Covenant At Sinai Quotes

The Hebrew word for “divorce” is, garash (#H1644 גְרַשְׁ). It means: divorce, drive out, cast out. This same word appears at, Nu 30:9, Le 22:13, and other places in your Bible. The divorce unbundled what was once bundled: Judah gained her husband’s name at Mt. Sinai, but lost it when she made a covenant with Egypt. Lamentations, pg 3

The first grand federalist design...was that of the Bible, most particularly the Hebrew Scriptures or Old Testament... Biblical thought is federal (from the Latin foedus, covenant) from first to last--from God's covenant with Noah establishing the biblical equivalent of what philosophers were later to term Natural Law to the Jews' reaffirmation of the Sinai covenant under the leadership of Ezra and Nehemiah, thereby adopting the Torah as the constitution of their second commonwealth. The covenant motif is central to the biblical world view, the basis of all relationships, the mechanism for defining and allocating authority, and the foundation of the biblical political teaching.

If God were always visible, humans could not exist at all. “No one can see Me and live,” says God. “If we continue to hear the voice of God, we will die,” say the Israelites at Sinai. But if God is always invisible, hidden, imperceptible, then what difference does His existence make? It will always be as if He were not there. The answer to this dilemma is holiness. Holiness represents those points in space and time where God becomes vivid, tangible, a felt presence. Holiness is a break in the self-sufficiency of the material world, where infinity enters space and eternity enters time. In relation to time, it is Shabbat. In relation to space, it is the Tabernacle. These, in the Torah, are the epicentres of the sacred.

If God were always visible, humans could not exist at all. “No one can see Me and live,” says God. “If we continue to hear the voice of God, we will die,” say the Israelites at Sinai. But if God is always invisible, hidden, imperceptible, then what difference does His existence make? It will always be as if He were not there. The answer to this dilemma is holiness. Holiness represents those points in space and time where God becomes vivid, tangible, a felt presence. Holiness is a break in the self-sufficiency of the material world, where infinity enters space and eternity enters time. In relation to time, it is Shabbat. In relation to space, it is the Tabernacle. These, in the Torah, are the epicentres of the sacred. We can now understand what makes them holy. Shabbat is the time when humans cease, for a day, to be creators and become conscious of themselves as creations. The Tabernacle is the space in which humans cease to be masters – “fill the earth and subdue it” – and become servants. Just as God had to practise self-restraint to make space for the finite, so human beings have to practise self-restraint to make space for the infinite. The holy, in short, is where human beings renounce their independence and self-sufficiency, the very things that are the mark of their humanity, and for a moment acknowledge their utter dependence on He who spoke and brought the universe into being. The universe is the space God makes for man. The holy is the space man makes for God. The secular is the emptiness created by God to be filled by a finite universe. The holy is the emptiness in time and space vacated by humans so that it can be filled by the infinite presence of God.

Covenantees, therefore, under the Christian economy, can be no other than the spiritual seed of Abraham: and such are the subjects of this kingdom. Hence the Gospel Covenant is called new, and is expressly opposed to the Sinai Confederation, from which it is extremely different. It is also pronounced a better Covenant than that which Jehovah made with the ancient Israel: and so it is, whether we consider its objects, its blessings, its confirmation, or its continuance.

I don’t know how I didn’t see it for so many years of Bible reading, but I didn’t.  Paul didn’t teach the Gentiles not to follow the law, he didn’t teach people not to have their sons circumcised (in fact he himself had Timothy circumcised in Acts 16:3).  And Paul himself kept the law.  Otherwise, James would have been telling Paul to lie about what he was doing.   So we traded Christmas for Sukkot, the true birth of Messiah during the Feast of Tabernacles, which is a shadow picture of Him coming back to reign for a thousand years.  When we keep that feast, we are making a declaration that we believe He was, is, and is coming.  We keep Yom Kippur, which is a declaration that we believe that Yeshua is the salvation of the nation of Israel as a whole, that “all Israel shall be saved.”  We keep Yom Teruah, the day of Trumpets, which occurs on “the day and hour that no man knows” at the sighting of the first sliver of the new moon during the 7th biblical month of Tishri.  We traded Pentecost for Shavuot, the prophetic shadow picture of the spirit being poured out on the assembly, as we see in the book of Acts,  just as the law was given at Mt Sinai to the assembly, which according to Stephen was the true birth of the church (Acts 7:38) – not in Jerusalem, but at Sinai. We also traded Easter for Passover, the shadow picture of Messiah coming to die to restore us to right standing with God, in order to obey Him when He said, “from now on, do this in remembrance of Me.”  We traded Resurrection Sunday for First Fruits, the feast which served as a shadow of Messiah rising up out of the earth and ascending to be presented as a holy offering to the Father.  In Leviticus 23, these are called the Feasts of the LORD, and were to be celebrated by His people Israel forever, not just the Jews, but all those who are in covenant with Him. Just like at Mt Sinai, the descendants of Jacob plus the mixed multitude who came out of Egypt.    We learned from I John 3:4 that sin is defined as transgression of the law.  I John 1:10 says that if we claim we do not sin we are liars, so sin still exists, and that was written long after the death of the other apostles, including Paul.  I read what Peter said about Paul in 2 Peter 3:15-16 – that his writings were hard to understand and easily twisted.  And I began to see that Peter was right because the more I understood what everyone besides Paul was saying, the more I realized that the only way I could justify what I had been doing was with Paul’s writings.  I couldn’t use Yeshua (Jesus), Moses, John, Peter or any of the others to back up any of the doctrines I was taught – I had to ignore Yeshua almost entirely, or take Him out of context.  I decided that Yeshua, and not Paul, died for me, so I had to

