Blood Sprinkles - Exodus 24:1-8

Just as an overview of what has been discussed, let’s go back to chapter 19 for just a minute. It’s hard to keep track of all of it, for me anyway, because like I said yesterday, we’ve been covering this “covenant” since July, so 5 months of keeping it all straight is a little bit more difficult. At the beginning of chapter 19, the Lord has Moses bring the people to Mount Sinai and he went up and down a couple of times, I think, conveying the words of the people to God and the words of God to the people. And there was smoke and fire and quaking, and “the voice of the trumpet.” Then God gave Moses the Ten Commandments, and other ancillary laws, and then made the promises at the end of chapter 23.

The IM gives an overview of these promises, saying, “God promised five things to Israel for their obedience. First, an angel of the Lord would lead them into the promised land. Second, they would be blessed with good health. Third, they and their flocks would be greatly multiplied. Fourth, they would be successful in their fight against heathen nations. Fifth, they would ultimately inherit everything form the Red Sea to the Euphrates River.

Like TB said, these promises are different because, unlike the promises made with Noah and Abraham, these promises are conditioned on acceptance and obedience. Because God operates on the condition of free will and choice, this covenant couldn’t be forced onto Israel, they had to accept the terms of the agreement in order to be held accountable.

24:1-8 - God calls Moses to bring Aaron and some others “and seventy of the elders of Israel” to come to the mount, and Moses was to ascend the mount, but the others were to wait a distance off. The number 70 was interesting to me, because we have the quorum of the 70 now and I know that there have historically been 70 elders called into various positions in Jesus’ church, like the 70 missionaries called during His mortal ministry, so I wondered at the significance of that.

TB comments, “we cannot be sure whether the number 70 is precise or is symbolic; because in Hebrew literature rounded numbers like this are often symbolic. It could be that 70 IS the actual number at the same time it is symbolic of totality or comprehensiveness. That is, this group represents Israel completely.” The significance of this to me is that these “70” is that it means that these aren’t 70 “leaders” who were picked because they would do whatever Moses wanted. Kind of like elected representatives who make decisions for people without their best interest in mind. These “70” elders were capable to accepting the covenant with God as equal and factual representatives of the people, so the people’s accountability would have been accurate. God knew this of course.

Moses wrote down all the words of the Lord and told them to the people “and all the people answered with one voice, and said, All the words which the Lord hath said will we do.” It’s actually really surprising how much information I got about ancient Israel from the movies, specifically the Ten Commandments movie, but one thing that always was weird to me was that, from the movie’s perspective, God “chose” Israel to be his people, then gave them commandments to follow and then punished them when they didn’t follow them. And I never really thought about it enough to put in words until now but that would piss me off if I was a Hebrew and all of a sudden there was this “god” who was telling me what to do then punishing me if I didn’t do it, that sounds like slavery to me. The movie never showed the people of Israel accepting the covenant with a promise to obey, which changes the whole narrative and looking back at it, is the only way that a just God would have operated. So now, going forward, all the conflict that the people have with God and all the disobedience and punishment can be viewed from the perspective of “you agreed to do this and now you aren’t.”

Moses takes the words of God that he wrote down, built an alter, then “sent young men of the children of Israel, which offered burnt offerings, and sacrificed peace offerings of oxen unto the Lord.” TB stops to talk about why “young men” did the sacrificing at this point, and I didn’t think it was a big deal until he made a note of it, but yeah, I guess it seemed kind of random. He noted that the animals being sacrificed were oxen, so they were heavy and the young men were probably stronger than the “elders” so they could heave the animal around more easily. But priesthood ordinances have never been about who was physically more capable of performing it, so I thought about what the priesthood authority would have been to perform he sacrifices and I thought “why didn’t the Levite priests do it?” This was TB’s next question as well and he answers saying, “because the priesthood has not yet been established, as it soon will be.” I hadn’t thought about the time line but that makes sense. He then, interestingly, points out that “before the priesthood was established each family (separately) performed whatever rituals they traditionally followed… the firstborn (male) more or less had the position of the ‘family priest; but ONLY until the Lord established the official priesthood.”

Now that all the covenants have been written down, Moses reads it again to the people “and they said, All that the Lord hath said will we do, and be obedient.” With them again agreeing to the covenant, Moses took the blood from the oxen sacrifice and sprinkled it on the people, signifying that both God and the people had accepted the covenant and were now bound by it.