The Ten Commandments

It is Thomas Watson's exposition of the moral law — taking each of the Ten Commandments in turn and showing what it forbids, what it requires, and how it drives a person to Christ. Part of his Body of Practical Divinity, it was delivered as catechism lectures to a London congregation and remains a searching, richly practical treatment of the commandments.

Thomas Watson was a Puritan pastor in London in the seventeenth century, ejected from his pulpit in 1662 for nonconformity, and one of the most quotable of the Puritan writers. His works on the catechism — including this one on the commandments — combine doctrinal soundness with vivid, memorable application, and have been treasured ever since.

In the classic Puritan manner: for each commandment he shows both the sin it forbids and the duty it requires, since a command against one thing implies a command toward its opposite. So the commandment against stealing, for instance, also requires honesty and generosity. He then presses each home to the conscience with searching application.

No — and this is central to his purpose. Watson shows the law's height and our failure to reach it precisely so that the commandments will drive the reader to Christ. The law, in his hands, is a mirror that reveals sin and a schoolmaster that leads to the gospel; it cannot save, but it can expose our need of the Saviour who kept it for us.

Watson, with the Puritan tradition, holds that the moral law summarized in the commandments remains the enduring standard of holiness for the believer — not as a way of salvation, which is by grace alone, but as the rule of a grateful, obedient life. The Christian is freed from the law's curse, he teaches, but not from its guidance.

His gift for vivid, pithy application. Watson fills his lectures with striking images, homely comparisons, and searching questions that fasten the truth to the conscience. The doctrine is thorough but never dry; readers remember his phrases, and generations have found his treatment of the commandments both instructive and deeply convicting.

Any Christian wanting to understand the moral law deeply and to be searched by it, and anyone drawn to the practical, heart-searching divinity of the Puritans. It serves as both a doctrinal exposition of the commandments and a devotional work that examines the reader's own obedience and drives them repeatedly to Christ.

At the beginning, or with whichever commandment presses on the reader's own conscience, since Watson's treatment of each stands largely on its own. Read as part of his larger Body of Divinity it fits into a whole, but taken by itself it rewards slow, prayerful reading, one commandment at a time, letting each search the heart.