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

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

I do not remember ever noticing before, although I am confident that at some point it must have been part of a sermon I heard, that God told the people of Israel that if they obeyed His commands they would be a nation of priests.  A similar idea occurs in the New Testament where Peter refers to all Believers as priests.  It is the job of a priest to intercede with God for others.  So, God intended for the Children of Israel to intercede with Him for others, and intends for Believers to intercede with Him for the people around them.  Let us strive to fulfill that role.  As God’s priests we should seek to reconcile others to God by making them aware of Christ’s sacrifice for them and by illustrating how serving God makes our lives better.

I think I have written about what I want to cover next before, but I’m not sure (and am too lazy to go back through my blogs to check).  When God told the Israelites not to misuse His name, He was telling them something more than what I was taught that it meant.  I was taught that He meant that we should not use “God” as an expletive.  While, that is almost certainly true, that is not really what God was telling them, and us.  No, what He was saying was that we should not use God’s name to promote our agenda.  He was warning us against using His name to get people to support the war we want to fight, or some other cause which serves our interests.  Sometimes it is easy to see how this would apply, because some causes are clearly not godly.  But other times it is not so clear. There are causes which are perfectly fine to support, but which are not God’s causes.  I can support a cause to clean up the trash from an abandoned lot, but that is not a cause which every righteous person must get behind (not that I can imagine any reason for a righteous person to oppose it, it’s just that you don’t have to get involved in it to be righteous).  Using God’s name to drum up support for this latter cause would be misusing His name, as would using His name to drum up support for a war.

Now that I have gotten to this point, I really want to spend some time trying those two paragraphs together, because they really are connected. However, that would make this entirely too long.