On reading a translated copy of the covenant, Philip V was horrified. The Muslim ruler of Jerusalem, through his emissary, the viceroy of Islamic Granada, was extending to the Jewish people the hand of eternal peace and friendship. The gesture was occasioned by the recent discovery of the lost ark of the Old Testament and the stone tablets upon which God had etched the Law with His finger. Both were found in perfect condition in a ditch in the Sinai Desert and had awoken in the Muslims, who discovered them, a desire to be circumcised, convert to Judaism, and return the Holy Land to the Jews. However, since this would leave millions of Palestinian Muslims homeless, the King of Jerusalem wanted the Jews to give him France in return. The guilty homeowner Bananias told French authorities that after the Muslim offer, the Jews of France concocted the well-poisoning plot and hired the lepers to carry it out. After reading the translation and several corroborating documents, including a highly incriminating letter from the Muslim King of Tunisia, Philip ordered all Jews in France arrested for “complicity . . . to bring about the death of the people and the subjects of the kingdom.” Two years later, any Jewish survivors of the royal terror were exiled from the country.   The

(3) Theology of Exodus: A Covenant People “I will take you as my own people, and I will be your God” (Exod 6:7). When God first demanded that the Egyptian Pharaoh let Israel leave Egypt, he referred to Israel as “my … people.” Again and again he said those famous words to Pharaoh, Let my people go.56 Pharaoh may not have known who Yahweh was,57 but Yahweh certainly knew Israel. He knew them not just as a nation needing rescue but as his own people needing to be closely bound to him by the beneficent covenant he had in store for them once they reached the place he was taking them to himself, out of harm's way, and into his sacred space.58 To be in the image of God is to have a job assignment. God's “image”59 is supposed to represent him on earth and accomplish his purposes here. Reasoning from a degenerate form of this truth, pagan religions thought that an image (idol) in the form of something they fashioned would convey to its worshipers the presence of a god or goddess. But the real purpose of the heavenly decision described in 1:26 was not to have a humanlike statue as a representative of God on earth but to have humans do his work here, as the Lord's Prayer asks (“your will be done on earth as it is in heaven,” Matt 6:10). Although the fall of humanity as described in Genesis 3 corrupted the ability of humans to function properly in the image of God, the divine plan of redemption was hardly thwarted. It took the form of the calling of Abraham and the promises to him of a special people. In both Exod 6:6–8 and 19:4–6 God reiterates his plan to develop a people that will be his very own, a special people that, in distinction from all other peoples of the earth, will belong to him and accomplish his purposes, being as Exod 19:6 says “a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.” Since the essence of holiness is belonging to God, by belonging to God this people became holy, reflecting the character of their Lord as well as being obedient to his purposes. No other nation in the ancient world ever claimed Yahweh as its God, and Yahweh never claimed any other nation as his people. This is not to say that he did not love and care for other nations60 but only to say that he chose Israel as the focus of his plan of redemption for the world. In the New Testament, Israel becomes all who will place faith in Jesus Christ—not an ethnic or political entity at all but now a spiritual entity, a family of God. Thus the New Testament speaks of the true Israel as defined by conversion to Christ in rebirth and not by physical birth at all. But in the Old Covenant, the true Israel was the people group that, from the various ethnic groups that gathered at Sinai, agreed to accept God's covenant and therefore to benefit from this abiding presence among them (see comments on Exod 33:12–24:28). Exodus is the place in the Bible where God's full covenant with a nation—as opposed to a person or small group—emerges, and the language of Exod 6:7, “I will take you as my own people, and I will be your God,” is language predicting that covenant establishment.61

at Mt Sinai, the people who had been in slavery were now free, free to keep the perfect law of liberty, free to be in Covenant with the Creator of the universe.  Compared to the way the rest of the world lived, subject to the tyranny of men, and false gods and their unjust laws, it is easy to see why the Torah is called the perfect law of liberty.  Torah was given for a purpose, and that purpose was for our good and not evil.

Israelite (1) – Descendant of Abraham through Isaac and Jacob (called Israel).[22]  At Mt Sinai, this was expanded to include those of the mixed multitude who came into Covenant with the God of Israel circa 1446 BC. 

Also called Jacob, or Ephraim, or Joseph, these descendants of the 10 northern tribes disappeared into the nations even though, genetically, they were descendants of Jacob and were cut off from the Covenant, but not forever.  Israel (Ephraim) will come back to life again as a people and will be united with Judah, the Jews, as per the prophecy given by the prophet Ezekiel[25]  Note:  there is no scriptural justification for the belief that Christianity constitutes Ephraim, which is a common form of replacement as well as predestination theology, the belief that those who are Christians are automatically descended from the exiled and lost tribes of Israel.  This would stand in the face of the fact that at Mt Sinai, many joined themselves to Israel who were not descended from Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.

To be a Gentile, by definition, simply means that we were not born a part of the Covenant made between the LORD and the people of Israel at Mt Sinai.  But the good news is this -- that we were indeed born to become a part of the Covenant between the LORD and the people at Mt Sinai.  We were born with every bit as much right to worship the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob as anyone else, just as much potential to serve and please Him, and we were born with every bit as much right to claim the Covenant promises and obligations as anyone else.  Remember how I said God doesn’t have different rules for different people in His Kingdom?  That He is the God of fairness and justice?

What we commonly associate with modern Judaism sometimes has very little to do with the commandments given by God at Sinai, as I will show throughout this book.  Just like the doctrines of Catholicism and Protestantism often have very little to do with what Jesus actually commanded.  But like the Jews, our waters have been muddied for thousands of years and we don’t always know where to place that dividing line between truth and tradition. You have a choice – to continue in the tradition, or to do what Jesus challenged people to do – find out what the commandments really are, do them, and teach others to do the same.[28]

Nothing in scripture stands by itself, we must always look back for parallels – and who was associated with being broken-hearted, in captivity and in prison -- the children of Israel who were suffering under the bondage of slavery!  Moses came in the Name of the LORD and preached their release, the opening of the prison and the end to their heartbreak – which the LORD most definitely delivered on.  His salvation of the children of Israel culminated in the experience at Mt Sinai when the laws were given to Moses. 

