How many fingers do you have? Ten. How many toes do you have? Ten. God thought ten was a good number when he was making us. If you hurt one of your fingers, it’s hard to get the other ones to work right. Sometimes you have to put a band-aid on your finger if it is hurt. It’s hard to hold a crayon if you have a bandage on your finger.

God used the number ten in the Bible, too. When the children of Israel were slaves in Egypt, God sent ten plagues on the Egyptian people because their king wouldn’t let the people out of slavery. A plague is something bad or sad.  But the king wouldn’t listen to God and let the people go for a long time. Some of the plagues that happened to the people were there were frogs were everywhere, locusts came and got on everything, flies were all over the place, and the water turned to blood. It was really bad. But the king was stubborn and didn’t want to let all the slaves go. Finally, he let them go and Moses took them all out of Egypt. After they left there, God gave Moses the Commandments for the people. A commandment is a rule or a law that the people were supposed to obey. There were ten of these rules and we call them the Ten Commandments.

God used the number ten when He created us, when He was trying to get the bad king to listen to Him, and when He was teaching the people how to live and obey Him. The ten plagues ended the slavery for the children of Israel and the Ten Commandments ended the people wondering what God wanted them to do. They still didn’t always follow his rules, but they knew what God expected from them.