Laws About Altars

Story:  Laws About Altars

Passage: Exodus 20:22-26

Characters:  God, Israel

Summary:    God gave Moses a set of laws about altars.  First He repeated that they should never have any idols.  Then he said altars should be made of earth.  If it is made of stone, it must not be hewn, and there must not be stairs leading up to it. 

  

Notes:  God begins by reminding the people that they have heard His voice and seen His presence.  He uses this to remind them to not make idols.  His logic is basically that they had seen His power and majesty and heard His voice.  They know He is alive, so they should not worship something that is not alive.  We will see how they utterly fail at this later.  God specifies He wants an altar made of earth.  He wants a simple looking altar.  The glorious thing about an altar of God is not the altar itself, but the God who the altar is for.  Ultimately, the greatest sacrifice was made on an altar of two pieces of wood.  God promises in the middle of this passage to bless the people wherever they go.  If the altar is made of stone, it must not be cut stone.  The glory and praise for the altar should not go to anyone but God.  Rather that the material being crafted by a human, it is to be natural stone crafted by God.  There were to be no steps leading up to the altar so that their nakedness would not be exposed.  Going up stairs would reveal flesh.  It is hard to keep your legs covered going up stairs.  I believe this is symbolic of the fact that our flesh is in perfect conflict with His holiness.  Our flesh has no place at the altar. 

Questions:  Why could there be no stairs?  Why did God not want altars made of other materials?

Lessons:  We see in this passage that God is really emphasizing that He does not want us to worship idols.  This is a big deal to God.  In fact, our attitude towards worship in general is a big deal and it dominates a good portion of the law.  It is important that our worship and praise goes where it deserves.  We need to worship the creator and not His creation.

The Ten Commandments

Story:  The Ten Commandments

Passage: Exodus 20:1-21

Characters:  Moses, God

Summary:    God gave Moses a list of commandments to follow.  The Israelites freaked out when they saw the mountain smoking and heard the thunder that was God’s voice.  They wanted to draw back and wanted Moses to speak to them instead of God.  The people drew away while Moses drew closer.

  