The Gospel has always been God’s promised redemption for the purpose of creating a people for Himself.  Time and time again, the prophets have preached redemption and deliverance - from Egypt, from Babylon, from sin, from death.  The Gospel is good news, and Moses preached it at Sinai, their redemption from Egyptian slavery into right relationship through the Covenant.  Jeremiah preached it to the Jews, that the people would be redeemed from Babylon and brought back into right relationship through the Covenant.[32] Hosea preached it to the rebellious house of Israel, that there would someday be a way for redemption and restoration through the Covenant.[33]

God redeemed them, and then told them to do something that would lead to blessing, which required obedience, and they refused to do it, an act of rebellion.  They had the audacity to decide that His commandments were optional, and so they did not enter into His promises – even after seeing the plagues of Egypt and the Red Sea part and the mountain covered with fire.  They did it at Sinai with the Golden Calf right after the first Ten Commandments were given,[36] they did it again when ten of the spies brought an evil report and the people refused to go into the Land,[37] and then again when they whored with the pagan women![38]  They did not treat God like He was God.  They violated the very word and spirit of the Covenant.

The law would be given, over the course of the next 40 days and nights to Moses on Mt Sinai, and God united the giving of that law with His mercy, His grace and the forgiving nature of His character.[45]  He declared Himself as full of grace before giving the law, not 1400 years later.

Grace was available in the times of Noah, at Sinai, and all through what Christians call the Old Testament and Jews call the Tanakh.  Jesus didn’t bring grace, Jesus was merely the proof that it was always there.  The giving of the Holy Spirit, as well, does not mark the arrival of grace but again, is merely a greater manifestation of it, a deepening of the covenant.

God says, “You will do my statues, and judge with my judgments, and I will bless you.” (Lev 25:18 paraphrase mine) Moses says, “You will keep His commandments and obey Him and serve Him and cleave to Him.”  And also, “He is faithful and will keep the Covenant with those who love Him and keep His commandments to a thousand generations.” (Deut 13:4 and 7:9 paraphrase mine) That is an interesting point.  A thousand generations.  If a generation is even just 20 years, then 1000 times that is 20,000 years – that is how long God will bless those who keep His commandments.  Sinai happened roughly 3500 years ago.  A thousand generations is a long, long time from now – and certainly did not come to an abrupt halt 2000 years ago, ending the obligation to keep those commandments.

The Talmud was compiled from the oral teachings handed down generation after generation by rabbis who claimed that Moses received not one, but two revelations on Mt Sinai, one to be written down and another to be passed along by word of mouth.  You can see how problematic this is, because even if it were true (and it is written that Moses wrote all the words that God gave him[77]), people over the 1400 years between Sinai and Jesus’ ministry could have added to and subtracted from them – and we see from the very writings of the Talmud (compiled between 200 and 600 AD) that the legal orthodox Jewish requirements have gone through alterations.  The Talmud is largely a book of Jewish laws and commentary, in essence, no different than we find in books on Catholicism and Protestant Christianity, except that the writings of the sages have been combined into one large text to be compared side by side so it can easily be seen what many ancient sages said about a given topic or dispute.

The traditions of the elders largely defined what it was to be a religious Jew in Jesus’ day, and in some ways, greatly departed from the law given at Mt Sinai.  For instance, at Mt Sinai there was no separation between the natural born Hebrews and the foreigners who attached themselves to God, but in Jesus’ day, there was a great wall of legal division, not in any way justified by the Torah as given through Moses.

These verses, as v.18 shows, recount the establishment of a covenant between God and Abram. Thus it is fitting that in several respects the account should foreshadow the making of the covenant at Sinai. The opening statement, “I am the LORD who brought you out of Ur of the Chaldeans” (v.7), anticipates a virtually identical opening statement for the Sinaitic covenant (Ex 20:2): “I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of Egypt.” The expression “Ur of the Chaldeans” is a reference back to 11:28 and 31 and grounds the present covenant in a past act of divine salvation from “Babylon,” just as Exodus 20:2 grounds the Sinaitic covenant in an act of divine salvation from Egypt. The coming of God’s presence in the fire and darkness of Sinai (Ex 19:18; 20:18; Dt 4:11) is foreshadowed in Abram’s fiery vision in this chapter (vv.12, 17). In the Lord’s words to Abram (vv.13 – 16), a connection between his covenant and the Sinaitic covenant is established by a reference to the four hundred years of bondage for Abram’s descendants and their subsequent “exodus” “and afterward they will come out,” v.14).

Obedience follows trust as surely as disobedience follows distrust. But what does distrust look like? Distrust has two aspects: (1) Distrust is Adam disregarding God and saying, "I know better" and (2) distrust is the Israelites at Sinai saying "God, tell us what to do, and we'll do it" (see Exodus 19:8). Don't be fooled by the Isrealites' desire to obey God. Their motives were rotten, and their hearts were faithless. If they trusted God they would not have asked for rules. They would've said, "God, remember your covenant with our father Abraham and bless us." Instead they basically said, "God, we don't believe your promises to Abraham. Tell us how we can bless ourselves." And God gave them what they asked for: rules for self-blessification.

Hebrew Scriptures (Old Testament) One of the distinguishing characteristics of Judaism, the religion of Jesus, is its sense of moral and social responsibility. After liberating the Hebrew people from slavery in Egypt in the Exodus, God made explicit God's covenant with this people through Moses at Mount Sinai—“I am your God, and you are my people.” The primary conditions for being God's people were to worship God alone (monotheism and the prohibition of idolatry) and to create a just community (righteousness and justice). God insists that the Hebrews respect the rights and needs of the alien (or immigrant), the widow, and the orphan—that is, the marginal and vulnerable people—reminding them that they were once slaves in Egypt and that their God is the defender of the oppressed (Deut 24:17–18; 26:12–15; Ex 22:21–24; Jer 22:3).17 The laws regarding the forgiveness of debts during sabbatical years (Deut 15:1–11 and Lev 25:1–7) and the return to the original equality among the twelve tribes of Israel during the Jubilee year (Lev 25:8–17) symbolize the justice and community required of the Hebrew people.18 After the Hebrew people settled in the Promised Land, oppression came to characterize Israel. The God who had liberated the people from oppression in Egypt now sent prophets who called them to adhere to the requirements of the covenant or face the fate of the Egyptians—destruction. The Hebrew prophets (eighth century to sixth century B.C.E.), such as Amos, Micah, Hosea, Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel, accused the people of infidelity to the covenant because of their idolatry and the social injustice they created.19 The warnings and the promises of the prophets remind each generation of God's passion for justice and God's faithful love. In Judaism, one's relationship with God (faith) affects one's relationship with others, the community, and the earth (justice).20 Faith and justice are relational, both personally and communally.

