Scripture: Exodus 20:1-17
Listen link: https://www.lcepc.org/blogger
NASA astronauts take great care to go out in to space. If they don't dress properly and take special precautions with special preparations for space travel, they can't survive out there for even a minute! Full contact with outer space means instant death. Ordinary humans are not fit for outer space.
In the same way, we may say that ordinary humans are not fit for contact with God. But God longs to be with us, to close the gap and make it possible for us to dwell with him in peace and joy. So, God shows us how it can be done. That’s the point of all the rules and regulations of the sacrificial system and the Ten Commandments in Exodus.
But we have a hard time believing it. People are so fickle. And since we are people, I suppose it’s only fair to lay that on ourselves and confess, “we are so fickle.” We have a hard time living by the faith that saves. Those Israelites had it so easy! They had just witnessed the miracles of God’s deliverance through the plagues. They had walked through the Red Sea! They were following a gigantic pillar of cloud by day and fire by night! God was right there before their very eyes doing some things that had never been done before. It was obviously the power of a god. And it was all to bless them!
Doesn’t matter. Even with all that personal eye witness experience of God’s mighty power and concern for them, at the first sign of trouble they are almost instantly prepared to condemn Moses and head back to Egypt where it’s supposedly safer, but what they mean is familiar and believable. We saw it even just before they crossed the Red Sea.
They just couldn’t believe that the God who had saved them from everything else also had a plan to deal with the challenge of the Red Sea too. But He did, and they lived through it. They crossed through the Red Sea on dry ground. Now they were really safe, far from any Egyptian threat, far from any threat from anybody. They were at Mt. Sinai where they could rest and all they had to do was wait for Moses to come back down the mountain. But would they? Would we?
Moses is up on the mountain. Moses on the mountain was just listening. God was doing all the talking, handing down his wisdom for living and describing the constitution and laws of a nation designed by God to bring glory and honor to himself by displaying a society of justice and compassion like no other that had ever existed.
While the people waited below, God gave Moses the pattern to create a tabernacle in which he would dwell with His people. God revealed his interest in walking with His people. God wants to come down and dwell with Israel. One of our Good News Club kids, said it this way, “God’s in town!” This is the big idea in the Bible.
This is the big vision of the whole story of God. The trinity of God wants to extend their community of loving relationships to include people. God wants to come down and do life with us. That was the original vision of Genesis 1, and this is what God is desperately wanting to do. In page after page in scripture, chapter after chapter of The Greatest Story Ever Told, God wants to win us back. He wants to get things back to the way things were in the Garden of Eden. He loves us and longs to be with us.
In Genesis 3, sin changed everything. It ruined God’s vision and separated us from God, and really, from each other. With Noah, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, God interacted with people indirectly, just a voice, but now in the story of the Exodus we learn that God is determined to come back down and dwell with the people. But, in order for this to happen, three things are required; Guidelines, place and sacrifice.
And God himself makes it clear what those are as he reveals it all to Moses. 1, Guidelines: God gave the 10 Commandments because we need to follow his guidelines on how to treat each other and God. 2: Place, God needs a place to stay so he describes the tabernacle that Moses is to put up. And 3: sacrifice, Sin that separated us from God, must be atoned for, so God can draw near again. So, God describes the sacrifices that the people ought to make.
We learn in the book of Hebrews, chapter 8, that the tabernacle is an earthly copy of a heavenly reality. The dwelling place of God is pictured in the tabernacle. The Levitical priests would serve at a sanctuary that is a copy and shadow of what is in heaven. This is why Moses was warned when he was about to build the tabernacle: “See to it that you make everything according to the pattern shown you on the mountain.” But through this pattern, God could be closer to His people, one step closer to the perfection he envisioned and longed for. We also learn that the whole system of sacrifices for sin and guilt and fellowship is also to illustrate the one incredible thing that God would do for us to win us back to himself.
God was laying out the plans and principles by which His people could live their lives mindful of God’s plans. But down below, the story happening at the foot of the mountain gets really messy. Look how quickly they forgot about the power of God! Well, 40 days, or almost six weeks, is a long time to wait for a guy that went alone up a mountain with no food or water to sustain his life. Certainly, he couldn’t have carried that much food, even if he had a backpack.
It was reasonable for those people to presume him dead. Except for the manna. They could have believed God would feed Moses as he had been feeding them. But, it was the 40 days that mattered most. They really didn’t have any idea what happened to Moses. And they weren’t about to send a search party because they had been strictly forbidden to approach a mountain that they were deathly afraid of anyway. It looked like a raging volcano to them.
