There is no doubt as to the NUMBER of the Commandments. There are ten (Ex. 34:28; Deut. 4:13; 10:4).
It is their CONTENT which is of vital concern. It was not until the fourth century A.D. that this confusion even began to exist. It was then that Augustine (Catholic bishop of Hippo in North Africa) devised a new way of presenting the Ten Commandments in order to allow the use of images and statues in religious worship. He dropped the Second Commandment altogether, divided the Tenth into two “commandments,” and then renumbered his revised list of ten.
Dropping the Second Commandment makes it appear that there is only one commandment against idolatry. But, there are two kinds of idolatry — and two distinct commandments prohibit these two major sins:
- The First Commandment forbids worship of anything in the place of God (Ex. 20:3).
- The Second Commandment is altogether different and forbids bowing down to, serving, or otherwise using statues in the worship of God (Ex. 20:4-6). The latter is the one Catholics do not like, for obvious reasons.