But there was a still greater truth to be impressed upon their minds. Living in the midst of idolatry and corruption, they had no true conception of the holiness of God, of the exceeding sinfulness of their own hearts, their utter inability, in themselves, to render obedience to God’s law, and their need of a Saviour. All this they must be taught. God brought them to Sinai; he manifested his glory; he gave them his law, with the promise of great blessings on condition of obedience: “If ye will obey My voice indeed, and keep My covenant, then ...ye shall be unto Me a kingdom of priests, and an holy nation.” Exodus 19:5, 6. The people did not realize [372] the sinfulness of their own hearts, and that without Christ it was impossible for them to keep God’s law; and they readily entered into covenant with God. Feeling that they were able to establish their own righteousness, they declared, “All that the Lord hath said will we do, and be obedient.” Exodus 24:7. They had witnessed the proclamation of the law in awful majesty, and had trembled with terror before the mount; and yet only a few weeks passed before they broke their covenant with God, and bowed down to worship a graven image. They could not hope for the favor of God through a covenant which they had broken; and now, seeing their sinfulness and their need of pardon, they were brought to feel their need of the Saviour revealed in the Abrahamic covenant and shadowed forth in the sacrificial offerings. Now by faith and love they were bound to God as their deliverer from the bondage of sin. Now they were prepared to appreciate the blessings of the new covenant. The terms of the “old covenant” were, Obey and live: “If a man do, he shall even live in them” (Ezekiel 20:11; Leviticus 18:5); but “cursed be he that confirmeth not all the words of this law to do them.” Deuteronomy 27:26. The “new covenant” was established upon “better promises”—the promise of forgiveness of sins and of the grace of God to renew the heart and bring it into harmony with the principles of God’s law. “This shall be the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel; After those days, saith the Lord, I will put my law in their inward parts, and write it in their hearts.... I will forgive their iniquity, and will remember their sin no more.” Jeremiah 31:33, 34.

The same law that was engraved upon the tables of stone is written by the Holy Spirit upon the tables of the heart. Instead of going about to establish our own righteousness we accept the righteousness of Christ. His blood atones for our sins. His obedience is accepted for us. Then the heart renewed by the Holy Spirit will bring forth “the fruits of the Spirit.” Through the grace of Christ we shall live in obedience to the law of God written upon our hearts. Having the Spirit of Christ, we shall walk even as he walked. Through the prophet he declared of himself, “I delight to do Thy will, O My God: yea, Thy law is within My heart.” Psalm 40:8. And when among men he said, “The Father hath not left Me alone; for I do always those things that please him.” John 8:29. [373] The apostle Paul clearly presents the relation between faith and the law under the new covenant. He says: “Being justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.” “Do we then make void the law through faith? God forbid: yea, we establish the law.” “For what the law could not do, in that it was weak through the flesh”—it could not justify man, because in his sinful nature he could not keep the law—“God sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh, and for sin, condemned sin in the flesh: that the righteousness of the law might be fulfilled in us, who walk not after the flesh, but after the Spirit.” Romans 5:1; 3:31; 8:3, 4. God’s work is the same in all time, although there are different degrees of development and different manifestations of his power, to meet the wants of men in the different ages. Beginning with the first gospel promise, and coming down through the patriarchal and Jewish ages, and even to the present time, there has been a gradual unfolding of the purposes of God in the plan of redemption. The Saviour typified in the rites and ceremonies of the Jewish law is the very same that is revealed in the gospel. The clouds that enveloped his divine form have rolled back; the mists and shades have disappeared; and Jesus, the world’s Redeemer, stands revealed. He who proclaimed the law from Sinai, and delivered to Moses the precepts of the ritual law, is the same that spoke the Sermon on the Mount. The great principles of love to God, which he set forth as the foundation of the law and the prophets, are only a reiteration of what he had spoken through Moses to the hebrew people: “hear, O Israel: The Lord our God is one Lord: and thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thine heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy might.” Deuteronomy 6:4, 5. “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.” Leviticus 19:18. The teacher is the same in both dispensations. God’s claims are the same. The principles of his government are the same. For all proceed from him “with whom is no variableness, neither shadow of turning.” James 1:17. [374] Chapter

From the period of development to the present, Reformed theologians have debated the finer points (particularly the relation of the Sinai covenant to the covenant of grace). Nevertheless, a consensus emerged (evident, for example, in the Westminster Confession) affirming the three covenants I have mentioned: the eternal covenant of redemption; the covenant of works; and the covenant of grace. With these last two covenants, Reformed theology affirmed (with Lutheranism) the crucial distinction between law and gospel, but within a more concrete biblical-historical framework...Ironically, just at the moment when so much Protestant biblical scholarship is rejecting a sharp distinction between law and gospel, Ancient Near Eastern scholars from Jewish and Roman Catholic traditions have demonstrated the accuracy of that seminal distinction between covenant of law and covenants of promise. P.13

[I]n 1955, Klaus Koch proposed a construct of “deeds-consequences,” wherein he argued that the very structure of most sayings in the Book of Proverbs (and elsewhere in the Old Testament) assumed and affirmed that human deeds have automatic and inescapable consequences, so that acts for good or for ill produce their own “spheres of destiny.” The critical point in Koch’s argument is that in “foolish acts” - acts that violate Yahweh’s righteousness - Yahweh does not need to intervene directly in order to punish or reward, as in the covenant blessings and curses of Sinai. Rather, the deed carries within it the seed of its own consequence, punishment or reward, which is not imposed by an outside agent (Yahweh). Thus, for example, a lazy person suffers the consequence of poverty, without the instrusion of any punishing agent; likewise, carelessness in choosing friends will produce a life of dissolution, all on its own. Consequently, “responsible acts” - those that cohere with Yahweh’s ordering of creation - will result in good for self and for community. Yahweh is not at all visible in this process. But, according to Israel, Yahweh is nonetheless indispensable for the process. This is not, in Israel’s horizon, a self-propelled system of sanctions, but it is an enactment of Yahweh’s sovereign, faithful intentionality.

