Exodus Moses Quotes

We don’t ask why God chose as his prophet a stutterer with a public speaking phobia. But we should. The book of Exodus is short on explication, but its stories suggest that introversion plays yin to the yang of extroversion; that the medium is not always the message; and that people followed Moses because his words were thoughtful, not because he spoke them well.

When Moses says, "Who am I that I should go to Pharaoh?" God answers not by telling Moses who he is, but by telling him who God is, saying, "I will be with you" (Exodus 3:12)

They were quiet for a time, alone with their thoughts, but then John sat up straight, struck by a thought. "There's a passage in Exodus - God tells Moses, 'No one can see My face, but I will protect you with My hand until I have passed by you, and then I will remove My hand and you will see My back.' Remember that?" Emilio nodded, listening. Well I always thought that was a physical metaphor," John said, "but, you know - I wonder now if it isn't really about time? Maybe that was God's way of telling us that we can never know His intentions, but as time goes on...we'll understand. We'll see where He was: we'll see His back.

Can we believe that the real God, if there is one, ever ordered a man to be killed simply for making hair oil, or ointment? We are told in the thirtieth chapter of Exodus, that the Lord commanded Moses to take myrrh, cinnamon, sweet calamus, cassia, and olive oil, and make a holy ointment for the purpose of anointing the tabernacle, tables, candlesticks and other utensils, as well as Aaron and his sons; saying, at the same time, that whosoever compounded any like it, or whoever put any of it on a stranger, should be put to death. In the same chapter, the Lord furnishes Moses with a recipe for making a perfume, saying, that whoever should make any which smelled like it, should be cut off from his people. This, to me, sounds so unreasonable that I cannot believe it. Why should an infinite God care whether mankind made ointments and perfumes like his or not? Why should the Creator of all things threaten to kill a priest who approached his altar without having washed his hands and feet? These commandments and these penalties would disgrace the vainest tyrant that ever sat, by chance, upon a throne.

I especially loved the Old Testament. Even as a kid I had a sense of it being slightly illicit. As though someone had slipped an R-rated action movie into a pile of Disney DVDs. For starters Adam and Eve were naked on the first page. I was fascinated by Eve's ability to always stand in the Garden of Eden so that a tree branch or leaf was covering her private areas like some kind of organic bakini. But it was the Bible's murder and mayhem that really got my attention. When I started reading the real Bible I spent most of my time in Genesis Exodus 1 and 2 Samuel and 1 and 2 Kings. Talk about violent. Cain killed Abel. The Egyptians fed babies to alligators. Moses killed an Egyptian. God killed thousands of Egyptians in the Red Sea. David killed Goliath and won a girl by bringing a bag of two hundred Philistine foreskins to his future father-in-law. I couldn't believe that Mom was so happy about my spending time each morning reading about gruesome battles prostitutes fratricide murder and adultery. What a way to have a "quiet time." While I grew up with a fairly solid grasp of Bible stories I didn't have a clear idea of how the Bible fit together or what it was all about. I certainly didn't understand how the exciting stories of the Old Testament connected to the rather less-exciting New Testament and the story of Jesus. This concept of the Bible as a bunch of disconnected stories sprinkled with wise advice and capped off with the inspirational life of Jesus seems fairly common among Christians. That is so unfortunate because to see the Bible as one book with one author and all about one main character is to see it in its breathtaking beauty.

When it came time to build a tabernacle, the Israelite women brought all their mirrors to Moses so he could use them to make God's building more beautiful. (Exodus 38:8.) They were far more interested in enjoying God's glory than reflecting on their own images.

Those who are wounded wound others. Moses was wounded profoundly when he lost his birth family, his heritage, and his history. In the years to come, he would come to know Jehovah-rophe, the Healer of life’s sicknesses and sorrows. Exodus 15: 26b says, “…for I am the Lord, who heals you.” (from Under His Wings: Healing Truth for Adoptees of All Ages)

The Word of God needs to saturate our minds if we want to know and follow God’s will.

The Bible is filled with discrepancies, many of them irreconcilable contradictions. Moses did not write the Pentateuch (the first five books of the Old Testament) and Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John did not write the Gospels. There are other books that did not make it into the Bible that at one time or another were considered canonical—other Gospels, for example, allegedly written by Jesus’ followers Peter, Thomas, and Mary. The Exodus probably did not happen as described in the Old Testament. The conquest of the Promised Land is probably based on legend. The Gospels are at odds on numerous points and contain nonhistorical material. It is hard to know whether Moses ever existed and what, exactly, the historical Jesus taught. The historical narratives of the Old Testament are filled with legendary fabrications and the book of Acts in the New Testament contains historically unreliable information about the life and teachings of Paul. Many of the books of the New Testament are pseudonymous—written not by the apostles but by later writers claiming to be apostles. The list goes on.

Moses’ epic achievement is establishing a divinely inspired system for provoking both Abrahamic critical thinking (Hanif ) and channeling it toward restorative growth (Muslim). This system, embodied in a scripture called the Torah (“instruction” or “guidance”), had to be accessible and practical for ordinary people, with structures designed to assist free-thinkers to unleash their individual potential. Not surprisingly, Moses finds the generation of emancipated slaves quite set in their ways despite the dramatic exodus from Egypt. He ultimately concentrates his energies on training a new generation of disciples—“Only the youth among Moses’ people were open to his mes- sage” (10:83).

When reading the history of the Jewish people, of their flight from slavery to death, of their exchange of tyrants, I must confess that my sympathies are all aroused in their behalf. They were cheated, deceived and abused. Their god was quick-tempered unreasonable, cruel, revengeful and dishonest. He was always promising but never performed. He wasted time in ceremony and childish detail, and in the exaggeration of what he had done. It is impossible for me to conceive of a character more utterly detestable than that of the Hebrew god. He had solemnly promised the Jews that he would take them from Egypt to a land flowing with milk and honey. He had led them to believe that in a little while their troubles would be over, and that they would soon in the land of Canaan, surrounded by their wives and little ones, forget the stripes and tears of Egypt. After promising the poor wanderers again and again that he would lead them in safety to the promised land of joy and plenty, this God, forgetting every promise, said to the wretches in his power:—'Your carcasses shall fall in this wilderness and your children shall wander until your carcasses be wasted.' This curse was the conclusion of the whole matter. Into this dust of death and night faded all the promises of God. Into this rottenness of wandering despair fell all the dreams of liberty and home. Millions of corpses were left to rot in the desert, and each one certified to the dishonesty of Jehovah. I cannot believe these things. They are so cruel and heartless, that my blood is chilled and my sense of justice shocked. A book that is equally abhorrent to my head and heart, cannot be accepted as a revelation from God. When we think of the poor Jews, destroyed, murdered, bitten by serpents, visited by plagues, decimated by famine, butchered by each, other, swallowed by the earth, frightened, cursed, starved, deceived, robbed and outraged, how thankful we should be that we are not the chosen people of God. No wonder that they longed for the slavery of Egypt, and remembered with sorrow the unhappy day when they exchanged masters. Compared with Jehovah, Pharaoh was a benefactor, and the tyranny of Egypt was freedom to those who suffered the liberty of God. While reading the Pentateuch, I am filled with indignation, pity and horror. Nothing can be sadder than the history of the starved and frightened wretches who wandered over the desolate crags and sands of wilderness and desert, the prey of famine, sword, and plague. Ignorant and superstitious to the last degree, governed by falsehood, plundered by hypocrisy, they were the sport of priests, and the food of fear. God was their greatest enemy, and death their only friend. It is impossible to conceive of a more thoroughly despicable, hateful, and arrogant being, than the Jewish god. He is without a redeeming feature. In the mythology of the world he has no parallel. He, only, is never touched by agony and tears. He delights only in blood and pain. Human affections are naught to him. He cares neither for love nor music, beauty nor joy. A false friend, an unjust judge, a braggart, hypocrite, and tyrant, sincere in hatred, jealous, vain, and revengeful, false in promise, honest in curse, suspicious, ignorant, and changeable, infamous and hideous:—such is the God of the Pentateuch.

Death moved in the night, in search for blood, and when it found Life, it passed on by, like a cloud that moves by the face of the moon. When he found those dead without the red, he took the life before them born first, and the mourning emptied itself till the morning.

The Civil calendar is the only calendar used in Genesis and Exodus. When God told Moses to start numbering the days in the Spring, the sacred or religious calendar was created. From this point on, we must look at the passage to see which calendar is being used. All the dates given in this book are based on the civil calendar. The civil calendar is the standard one used by Jews today. This is why the Jewish new year takes place in the Fall.