Notes:  The Ten Commandments.  This is one of the most known passages in the Bible.  When some people think of Christians this is what they think of.  God begins by stating who He is.  He is the Lord our God, who brought them out of Egypt, out of slavery.  Some might think that it is odd that God reminds them that He had just freed them from slavery and now He was going to give them a bunch of different rules and laws to follow.  The difference is that a slave does not legitimately owe anything to his master.  We do legitimately owe something to God.  He has freed us and allows us to live.  His holiness demands our holiness.  We obviously fall short, but these rules are a way for us to attempt to show our submission to the only one who deserves total authority over us.  The first four commands can be summarized as loving God.  He is to be our only God, we are to have no idols, we are to not take His name in vain, and we are to keep the Sabbath holy.  The next six are about loving others.  Honor your parents, don’t murder, don’t commit adultery, don’t steal, don’t bear false witness, and don’t covet.  In a lot of ways, these all actually have to do with honoring God.  I am going to try to break down each commandment, but first I want you to prepare yourself.  Christians tend to get all excited about sins that they don’t commit and overlook the ones which they do commit.  We tend to look at murder as much worse than pride.  I will submit that each of these ten commandments is equal in magnitude and I will try to explain why I think that.  Each commandment is intended to ensure we keep God in His rightful place and don’t lower Him.  We need to make sure we equalize sin in our lives.  All sin separates us from a holy God and is all serious.  Just because you haven’t killed someone does not make you a better person than a murderer.  Anyway, moving on, the first commandment is to have no other God’s besides the one true God.  This is pretty straightforward.  If we worship another God, we are lowering God and elevating something false.  Next we are to have no idols.  The commandment seems to talk about physical idols.  God is a jealous God.  He is not jealous of us, He is jealous of our attention.  He wants our love and worship and He hates it when we turn that towards something that does not deserve it.  An idol is just an object that we worship and give our attention instead of God.  Today, this could be money, property, a celebrity, sports, etc.  If we evaluate where our attention lies, it is either on God, or on something that does not deserve our worship.  God says that worshipping idols will result in punishment even to future generations.  However, God’s love will also reach to future generations of those who love Him.  Next we are told to not take God’s name in vain.  This is a big deal that we tend to brush over.  Think of one of the most important people in the world.  Their name commands respect.  You wouldn’t just throw their name around in a conversation without some sense of respect.  For example, I am not a huge fan of our current president, but when I think about or talk about Obama, I have respect for him and for his position.  I try my best to not disrespect him even if I disagree with him.  God commands an infinite amount of respect.  We throw God’s name around like He’s just a concept that we use to get what we want.  If we truly grasped His holiness and majesty, I suspect we would be cautious to even talk about Him out of fear that we might misrepresent Him or disrespect Him.  This commandment is about so much more than using His name as a curse word!  It has to do with using His name as any normal name.  The next command has to do with the Sabbath day.  God’s reasoning is that He rested on the seventh day of creation, so we should rest too.  It is interesting that He has designed us to need rest.  Especially in today’s culture, it is hard to slow down and just rest, but God wanted that for us so much He put it into the law!  The Sabbath was to be a holy day of rest.  Now come the commands dealing with other people.  We are to honor our father and mother.  This comes with the promise that if you honor your parents, you will live long.  Ultimately, by dishonoring your parents, you are dishonoring God.  Not only did He choose who your parents would be, but He is ultimately our father and by showing a lack of respect for parental authority we show a lack of respect for His relationship to us. Next is the command to not murder.  This word includes taking a human life out of carelessness or recklessness.  It does not have to be intentional.  Taking a life if huge!  You are destroying someone made in the image of God.  Next is the command to not commit adultery.  A lack of faithfulness is a lack of commitment.  God requires commitment from us and if we cannot commit to our wives how can we commit to Him?  In fact, many times humanity is described as an adulterous woman when we sin.  We are told to not steal.  Stealing displays a lack of contentment as well as a lack of respect for someone else’s property.  Not bearing false witness is important because God is truth.  Anytime we speak something other than the truth, we are not following the God of truth.  The final command is to not covet.  This is sort of the source of the commands to not steal or commit adultery.  When we covet, we are blatantly expressing jealousy and a lack of contentment for what we have.  Coveting also tends to elevate physical things to a higher place than they deserve.  If you are truly satisfied in Christ, you have no reason to be dissatisfied with what He has given you.  Every one of these sins has a lack of respect or honor for God at it’s heart.  Thus both coveting and murder are equally wrong on a spiritual level.  One obviously has larger consequences in the physical world however.

 The final part of this passage describes the peoples’ reaction to God giving the commandments to Moses.  They were terrified by the noise.  They stood as far as they could and asked Moses to speak to them instead of God because they were afraid they would die.  When they encountered the holiness of God, they realized their own nakedness and they feared for their lives.  Throughout the Bible, whenever someone truly encounters God, they fear they will die.  When our imperfection is exposed to His perfection we see our true frailty and we are overcome with awe and fear of the Holy One.  Have you ever wondered how every knee could bow when Christ returns?  It is because there is no other response available to imperfect humans in the presence of a holy God.  Moses told the people that God had come to give them a fear of Him to keep them from sin.  We will see how that plays out in future posts.  I think the final verse of this passage is telling.  The people stood far off while Moses drew near to the thick darkness where God was.  The Israelites shrunk back from God while Moses drew close.  Moses had the same fear they had when he first encountered God in the burning bush, but now that he ahd submitted to God’s authority, He wanted nothing more than to be in His presence.  I feel like this is summed up in James 4:8, “Draw near to God and He will draw near to you.”  When we allow God to take the highest place in our lives, we have nothing to fear.  But when we try to occupy that highest place ourselves, we have every reason to be terrified of God as the people were.

Questions:  Was Aaron with Moses when these commands were given?  What was his reaction to this?  Was everybody else afraid to be anywhere near the mountain?  Why did God design us to need rest?