So, they are in a dilemma. Something must be done! Nothing is given to us about their thought process, only the conclusion that they came to after 40 days. One thing we are looking at here is what happens when people try to make their own decisions without discerning God’s will. The decision to make up their own gods may seem foolish to us. But really, we do it all the time, just like they did and for the same reasons. They were in a desperate situation and in need of leadership. If it looks like God isn’t doing anything, we come up with our own plans.
They also needed some plan for how to get enough food and water to keep them alive in their journey to wherever they might go next, probably back to Egypt because it was familiar territory, they were used to it and the Egyptians probably wanted them back. Or they may have hoped that the Egyptians wanted them back. But think of what the Egyptian nation was enduring all because of those Hebrews! No army! No economy and no work force to rebuild it! Would the Hebrews really be welcomed back? Were they even thinking about that?
We can be sure of this. Whatever thought process they engaged in, it was entirely based on their own wisdom and cleverness. They did not consult God. They did not wait on God. They seem to have forgotten that they had clearly been told to wait. They should have believed that, as a promise that Moses would return to them. But they lost faith and decided to act on their own recognizance. They invented their own forms for worship, even while Moses was being given the true forms of worship. Everything would have been so much better if they had just waited a little longer.
That is so often how it goes with us, even as Christians. We may remember the mighty acts of God by which we are saved. We may be grateful to be set free from sin. But we need guidance for our daily lives too and if God keeps us waiting very long we are more than likely to come up with our own ideas and just do whatever makes the most sense to us. That is, we will use our own earthly resources to make progress with our own plans. And that is idolatry. That is when we just refuse to believe that God is communicating his plans to anyone and we definitely have a hard time waiting to find out what God’s will is.
But it doesn’t have to be that way. God gave the Ten Commandments to Moses on Mt. Sinai so that we could know very clearly all we need to know to live a blessed life. But it was nearly 3,500 - 4,000 years ago. So why do we still care about these ancient words of wisdom? It ought to be because they come from God! If anybody could tell us the best way to live it would certainly have to be the designer of life.
However, God also gave us the gospel of salvation by grace through faith in Jesus Christ that set us free from the Law. That was only about 2,000 years ago. In addition, Paul teaches in Galatians 3:23-25, “Before the coming of this faith, we were held in custody under the law, locked up until the faith that was to come would be revealed. So, the law was our guardian until Christ came that we might be justified by faith. Now that this faith has come, we are no longer under a guardian.”
So what place does the Law now have in the life of a Christian? Well, in Galatians 5:14 Paul says, “the entire law is fulfilled in keeping this one command: “Love your neighbor as yourself.” But just as a lawyer once asked Jesus, “Who is my neighbor?” So, we may ask, “What does such love look like?” For example, we may have to make a choice one day as to whether it is more loving to leave someone alone or to intervene.
As we study the Ten Commandments, we can see the value of the them in our lives today, even though they no longer serve as guardian, and never did serve as a path to salvation, no matter how much people may think they once did. What we will see is that the Ten Commandments today serve as a guide to happiness. Yes, Happiness!
The Ten Commandments do not hem us in and limit our freedoms as some suppose, but actually set us free to live life more joyfully. Even when God uses language like “must” and “shall” it is just because that’s the way we need to hear it. Otherwise, we would call them the ten suggestions. The commandments are not a path to salvation, but they are guard rails along that path that help to protect us from harm as we follow Christ.
Think of it this way. Let’s look again at a couple of the simplest of the commandments and I think I can show you how they’re supposed to work. When God says, “Don’t lie! Don’t steal!” you can hear the love and concern behind it if you think of it the same way we tell our little ones to stay away from a hot stove. “Don’t touch! That’s hot! You’ll get hurt!” Really, all the commandments have the same loving concern behind them. For example, if you don’t honor the Sabbath, you might work yourself to death!
The law of God is really a documentation of Grace! Did it ever occur to you that knowing what sin is, is a basic need for a satisfying human existence? Actually, let’s say that in a positive way. Knowing what will please God, knowing what He approves of and disapproves of, is a basic need if we are to survive and thrive in the world He created. How wonderful to know that God wants to help us achieve the highest possible success and joy in life. His goal of holiness for our lives is actually the secret of happiness!
