head of a cat. The
Egyptians were very fond of cats. I am rather fond of cats myself, but it is
interesting, is it not, that the cat is the only domestic animal that does not
appear in the Bible. You can go from Genesis to Revelation and you will find
some surprising things, but never a cat. Well, I will leave that with you. They
had gods with the head of a hawk, and gods with the heads of serpents. But the
higher priesthood did not believe in those things. The upper ranks of the
clergy did not think for a moment that a cat could be a god, or that a god
would clothe himself in the body of a hawk or a serpent. They knew that those
were symbols—the bull as the symbol for strength and power, the tiger
and the lion as a symbol also for strength and power of another kind, the dove
as a symbol for peace and diplomacy. They knew these things. It has
been the custom all through the Christian era to blame the priests of But there is
another side to it. Many people do not want the higher truth, even in this
twentieth century of ours. A lot of people's attitude is, "Let me alone.
Leave me where I am. I am quite comfortable. Do not upset me. I don't want to
go higher." The Egyptian people were exactly like us. We do not want the
higher truth, any one of us, in many parts of our lives. We see the beauty of
it, we love it, and we hunger for the protection which we think it has; but we
keep our lives full of things with cats' heads, snakes' heads, and all kinds of
things which we do not want to get rid of, rather than put the one God there
instead. When you and I want to put the one God there then it will be high time
to blame the Egyptians, and I think that when we reach that stage we will not
want to blame them. At any
rate, there they were, and Moses was trained in that teaching. And then you
know what happened. He always felt a kinship with his own people, and he went
among them. One day he
saw an Egyptian beating one of his people, and here is a wonderful sidelight on
the character of Moses. He immediately set upon him and beat him up. Moses was
by no means perfect. He had a terrible temper in the beginning. He set upon
this Egyptian and he was so angry that he beat him until he killed him. That is
quite a temper—for a person high up in the priesthood. Then he buried him in
the sand. Next day, he was walking about again and he saw two of his own people
quarreling. He stepped in. It was not his business a bit. So you see that he
had something else to learn. Then one of the men said to him, "Oh, are you
going to kill me as you killed that person yesterday and buried him over
there?" So Moses knew that his deed was known and he cleared out of When he
was out there he came to a well. Wells are of tremendous importance in those
lands where there is very little rain. The well means life itself. It is a
gathering place, a
gossiping place—very much as the corner grocery store was in the old days in At any
rate, this particular priest had these seven daughters who went to the well to
get the water for the family for drinking purposes, and cooking and washing,
and watering their flock. Some shepherds came to drive them away to get ahead
of them. But Moses again could not mind his own business. So he interfered, and
he seemed to be a pretty husky person. He drove off the shepherds and he helped
the seven girls to get the water. And their father sent for him, and before
very long—almost before Moses could turn around—he had married him off to the
eldest daughter. I want to show
you that the Bible is full of real drama, real human happenings. Moses was not
a statue by Michelangelo. He was a real person like yourself, full of difficulties,
searching out for God. This priest of Midian was not a statue. He was a living
man with seven daughters. And as soon as a stranger came along, an eligible
sort of person, a gentleman, a person of some importance—well, after all, a man
with seven daughters—he married her off! All right. That is the story. They
were real people, just as real as if they lived in Now
consider the spiritual part of this. Always in the Bible we must ask what the
name means. The Bible names always have a meaning. Moses means "drawn out
of the water," and we know that "water" in the Bible stands for
the human mind, the human personality, and especially the emotional nature. Of
course, nine tenths of your personality is your feelings, and one tenth your
knowledge. That is water, and Moses has to be drawn out of the water. It is
Moses who leads the children of Now we
have come to an extremely important Bible symbol— So this
child grew up and he led the people out of He knew
that the outer thing is only a picture. The Egyptian priesthood said,
"Yes, it is real, but we can manage it." They believed in what is
called mind over matter. They were very much in the position of some
psychologists today. They said, "Yes, the thing is there but we can manage
it. Yes, that is a tubercular lung but we can heal it." Moses, however,
knew that the outer thing is only a picture and that anything that seems to be
evil, no matter what it is, is still but a false belief. He knew that life is
consciousness, and only the very, very few, the very elect among the human race,
have known that—until Jesus came and taught it to the people. Moses knew it.
Abraham knew it. Gautama Buddha knew it. The very elect of the early Hindu
teachers knew it, and although they did not keep it secret—they gave it to
their students—their students could not understand it and therefore could not
get it; just as Jesus tried to teach it to the Twelve Apostles and not one of
them got it until after the Day of Pentecost. They had the words but not the
understanding of the thing. Then,
before Moses starts his work he has to conquer himself. He has to realize that
he is full of limitation. He sees himself killing someone. He sees himself
interfering—a dramatization of his own faults. And so he goes into the
wilderness to overcome that. The first step toward God is to realize our own
unworthiness. As long as we are pleased with ourselves we cannot get to God.
