Today, I am reading and commenting on  Exodus 19-21.

Yet another day where I have a few thoughts about the passage, but am unsure what how those thoughts tie together.  So, I am just going to start recording my thoughts and see if a lesson comes out of them.   It starts with Moses going up Mt Sinai to God and God calling out to Moses from the mountain.  Then Moses went back and summoned the elders, got their response and returned up the mountain.  Moses finally returned down the mountain and told the people to consecrate themselves.  Then on the third day, Moses once more went up the mountain to God, returned to the people, and then ascended the mountain once more.    That is a lot of going up and down the mountain.   What God said told Moses to tell the people, and the people’s responses to those messages are important, but I think we miss how much back and forth there was when we look at the words spoken on each end of each trip.  Having written all of that, I don’t see any further comment to make, but I think it is important to highlight how much trudging up and down the mountain did at Sinai.

Now, I want to look a little but about what God said, and how the people responded.  The first time up the mountain, God told Moses to remind the people what they had seen Him do for them in bringing them out of Egypt and that if they obeyed His commands, He would make them His special people out of all of the earth, even though all of the earth was His.  The people responded that they would do everything the Lord had said.  Then, on the third day when Moses went up on the mountain, God told him to go back down and return with Aaron.  I find that interesting because this was before God spoke directly to the people and gave them the Ten Commandments (often referred to by Jews as the Ten Sayings, which I find actually a rather helpful way of thinking about them).  After God directly gave them the Ten Sayings, the people asked Moses to talk to God for them and then tell them what He wanted them to know.  So, God knew that the people would ask that He not continue to talk to them directly.  The request by the people for God not to talk to them directly represents an issue which people have struggled with since Adam and Eve sinned.  Jesus died on the cross to reconcile us with God so that we would be comfortable in His presence again, as Adam and Eve had been in the Garden before they sinned.

I use the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.