In Exodus, chapter 14, Moses must lead the Jews out of Egypt and to safety by parting the Red Sea. This story teaches us a valuable lesson about how we must face the future. I want to draw your attention to two verses in particular. Exodus (14:15) reads: “And the Lord said to Moses, ‘Tell the people of Israel to march forward.’” Exodus (14:16) reads: “Lift up your rod and stretch out your hand over the sea and divide it.” The thing to note here is that Moses is instructed to raise his rod to divide the sea only after telling his people to march forth into the water. The Israelites were actually in the water, some of them up to their necks, and were told to keep marching before the water split. And yet no one complained or feared drowning because the message from God was very clear: walk first into the water and the ocean will split afterwards. Had the Israelites waited around for the waters to part, they would have been waiting a long time—perhaps forever. They had to bring about their own miracle, a truth we can deduce from the peculiar order of these two verses, which is no accident as there are no accidents in Scripture. To succeed at life and business, you too must face the future as the Israelites did at the Red Sea. Get moving now. Do not wait for the bridge. Cross now and the way through will present itself.

Exodus 32:33 says, “And the Lord said to Moses, ‘Whoever has sinned against Me, I will blot him out of My book.

world’s first labor story: Exodus. Pharaoh was the first bad boss, Moses was the first labor leader, and the Exodus was the first strike.

Never enter into spiritual combat lightly. We must engage the enemy only under the direction and protection of God because victory by human means is impossible.

Chelnov directed Rubin's attention to the geography of Moses' crossing. From the Nile to Jerusalem the Jews had at most 250 miles to go, and that meant that even if they rested on the Sabbath they could have easily covered the distance in three weeks. Wasn't it necessary therefore to assume that for the remaining forty years Moses did not simply lead them but misled them all over the Arabian desert?

In decreeing the Decalogue, moreover, YHWH bypasses Moses to address the people as a whole, communicating his will to them in quasi-democratic openness, without the need for any royal or prophetic intermediary. That is not only without precedent in the history of religion; it is also unparalleled in the Hebrew Bible. God’s proclamation of the Decalogue accordingly lies at the heart of the theme of revelation.

But Moses said to God, "Who am I that I should go to Pharaoh and bring the Israelites out of Egypt?" And God said, "I will be with you." (Exodus 3:10-12). Moses is asking about his identity when he asks God: "Who am I?" In effect, he is saying, "Are you sending me back to the Pharaoh as an Egyptian prince, as a Jewish slave or as a Midianite shepherd?" This would have huge implications for the words he would use and the approach he woudl take in confronting Pharoah. What is intriguing to me is God never gives him an answer. He simply tells Moses to go and that his presence will be with Moses. God is affirming Moses' triculturalism: "I have created you the way you are, Moses. You are the person that I need for this task right now. Go and I will give you all that you need to accomplish what I have set before you." God uses us where we are, in all our complexity and confusion, especially in our ethnic identity, and does great and wonderful things through us.

EXODUS 6 But the LORD said to Moses, “Now you shall see what I will do to Pharaoh; for with a strong hand he will send them out, and with  ea strong hand he will  fdrive them out of his land.” 2God spoke to Moses and said to him,  g“I am the LORD

The face that Moses had begged to see—was forbidden to see—was slapped bloody (Exodus 33:19–20). The thorns that God had sent to curse the earth’s rebellion now twisted around his own brow.… “On your back with you!” One raises a mallet to sink in the spike. But the soldier’s heart must continue pumping as he readies the prisoner’s wrist. Someone must sustain the soldier’s life minute by minute, for no man has this power on his own. Who supplies breath to his lungs? Who gives energy to his cells? Who holds his molecules together? Only by the Son do “all things hold together” (Colossians 1:17). The victim wills that the soldier live on—he grants the warriors continued existence. The man swings. As the man swings, the Son recalls how

EXODUS 6 But the LORD said to Moses, “Now you shall see what I will do to Pharaoh; for with a strong hand he will send them out, and with  ea strong hand he will  fdrive them out of his land.” 2God spoke to Moses and said to him,  g“I am the LORD.

The book of Exodus is short on explication, but its stories suggest that introversion plays yin to the yang of extroversion; that the medium is not always the message; and that people followed Moses because his words were thoughtful, not because he spoke them well.

We tend to write Moses’ true personality out of the Exodus story. (Cecil B. DeMille’s classic, The Ten Commandments, portrays him as a swashbuckling figure who does all the talking, with no help from Aaron.) We don’t ask why God chose as his prophet a stutterer with a public speaking phobia. But we should. The book of Exodus is short on explication, but its stories suggest that introversion plays yin to the yang of extroversion; that the medium is not always the message; and that people followed Moses because his words were thoughtful, not because he spoke them well.

Jesus Christ is not a cosmic errand boy. I mean no disrespect or irreverence in so saying, but I do intend to convey the idea that while he loves us deeply and dearly, Christ the Lord is not perched on the edge of heaven, anxiously anticipating our next wish. When we speak of God being good to us, we generally mean that he is kind to us. In the words of the inimitable C. S. Lewis, "What would really satisfy us would be a god who said of anything we happened to like doing, 'What does it matter so long as they are contented?' We want, in fact, not so much a father in heaven as a grandfather in heaven--a senile benevolence who as they say, 'liked to see young people enjoying themselves,' and whose plan for the universe was simply that it might be truly said at the end of each day, 'a good time was had by all.'" You know and I know that our Lord is much, much more than that. One writer observed: "When we so emphasize Christ's benefits that he becomes nothing more than what his significance is 'for me' we are in danger. . . . Evangelism that says 'come on, it's good for you'; discipleship that concentrates on the benefits package; sermons that 'use' Jesus as the means to a better life or marriage or job or attitude--these all turn Jesus into an expression of that nice god who always meets my spiritual needs. And this is why I am increasingly hesitant to speak of Jesus as my personal Lord and Savior. As Ken Woodward put it in a 1994 essay, 'Now I think we all need to be converted--over and over again, but having a personal Savior has always struck me as, well, elitist, like having a personal tailor. I'm satisfied to have the same Lord and Savior as everyone else.' Jesus is not a personal Savior who only seeks to meet my needs. He is the risen, crucified Lord of all creation who seeks to guide me back into the truth." . . . His infinity does not preclude either his immediacy or his intimacy. One man stated that "I want neither a terrorist spirituality that keeps me in a perpetual state of fright about being in right relationship with my heavenly Father nor a sappy spirituality that portrays God as such a benign teddy bear that there is no aberrant behavior or desire of mine that he will not condone." . . . Christ is not "my buddy." There is a natural tendency, and it is a dangerous one, to seek to bring Jesus down to our level in an effort to draw closer to him. This is a problem among people both in and outside the LDS faith. Of course we should seek with all our hearts to draw near to him. Of course we should strive to set aside all barriers that would prevent us from closer fellowship with him. And of course we should pray and labor and serve in an effort to close the gap between what we are and what we should be. But drawing close to the Lord is serious business; we nudge our way into intimacy at the peril of our souls. . . . Another gospel irony is that the way to get close to the Lord is not by attempting in any way to shrink the distance between us, to emphasize more of his humanity than his divinity, or to speak to him or of him in casual, colloquial language. . . . Those who have come to know the Lord best--the prophets or covenant spokesmen--are also those who speak of him in reverent tones, who, like Isaiah, find themselves crying out, "Woe is me! for I am undone; because I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips: for mine eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts" (Isaiah 6:5). Coming into the presence of the Almighty is no light thing; we feel to respond soberly to God's command to Moses: "Put off thy shoes from off thy feet, for the place whereon thou standest is holy ground" (Exodus 3:5). Elder Bruce R. McConkie explained, "Those who truly love the Lord and who worship the Father in the name of the Son by the power of the Spirit, according to the approved patterns, maintain a reverential barrier between themselves and all the members of the Godhead.

