‘Who is on the Lord’s Side?’
Moses comes down from Mount Sinai with a constitution for a holy nation, to find it already broken.
Moses comes down from Mount Sinai with a constitution for a holy nation, to find it already broken.
This post is number 7 in the series The Story of Moses
The Israelites have tired of waiting for Moses to come down from Mount Sinai, and have made themselves a golden calf for a god in place of the God of Moses. But Moses now has returned, bearing two stone tablets inscribed with a law for his people, and he is not pleased to see it has been broken already.
AS Joshua came down the mountain with Moses, carrying the stone tablets of the law, he feared that there was the noise of battle in the Israelite camp. “That” said Moses “is not the sound of battle. It is the sound of song.” And so it was, for the Israelites were dancing and singing and disporting themselves shamelessly around their witless golden calf.
God declared himself ready to destroy them all. Yet why trouble to rescue them, Moses replied boldly, only to destroy them? Would not the Egyptians feel they had won? He had his way, of course, but even so he broke the stone tables of the law he had brought from the mountain in full view of the people, melted down their abominable calf, and then cried ‘Who is on the Lord’s side?’ At that, the people divided into two armies, and fought; and Moses’s army routed those who had declared themselves against him, and against God.
Next in series: Heaven on Earth
See The Ten Commandments in Church English in our Bible (Authorised Version) section. The list of commandments is given twice in the Bible, once in Exodus 20:3-17, and once in Deuteronomy 5:7-21.