If man had kept the law of God, as given to Adam after his fall, preserved by Noah, and observed by Abraham, there would have been no necessity for the ordinance of circumcision. And if the descendants of Abraham had kept the covenant, of which circumcision was a sign, they would never have been seduced into idolatry, nor would it have been necessary for them to suffer a life of bondage in Egypt; they would have kept God’s law in mind, and there would have been no necessity for it to be proclaimed from Sinai or engraved upon the tables of stone. And had the people practiced the principles of the Ten Commandments, there would have been no need of the additional directions given to Moses. The sacrificial system, committed to Adam, was also perverted by his descendants. Superstition, idolatry, cruelty, and licentiousness corrupted the simple and significant service that God had appointed. Through long intercourse with idolaters the people of Israel had mingled many heathen customs with their worship; therefore the Lord gave them at Sinai definite instruction concerning the sacrificial service. After the completion of the tabernacle he communicated with Moses from the cloud of glory above the mercy seat, and gave him full directions concerning the system of offerings and the forms of worship to be [365] maintained in the sanctuary. The ceremonial law was thus given to Moses, and by him written in a book. But the law of Ten Commandments spoken from Sinai had been written by God himself on the tables of stone, and was sacredly preserved in the ark. There are many who try to blend these two systems, using the texts that speak of the ceremonial law to prove that the moral law has been abolished; but this is a perversion of the Scriptures. The distinction between the two systems is broad and clear. The ceremonial system was made up of symbols pointing to Christ, to his sacrifice and his priesthood. This ritual law, with its sacrifices and ordinances, was to be performed by the hebrews until type met antitype in the death of Christ, the Lamb of God that taketh away the sin of the world. Then all the sacrificial offerings were to cease. It is this law that Christ “took ...out of the way, nailing it to his cross.” Colossians 2:14. But concerning the law of Ten Commandments the psalmist declares, “Forever, O Lord, Thy word is settled in heaven.” Psalm 119:89. And Christ himself says, “Think not that I am come to destroy the law.... Verily I say unto you”—making the assertion as emphatic as possible—“Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law, till all be fulfilled.” Matthew 5:17, 18. Here he teaches, not merely what the claims of God’s law had been, and were then, but that these claims should hold as long as the heavens and the earth remain. The law of God is as immutable as his throne. It will maintain its claims upon mankind in all ages.

The book of Exodus is bifid in composition, meaning that its material is presented to the reader in two main parts. A first part tells the story of God's rescue of the people of Israel from Egypt and his bringing them to Mount Sinai (chaps. 1–19), and a second part describes his covenant with them, made as they encamped at Mount Sinai (chaps. 20–40). Many possible subdivisions are found within these two major halves of the book (as, indeed, this commentary takes note of), but it is hard to miss the basic division of stories of Israel on their way to Sinai and accounts of God's covenant provision for them (including confirmations of and threats to that covenant relationship) after they are there.1 Exodus may thus be divided into two broad topics: (1) deliverance of a group of people from submission to their oppressors to submission to God and (2) the constitution of that group as a people of God. Put another way, Exodus is about rescue from human bondage and rescue from sin's bondage.2 Yet another way to think of the two parts of the book is through the idea of servitude: in Egypt, Israel was the servant of pharaoh; at Sinai they became God's servants.

The Sinai covenant itself, then, is a law-covenant. The land is given to Israel, but for the purpose of fulfilling its covenantal vocation. Remaining in the land is there fore conditional on Israel's personal performance of the stipulations that people swore at Sinai...The ultimate promise of a worldwide family of Abraham--sinners justified and glorified in a renewed creation--is unconditional in its basis, while the continuing existence of the national theocracy as a type of that everlasting covenant depended on Israel's obedience...The Decalogue and Joshua 24 fit this suzerainty pattern, but as Mendenhall observe, "it can readily be seen that the covenant with Abraham (and Noah) is of completely different form." P.15

He once said: “In Israel, in order to be a realist, you must believe in miracles.”3 To put it at its simplest: In Egypt, where the source of life was the Nile, you looked down. In Israel, where the source of life is rain, you had no choice but to look up.

On this, the Mishna comments: “Did the hands of Moses make or break war? Rather, the text implies that whenever the Israelites looked up and dedicated their hearts to their Father in heaven, they prevailed, but otherwise they fell” (Mishna Rosh HaShana 3:8).

Every individual would count. Therefore every individual had to feel part of the whole, respected and given the means of a dignified life. Injustice, gross inequality, or a failure of concern for the weak and marginal would endanger society at its very roots. There was no margin for error or discontent. Without indomitable courage based on the knowledge that God was with them, the people would fall prey to larger powers.

There neither was nor would be a time when Israel could rely on numbers, or vast tracts of territory, or easily defensible borders. So it was then. So it is now.

That is the nature of Jewish faith – not security but the courage to live with insecurity, knowing that life is a battle, but that if we do justice and practise compassion, if we honour great and small, the powerful and the powerless alike, if our eyes do not look down to the earth and its seductions but to heaven and its challenges, this small, vulnerable people is capable of great, even astonishing, achievements.

There are, however, dangers in covenantal politics. First, it can lead to overconfidence, the belief that “God is on our side.” This was the message of the false prophets whom Jeremiah denounced in his day. Second, it can lead to moral self-righteousness. People can come to think: We are the chosen or almost chosen people, therefore we are morally better than the rest. The prophet Malachi addresses this with biting irony: “From where the sun rises to where it sets, My name is great among the nations…but you profane it” (Mal. 1:11–12).