The face that Moses had begged to see – was forbidden to see – was slapped bloody (Exodus 33:19-20) The thorns that God had sent to curse the earth’s rebellion now twisted around his brow… “On your back with you!” One raises a mallet to sink the spike. But the soldier’s heart must continue pumping as he readies the prisoner’s wrist. Someone must sustain the soldier’s life minute by minute, for no man has this power on his own. Who supplies breath to his lungs? Who gives energy to his cells? Who holds his molecules together? Only by the Son do “all things hold together” (Colossians 1:17). The victim wills that the soldier live on – he grants the warrior’s continued existence. The man swings. As the man swings, the Son recalls how he and the Father first designed the medial nerve of the human forearm – the sensations it would be capable of. The design proves flawless – the nerves perform exquisitely. “Up you go!” They lift the cross. God is on display in his underwear and can scarcely breathe. But these pains are a mere warm-up to his other and growing dread. He begins to feel a foreign sensation. Somewhere during this day an unearthly foul odor began to waft, not around his nose, but his heart. He feels dirty. Human wickedness starts to crawl upon his spotless being – the living excrement from our souls. The apple of his Father’s eye turns brown with rot. His Father! He must face his Father like this! From heaven the Father now rouses himself like a lion disturbed, shakes His mane, and roars against the shriveling remnant of a man hanging on a cross.Never has the Son seen the Father look at him so, never felt even the least of his hot breath. But the roar shakes the unseen world and darkens the visible sky. The Son does not recognize these eyes. “Son of Man! Why have you behaved so? You have cheated, lusted, stolen, gossiped – murdered, envied, hated, lied. You have cursed, robbed, over-spent, overeaten – fornicated, disobeyed, embezzled, and blasphemed. Oh the duties you have shirked, the children you have abandoned! Who has ever so ignored the poor, so played the coward, so belittled my name? Have you ever held a razor tongue? What a self-righteous, pitiful drunk – you, who moles young boys, peddle killer drugs, travel in cliques, and mock your parents. Who gave you the boldness to rig elections, foment revolutions, torture animals, and worship demons? Does the list never end! Splitting families, raping virgins, acting smugly, playing the pimp – buying politicians, practicing exhortation, filming pornography, accepting bribes. You have burned down buildings, perfected terrorist tactics, founded false religions, traded in slaves – relishing each morsel and bragging about it all. I hate, loathe these things in you! Disgust for everything about you consumes me! Can you not feel my wrath? Of course the Son is innocent He is blamelessness itself. The Father knows this. But the divine pair have an agreement, and the unthinkable must now take place. Jesus will be treated as if personally responsible for every sin ever committed. The Father watches as his heart’s treasure, the mirror image of himself, sinks drowning into raw, liquid sin. Jehovah’s stored rage against humankind from every century explodes in a single direction. “Father! Father! Why have you forsaken me?!” But heaven stops its ears. The Son stares up at the One who cannot, who will not, reach down or reply. The Trinity had planned it. The Son had endured it. The Spirit enabled Him. The Father rejected the Son whom He loved. Jesus, the God-man from Nazareth, perished. The Father accepted His sacrifice for sin and was satisfied. The Rescue was accomplished.

What is our life on earth, if not discovering, becoming conscious of, penetrating, contemplating, accepting, loving this mystery of Gods, the unique reality which surrounds us, and in which we are immersed like meteorites in space? “In God we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28). There aren't many mysteries, but there is one upon which everything depends, and it is so immense that it fills the whole space. Human discoveries do not help us to penetrate this mystery. Future millennia will illuminate no further what Isaiah said and what God himself declared to Moses before the burning bush, “I am who I am” (Exodus 3:14).

I managed a polite smile, donned my oven mittens, and withdrew the tarts. “Let me tell you something, Dad. Guys today have biblical reasons for the way we are.” “You do?” “Sure,” I mused, “Uh...let me see...You remember Moses, right?” “Sure do. He led the Israelites in their Exodus from Egyptian slavery and oppression.” “That’s right. But did you ever wonder why he wandered in the wilderness for 40 years?” “That’s easy. It was because of his unbelief.” “No. Try again.” “Because he wanted the Children of Israel to really appreciate the Promised Land once they got there?” “No. The truth is, it took them so long because Moses refused to ask his wife for directions.

When Moses heard the voice of God, he shook with terror and hid his face in the folds of his robe. Why? Because he was about to receive a couple of chapters of the book of Exodus? No! He was awestruck because the voice he heard made real and immediate the presence of the Holy One of Israel. In the words, Moses met God. And so can we.

IT HAS BEEN SHOWN that the story of Moses and the Exodus can be understood not as literal history or history mythologized but as myth historicized. The lawgiver motif ranks as solar and allegorical, reflecting an ancient archetype extant also in the myth of Dionysus, god of vine and wine, who shares numerous significant attributes with Moses.

The Sumerian Tablets speak of King Sargon the Elder being found as a baby floating in a basket on the river and brought up by a royal family. Exodus speaks of Moses being found as a baby floating in a basket on the river by a royal princess and how he was brought up by the Egyptian royal family. The list of such ‘coincidences’ goes on and on.

If Your Presence does not go with us, do not bring us up from here.” (Exodus 33:15) As a reminder, where was here? It was the place of lack, adversity, stress, and hardship—the desert. Moses gave a reply that’s perplexing, even mind-boggling, to the average person. In essence he declared, “If I have to choose between Your presence and Your blessing, I’ll take Your presence—even if it’s in a place of lack and hardship—over Your blessing in a great environment.” Was Moses delusional? Had the desert sun distorted his sense of judgment? No. His internal GPS was set on what was best. It was directing him to make the best choice even when God was offering him a good choice, one that common sense and uncomfortable circumstances would have dictated he accept.

Not one word was said by Moses or Aaron as to the wickedness of depriving a human being of his liberty. Not a word was said in favor of liberty. Not the slightest intimation that a human being was justly entitled to the product of his own labor. Not a word about the cruelty of masters who would destroy even the babes of slave mothers. It seems to me wonderful that this God did not tell the king of Egypt that no nation could enslave another, without also enslaving itself; that it was impossible to put a chain around the limbs of a slave, without putting manacles upon the brain of the master. Why did he not tell him that a nation founded upon slavery could not stand? Instead of declaring these things, instead of appealing to justice, to mercy and to liberty, he resorted to feats of jugglery. Suppose we wished to make a treaty with a barbarous nation, and the president should employ a sleight-of-hand performer as envoy extraordinary, and instruct him, that when he came into the presence of the savage monarch, he should cast down an umbrella or a walking stick, which would change into a lizard or a turtle; what would we think? Would we not regard such a performance as beneath the dignity even of a president? And what would be our feelings if the savage king sent for his sorcerers and had them perform the same feat? If such things would appear puerile and foolish in the president of a great republic, what shall be said when they were resorted to by the creator of all worlds? How small, how contemptible such a God appears!

Ever since black people came to this country we have needed a Moses. There has always been so much water that needs parting. It seems like all black children, from the time we are born, come into the world in the midst of a rushing current that threatens to swallow us whole if we don't heed the many, many warnings we are told to heed. We come into the world as alchemists of the water, bending it, willing it to bear us safe passage and cleanse us along the way, to teach us to move with joy and purpose and to never, ever stop flowing forward into something grand waiting at the other end of the delta. We're a people forever in exodus. Before Moses there was Abraham, and ever since black people came to this country we have needed an Abraham. We have always been sending each other away -- for our own good, don't you know it -- and calling each other back, finding kinship where a well springs from tears. We are masters of the art of sacrifice; no one is more skilled at laying their greatest beloveds on the altar and feeling certainty even as we feel sorrow. And when we see the ram, we know how to act fast, and prosper, even as the stone knife warms in our hands.

The phrase as weak as a baby doesn’t apply in the kingdom of God, for when the Lord wants to accomplish a mighty work, He often starts by sending a baby. This was true when He sent Isaac, Joseph, Samuel, John the Baptist, and especially Jesus. God can use the weakest things to defeat the mightiest enemies (1 Cor. 1: 25–29). A baby’s tears were God’s first weapons in His war against Egypt (p. 21).

Matthew has Jesus flee to Egypt to escape Herod’s massacre not because it happened, but because it fulfills the words of the prophet Hosea: “Out of Egypt I have called my son” (Hosea 11:1). The story is not meant to reveal any fact about Jesus; it is meant to reveal this truth: that Jesus is the new Moses, who survived Pharaoh’s massacre of the Israelites’ sons, and emerged from Egypt with a new law from God (Exodus 1:22).

Sin is whatever offends God, and sin is an enslaver. But this slavery can be escaped—not by skill or cunning but by changing masters from sin to God.48 This comes about not by human initiative but by God's gift, to which humans can only respond.49 In Exodus, likewise, freedom from bondage is accomplished only by God. The Israelites are portrayed as having no chance whatever to save themselves. God must make the demands (“Let my people go!”); the people on their own, with or without Moses, would never have dared even asked.

The cross has also been discerned in the Old Testament, predating Christianity by centuries. As the Catholic Encyclopedia further relates, "The cross, mentioned even in the Old Testament, is called in Hebrew... 'wood,' a word often translated crux by St. Jerome (Gen., xl, 19; Jos., viii, 29; Esther, v, 14; viii, 7; ix, 25)."43 Christian writers such as Barnabas asserted that not only was the brazen serpent of Moses set up as a cross but Moses himself makes the sign of the cross at Exodus 17:12, when he is on a hilltop with Aaron and Hur.

