Stone Tablets and a Golden Calf
Even as Moses is in the presence of God receiving the Ten Commandments, the people down below are already breaking the first of them.
Even as Moses is in the presence of God receiving the Ten Commandments, the people down below are already breaking the first of them.
This post is number 6 in the series The Story of Moses
Moses has brought the Israelites out of servitude in Egypt into the hard wilderness of the Sinai Peninsula. God has given them manna to eat and water from dry stone, but their hearts fail them when Moses goes up into the quaking, cloud-capped, lightning-crowned Mount Sinai, and does not return for over a month.
THERE upon Sinai’s peak, enveloped in thick cloud, God gave to Moses a law for the people of Israel, beginning with Ten Commandments.* They were to live by this law in the happy land to which he would bring them, bounded by the Red Sea, the Mediterranean, and the River Jordan, and utterly reject all the laws and gods of other peoples. He also showed Moses the sanctuary of heaven itself, and bade him draw up plans for an earthly temple made in its likeness.* These laws God inscribed upon two tablets of stone.
Moses was gone forty days and nights, and down below the Israelites were growing restive. Convinced Moses was dead, they persuaded Aaron to melt down the jewellery given them by the Egyptians, and cast from it a golden calf. Then they offered sacrifices to their calf-god, and sang songs to it, crediting it with delivering them from slavery in Egypt, and pleading with it to save them once more.
Next in series: ‘Who is on the Lord’s Side?’
See The Ten Commandments as given in the English Prayer Book of 1549. The list of commandments is given twice in the Bible, once in Exodus 20:3-17, and once in Deuteronomy 5:7-21.
See Exodus-24:9-11. Moses and his companions saw heaven’s own sanctuary, and “saw God, and did eat and drink”. Thereafter, it is repeatedly stated that the instructions for building an earthly temple must be carried out “according to the pattern shewed to thee in the mount”. The author of the Letter to the Hebrews makes a great deal of this, saying that Christ has entered that heavenly sanctuary to plead for us before God. See Hebrews 8-9.