Lessons:  There are a lot of lessons in this passage and many of them I have covered in the notes section.  This is a significant passage because it shows how important it is to God that we keep Him where He belongs and remain humble ourselves.  Many times we judge people who cannot keep these specific laws when we are just as guilty of lowering God and raising ourselves.  The point of these commandments is not for us to condemn those who cannot keep them, but rather they are for us to see the standard we are supposed to hold to and to see how we fail and need the blood of Christ to save us.  We need to be careful to use this passage as a tool to lead us to the cross instead of a tool to make us feel like we don’t need the cross compared to others.

Israel at Mount Sinai

Story:  Israel at Mount Sinai

Passage: Exodus 19

Characters:  Moses, God, Israel

Summary:    Israel came to Mount Sinai.  The people camped out while Moses went up to God.  God came to the mountain in a thick cloud.  There was fire and the ground shook.  The people consecrated themselves and were not allowed to touch the mountain.  Aaron was allowed to go up the mountain with Moses, but no one else could.

  

Notes:  The people had been traveling for three months now.  God called to Moses from the mountain.  This was strangely not a new thing for Moses!  God made a covenant with the people through Moses there.  If they obeyed His voice and kept His covenant, they would be His treasured possession and a kingdom of priests.  The people responded by promising obedience.  I find God’s response funny.  In response to their confidence, He tells Moses that He is coming down there so the people can hear Him and believe Moses.  In other words, yeah I know they said that, but I’m going to make sure they hear me so they won’t forget.  God gave them three days to consecrate themselves.  They had to wash their dirty clothes.  Moses set up limits for the people.  If they were to even touch the mountain, they were to be killed by being stoned or shot with an arrow.  They were not allowed to be touched.  There is something about contact with holiness which is not allowed.  It is almost like by touching the mountain, the person would  become holier by association.  Then if someone else touched that person, they would repeat the process.  I don’t know if that’s what was really going on, but it does look like it.  Moses also told the men to not go near the women.  He didn’t say not to sleep with the women, he said not to go near them.  He knew human nature well enough to know that the only sure way to keep them from defiling themselves was to not even give them the opportunity.  The mountain was surrounded by smoke and covered in fire.  The whole mountain shook.  This was the display of glory that came when God showed up at the mountain.  Interestingly, He wasn’t even displaying His full glory.  If His partial glory can affect the Earth like that, can you imagine His full glory?  There was a trumpet sound and Moses spoke.  God responded with thunder.  His voice was not like thunder, His voice was thunder.  The sheer power and majesty in this passage is intimidating!  Too many times we lock God into the image of a poor helpless lamb who just wants to nuzzle us and frolic around in the grass with us.  That is not what I see here!  I’m not saying that God is not a loving lamb, but He is also a powerful holy God.  When He comes, the mountains shake and are covered in fire and smoke.  His voice is the thunder.  We need to make sure that we do not water God down and ignore this facet of His character.  God then tells Moses to go back down and warn the people to stay back.  He also tells Moses to make sure the priests consecrate themselves.  Moses responds by reminding God that God already told them not to come up.  God responds by telling Moses to go down and remind them.  This is also funny to me.  God basically says to tell the people to stay back and Moses is thinking, “No I don’t want to leave.  I already told them that they don’t need to hear again!”  God felt otherwise.  Apparently Moses has changed from the shepherd who would not obey a burning bush to a man who couldn’t comprehend people not listening to the commands of God!  God knows the people well though and sends Moses down anyway.  Apparently the priests had not consecrated themselves either.  Maybe they felt they did not need it because they were priests.  It is obvious that their status did not make them any cleaner in God’s eyes than the rest of the people.  God wanted Aaron on the mountain as well.  God knew that Aaron would soon be the high priest of Israel and He wanted Aaron up on the mountain with Moses to witness His glory.  Maybe God was trying to keep Aaron’s focus on Him because He knew Aaron’s susceptibility to idols.  Who knows?