Yup. I had a crisis of trying to make sense of theistic determinism. The Exodus story. Moses goes to Pharaoh and says, “Let my people go.” And Pharaoh says, “No way.” And Moses brings a plague upon Egypt. And Pharaoh says, “Okay, I give up. You can all go.” And then, at least in the version I was raised with, “God hardened Pharaoh’s heart” and made him say, “I changed my mind, nobody’s going anywhere.” So now, in comes the second plague, and Pharaoh says, “I give up.” And God intervenes again, and at the end we’re asked not only to judge Pharaoh but, while we’re at it, kill all the firstborns and the horses and whatever poor schmucks have been forced to be in the army running those chariots across the Red Sea. And justice has been served. But wait a second—God interfered. But then God judged them, and that’s very confusing. And when I was thirteen, it became crystal clear. I remember one night waking up at two in the morning and thinking, “None of that makes sense. None of it’s for real. It’s nonsense.” And I’ve been incapable of a shred of spirituality or religiosity since then.

Given our present physical reality and limited awareness, it is difficult to see how God is an integral and intimate portion of our being and how we are a portion of God’s being. God is with us, and this naturally showers us with God’s grace. Ezekiel revealed this when he searched for God, after he had gotten himself in trouble with the authorities and began to feel that he was alone in his quest, and grew weary of his mission. At first, Ezekiel searched for God in the things of power in the earth—thunder, lightning, fire, and earthquake—but not finding God in these, he became quiet and wrapped himself in his cloak, and there, within himself, he heard a “still, small voice.” At last, there was God’s presence. God had been with him the whole time. In Psalm 46 God instructed the psalmist to “be still, and know that I am God.” In Luke 17:11, Jesus taught, “the kingdom of God is within you.” In Exodus 3:14, when Moses asked God for His name, God replied, “I am that I am,” indicating that the great I AM is in that portion of us that has a sense of “I am.” The great I AM and the little I am are one. Our little consciousness is a portion of the vast Universal Consciousness that is God’s mind.

We shall never know where the Israelites discovered Yahweh, if indeed he really was a completely new deity. Again, this would be a very important question for us today, but it was not so crucial for the biblical writers. In pagan antiquity, gods were often merged and amalgamated, or the gods of one locality accepted as identical with the god of another people. All we can be sure of is that, whatever his provenance, the events of the Exodus made Yahweh the definitive God of Israel and that Moses was able to convince the Israelites that he really was one and the same as El, the God beloved by Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.

Romans 9:17: “For the scripture saith unto Pharaoh, Even for this same purpose have I raised thee up….” The “scripture” said to Pharaoh? Why, in the book of Exodus there were no Scriptures around when Moses talked with Pharaoh. Moses wrote the book of Exodus after those events took place. The Scripture didn’t say it to Pharaoh. Who said to Pharaoh, “Even for this same purpose have I raised thee up, that I might shew my power in thee”? Who said that? Why, the Lord said it. Paul is kind of careless, isn’t he? The idea of putting the word “scripture” for the word “God”! Isn’t that kind of careless? Paul must have been a Bibliolater.

Through the “transference” of the king-god relationship and the king-people relationship to the relationship between God and his people, Assyrian state ideology is converted into Israelite covenant theology. The fact that God makes his covenant with the people as a whole, rather than through the intercession of royalty, priesthood, or some other representative authority, becomes the basis for a new, specific, emphatic, and to some extent “democratic” conception of the people. The people—not Moses, not the seventy elders, not Aaron, not the Levites—assume the role of a sovereign partner in the covenant. This directness of access to God is what lends the biblical concept its democratic force.

When Israel came out of Egypt and the House of Jacob from among a strange people, Judah was his sanctuary and Israel his dominion. For if we regard the letter alone, what is set before us is the exodus of the Children of Israel from Egypt in the days of Moses; if the allegory, our redemption wrought by Christ; if the moral we are shown the conversion of the soul from the grief and wretchedness of sin to the state of grace; if the anagogical. we are shown the departure of the holy soul from the thraldom of this corruption to the liberty of eternal glory. And although these mystical meanings are called by various names, they may all be called in general allegorical, since they differ from the literal and historical.

When Israel came out of Egypt and the House of Jacob from among a strange people, Judah was his sanctuary and Israel his dominion. For if we regard the letter alone, what is set before us is the exodus of the Children of Israel from Egypt in the days of Moses; if the allegory, our redemption wrought by Christ; if the moral we are shown the conversion of the soul from the grief and wretchedness of sin to the state of grace; if the anagogical. we are shown the departure of the holy soul from the thraldom of this corruption to the liberty of eternal glory. And although these mystical meanings are called by various names, they may all be called in general allegorical, since they differ from the literal and historical.

When Israel came out of Egypt and the House of Jacob from among a strange people, Judah was his sanctuary and Israel his dominion. For if we regard the letter alone, what is set before us is the exodus of the Children of Israel from Egypt in the days of Moses; if the allegory, our redemption wrought by Christ; if the moral we are shown the conversion of the soul from the grief and wretchedness of sin to the state of grace; if the anagogical. we are shown the departure of the holy soul from the thraldom of this corruption to the liberty of eternal glory. And although these mystical meanings are called by various names, they may all be called in getteral allegorical, since they differ from the literal and historical.

Father Kolvenbach recounted the story of an abbot in the Middle Ages who would speak to his monks every day “on finding God, on searching for God, on encountering God.” One day a monk asked the abbot if he ever encountered God. Had he ever had a vision or seen God face-to-face? After a long silence the abbot answered frankly: no, he hadn’t. But, said the abbot, there wasn’t anything surprising in this because even to Moses in the Book of Exodus (33:19–20) God said, “You cannot see my face; for no one shall see me and live.” God says that Moses will see his back as he passed by him. “Thus,” Father Kolvenbach wrote, “looking back over the length and breadth of his life the abbot could see for himself the passage of God.

While an ever-increasing number of people consider themselves agnostic, the great majority of these people live as if they are atheists, bereft of all the magnificent life-enhancing benefits a God-centered life provides. These individuals are agnostics intellectually, but atheists behaviorally. Such people need to make a choice: Will I live as if there is a God or as if there is no God? You can be an agnostic intellectually, but you cannot live as an agnostic; you live as either a believer or as an atheist. You live either as if life is random chance or as if it is infused with ultimate meaning. Moses chose to look carefully and see a miracle in that burning bush. If we look carefully, we, too, will see a miracle—in everything.

No attempt should be made to "reconcile" Yahweh's hardening of Pharaoh's heart (plagues 6,8,9,10) with statements in the other plagues that Pharaoh hardened his own heart. The tension cannot be resolved in a facile manner by suggesting, for example, that Pharaoh has already demonstrated his recalcitrance, so Yahweh merely helps the process along, or that he is doing what Pharaoh would have done on his own anyway. Rather, 9:12 is a striking reminder of what God has been trying to teach Moses and Israel since the beginning of the Exodus episode: He is in complete control. However Pharaoh might have reacted is given the chance is not brought into the discussion. He is not even given that chance. Yahweh hardens his heart. It is best to allow the tension of the text to remain.

Verse 12 [of Ex. 12) tells us that the judgment of Yahweh is not only on the Egyptians but also on their deities. This is probably an allusion to the fact that Egyptians would often pray for the safety of their firstborn, particularly firstborn sons, as was the custom in many ancient patriarchal cultures. The death of the firstborn would be seen as a sign of the anger or perhaps the impotence of their gods. This is worth pondering when it comes to the death of Jesus as God’s only begotten, or beloved, Son. Would Jesus’ contemporaries have assumed his death was a manifestation of God’s wrath? Probably so. In any event, Yahweh is showing his superiority over the spirits behind the pagan deities, and thus we should not overlook the supernatural struggle that is implied to be behind the contest of wills between Moses and Pharaoh.

Do not be slow to answer the Lord’s call! From the passage of the Book of Exodus read to us in this Mass we can learn how the Lord acts in every vocation (cf. Ex 3:1–6, 9–12). First, he provokes a new awareness of his presence—the burning bush. When we begin to show an interest he calls us by name. When our answer becomes more specific and like Moses we say: “Here I am” (cf. v. 4), then he reveals more clearly both himself and his compassionate love for his people in need. Gradually he leads us to discover the practical way in which we should serve him: “I will send you.” And usually it is then that fears and doubts come to disturb us and make it more difficult to decide. It is then that we need to hear the Lord’s assurance: “I am with you” (Ex 3:12). Every vocation is a deep personal experience of the truth of these words: “I am with you.”[153]

I remember one worship experience in which we were all singing "Our God Reigns." One of the verses begins, "How lovely on the mountains are the feet of him who brings good news." I was standing next to the only Nepali delegate to the conference. His coworker had been arrested for his faith the day before he was to fly to join us. In his cultural tradition, the man next to me worshiped barefoot (as in God's command to Moses in Exodus 3:5 to take off his sandals, because he was standing on holy ground). As we sang about the feet bringing good news across the mountains, I saw my brother's feet. I thought about the thousands of Hindu villages scattered across mountainous Nepal, and I realized we were singing about his feet: feet that were taking the gospel to places I will never see. I confessed, "Lord, you are doing something in the world I never knew.