We do have today a couple things the Israelites didn’t have. We have the written Word of God. It is said that 99% of God’s will for your life is recorded for us in this book. You may have heard the one that says that B.I.B.L.E. stands, “Basic Instructions Before Leaving Earth.” In it we have the Ten Commandments, all kinds of social laws that our modern legal system is really based upon. We have the Proverbs for wisdom. And we have the examples of the people of God, to follow the good ones and avoid the bad ones. Also, besides the written Word, we have the Church, plus the Holy Spirit. For us, in the body of Christ, there is the outpouring of the Holy Spirit who helps us understand God’s Word, even gives us the very mind of Christ! And we can learn the spiritual practices and the kinds of prayers that help us listen to the Spirit.
Apart from God, people are fickle. But God is faithful. His longing never changes. He still wants as close a relationship with you and me as is possible through Christ Jesus and the Holy Spirit. However, before we get to that, we do have to take a closer look at what was going on between Moses and God as God began to respond to what the people had been doing down below with their lack of faith and their idol worship. If you think of God as a person, you can certainly understand why he would be upset.
After all he had done to get the people this far, they were doing the Adam and Eve thing again. By their actions they were communicating to God, “We just can’t wait any longer. Moses must be dead so we’re on our own. We don’t care what God said about waiting. We believe our own ideas more. We believe in God and we will worship, but it ought to be okay for us to worship God in our own way.”
How would you feel if your children repeatedly showed the same kind of disrespect? How would you feel if your children rejected your good counsel and wisdom that you offer because you love them and know how things will go if they don’t listen to you? Oh, I think you have felt that same kind of burning anger God is talking about when he tells Moses to leave him alone so he can destroy them and start over with Moses to stand in as the next Abraham.
Can’t you just hear the very real emotions in God’s voice as he tells Moses to go down to your people whom you brought out of Egypt? Can you imagine the surprise on Moses face and in his heart as he turns that back around and says, “Why should your anger burn against your people whom you brought out of Egypt? I didn’t do that. I didn’t even want to remember?”
But God cannot be fickle. He still has his plans. He still wants to end up with a faithful people who would love him as much as he loves them. That’s why he said he’d start over with Moses. He could have done that. So, did Moses change God’s mind? Only partly; Moses just reminded God about God’s own concern for his glory and that the whole world should know of his power and might and compassion and concern for his people. God clearly let Moses know how he feels. And because Moses wrote it down we all get to learn about this character of God who cares about us, is vulnerable to us and can be hurt by the way we behave. We can hurt God’s feelings when we spurn His love.
But in spite of his emotions, God did relent and did not bring on his people the disaster he threatened. We see that God did the right thing, the compassionate and merciful thing, in spite of how we make him feel. His anger lasts for a moment, but joy comes in the morning. God’s love for us will always keep him faithful to his ultimate aim to win us back. Mercy triumphs over judgment because God’s love is strong enough to endure and overcome the pain we cause Him. That can be taken as a simple explanation of why Jesus was able to conquer death and rise from the grave. God’s love is strong enough to endure and overcome any pain we cause Him. People are fickle. But God is faithful.
Fortunately, for us, the result is that we get second chances, and thirds, and as many as it takes for us to get life right. God is constantly reminding us that he wants to come down and be with us, but three things have to be worked out first. Remember guidelines, place and sacrifice? Let’s take them in a different order now. In order for God to draw near us sin has to be atoned for. But what was only pictured in the sacrificial system given to Moses was accomplished perfectly for us by Christ. Now, the blood of Jesus has only to be applied to the doorframe of our soul. Jesus made the perfect sacrifice.
Next God needs a place to tabernacle. Now the place for God is in us. We are the place where God stays. We are his Holy Temple. And finally, in order for God to come down, there have to be guidelines for how we treat each other. There is still value in the 10 Commandments and all the other wisdom handed down to us by the prophets and even by Jesus in his teaching ministry. But, we must understand that we cannot outwardly conform to God’s laws without being inwardly transformed by his presence in us. Christianity is not all about behaving. It is much more about loving. If we make it about behaving we all tend to compare ourselves and judgmentally look down on those who don’t measure up. But as long as we keep it about loving, well then, we can even love our enemies!
The Israelite’s history demonstrates time and time again that without God in us, people are fickle. But thanks be to God for his gracious provision, his spirit and his blood poured out for us. We are allowed through the perfect sacrifice of Christ to become the dwelling place of God and learn how to do his will faithfully. Then following the commandments becomes the pathway to peace and happiness, the kind of life we always wanted to live and now are able to live because Jesus Christ has saved us. Through his work on the cross and in the tomb, Jesus Christ has given us a new life in which God can dwell.