Questions:  Were the people really going to try to go up the mountain?  Did they protest to consecrating themselves?  Why did the priests not originally consecrate themselves? 

Lessons:  We need to make sure we remember God’s holiness and power.  We don’t serve a weak God!  We are dirty and without Him washing us clean, we don’t even deserve to be in the presence of Him.  Too often we take for granted the fact that we can pray and He will listen!  We forget the price that it took to gain us this access to God.  We forget how dirty we are compared to His holiness!  We must never forget what it means that He is holy and we are not!

Jethro’s Advice

Story:  Jethro’s Advice

Passage: Exodus 18

Characters:  Moses, Aaron, Jethro

Summary:    Jethro met Israel with Moses’ wife and children.  Moses met with him and filled him in on all that had happened.  Jethro worshipped God.  Moses sat down to be a judge for the people and Jethro suggested he set up people who could do that for him.  He followed Jethro’s advice.

  

Notes:  I find it interesting that Moses did not have his wife and kids with him this whole time!  Apparently at some point he had sent them home.  I suspect it was because he expected some resistance from Pharaoh and he thought it would be safer to send them on.  When Moses told Jethro what had happened, he worshipped God.  Jethro realized that these events showed that God is greater than all other gods.  When Moses told him about the events, he started with what God had done to Egypt, then he talked about their hardships in the wilderness, and then God’s deliverance.  Unlike Israel, Moses did not stop his story with the hardships but continued on to God’s deliverance from the hardship.  This is significant because we all face hardship and it is easy to focus on that.  But if we don’t focus on how God dealt with the hardship, we will end up as depressed negative people with no trust in God.  The whole episode with the judges is interesting as well.  Moses was handling all of the cases Israelites had with each other.  Can you imagine the tens of thousands of people having only one judge?  This is obviously something Moses had not received a structure for.   As a go between between them and God, Moses was taking all of the authority on himself to interpret God’s laws for the people.  Jethro was a little more practical.  He suggested a structure with judges over ten, fifty, a hundred, and a thousand people.  These judges would handle smaller cases within their own groups.  Larger cases would be brought to Moses.  This allowed him to focus on leading the nation and communicating with God.  Jethro claimed that God would be with this plan and Moses obeyed.  Jethro is therefore the father of our judicial system!  Not really, but it is a similar setup.  Moses was the equivalent of the Supreme Court.  These judges had the responsibility of hearing a case and interpreting God’s laws for the people in reference to the case. 

Questions:  How long was Moses’ family with Jethro?  Did Jethro believe in God?  Where did Jethro get his idea?  Did it come from God?  How did Moses choose these judges?

Lessons:  One lesson I can see here is to not focus on your hardships but to trust God and when he delivers you, to focus on His deliverance.  The other lesson I see is to share the load.  Moses took the full load of judging the people on himself.  This would have worn him out and rendered him incapable of leading the nation the way he needed to.  It was not wrong for him to give that authority to others.  It just allowed him to focus his efforts on his own calling.

Water from the Rock

Story:  Water from the Rock

Passage: Exodus 17:1-7

Characters:  Moses, God, Israel, random rock

Summary:    There was no water for the people to drink.  They got angry at Moses.  They were about to stone him when he cried out to God.  God told him to take his staff and strike the rock at Horeb.  He did so and water came out of it.

  