When it comes to the heart and soul of the Jewish faith - the law of Moses - Jesus was adamant that his mission was not to abolish the law but to fulfill it (Matthew 5:17). That law made a clear distinction between relations among Jews and relations between Jews and foreigners. The oft-repeated commandment "love your neighbor as yourself" was originally given strictly in the context of internal relations within Israel. The verse in question reads: "You shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against any of your people , but shall love your neighbor as yourself" (Leviticus 19:18). To the Israelites, as well to Jesus's community in first-century Palestine,"neighbor" meant one's fellow Jews. With regard to the treatment of foreigners and outsiders, oppressors and occupiers, however, the Torah could not be clearer: "You shall drive them out before you. You shall make no covenant with them and their gods. They shall not live in your land" (Exodus 23:31-33)

From Moses' point of view, he was now permanently separated both from what he regarded as his homeland, Egypt, and also from the people he now identified with as his own, Israel. Consider, then, the spiritual challenge that was his. He was a failure as a deliverer of his people, a failure as a citizen of Egypt, unwelcome among either of the nations he might have called his own, a wanted man, a now-permanent resident of an obscure place, alone and far from his origins, and among people of a different religion (however much or little Midianite religion may have shared some features with whatever unwritten Israelite religion existed at this time). His character, as we have seen, was clearly that of a deliverer. His circumstances, however, offered no support for any calling appropriate to that character. It would surely require an amazing supernatural action of a sovereign God for this washed-up exile to play any role in Israel's future. Moses knew this, and his statement, “I have become an alien in a foreign land,” resignedly confirms it 152

Moses, for example, was not, according to some interpretations of his story, the brash, talkative type who would organize road trips and hold forth in a classroom at Harvard Business School. On the contrary, by today’s standards he was dreadfully timid. He spoke with a stutter and considered himself inarticulate. The book of Numbers describes him as “very meek, above all the men which were upon the face of the earth.” When God first appeared to him in the form of a burning bush, Moses was employed as a shepherd by his father-in-law; he wasn’t even ambitious enough to own his own sheep. And when God revealed to Moses his role as liberator of the Jews, did Moses leap at the opportunity? Send someone else to do it, he said. “Who am I, that I should go to Pharaoh?” he pleaded. “I have never been eloquent. I am slow of speech and tongue.” It was only when God paired him up with his extroverted brother Aaron that Moses agreed to take on the assignment. Moses would be the speechwriter, the behind-the-scenes guy, the Cyrano de Bergerac; Aaron would be the public face of the operation. “It will be as if he were your mouth,” said God, “and as if you were God to him.” Complemented by Aaron, Moses led the Jews from Egypt, provided for them in the desert for the next forty years, and brought the Ten Commandments down from Mount Sinai. And he did all this using strengths that are classically associated with introversion: climbing a mountain in search of wisdom and writing down carefully, on two stone tablets, everything he learned there. We tend to write Moses’ true personality out of the Exodus story. (Cecil B. DeMille’s classic, The Ten Commandments, portrays him as a swashbuckling figure who does all the talking, with no help from Aaron.) We don’t ask why God chose as his prophet a stutterer with a public speaking phobia. But we should. The book of Exodus is short on explication, but its stories suggest that introversion plays yin to the yang of extroversion; that the medium is not always the message; and that people followed Moses because his words were thoughtful, not because he spoke them well.

Question Five: "Why is God such a huge proponent of slavery in the Bible?” We tend to look at slavery through the eyes of the cruel American slave trade, where races of people were kidnapped and sold for slaves. Kidnapping was a crime that God consider to be so serious, it was punishable by death (see Exodus 21:16). Biblical "slavery” (a bond-servant) wasn’t kidnapping, and it wasn’t determined by skin color. Those who were in debt paid off their debt through becoming a bond servant (see Leviticus 25:39). After six years, the servant was given his freedom (see Deuteronomy 15:12). However, rather than have their freedom, some chose to stay as bondservants because Hebrew law not only provided for them, it legally protected them. For example, if a slave was mistreated and died at the hands of his master, the master was to be put to death himself (see Exodus 21:20–21). The Law of Moses did allow the use of enemy slave labor, as did America with German soldiers captured during World War II.88 Not every ordinance in "the Law of Moses” should be considered to be God’s will, as in the case of divorce (see Matthew 19:7–8).

The men who had inhabited prehistoric Egypt, who had carved the Sphinx and founded the world‘s oldest civilization, were men who had made their exodus from Atlantis to settle on this strip of land that bordered the Nile. And they had left before their ill-fated continent sank to the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, a catastrophe which had drained the Sahara and turned it into a desert. The shells which to-day litter the surface of the Sahara in places, as well as the fossil fish which are found among its sands, prove that it was once covered by the waters of a vast ocean. It was a tremendous and astonishing thought that the Sphinx provided a solid, visible and enduring link between the people of to-day and the people of a lost world, the unknown Atlanteans. This great symbol has lost its meaning for the modern world, for whom it is now but an object of local curiosity. What did it mean to the Atlanteans? We must look for some hint of an answer in the few remnants of culture still surviving from peoples whose own histories claimed Atlantean origin. We must probe behind the degenerate rituals of races like the Incas and the Mayas, mounting to the purer worship of their distant ancestors, and we shall find that the loftiest object of their worship was Light, represented by the Sun. Hence they build pyramidal Temples of the Sun throughout ancient America. Such temples were either variants or slightly distorted copies of similar temples which had existed in Atlantis. After Plato went to Egypt and settled for a while in the ancient School of Heliopolis, where he lived and studied during thirteen years, the priest-teachers, usually very guarded with foreigners, favoured the earnest young Greek enquirer with information drawn from their well-preserved secret records. Among other things they told him that a great flat-topped pyramid had stood in the centre of the island of Atlantis, and that on this top there had been build the chief temple of the continent – a sun temple. […] The Sphinx was the revered emblem in stone of a race which looked upon Light as the nearest thing to God in this dense material world. Light is the subtlest, most intangible of things which man can register by means of one of his five senses. It is the most ethereal kind of matter which he knows. It is the most ethereal element science can handle, and even the various kind of invisible rays are but variants of light which vibrate beyond the power of our retinas to grasp. So in the Book of Genesis the first created element was Light, without which nothing else could be created. „The Spirit of God moved upon the face of the Deep,“ wrote Egyptian-trained Moses. „And God said, Let there be Light: and there was Light.“ Not only that, it is also a perfect symbol of that heavenly Light which dawns within the deep places of man‘s soul when he yields heart and mind to God; it is a magnificent memorial to that divine illumination which awaits him secretly even amid the blackest despairs. Man, in turning instinctively to the face and presence of the Sun, turns to the body of his Creator. And from the sun, light is born: from the sun it comes streaming into our world. Without the sun we should remain perpetually in horrible darkness; crops would not grow: mankind would starve, die, and disappear from the face of this planet. If this reverence for Light and for its agent, the sun, was the central tenet of Atlantean religion, so also was it the central tenet of early Egyptian religion. Ra, the sun-god, was first, the father and creator of all the other gods, the Maker of all things, the One, the self-born [...] If the Sphinx were connected with this religion of Light, it would surely have some relationship with the sun.

The Israelites called Yahweh “the God of our fathers,” yet it seems that he may have been quite a different deity from El, the Canaanite High God worshipped by the patriarchs. He may have been the god of other people before he became the God of Israel. In all his early appearances to Moses, Yahweh insists repeatedly and at some length that he is indeed the God of Abraham, even though he had originally been called El Shaddai. This insistence may preserve the distant echoes of a very early debate about the identity of the God of Moses. It has been suggested that Yahweh was originally a warrior god, a god of volcanoes, a god worshipped in Midian, in what is now Jordan.17 We shall never know where the Israelites discovered Yahweh, if indeed he really was a completely new deity. Again, this would be a very important question for us today, but it was not so crucial for the biblical writers. In pagan antiquity, gods were often merged and amalgamated, or the gods of one locality accepted as identical with the god of another people. All we can be sure of is that, whatever his provenance, the events of the Exodus made Yahweh the definitive God of Israel and that Moses was able to convince the Israelites that he really was one and the same as El, the God beloved by Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.