Listen link: https://www.lcepc.org/blogger
NASA astronauts take great care to go out in to space. If they don't dress properly and take special precautions with special preparations for space travel, they can't survive out there for even a minute! Full contact with outer space means instant death. Ordinary humans are not fit for outer space.
In the same way, we may say that ordinary humans are not fit for contact with God. But God longs to be with us, to close the gap and make it possible for us to dwell with him in peace and joy. So, God shows us how it can be done. That’s the point of all the rules and regulations of the sacrificial system and the Ten Commandments in Exodus.
But we have a hard time believing it. People are so fickle. And since we are people, I suppose it’s only fair to lay that on ourselves and confess, “we are so fickle.” We have a hard time living by the faith that saves. Those Israelites had it so easy! They had just witnessed the miracles of God’s deliverance through the plagues. They had walked through the Red Sea! They were following a gigantic pillar of cloud by day and fire by night! God was right there before their very eyes doing some things that had never been done before. It was obviously the power of a god. And it was all to bless them!
Doesn’t matter. Even with all that personal eye witness experience of God’s mighty power and concern for them, at the first sign of trouble they are almost instantly prepared to condemn Moses and head back to Egypt where it’s supposedly safer, but what they mean is familiar and believable. We saw it even just before they crossed the Red Sea.
They just couldn’t believe that the God who had saved them from everything else also had a plan to deal with the challenge of the Red Sea too. But He did, and they lived through it. They crossed through the Red Sea on dry ground. Now they were really safe, far from any Egyptian threat, far from any threat from anybody. They were at Mt. Sinai where they could rest and all they had to do was wait for Moses to come back down the mountain. But would they? Would we?
Moses is up on the mountain. Moses on the mountain was just listening. God was doing all the talking, handing down his wisdom for living and describing the constitution and laws of a nation designed by God to bring glory and honor to himself by displaying a society of justice and compassion like no other that had ever existed.
While the people waited below, God gave Moses the pattern to create a tabernacle in which he would dwell with His people. God revealed his interest in walking with His people. God wants to come down and dwell with Israel. One of our Good News Club kids, said it this way, “God’s in town!” This is the big idea in the Bible.
This is the big vision of the whole story of God. The trinity of God wants to extend their community of loving relationships to include people. God wants to come down and do life with us. That was the original vision of Genesis 1, and this is what God is desperately wanting to do. In page after page in scripture, chapter after chapter of The Greatest Story Ever Told, God wants to win us back. He wants to get things back to the way things were in the Garden of Eden. He loves us and longs to be with us.
In Genesis 3, sin changed everything. It ruined God’s vision and separated us from God, and really, from each other. With Noah, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, God interacted with people indirectly, just a voice, but now in the story of the Exodus we learn that God is determined to come back down and dwell with the people. But, in order for this to happen, three things are required; Guidelines, place and sacrifice.
And God himself makes it clear what those are as he reveals it all to Moses. 1, Guidelines: God gave the 10 Commandments because we need to follow his guidelines on how to treat each other and God. 2: Place, God needs a place to stay so he describes the tabernacle that Moses is to put up. And 3: sacrifice, Sin that separated us from God, must be atoned for, so God can draw near again. So, God describes the sacrifices that the people ought to make.
We learn in the book of Hebrews, chapter 8, that the tabernacle is an earthly copy of a heavenly reality. The dwelling place of God is pictured in the tabernacle. The Levitical priests would serve at a sanctuary that is a copy and shadow of what is in heaven. This is why Moses was warned when he was about to build the tabernacle: “See to it that you make everything according to the pattern shown you on the mountain.” But through this pattern, God could be closer to His people, one step closer to the perfection he envisioned and longed for. We also learn that the whole system of sacrifices for sin and guilt and fellowship is also to illustrate the one incredible thing that God would do for us to win us back to himself.
God was laying out the plans and principles by which His people could live their lives mindful of God’s plans. But down below, the story happening at the foot of the mountain gets really messy. Look how quickly they forgot about the power of God! Well, 40 days, or almost six weeks, is a long time to wait for a guy that went alone up a mountain with no food or water to sustain his life. Certainly, he couldn’t have carried that much food, even if he had a backpack.
It was reasonable for those people to presume him dead. Except for the manna. They could have believed God would feed Moses as he had been feeding them. But, it was the 40 days that mattered most. They really didn’t have any idea what happened to Moses. And they weren’t about to send a search party because they had been strictly forbidden to approach a mountain that they were deathly afraid of anyway. It looked like a raging volcano to them.