Notes:  Oh Israel.  Once again, they lose their trust in God quickly.  Last time it was lack of food, now it is lack of water.  Moses identified the problem immediately.  He told them they were testing the Lord.  He knew that by complaining about him they were complaining about God.  The people accused Moses of bringing them out of Egypt to kill them.  They were ready to stone him.  Think about this for a second!  They are slaves in Egypt.  A man comes to them saying that God wants to use him to deliver them from slavery.  This is what they have been looking for for years!  God does ten amazing things through this man.  After these plagues, they get to just walk out of Egypt.  They cross a sea on dry ground, following a visible portrayal of God in a pillar of cloud and fire.  They run low on food and God supplies a daily supply of sweet bread.  Now they are low on water and their conclusion is that God is not with them and Moses just wants to kill them.  How slow are these people?  God’s solution is for Moses to hit a rock with his staff.  Now this must have been a huge rock since Moses would have known what God meant by the rock at Horeb.  It is interesting that the passage does not actually give a description of what happened or the effect it had on the people.  It just says that Moses obeyed.  Ultimately, this is an issue of the people not trusting God.  They are basically assuming that if God is with them, they will always have plenty of food and plenty of water.  While it is true that they are surviving thanks to the provision of God, they are not content with that.  They want a surplus.  Keep in mind a surplus is coming once they reach the Promised Land, but for now, they are to live with the day to day provision from God.  In a similar way, we are not promised a surplus in this world.  When we get to heaven, we will have a surplus, but in this life, our journey, we are to trust God to sustain us day to day.  We have no reason to expect Him to give us wealth or plenty, but rather we can fully trust Him to give us what we need to live and serve Him. 

Questions:  What was the people’s reaction?  How did they think stoning Moses would help them?  How long had they been wandering at this point?  Were they really completely out of water?

Lessons:  We need to trust God to sustain us and provide our needs, but we can’t get too wrapped up with blessings in this life.  Rather, we need to focus our attention and our energy on the blessings we will receive in heaven.  We must be careful when we complain and grumble.  When we grumble, we are complaining about God without realizing it.  We are saying we aren’t content with what He has already done for us and we want more.  In fact, we often feel we deserve more!

Bread from Heaven

Story:  Bread from Heaven

Passage: Exodus 16

Characters:  Moses, God, Israel

Summary:    The people traveled for another month and a half.  They grumbled against Moses and Aaron about the lack of bread.  The Lord said He would rain bread down from heaven.  Moses and Aaron told the people this.  God showed His glory to the people and told Moses what He was going to do in the presence of the people.  In the evening, He provided quail, and in the morning He provided manna, a bread like substance.  They were to only gather about 2 quarts per person per day.  However some people disobeyed.  They were to only gather 6 days a week and rest the seventh.  A sample of manna was kept in a jar to be a testament to God’s provision.  The Lord provided manna to the people for forty years. 

  

Notes:  There are some interesting things happening in this story.  We begin to once again see Israel’s stupidity, but once again, we have to remember that we are as bad as they are!  The people are complaining again.  They seem to be blaming Moses and Aaron for their lack of food.  They even claimed to prefer having died by God’s hand in Egypt while they still had food.  This is ridiculous in my opinion!  It shows how shortsighted the Israelites were!  They would rather have food but die than be hungry and live.  They were focused more on their comfort than on the purpose of their life and following God.  God tells Moses He is going to rain down bread from heaven for them every day.  He even says His reason to do this is to test if the people will walk in His law or not.  If I was told that God was doing this to test whether I would obey or not and this test was going to involve me eating food, I would be all for that!  Maybe I would slip up and mess up months into it.  But Israel couldn’t follow God’s command for 24 hours!  I’ll get to that in a minute.  Moses and Aaron knew what was really going on though.  They knew the people were actually grumbling against God.  God showed His glory to the entire congregation.  This is impressive and shows that the root of the problem was that the people did not believe that He was God.  After all of the wonders and provision they had already seen, they still did not understand His holiness!  I just don’t get that!  God does specifically say that He was going to provide bread and meat so that they may know that He is the Lord their God.  Sure enough, God covered the camp in quail in the evening and with a flaky fine honey tasting bread that the people called manna in the morning.  God’s instructions were to gather an omer, or about 2 quarts, per person per day, and to leave none of it until morning.  As it turns out, an omer was a perfect amount of manna for one person in one day! What do you know! Some people kept it until the next morning though.  Moses was angry with good reason.  This showed not only a lack of obedience, but also a lack of trust that God would continue to provide for them the next day!  The manna rotted and smelled and bred worms if it was kept until the next morning.  God provided double on the sixth day.  The people were told to keep half of it until the next day and to rest the next day.  This is the first occurrence of the Sabbath.  It is not just a day of rest, it is a day of solemn rest, a holy Sabbath to the Lord.  However, some people tried to gather manna on the seventh day! These people could not listen to instructions!  They obviously found nothing!  The cool think is that the manna did not rot on the Sabbath.  This was just another obvious sign that God was behind all of this!  When people disobeyed by trying to gather manna on the Sabbath, God got angry at Moses.  Then the people obeyed!  God wanted them to keep a sample of the manna.  He knew the people needed visual affirmation of His provision.  This manna was to remind them that He is capable and willing to provide for them and help them survive!  Interestingly, Christ is the bread of life provided for us when we were starving in the wilderness.  God is in the business of provision at every level of life!  That said, we are not to depend on the provision, but rather on the provider! 