EXODUS 3 Now Moses was keeping the flock of his father-in-law, Jethro, the priest of Midian, and he led his flock to the west side of the wilderness and came to Horeb, the  wmountain of God. 2 xAnd  ythe angel of the LORD appeared to him in a flame of fire out of the midst of a bush. He looked, and behold, the bush was burning, yet it was not consumed. 3And Moses said, “I will turn aside to see this great sight, why the bush is not burned.” 4When the LORD saw that he turned aside to see,  zGod called to him  aout of the bush, “Moses, Moses!” And he said, “Here I am.” 5Then he said, “Do not come near;  btake your sandals off your feet, for the place on which you are standing is holy ground.” 6And he said,  c“I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.” And Moses hid his face, for  dhe was afraid to look at God. 7Then the LORD said,  e“I have surely seen the affliction of my people who are in Egypt and have heard their cry because of their  ftaskmasters. I know their sufferings, 8and  gI have come down to deliver them out of the hand of the Egyptians and  hto bring them up out of that land to a  igood and broad land, a land  jflowing with milk and honey, to the place of  kthe Canaanites, the Hittites, the Amorites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites.

... P doth protest to much. It would be one thing if P were merely silent about Midian. But P is hostile to Midian. Its author tells a story of a complete massacre of the Midianites. He wants no Midianites around. And he especially wants no Midianite women around. This author buried the Moses-Midian connection. We can know why he did this. Practically all critical scholars ascribe this Priestly work to the established priesthood at Jerusalem. For most of the biblical period, that priesthood traced its ancestry to Aaron, the first high priest. It was a priesthood of Levites, but not the same Levites who gave us the E text. Some, including me, ascribe the E text to Levites who traced their ancestry to Moses. These two Levite priestly houses, the Aaronids and the Mushites, were engaged in struggles for leadership and in polemic against each other. The E (Mushite) source took pains, as we have seen to connect Moses' Midianite family back to Abraham. That is understandable. E was justifying the Mushite Levites' line in Israel's history. And it is equally understandable why their opponents, the Aaronids, cast aspersions on any Midianite background. That put a cloud over any Levites, or any text, that claimed a Midianite genealogy. We all could easily think of parallel examples in politics and religion in history and today.

The Lord Gives Victory See, God has come to save me. I will trust in him and not be afraid. The LORD GOD is my strength and my song; he has given me victory.” ISAIAH 12:2 NLT The first time we see the phrase “the Lord is my strength and my song” is in the book of Exodus in the song Miriam and the women danced to as Moses and Miriam and the children of Israel sang. The reason for their rejoicing was their deliverance from Pharaoh and his army. When the Israelites left Egypt, they came to the Red Sea. They realized the army of Egypt had followed them. Then the Lord opened the Red Sea, and the Israelites crossed on dry land. The Egyptians followed. But once the last Israelite was safe on the other side, the Lord closed the waters over the Egyptians who had followed them. It was a great deliverance, and the people celebrated. Later, Isaiah not only predicted God’s judgment on the people of Israel because of their sin and desire to go their own way, he also predicted that God would send salvation and deliverance once their time of judgment was complete. As God had delivered the nation of Israel in ancient times, so would He deliver His people in the future. All would know His name; all would trust Him and not be afraid; all would find strength in praise and rejoicing. And therein lies true victory. Father, faith in You brings victory in the battle against sin. May we sing praises to You for Your salvation.

Hesed is a defining characteristic of God. It is linked to his compassion and graciousness. It is expressed in his willingness to forgive wrongdoing and to take upon himself the sin, rebellion, and wrongdoing of his people. As an expression of his lovingkindness, God allows his people to experience the consequences of their sin, as he promised Moses in Exodus 34:7. Even this is an expression of his hesed. God can be approached boldly based on the confidence we have in this aspect of his revealed nature. He is amazingly kind and loving to his servants as well as to the ungrateful and wicked. He is delighted to show them kindness. Due to this, they marvel that no other god is like their God because of his hesed. The scope of hesed is expanded in the context of worship. It is most often sung, as our hearts resonate sympathetically to the One who created us in his lovingkindness. However, when the reciprocal nature of hesed has been violated we are encouraged in the imprecatory psalms to offer feelings of anger and outrage, trusting in the hesed of the One who knows our hearts and will stand in solidarity with us and act on behalf of the poor. When we are facing despair we can take confidence in all God’s former acts of lovingkindness. Hesed is a standard to which we can appeal. We understand that we can ask, beg, and expect to receive according to the standard of God’s hesed. In light of our inability to keep any of the covenants, God has graciously granted to us a new covenant, based solely on his faithfulness. That covenant came into effect and will be sustained by means of a person Jeremiah refers to as the “Righteous Branch.” He is the incarnation of hesed, full of grace and truth.

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

The Ten Commandments EXODUS 20 And God spoke all these words, saying, 2“I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery. 3“You shall have no other gods before [1] me. 4“You shall not make for yourself a carved image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. 5You shall not bow down to them or serve them, for I the LORD your God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children to the third and the fourth generation of those who hate me, 6but showing steadfast love to thousands [2] of those who love me and keep my commandments. 7“You shall not take the name of the LORD your God in vain, for the LORD will not hold him guiltless who takes his name in vain. 8“Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy. 9Six days you shall labor, and do all your work, 10but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the LORD your God. On it you shall not do any work, you, or your son, or your daughter, your male servant, or your female servant, or your livestock, or the sojourner who is within your gates. 11For in six days the LORD made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, and rested on the seventh day. Therefore the LORD blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy. 12“Honor your father and your mother, that your days may be long in the land that the LORD your God is giving you. 13“You shall not murder. [3] 14“You shall not commit adultery. 15“You shall not steal. 16“You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor. 17“You shall not covet your neighbor’s house; you shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, or his male servant, or his female servant, or his ox, or his donkey, or anything that is your neighbor’s.” 18Now when all the people saw the thunder and the flashes of lightning and the sound of the trumpet and the mountain smoking, the people were afraid [4] and trembled, and they stood far off 19and said to Moses, “You speak to us, and we will listen; but do not let God speak to us, lest we die.” 20Moses said to the people, “Do not fear, for God has come to test you, that the fear of him may be before you, that you may not sin.” 21The people stood far off, while Moses drew near to the thick darkness where God was.

We all know that there are harsh passages toward others in the Bible as well: dispossess the Canaanites, destroy Jericho, etc. But, as I said earlier, the evidence on the ground indicates that most of that (the Conquest) never happened. Likewise in the case of the destruction of the Midianites, as I described in Chapter 4, this was a story in the Priestly (P) source written as a polemic against any connection between Moses and Midian. It is a polemical story in literature, not a history of anything that actually happened. At the time that the Priestly author wrote the instruction to kill the Midianites, there were not any Midianites in the region. The Midianite league had disappeared at least four hundred years earlier. As we saw in Chapter 2, it was an attested practice in that ancient world to claim to have wiped out one's enemies when no such massacre had actually occurred. King Merneptah of Egypt did it. King Mesha of Moab did it. And, so there is no misunderstanding, the purpose of bringing up those parallels is not to say that it was all right to do so. It is rather to recognize that, even in what are possibly the worst passages about warfare in the Bible, those stories do not correspond to any facts of history. They are the words of an author writing about imagined events of a period centuries before his own time. And, even then, they are laws of war only against specific peoples: Canaanites, Amalekites, and Midianites, none of whom exist anymore. So they do not apply to anyone on earth. The biblical laws concerning war in general, against all other nations, for all the usual political and economic reasons that nations go to war, such as wars of defense or territory, do not include the elements that we find shocking about those specific cases. ... Now one can respond that even if these are just fictional stories they are still in the Bible, after all, and can therefore be regarded as approving of such devastating warfare. That is a fair point to raise. I would just add this caution: when people cherry-pick the most offensive passages in the Bible in order to show that it is bad, they have every right to point to those passages, but they should acknowledge that they are cherry-picking, and they should pay due recognition to the larger--vastly larger--ongoing attitude to aliens and foreigners. In far more laws and cases, the principle of treatment of aliens is positive.

The lack of attention to Moses’s sons here and elsewhere in the Torah—essentially nothing is said about them—needs to be explained. And the explanation is probably this: They did not amount to much. This raises the interesting issue of the difficulty many children of great people face in leading successful and satisfying lives. In a book about Moses, ‘Overcoming Life’s Disappointments’, Rabbi Harold Kushner writes about this: Sometimes the father casts so large a shadow that he makes it hard for his children to find the sunshine they need to grow and flourish. Sometimes, the father’s achievements are so intimidating that the child just gives up any hope of equaling him. But mostly, I suspect, it takes so much of a man’s [the father’s] time and energy to be a great man—great in some ways but not in all—that he has too little time left to be a father. As the South African leader Nelson Mandela’s daughter was quoted as saying to him, ‘You are the father of all our people but you never had time to be a father to me.’ Kushner relates a remarkable story he read in a magazine geared toward clergy, a fictional account of a pastor in a mid-sized church who had a dream one night in which a voice said to him, ‘There are fifty teenagers in your church, and you have the ability to lead forty-nine of them to God and lose out on only one.’ Energized by the dream, the minister throws all his energy into youth work, organizing special classes and trips for the church’s teens. He eventually develops a national reputation in his denomination for his work with young people. ‘And then one night he discovers his sixteen-year-old son has been arrested for dealing drugs. The boy turned bitterly against the church and its teachings, resenting his father for having had time for every sixteen-year-old in town except him, and the father never noticed. His son was the fiftieth teenager, the one who got away.’ Of course, this was not necessarily true of Moses’s children, but the silence of the Torah concerning his children (which is not the case with the children of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Aaron) serves as an important reminder to parents who have achieved success to be sure to make time for their children. They need to try to ensure their children feel they occupy a special place in their parents’ hearts and no matter how pressing the parent’s responsibilities he or she will always find time for them.

