Still Scared - Exodus 20:18-26

20:18-26 – After the discussion of the Ten Commandments or the Ten Words, we have to go back to the end of chapter 19 to get set the xcene again. The Lord had called Moses and the people forth from the camp to speak to God directly. Moses, I think, is pretty used to God’s presence and what all it entails to speak to Him, but the people are pretty freaked out about it. And for how much they complain about Moses, when the time comes to speak to God themselves, they are pretty quick to get scared and back off, asking Moses, “speak thou with us, and we will head: but let not God speak with us, lest we die.” I wonder if this was at all validating for Moses, to have the people who complained about him this whole time to be scared of the entity that he encounters regularly. Probably not, that’s probably just an emotion that I would experience.

The people “saw the thunderings, and the lightnings, and the noise of the trumpet, and the mountain smoking,” and decided that Moses was the one who could handle all that for them and they would just listen to him. But Moses encouraged them to participate in their own experience saying, “Fear not: for God is come to prove you, and that his fear may be before your faces, that ye sin not.” He says, “God’ just trying to help you be better,” and the people still back up and say “no thanks.”

God, of course, knew that this would happen so he just told Moses that it would be ok just to tell them what God told him. Interestingly, in addition to all the commandments that He just gave, God added on, that the sacrificial offerings that they were to make to Him were to be done on “an altar of earth,” so basically a mound of dirt. Or, it they really wanted to, they could make “an altar of stone,” but only one made of rocks found exactly how they naturally occurred, “thou shalt not build it of hewn stone: for it thou lift up thy tool upon it, thou has polluted it.”

This is an interesting requirement, but one that makes sense if we think about it. God was working really hard to break the Hebrews away from the idolatrous religious culture of Egypt, or even the culture that had permeated religion throughout human history. I don’t know why as soon as people rejected the God of Adam, they immediately clung to idols. Maybe it’s because they could satisfy the inherent need for God and worship in their lives but in a way that requires very little effort from them and still lets them do whatever they want. That belief system has been in play since humans began and it took from when the Hebrews left Egypt in 1300 BCE several hundred years forward for the practice to be abandoned.

But even then, people who don’t want to be beholden to the God of Abraham, the one that requires effort of them, they still make up their own rules to get around the standard. It can be through physical idols or through the 600+ laws the Pharisees clung to, to really anything that anyone can use to justify not doing what God says and doing what they want instead. I mean, I’ve been there, I’ve done it a hundred times myself, so I get it. It’s human nature. God wanted to take out the very opportunity for people to find meaning in creating artistic, creative, beautiful stone work to create the altar and just basically said, “I created these rocks and they are good enough to be used as a worship surface.”