So, they are in a dilemma. Something must be done! Nothing is given to us about their thought process, only the conclusion that they came to after 40 days. One thing we are looking at here is what happens when people try to make their own decisions without discerning God’s will. The decision to make up their own gods may seem foolish to us. But really, we do it all the time, just like they did and for the same reasons. They were in a desperate situation and in need of leadership. If it looks like God isn’t doing anything, we come up with our own plans.
They also needed some plan for how to get enough food and water to keep them alive in their journey to wherever they might go next, probably back to Egypt because it was familiar territory, they were used to it and the Egyptians probably wanted them back. Or they may have hoped that the Egyptians wanted them back. But think of what the Egyptian nation was enduring all because of those Hebrews! No army! No economy and no work force to rebuild it! Would the Hebrews really be welcomed back? Were they even thinking about that?
We can be sure of this. Whatever thought process they engaged in, it was entirely based on their own wisdom and cleverness. They did not consult God. They did not wait on God. They seem to have forgotten that they had clearly been told to wait. They should have believed that, as a promise that Moses would return to them. But they lost faith and decided to act on their own recognizance. They invented their own forms for worship, even while Moses was being given the true forms of worship. Everything would have been so much better if they had just waited a little longer.
That is so often how it goes with us, even as Christians. We may remember the mighty acts of God by which we are saved. We may be grateful to be set free from sin. But we need guidance for our daily lives too and if God keeps us waiting very long we are more than likely to come up with our own ideas and just do whatever makes the most sense to us. That is, we will use our own earthly resources to make progress with our own plans. And that is idolatry. That is when we just refuse to believe that God is communicating his plans to anyone and we definitely have a hard time waiting to find out what God’s will is.
But it doesn’t have to be that way. God gave the Ten Commandments to Moses on Mt. Sinai so that we could know very clearly all we need to know to live a blessed life. But it was nearly 3,500 - 4,000 years ago. So why do we still care about these ancient words of wisdom? It ought to be because they come from God! If anybody could tell us the best way to live it would certainly have to be the designer of life.
However, God also gave us the gospel of salvation by grace through faith in Jesus Christ that set us free from the Law. That was only about 2,000 years ago. In addition, Paul teaches in Galatians 3:23-25, “Before the coming of this faith, we were held in custody under the law, locked up until the faith that was to come would be revealed. So, the law was our guardian until Christ came that we might be justified by faith. Now that this faith has come, we are no longer under a guardian.”
So what place does the Law now have in the life of a Christian? Well, in Galatians 5:14 Paul says, “the entire law is fulfilled in keeping this one command: “Love your neighbor as yourself.” But just as a lawyer once asked Jesus, “Who is my neighbor?” So, we may ask, “What does such love look like?” For example, we may have to make a choice one day as to whether it is more loving to leave someone alone or to intervene.
As we study the Ten Commandments, we can see the value of the them in our lives today, even though they no longer serve as guardian, and never did serve as a path to salvation, no matter how much people may think they once did. What we will see is that the Ten Commandments today serve as a guide to happiness. Yes, Happiness!
The Ten Commandments do not hem us in and limit our freedoms as some suppose, but actually set us free to live life more joyfully. Even when God uses language like “must” and “shall” it is just because that’s the way we need to hear it. Otherwise, we would call them the ten suggestions. The commandments are not a path to salvation, but they are guard rails along that path that help to protect us from harm as we follow Christ.
Think of it this way. Let’s look again at a couple of the simplest of the commandments and I think I can show you how they’re supposed to work. When God says, “Don’t lie! Don’t steal!” you can hear the love and concern behind it if you think of it the same way we tell our little ones to stay away from a hot stove. “Don’t touch! That’s hot! You’ll get hurt!” Really, all the commandments have the same loving concern behind them. For example, if you don’t honor the Sabbath, you might work yourself to death!
The law of God is really a documentation of Grace! Did it ever occur to you that knowing what sin is, is a basic need for a satisfying human existence? Actually, let’s say that in a positive way. Knowing what will please God, knowing what He approves of and disapproves of, is a basic need if we are to survive and thrive in the world He created. How wonderful to know that God wants to help us achieve the highest possible success and joy in life. His goal of holiness for our lives is actually the secret of happiness!
