Commandments are absolutely essential in order to help someone come to God.
9 The fear of the Lord is clean, enduring for ever: the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.
10 More to be desired are they than gold, yea, than much fine gold: sweeter also than honey and the honeycomb.
11 Moreover by them is thy servant warned: and in keeping of them there is great reward. (Psalm 19)
Commandments are a critical source for training our model of God. Commandments expose differences between how you and God would act in a particular circumstance, facilitating your choice to change in order to become more like him in that thing.
The term commandment generally refers to a rule which prescribes a specific behavior in a specific circumstance. But commandments are not limited to just rules, nor are rules the highest form of a commandment.
Commandments are given as a way to help train us towards a character more like God’s. All commandments are not equal in this task.
The finite nature of rules ensures a disconnect between static commandments and the fullness of God’s character and knowledge. Rules can only provide snapshots of God’s character as it applies to a specific degree of understanding and a specific situation. God’s character and knowledge predict his behavior and desires in all situations.
Rules do not apply to all situations—just the situations for which the rule is given. Principles, on the other hand, are general. They can be applied across a broad swath of circumstances.
The more general a commandment is, the less prescriptive it is in how to live it. For example, while God has commanded us to be like he is, or to love others as he loves us, knowing how to do those things would require either knowing him or receiving many more commandments more specific than the first.
As we learn a new commandment, we don’t need to stop at merely obeying the immediate context of the commandment. We can use the commandment to tune our model of God by expanding or improving our understanding of how God would act in other situations. In this way, commandments can reveal more of God’s character to us. We learn God’s character in the same way we get to know the character of other people: through observing them in different situations in order to become successively more correct in our prediction of how they would act in others.