Yet there is no verb in biblical Hebrew that means to obey.

In Judaism faith is a form of listening – to the song creation sings to its Creator, and to the message history delivers to those who strive to understand it. That is what Moses says time and again in Deuteronomy: Stop looking; listen. Stop speaking; listen.

Faith in Judaism is not about ontology (what exists?) or epistemology (what can we know?) but about relationships – about the people with whom we converse.

God’s greatness is that He hears the unheard.

You do not need numbers to enlarge the spiritual and moral horizons of humankind. You need other things altogether: a sense of the worth and dignity of the individual, of the power of human possibility to transform the world, of the importance of giving everyone the best education they can have, of making each feel part of a collective responsibility to ameliorate the human condition.

Physically, the taller you are the more you look down on others. Morally, the reverse is the case. The more we look up to others, the higher we stand. For us, as for God, greatness is humility.

Moses would not have won an election. He was not that kind of leader. Instead Moses summons the people to humility and responsibility.

Moses insists on three things. First, we are free. The choice is ours. Blessing or curse? Good or evil? Faithfulness or faithlessness? You decide, says Moses. Never has freedom been so starkly defined, not just for an individual but for a nation as a whole.

The very name Ishmael means “God hears.” One of the tasks of a leader, according to Moses, is to “hear between your brothers” (Deut. 1:16; to this day, a court case is called “a hearing”). The great social legislation in Exodus states that “if you take your neighbour’s cloak as a pledge, return it to him by sunset, because his cloak is the only covering he has for his body. What else will he sleep in? When he cries out to Me, I will hear, for I am compassionate” (Ex. 22:25–26). Hearing is the basis of both justice and compassion

Moses’ words still challenge us today. God has given us freedom; it is for us to use it to create a just, generous, gracious society. God does not do it for us but He teaches us how it is done.

Only in a just society can justice flourish. Only in a free society can individual liberty be sustained.

Third, there is no description of the powers of the king – his role, his task, his mission. Instead there is a series of restrictions. He must not accumulate horses, wives, or wealth (Deut. 17:17). He is to have his personal Torah scroll that he is to read “all the days of his life” (17:18–19) and not deviate from its teachings “to the right or to the left” (17:20). He must be humble and “not consider himself better than his fellow Israelites” (17:20).

[God] gave us only over beast, fish, fowl, Dominion absolute; that right we hold By his donation; but man over men He made not lord; such title to himself Reserving, human left from human free.

Poverty is not, in Judaism, a blessed condition. It is, the rabbis said, “a kind of death”3 and “worse than fifty plagues” (Bava Batra 116a). They said, “Nothing is harder to bear than poverty, because he who is crushed by poverty is like one to whom all the troubles of the world cling and upon whom all the curses of Deuteronomy have descended. If all other troubles were placed on one side and poverty on the other, poverty would outweigh them all.

Without law, society becomes chaos. But without narrative, law itself loses contact with the realities of human life. It becomes impersonal and at times inhuman.

Cruelty to animals is wrong, not because animals have rights but because we have duties. The duty not to be cruel is intended to promote virtue, and the primary context of virtue is the relationship between human beings. But virtues are indivisible.

Not only does God utter the Ten Words from Mt. Sinai, but He also provides them with new signs and seals of His covenant: the tabernacle, the priesthood, and the sacrificial system. Not surprisingly, associated with these sacramental tokens of His presence are all sorts of blessings promised to those who faithfully perform them and curses for those who faithlessly violate the covenant rituals.

The corrupt not only believe they can fool their fellow humans; they believe they can fool God as well. When moral standards begin to break down in business, finance, trade, and politics, a kind of collective madness takes hold of people. The sages said Adam bahul al mamono (Pesaĥim 11b), meaning, roughly, “Money makes us do wild things.

No one emerges well in this story, which is there to tell us that in the long run, individual piety is unsustainable without collective moral responsibility.

The Hebrew Bible is a sustained protest against empires and their attempt to impose a human unity on God’s created diversity.

Jews became the people whose heroes were teachers, whose citadels were schools, and whose passion was study and the life of the mind.

His body did not accompany his people as they entered the land, but his teachings did. His sons did not succeed him, but his disciples did. He may have felt that he had not changed his people in his lifetime, but in the full perspective of history, he changed them more than any leader has ever changed any people, turning them into the people of the book and the nation who built not ziggurats or pyramids but schools and houses of study.

the greatest challenge comes when we are least conscious of the presence of a challenge.

It is when we are most blessed that we are most in need of protection – and the protection for which we pray is that the blessing remain a blessing and not turn into a curse – the curse of forgetting from where the blessings come.

In a previous essay, I pointed to the strange fact that biblical Judaism, a religion of 613 commands, contains no word that means “obey.” Instead, it uses the word shema, which means, to hear, to listen, to attend, to understand, to internalise, and to respond.

The people he is addressing are the children of those he led out of Egypt. They are more used to freedom than their parents, who were slaves. But they have not yet entered the land, or created a society, or been forced to work for a living. For forty years they have had their needs supplied by God. So he speaks to them in very simple terms. Follow God and be blessed, or follow your own inclinations and be cursed. This is the way one might speak to a child. As

The pinnacle of the moral life, to which we should all aspire, is precisely to do what is right because it is right, because that is what it is to walk in God’s ways. That is why the key word of Deuteronomy is shema, the word that is untranslatable precisely because it covers this multiplicity of senses from simple obedience to deep internalisation. As we grow and mature, we move from thinking of commands as hypothetical imperatives to thinking of them as categorical, and we move from heteronomy to autonomy, because we have made God’s will our will.

So, for instance, the law of the red heifer – purification from contact with the dead – occurs just before the death of Miriam and Aaron, as if to say: Bereavement and grief interfere with our contact with God but this does not last forever. We can become pure again. The story explains the law, and the law illuminates the story.

