Day 36 – Exodus 19-21

Talking Points

• God prepares His people to receive the law. The currency of the covenant they will be offered is obedience. If they obey His voice, they will be His people. It is interesting that obedience will not just show their trust in Him, it will lead them to live the best lives. It is their sign of commitment and God’s grace to them.
• We see how great God’s holiness truly is. They may approach Him only as He directs, or they will die. God is careful to warn them repeatedly of this reality.
• The ten commandments start off the law that God gives His people. The first four commands deal with how they will interact with God. The next six deal with how they will interact with each other as God’s people.
• Seeing God’s power and holiness, the people want to deal with Moses. It is profound that they see who God is and wish for a go-between and a mediator. How awesome that the point of the law was always to lead men to seek a Mediator.
• As the laws are explained, the cost of sin becomes real. Repayment, retribution, and death will be strictly enforced. Receiving the law had to be a sobering thing.

Thoughts

It is telling — for the people, for the priest, and even for Moses, it was a serious thing to approach God. Smoke covered the mountain, God approached as fire, the earth was quaking, and thunder was booming. To pass certain markers or to even try and peer through the smoke would result in instant death! Rites of washing and consecrating had to be followed to a T. No right-minded person could escape being struck with deep fear. And, so it was to draw near to God’s presence.

There are two takeaways:

First, we should be very considerate of how we see and think of God. Man has always endeavored to bring Him down to our level, to recreate Him in our image. He is our flippant buddy, the man upstairs, or a woman in a shack. He can be toyed with, made light of, or even ignored. Be sure — God cannot be reduced to the image of our liking. We do not define or position God. It’s interesting, though, while the instinct of man is to bring God down, the lie of Satan promises to lift man up. “For in that day you will be like God…” Satan says we can be as God. It was his own folly as well. Look how humanism, Hinduism, Mormonism, and many other false religions end with man elevated to the status of God. Yet, here’s the truth: God is awesome — infinitely so. He is holy — so unlike us. And, we are to revere Him as such.

Then, once we start to see the marvelous, awesome holiness of God, and we know that He is the all-powerful Creator and Sustainer of all things, and we grasp His hatred of sin, we should rejoice all the more for Jesus! God’s character has not changed — not one bit. He hasn’t lowered His standard in order to love us. No, He sent the perfect Mediator to cover us in His own perfect righteousness and to make us holy, that we might be in fellowship with God through Him. What a Savior!

“This was in accordance with the eternal purpose which He carried out in Christ Jesus our Lord, in whom we have boldness and confident access through faith in Him.”
– Ephesians 3:11-12