Unqualified Champions Consider these individuals from the Bible. Each person was aware of a personal shortcoming which should have rendered him disqualified for service. God, however, saw champion potential … Moses struggled with a speech impediment: “Then Moses said to the LORD, ‘Please, Lord, I have never been eloquent, neither recently nor in time past, nor since You have spoken to Your servant; for I am slow of speech and slow of tongue’” (Exodus 4:10). Yet God served as Moses’ source of strength. God used him to deliver the Israelites from bondage. Jeremiah considered himself too young to deliver a prophetic message to an adult population: “Then I said, ‘Alas, Lord GOD! Behold, I do not know how to speak, because I am a youth’” (Jeremiah 1:6). God’s reply: “Do not be afraid of them, for I am with you to deliver you,” (Jeremiah 1:8). Isaiah, whose encouragement I quoted earlier, had reservations of his own. Perhaps his vocabulary reflected my own—especially my vocabulary as a teenager: “I am a man of unclean lips” (Isaiah 6:5). Despite Isaiah’s flaws, God saw him as a man He could use to provide guidance to the nation of Judah. Paul the Apostle had, in his past, persecuted the very people to whom God would send him later. To most of us, Paul’s track record would disqualify him for use. But God brought change to Paul’s heart and redemption to his fervency. Samson squandered his potential through poor life choices. As I read about him, I can’t help but think, “The guy acted like a spoiled brat.” But God had placed a call on his life. Though Samson sank to life’s darkest depths—captors blinded him and placed him in slavery—at the end of his life, he turned his heart toward God and asked to be used for God’s purposes. God used Samson to bring deliverance to the Israelites. Do you feel like the least qualified, the least important, the least regarded? Perhaps your reward is yet to come. God has high regard for those who are the least. Jesus said, “For the one who is least among all of you, this is the one who is great” (Luke 9:48) and “But many who are first will be last; and the last, first” (Matthew 19:30). If heaven includes strategic positioning among God’s people, which I believe it will, that positioning will be ego-free and based on a humble heart. Those of high position in God’s eyes don’t focus on position. They focus on hearts: their own hearts before God, and the hearts of others loved by God. When we get to heaven, I believe many people’s positions of responsibility will surprise us. What if, in heaven, the some of today’s most accomplished individuals end up reporting to someone who cried herself to sleep at night—yet kept her heart pure before God? According to Jesus in Matthew 6:5, some rewards are given in full before we reach heaven. When He spoke those words, He referred to hypocritical religious leaders as an example. Could we be in for a heavenly surprise? I believe many who are last today—the ultimate servants—will be first in heaven. God sees things differently than we do.

To understand, you need some basic history. There is no evidence that Israel was ever a significant slave population in Egypt or that the mass Exodus, desert wanderings, or invasion of Canaan ever occurred. Israel appears to have simply evolved in Canaan, entering actual history when the Egyptian Pharaoh Merneptah recorded annihilating a people called “Israel” in Canaan on his victory stele, dated about 1200 BC.

Israelites saw the controlling power of the patriarchs’ God, as he intervened for the deliverance of their descendants. And indeed, Moses in the ordinary way could neither have foreseen nor controlled these phenomena. The fact that they occurred just at that time confirmed God's instructions given to him in his vision and made possible Israel’s escape from Egypt in the way in which Moses assured them it would happen.

This attitude we may call practical monotheism. Whether other gods—the defeated gods of Egypt or the gods of the Canaanites or of other nations—might have some sort of existence was not a question about which either Moses or his followers were likely to trouble themselves.

We don't ask why God chose as his prophet a stutterer with a public speaking phobia. But we should. The book of Exodus is short on explication, but its stories suggest that introversion plays yin to the yang of extroversion; that the medium is not always the message; and that people followed Moses because his words were thoughtful, not because he spoke them well.

Remember what happened to Moses, and why he vanished for the past forty years? He sought to right injustice, but in a wrong way. By killing an Egyptian who was beating a Hebrew slave, Moses fought heartless power with the same heartless power in response. His actions proved that there was much he needed to learn about how to patiently wait in faith for Yahweh to right injustice

It has been customary for quite some time for Christians to interpret Adam and Eve as humanity’s literal parents, but according to John Walton and Peter Enns, this is not what the authors of Genesis meant. Enns believes that we can learn a lot about the Adam and Eve story by looking ahead to the exodus story, when God creates the nation of Israel. Like Adam, Israel is “created” by God during the exodus “through a cosmic battle,” given a “lush land flowing with milk and honey,” and meant to “remain in the land as long as they obey the Mosaic law.” Ultimately, however, like Adam and Eve, Israel persists in a pattern of disobedience and is exiled to Babylon. According to Enns, Adam is also created after God tames the primordial waters of chaos, just as in the Moses story. 657 Thus it may be insightful to interpret the Aule–dwarves story as a story which resembles the story of the creation of Israel rather than the creation of the first human beings.

Moses’s initial response to God’s mission is framed around his own inabilities: “Who am I that I should do this?” (see Exodus 3:11). God doesn’t answer Moses’s question, because it is the wrong question. God’s response, “I will be with you,” is saying that in the promise of God’s presence, Moses must find his confidence and strength.

The point of all this is that the book of Exodus as we know it simply could not be as old as the thirteenth century BCE, and could not have been written by Moses.

Yahweh is worthy of worship To save is to “re-create” God’s mountain God gives lots of commands Israelites rebel against Moses and God

Or consider one of my all-time favorite passages, the description of the ten plagues that Moses brought down on the heads of the Egyptians in order to compel Pharaoh to “let my people go.” The fifth plague was a pestilence that killed “all of the livestock of the Egyptians” (Exodus 9:5). How is it, then, that a few days later the seventh plague, of hail, was to destroy all of the Egyptian livestock in the fields (Exodus 9:21–22)? What

If I read the Bible looking for myself in the text before I look for God there, I may indeed learn that I should not be selfish. I may even try harder not to be selfish. But until I see my selfishness through the lens of the utter unselfishness of God, I have not properly understood its sinfulness. The Bible is a book about God. As Moses would learn during the Exodus, who he was bore no impact on the outcome of his situation. Who God was made all the difference.

First half of life folks will seldom have the courage to go forward at this point unless they have a guide, a friend, a Virgil, a Tiresias, a Beatrice, a soul friend or a stumbling block to guide them toward the goal. There are few in our religious culture who understand the necessity of mature, internalized conscience so wise guides are hard to find. You will have many more Aarons building you golden calves than Moses’ leading you on any exodus.

How the Tithe Changed From Food to Money What most people don’t understand is that early believers who followed Christ in various congregations did not practice money tithing. The congregations or the called out ones financed themselves the same way the early Israelite society did. Because they were accustomed to their cultural norms, they followed finance methods of freewill offerings, which according to Moses was more than enough to provide for the needs of the temple. Giving in the New Testament followed the pattern of Exodus 35:5.

For those who view Jesus as the literally begotten son of God, Jesus’s Jewishness is immaterial. If Christ is divine, then he stands above any particular law or custom. But for those seeking the simple Jewish peasant and charismatic preacher who lived in Palestine two thousand years ago, there is nothing more important than this one undeniable truth: the same God whom the Bible calls “a man of war” (Exodus 15:3), the God who repeatedly commands the wholesale slaughter of every foreign man, woman, and child who occupies the land of the Jews, the “blood-spattered God” of Abraham, and Moses, and Jacob, and Joshua (Isaiah 63:3), the God who “shatters the heads of his enemies,” bids his warriors to bathe their feet in their blood and leave their corpses to be eaten by dogs (Psalms 68:21–23)—that is the only God that Jesus knew and the sole God he worshipped.