But few nations other than Israel set it as their highest task to understand why the law is as it is. Shema is the Torah’s call to moral growth.

Jewish law is concerned not only with protecting the rights of those who have been wronged, but also helping wrongdoers rebuild their future. Guilt, in Judaism, is about acts, not persons. It is the act, not the person, that is condemned.

In general, in the Mosaic books, style mirrors substance. The way something is said is often connected to what is being said.

Judaism is a religion of rejoicing; of remembering where we came from, and therefore not taking our blessings for granted; of recalling the source of the good, and therefore not forgetting the larger truth that it comes to us from the hand of God; of knowing that what we have, God has placed in our trust, to be used for the good of all, not just ourselves.

Know that prophecy does not help in-depth study of the meanings of the Torah

Greatness is humility.

If a prediction comes true it has succeeded. If a prophecy comes true it has failed.

A prophet does not foretell. He warns. A prophet does not speak to predict future catastrophe but rather to avert it. If a prediction comes true it has succeeded. If a prophecy comes true it has failed.

What he tells them is unexpected, counter-intuitive. In effect he says this: “You know what your parents suffered. You have heard about their slavery in Egypt. You yourselves have known what it is to wander in the wilderness without a home or shelter or security. You may think those were the greatest trials, but you are wrong. You are about to face a harder trial. The real test is security and contentment

Our contemporary consumer is constructed in the first-person singular: I want, I need, I must have. There are many things we can achieve in the first-person singular but one we cannot, namely, simĥa – because simĥa is the joy we share, the joy we have only because we share.

What would be seen as charity in other legal systems is, in Judaism, a strict requirement of the law, enforceable by the courts.

As historian Will Durant wrote: “A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself from within.”1

Even more threatening to Christian assumptions than the Qur’an’s flat denial that Jesus had been crucified, however, was the imperious, not to say terrifying, tone of authority with which it did so. Very little in either the Old or the New Testament could compare. For all the reverence with which Christians regarded their scripture, and for all that they believed it illumined by the flame of the Holy Spirit, they perfectly accepted that most of it, including the Gospels themselves, had been authored by mortals. Only the covenant on the tablets of stone, given to Moses amid fire and smoke on the summit of Sinai, ‘and written with the finger of God’,13 owed nothing to human mediation. Perhaps it was no surprise, then, that Moses, of all the figures in the Old and New Testaments, should have featured most prominently in the Qur’an. He was mentioned 137 times in all. Many of the words attributed to him had served as a direct inspiration to Muhammad’s own followers. ‘My people! Enter the Holy Land which God has prescribed for you!’14 The Arab conquerors, in the first decades of their empire, had pointedly referred to themselves as muhajirun: ‘those who have undertaken an exodus’. A hundred years on from Muhammad’s death, when the first attempts were made by Muslim scholars to write his biography, the model that they instinctively reached for was that of Moses. The age at which the Prophet had received his first revelation from God; the flight of his followers from a land of idols; the way in which—directly contradicting the news brought to Carthage in 634—he was said to have died before entering the Holy Land: all these elements echoed the life of the Jews’ most God-favoured prophet.15 So brilliantly, indeed, did Muslim biographers paint from the palette of traditions told about Moses that the fading outlines of the historical Muhammad were quite lost beneath their brushstrokes. Last and most blessed of the prophets sent by God to set humanity on the straight path, there was only the one predecessor to whom he could properly be compared. ‘There has come to him the greatest Law that came to Moses; surely he is the prophet of this people.’16

Rashi notes that the mourning for Aaron was more widespread than for Moses (of Aaron it says, “The entire house of Israel grieved” [Num. 20:29]; in the case of Moses the word “entire” is missing [Deut. 34:8]). The reason is that Aaron was a man of peace; Moses was a man of truth. We love peace, but truth is sometimes hard to bear. People of truth have enemies as well as friends.

We are never told or encouraged to think of ‘unchanging moral law’ when we read the words ‘Ten Commandments’ or any of its synonymous terms. We are to think ‘covenant document.’ We are to think of a specific code of law (the Ten Commandments) that was made the covenant terms of a specific covenant document. We are always to remember that the Ten Commandments were the specific terms, written on stone tablets, of the covenant that established Israel’s special relationship with God. The Ten Commandments, Israel, Sinai, and covenant all go together.

For now, we can say that the initial introduction of the words ‘Ten Commandments’ in the Word of God is very instructive. The following facts are presented: 1. The Ten Commandments were written on tablets of stone by God himself. 2. This event occurred at Mount Sinai when God entered into a special and unique covenant relationship with the nation of Israel. 3. The Ten Commandments were specifically ‘a covenant document’ and were called the ‘words of the covenant’ when they were written on the tablets at Mount Sinai. “…after the tenor of these words I have made a covenant …he wrote upon the tables the words of the covenant, the ten commandments. 4. The Ten Commandments, as a covenant document, were given only to the nation of Israel.

The Ten Commandments, considered as a covenant document, have been replaced by the New Covenant. The individual commandments stand, fall, or are changed according to Christ’s treatment of them. Nine of them are clearly repeated, with some changes, under the laws given to the New Covenant people of God in the New Testament Scriptures and therefore are just as binding today as when given at Sinai.

The tablets of stone, upon which God wrote the Ten Commandments, were not only a distinct and summary covenant document; they were the specific legal covenant document that established Israel as a special nation before God at Mount Sinai.

(1) Did God specifically promise to make a new covenant, or did he promise a new administration of the same covenant? (2) Was the Old Covenant made with Israel at Sinai or was it made with Adam in the Garden? What does Scripture say? The great difference between the nation of Israel and the Gentiles was that of ‘having the law’ as a covenant and the gospel as a promise, as opposed to ‘not having the law’ and being without a covenant or hope

Breaking the sabbath renounced the whole covenant relationship with God. To profane the Sabbath by performing even the slightest physical work was to deny all of the vows taken at Mount Sinai. It was an action equivalent to a man deliberately spitting in God’s face and then, in defiant self-sufficiency and rebellion, breaking the most important law of the covenant by walking away and picking up some sticks or doing some other physical work.