Questions:  What did the people think of the manna?  Did some people dislike it?  How quickly did people get tired of it?  Why could the Israelites not just obey! 

Lessons:  God will provide!  And when you get angry about your circumstances, try to remember that God put you in those circumstances.  You are ultimately complaining about Him.  I highly recommend not doing that!  I also think we can learn from this some of the dangers of relying too much on comfort.  The people would have rather been comfortable while they died, than alive and following God.  That sounds so ridiculously rebellious and like a slap in the face of God, but we do that all of the time!  We put our comfort or our image above God constantly!  Following God should be the number one and the number two priorities in our life!  Nothing else should even come close, not even our own comfort or image.  

Bitter Water Made Sweet

Story:  Bitter Water Made Sweet

Passage: Exodus 15:22-27

Characters:  Moses, God, Israel

Summary:  The Israelites went into the wilderness.  After three days they couldn’t find water so the people complained to Moses.  They found a source of bitter water.  The Lord showed Moses a piece of wood that he threw into the water and it became sweet.  The Lord promised to keep the Israelites healthy if they follow the Lord.  They camped by the water at Elim. 

  

Notes:   It takes very little to pull our focus from God.  It generally just takes a little bit of discomfort.  When discomfort gets to us and pulls us away from God, it shows that our focus was on ourselves the whole time!  To be fair on Israel though, three days with little to no water is tough to deal with.  And with the thousands and thousands of people they had, it probably looked grim.  Can you imagine the emotional rollercoaster they went through when they came to Marah and saw water?  They were probably overjoyed!  Then they realized the water was “bitter”.  It wasn’t drinkable!  The people would obviously have been upset.  But instead of praying to God for deliverance from this next obstacle, they complained about Moses!  Moses then asked God for deliverance.  Apparently, the fact that not even a sea had stopped them so far did not cross their minds!  God showed Moses a branch, or a tree depending on how you translate the word.  Moses threw it into the water and it became healthy to drink!  The passage says that the Lord tested them and gave them a statute that day.  He promised to heal them if they followed His commandments and diligently listened to His voice.  God calls Himself the Lord, your healer.  God is a healing God. He can heal physical, emotional, and mental brokenness.  Diligence is careful and persistent work or effort.  After this incident the Lord led them to Elim.  Elim had 12 springs of water and seventy palm trees.  God never intended them to die of dehydration; He just wanted them to trust Him to provide water.  Now that they had sort of passed the test, He led them to a huge source of water! It should also be noted that while God could have fixed the water Himself, He appears to have wanted Moses to do a tangible act of obedience to Him.  We will see that consistently throughout scripture.

Questions:  Was God still leading them with a cloud and fire?  Did the people carry water with them on the journey?  How did Moses know to throw the wood into the water?  What made the water bitter?

Lessons: The promise God made to Israel is worth noting today.  We need to diligently listen to His voice!  We need to try to do what is right in His eyes and not our own.  We need to believe that God is a God of healing and trust Him to deliver us from any brokenness that comes as a result of our fallen nature.  Just like God turned the water from being useless and bitter to sweet and useful for consumption, He can transform us from being polluted and worthless to clean and useful for doing His will.