12.14 This day shall be to you one of remembrance: The Torah affirms the central importance of remembering. It may be credited with the invention of collective memory. There are six commandments of remembrance in the Torah: 1. The Sabbath “Remember the Sabbath day and keep it holy” (Exodus 20: 8). 2. The Exodus “You shall not eat anything leavened with it . . . so that you may remember the day of your departure from the land of Egypt as long as you live” (Deuteronomy 16: 3). 3. Receiving the Law at Sinai “So that you do not forget the things that you saw with your own eyes . . . and make them known to your children and your children’s children, the day you stood before the Lord your God at Horeb. . . .” (Deuteronomy 4: 9-10) 4. Amalek “Remember what Amalek did to you on your journey after you left Egypt, how, undeterred by fear of God he . . . cut down all the stragglers in your rear” (Deuteronomy 25: 17-19). 5. The Golden Calf and other incidents in which the Israelites angered God “Remember, never forget, how you provoked the Lord your God to anger in the wilderness” (Deuteronomy 9: 7). 6. God’s punishment of Miriam for speaking ill of Moses “Remember what the Lord your God did to Miriam on the journey after you left Egypt” (Deuteronomy 24: 9—the verse alludes to Miriam and Aaron’s negative comments against Moses in Numbers 12: 1-9).

Exodus 14:13-14 Moses answered the people, “Do not be afraid. Stand firm and you will see the deliverance the Lord will bring you today. The Egyptians you see today you will never see again. The Lord will fight for you; you need only to be still.

Exodus 10:21-23, “The Lord said to Moses, ‘Stretch out your hand toward heaven, that there may be darkness over the land of Egypt, darkness which may even be felt.’ So Moses stretched out his hand toward heaven, and there was thick darkness in all the land of Egypt three days. They did not see one another; nor did anyone rise from his place for three days. But all the children of Israel had light in their dwellings.

Despite the attempts by Dawkins and others to postulate their unproven theories, according to the Word, God was not created. Rather He is self-existent. As he told Moses ‘ I AM WHO I AM’ (Exodus 3:14) The concept of a transcendent, eternal God who has always been is certainly difficult to wrap one’s mind around. But it is equally difficult to fathom what atheists believe.

We may have the vision of God and a very clear understanding of what God wants, and yet when we start to do it, there comes to us something equivalent to Moses’ forty years in the wilderness. It’s as if God had ignored the entire thing, and when we are thoroughly discouraged, God comes back and revives His call to us. And then we begin to tremble and say, “Who am I that I should go . . . ?” We must learn that God’s great stride is summed up in these words—“I AM WHO I AM . . . has sent me to you” (Exodus 3:14). We must also learn that our individual effort for God shows nothing but disrespect for Him—our individuality is to be rendered radiant through a personal relationship with God, so that He may be “well pleased” (Matthew 3:17). We are focused on the right individual perspective of things; we have the vision and can say, “I know this is what God wants me to do.” But we have not yet learned to get into God’s stride. If you are going through a time of discouragement, there is a time of great personal growth ahead.

Although Moses is the central human character of much of the Pentateuch, he is not introduced until ch 2 of Exodus, the second book.

When Moses came down off the mountain, his face was so bright with radiance that the people could not look at him (Exodus 34:29–30)—so great, so high and unapproachable is God. Can you imagine, then, if Moses were present today, and he were to hear the message of Christmas, namely that “the Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the one and only Son” (John 1:14)? Moses would cry out, “Do you realize what this means? This is the very thing I was denied! This means that through Jesus Christ you can meet God. You can know him personally and without terror. He can come into your life. Do you realize what’s going on? Where’s your joy? Where’s your amazement? This should be the driving force of your life!

According to the Exodus story, millions of escaped slaves were traumatized and tortured in the desert for four decades by Yahweh playing all manner of scary tricks and mind games on them. If the tale were true, such behavior would be condemnable as the practice of a bizarre and anti-human cult with an evil god. If the “chosen people” were so “stiff-necked” that they needed 40 years of being terrorized and abused in the desert, while alternately astonished by mind-bending miracles, one wonders why the all-powerful God would choose them in the first place.

There’s a passage in Exodus—God tells Moses, 'No one can see My face, but I will protect you with My hand until I have passed by you, and then I will remove My hand and you will see My back.’ Remember that? Emilio nodded, listening. “Well, I always thought that was a physical metaphor,” John said, “but, you know—I wonder now if it isn’t really about time? Maybe that was God’s way of telling us that we can never know His intentions, but as time goes on … we’ll understand. We’ll see where He was: we’ll see His back.

This is the human journey—the exodus from slavery to freedom, with Jesus as our new Moses. Jesus’s offer was, and still is, to rescue and deliver us from the prison of sin and self, to lead us to a new land, a new life.

†Type: The Exodus Ancestors Antitype: The Church The cloud The Holy Spirit The sea Baptism Baptized into Moses Baptized into Christ Spiritual food: manna Spiritual food: the Eucharist

Eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burn for burn, wound for wound, bruise for bruise.

Often, as we have seen, the Israelites offer examples of what not to do. Exodus, Numbers and Deuteronomy contain many negative lessons, and Moses’ speeches hint at more failures to come. But the Old Testament does contain a few bright spots of hope, with the book of Joshua shining as one of the brightest.

The structural elements between Exodus and the gospels can be seen in two ways. First the Moses-Exodus typology can be seen throughout the gospels: Jesus is depicted as the new Moses (Matthew 5:1; John 5:46); He leads a new exodus (Matthew 2:13, 4:1-17; Mark 1:1–13; Luke 3:4-6); He gives a new law (Matthew 5-7); He supplies bread from heaven (John 6:32-34); He offers a new/final Passover (Matthew 26:26; Mark 14:22; Luke 22:19). Second, much of Jesus’ teaching fits into the language of covenantal texts: Jesus’ self- declarations as the God of the covenant (John 6:35, 8:12, 8:51), condemnation of Israel’s covenant breaking (Matthew 21:40–41; Mark 12:9), teachings on how to live within the covenant community (Matthew 5–7), blessings and curses of the covenant (Luke 6:20–26; Matthew 23), and even covenant discipline (Matthew 16:18–19, 18:15– 20).

Although Sinai 361 is not dated, it is found among other inscriptions in the mines at Serâbît el Khadîm of the Egyptian New Kingdom. The pottery found in those mines was used during the reigns of Thutmose III (the Pharaoh who chased Moses out of Egypt) and Amenhotep II (the Pharaoh of the exodus) — so the pottery dates the inscription (c. 1446 B.C.).

What is the same in every human being and doesn't change? [...] That you exist. The words we use to express this concept are "I am." "I" is the pronoun we use to reference the self. "Am" is the verb that references a state of being. "I am" indicates self-awareness of being. In the space between all words, all thoughts, all memories, what do you know with certainty? "I exist and I am aware of it." When stating, "I am", all self-aware beings are referring to an identical experience. [...] No matter one's age or life history, "I am" - the awareness of being - is a shared phenomenon. [This is] the part of you beyond your story. Think of "I am" like the vast open sky. Any words that follow "I am" are clouds. They arise within the sky, temporarily changing the appearance of it, but they have no effect on the sky's basic existence. Who are you beyond your story? You are the open sky my friend - the presence and expression of an immense Awareness that knows it exists. Because this is a shared presence, it's more fitting to refer to this as the Absolute Self (with a capital S) as opposed to the temporary, limited sense of "my" self with a story. [...] In the Bible, in the Book of Exodus, the story goes that when Moses asked for God's name, the first response he received was, "I AM that I AM." So we have the Absolute "I AM" that is everywhere, all-knowing, and all-powerful. And we have over seven billion relative beings also claiming "I am." The difference between relative awareness and Absolute Awareness is the individual stories or exeriences that arise in the one I AM Awareness, like clouds in the sky. The Self is the sky. The selves are the clouds. You are not apart from the sky. You are intimately part of it as a self-aware expression fo self-awareness.

Idolatry isn’t just one of many sins. It’s the one great sin that all others come from. So if you start scratching at whatever struggle you’re dealing with, eventually you’ll find a false god underneath. Until that god is dethroned, and the Lord God takes his rightful place, you will not have victory. Idolatry isn’t an issue; it is the issue. All roads lead to the dusty, overlooked concept of false gods. Deal with life on the glossy outer layers, and you might never see it. But scratch a little beneath the surface, and you begin to see that it’s always there. There are a hundred million different symptoms, but the issue is always idolatry. That’s why, when Moses stood on Mount Sinai and received the Ten Commandments from God, the first one was, “I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery. You shall have no other gods before me” (Exodus 20:2 – 3).

The story assures us that Pharaoh (the ego) cannot kill off Moses (our connection to Spirit) no matter how hard he tries. He can bellow and stamp his feet and issue all the orders and decrees he likes; they will all come to naught. Pharaoh-ego simply doesn’t have the power to vanquish our link to the eternal. His frantic efforts must fail. The baby Moses will live.