The most difficult barrier between men and God is self-righteous-ness,
spiritual pride. So long as we think, "I am not such a bad person. I am pretty
good. I am rather spiritual," we cannot get to God. It is not until we
realize our complete unworthiness without God that we can become one with Him.
Then we shall realize our worthiness but we shall know that it is within and
not something separate. So Moses
had to go into the wilderness and realize his faults. That was the Always you
will find that there has to be time alone with God. If you cannot stand that,
well, you will have to wait for God until you can. So Moses
goes into the wilderness. We know historically that he did meet these seven
daughters, and he married one of them. That is historical, but on the spiritual
side, the priest stands for the approach to God. Of course,
the seven daughters are the Seven Main Aspects of God. There are seven avenues
through which humanity can approach God in the present age. There are others,
but they do not concern us because they do not belong to us in the present
age. There are seven different aspects of God and we learn about God by realizing these
aspects. They are Life, Truth, Love, Intelligence, Soul, Spirit, and Principle.
Always for each of us there is one which is easier for us than the others.
There is one which will be easier for us to realize and that is the one we
should concentrate upon most. Well,
Moses marries one of these daughters. Always in the Bible and in Oriental
literature, you will find that marriage is used as the symbol for the union of
God and man. The Old Testament says, "Thy Maker is thy husband," and
all through the Bible the soul is spoken of as the bride, and the Christ power
as the bridegroom. And now we
are told of the Israelites in Then it
says, "God heard their groaning, and God remembered His covenant . . .
and took knowledge of it." You will remember that covenant in which, if we
fill our minds with good and expect only good, then only good will come to us.
And if we fill our minds with evil and expect evil, evil must come to us. In
proportion that evil is in our thoughts, so will trouble be in our lives. And
so it says that God remembered the covenant and took mind of the children of In But in Moses, as
we have seen, was brought up in that. He learned all about these things, and he
learned things that no college or textbook could teach—things that only God
teaches direct. And of course, he also learned by experience. As a rule, the
great drawback to academic people is that they know nothing about life. The trouble
with our professors is that, like the Lady of Shalott, they turn their backs
on the world and look into a mirror, the mirror being a book, and they see men
not as they are, but as they are reflected in books and libraries. For
instance, most people in Moses,
however, went among the general public, the common people, and learned to
understand them; consequently, he balanced his academic knowledge with a practical
knowledge of life. He knew people and he knew human nature. He loved mankind,
but as he looked around him he was saddened at the unnecessary suffering in the
world. He saw all kinds of men and women, from the king of So he decided
he would put his knowledge at their disposal. He knew the causes of their
suffering and unhappiness. He knew why they were wasting their lives and not
getting anywhere—because they spent their time struggling with the outer thing,
and leaving their consciousness unchanged. He knew that as long as people did
that, even if they did it for a million years, the world would still be full of
strife, wars, labor troubles, booms followed by depressions, and so forth. So
he set to work and drew up his teaching in a manner which he thought best
calculated to help everybody. First of
all, he wanted to help the people who did not think—who accepted everything at
its face value—but who needed some rough and ready rules to go by. So he put
his rules in the form of Commandments in order that they would be understood by
that kind of people. But he
knew that there is a stage beyond this and that when people reached that stage
they needed something more. Moses, who
was one of the greatest prophets who ever lived, got his knowledge of the human
heart. Then, when he had prayed and meditated, he received his inspiration
direct from God—he got his illumination. He set down and described the human
soul and the way it works. He described it in this writing which we break into
ten clauses and call the Ten Commandments. In the
Bible they are very brief, very concise, whereas our modern psychology is
extremely nebulous and windy and wordy. If you ever try to read Freud, you will
see at once what I mean. You know how Freud takes ten pages to say what a newspaperman
might say in five, what a good writer might say in three, and what Moses said
in one. In that one page there is more about the working of the human mind than
in all the writings of the modern psychologists, to say nothing of the ancient
ones. The Ten
Commandments at their face value are true
and valid, but that is only the beginning. If people
are going to get anywhere, if they are going to escape from the continuous
strife and struggle of life, they must have something more. So within
these Commandments, he concealed the laws of psychology for those who were
ready for them. And within that again, he concealed the deepest and highest
spiritual teaching for those who were ready for that. In other words,
Moses designed these laws of life so that the higher we go spiritually, or the
deeper we go intellectually, the more we can get out of them. Order
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