When I say that the Ten Commandments are finished, I mean as a covenant document, or as the tables of the covenant. I am NOT talking about the morality contained in the individual commandments. I am talking about the Ten Commandments considered as a single document, specifically as a covenant document. The moral duties commanded on the tablets of stone did not begin at Sinai, but the use of those duties as the basis of a covenant did begin there. The content of nine of those ten rules was known by men, and infractions thereof were punished by God long before God gave them to Israel as covenant terms at Sinai. Men were punished for violations of every specific duty commanded in the Ten Commandments except the Fourth, or sabbath, prior to Mount Sinai, and likewise, every commandment except the Fourth, is repeated in the New Testament Scriptures.

First, even though the law, as codified covenant terms, has a historical beginning at Sinai, the underlying principles all of those laws, except the sabbath, were already revealed to man through the original creation. Neither knowledge of God and his character, nor the reality of known sin began at Sinai. Secondly, even though the law, viewed as a covenant document, ended when Christ established the New Covenant, the unchanging ethical elements that underlie the commandments written on the tables of stone are just as binding on us to day as they were on an Israelite.

Any discussion of the Ten Commandments that in any way separates that phrase from the ‘words of the covenant’ written on the tables of stone and given to Israel at Sinai does not follow the scriptural pattern for use of those terms. We must read these verses carefully and listen to what they say in order to understand correctly the nature, place and function of the Ten Commandments in the history of redemption.

By the first century, a complete system of universal, compulsory education was in place, an achievement the Talmud attributes to Yehoshua b. Gamla (Bava Batra 21a), the first of its kind anywhere in the world.

That is why they are called a “warped and twisted generation,” because good and evil were so interwoven in their conduct, and “it is difficult to separate good and evil when evil is done in a holy cause.

This therefore was the merit of the patriarchs, that beside the fact that they were righteous and pious and loved God to the utmost extent, they were also upright. In their relations with gentiles – even the worst idolaters – they acted out of love, and sought their good, for this is what allows the world to endure. Thus we find that Abraham, though he hated their wickedness, prostrated himself in prayer for the people of Sodom, for he wanted them to survive.

God hates hatred between people, and Scripture reckons it as equal to idolatry, forbidden sex, and bloodshed combined.

There are failings to which intensely religious people are sometimes prone, namely, indifference to the injustices of society, a willingness to overlook corruption within their own ranks, and a tendency to believe that attachment to God relieves one of the duty to be upright, civil, and gracious in one’s dealings with human beings.

Two phenomena are often confused: righteousness and self-righteousness. Outwardly they appear similar but between them is all the difference in the world. The righteous see the good in people, the self-righteous see the bad. The righteous have a high opinion of others, the self-righteous a high opinion of themselves. The righteous leave us feeling enlarged, the self-righteous leave us feeling diminished. The righteous lift us up, the self-righteous put us down.

Narrative teaches us the complexity of the moral life and the light-and-shade to be found in any human personality. Without this, self-righteousness can destroy the very perceptions and nuances, the tolerance and generosity of spirit on which society depends.

The God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob is not a detached and distant deity, whom we cannot know or feel. He is closer than Mount Sinai; He does more than make laws and set rules; He is not a pillar of fire and cloud. He is personal, intimate, and involved in our lives. He appeared to our forefathers in the form of a Man and an Angel, and made covenant with them

Covenant Theology insists that the covenant at Sinai was a gracious covenant made with a “redeemed” by which they mean “justified” people. It totally ignores the big “if” and the “then” in verse 5.30 They fail to see the covenant at Sinai was a conditional covenant. Israel was indeed a people redeemed by blood, but it was not spiritual redemption by Christ’s blood. It was a physical redemption from Egypt by animal blood. Israel becoming a “kingdom of priests” and a “holy nation” was totally dependent upon their keeping the covenant terms of Exodus 20, which they never did. The covenant at Sinai was without question a legal covenant of works conditioned on Israel’s obedience to the covenant terms. The words “if you will obey” and “then I will” cannot be made to mean “I will whether you do or not.” The covenant at Sinai was without question a conditional covenant. Language cannot be more explicit. God said, “If you obey me fully and keep my covenant, then [and only then] … you will be for me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.” They did become a “holy”31 (meaning separate) physical nation, but they did not become a “holy,” (meaning spiritual) nation where all of the members in the nation were regenerate saints.

One particularly poignant way in which these salvation themes are seen in Hosea involves the covenant between God and Israel initiated at Sinai being treated as a marriage. This analogy sees all the indictments of Israel’s idolatry as spiritual adultery. In addition, when God promises to save his people after he judges them (ch. 2), he depicts their future salvation as a new marriage ceremony at a new Sinai (cf. esp. 2:14–23). Jesus later came calling himself the bridegroom of God’s people (e.g., Matt. 9:15), and Paul strikingly states that the great mystery of marriage “refers to Christ and the church” (Eph. 5:32

Therefore... it [that is, the old covenant] is done away, first as it was a covenant from Mount Sinai, so it is clear turned out, and has no place in the gospel... (Gen. 21:10; Gal. 4:22-30, Heb. 12:18-24)... All of which evidently demonstrates that the law as it was a covenant from Mount Sinai is done away for believers.[104] As a consequence: As [the law][105] was a ministration by Moses, so it is done away, and is not to be preached or received, (as in the hand of Moses) as it was ministered, received and obeyed in the Old Testament. For it was ministered then on [condition of] life and death, and was (through man’s weakness) a ministration of death, and not of life.[106]

The offenders would pay for their acts by wandering 40 years in a desolate wilderness while a new, untainted generation grew up to replace them. But a pattern was beginning to emerge: If the Israelites failed God in the shadow of Mount Sinai, how would they possibly withstand the seduction of new cultures in the promised land? The next generation, too, would fail God, as would all their descendants. The old covenant, as Paul would so convincingly argue in the book of Galatians, succeeded mainly by proving undeniably the need for a new one.