We do have today a couple things the Israelites didn’t have. We have the written Word of God. It is said that 99% of God’s will for your life is recorded for us in this book. You may have heard the one that says that B.I.B.L.E. stands, “Basic Instructions Before Leaving Earth.” In it we have the Ten Commandments, all kinds of social laws that our modern legal system is really based upon. We have the Proverbs for wisdom. And we have the examples of the people of God, to follow the good ones and avoid the bad ones. Also, besides the written Word, we have the Church, plus the Holy Spirit. For us, in the body of Christ, there is the outpouring of the Holy Spirit who helps us understand God’s Word, even gives us the very mind of Christ! And we can learn the spiritual practices and the kinds of prayers that help us listen to the Spirit.
Apart from God, people are fickle. But God is faithful. His longing never changes. He still wants as close a relationship with you and me as is possible through Christ Jesus and the Holy Spirit. However, before we get to that, we do have to take a closer look at what was going on between Moses and God as God began to respond to what the people had been doing down below with their lack of faith and their idol worship. If you think of God as a person, you can certainly understand why he would be upset.
After all he had done to get the people this far, they were doing the Adam and Eve thing again. By their actions they were communicating to God, “We just can’t wait any longer. Moses must be dead so we’re on our own. We don’t care what God said about waiting. We believe our own ideas more. We believe in God and we will worship, but it ought to be okay for us to worship God in our own way.”
How would you feel if your children repeatedly showed the same kind of disrespect? How would you feel if your children rejected your good counsel and wisdom that you offer because you love them and know how things will go if they don’t listen to you? Oh, I think you have felt that same kind of burning anger God is talking about when he tells Moses to leave him alone so he can destroy them and start over with Moses to stand in as the next Abraham.
Can’t you just hear the very real emotions in God’s voice as he tells Moses to go down to your people whom you brought out of Egypt? Can you imagine the surprise on Moses face and in his heart as he turns that back around and says, “Why should your anger burn against your people whom you brought out of Egypt? I didn’t do that. I didn’t even want to remember?”
But God cannot be fickle. He still has his plans. He still wants to end up with a faithful people who would love him as much as he loves them. That’s why he said he’d start over with Moses. He could have done that. So, did Moses change God’s mind? Only partly; Moses just reminded God about God’s own concern for his glory and that the whole world should know of his power and might and compassion and concern for his people. God clearly let Moses know how he feels. And because Moses wrote it down we all get to learn about this character of God who cares about us, is vulnerable to us and can be hurt by the way we behave. We can hurt God’s feelings when we spurn His love.
But in spite of his emotions, God did relent and did not bring on his people the disaster he threatened. We see that God did the right thing, the compassionate and merciful thing, in spite of how we make him feel. His anger lasts for a moment, but joy comes in the morning. God’s love for us will always keep him faithful to his ultimate aim to win us back. Mercy triumphs over judgment because God’s love is strong enough to endure and overcome the pain we cause Him. That can be taken as a simple explanation of why Jesus was able to conquer death and rise from the grave. God’s love is strong enough to endure and overcome any pain we cause Him. People are fickle. But God is faithful.
Fortunately, for us, the result is that we get second chances, and thirds, and as many as it takes for us to get life right. God is constantly reminding us that he wants to come down and be with us, but three things have to be worked out first. Remember guidelines, place and sacrifice? Let’s take them in a different order now. In order for God to draw near us sin has to be atoned for. But what was only pictured in the sacrificial system given to Moses was accomplished perfectly for us by Christ. Now, the blood of Jesus has only to be applied to the doorframe of our soul. Jesus made the perfect sacrifice.
Next God needs a place to tabernacle. Now the place for God is in us. We are the place where God stays. We are his Holy Temple. And finally, in order for God to come down, there have to be guidelines for how we treat each other. There is still value in the 10 Commandments and all the other wisdom handed down to us by the prophets and even by Jesus in his teaching ministry. But, we must understand that we cannot outwardly conform to God’s laws without being inwardly transformed by his presence in us. Christianity is not all about behaving. It is much more about loving. If we make it about behaving we all tend to compare ourselves and judgmentally look down on those who don’t measure up. But as long as we keep it about loving, well then, we can even love our enemies!
The Israelite’s history demonstrates time and time again that without God in us, people are fickle. But thanks be to God for his gracious provision, his spirit and his blood poured out for us. We are allowed through the perfect sacrifice of Christ to become the dwelling place of God and learn how to do his will faithfully. Then following the commandments becomes the pathway to peace and happiness, the kind of life we always wanted to live and now are able to live because Jesus Christ has saved us. Through his work on the cross and in the tomb, Jesus Christ has given us a new life in which God can dwell.
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