Forgiveness - Exodus 34:1-17

34:1-3 - The first set of stone tablets in which God inscribed the covenant with Israel, the Ten Commandments, were broken by Moses when he descended the mount with them to find the people losing their mind with a golden calf idol. TB reminds us that this was a symbolic gesture done in ancient middle eastern times to demonstrate to the people that they had broken the covenant they made with God and that it was now null and void. Importantly it seems that the people are still at the base of Mount Sinai and they haven’t yet moved forward toward the promised land, even though God told them it was time to go. I don’t think that was a disobedience thing, it was probably more because it would have taken a significant amount of time to get ready to make that large of a journey with that many people to feed, just like we see with the Nephites and the Jaredites before their long expedition overseas.

God instructs Moses to make two more tablets out of stone and take them to the top of mount Sinai “in the morning” to talk with God. These two tablets are meant to be a new covenant for Israel, but God makes it clear that he’s going to re-write the same commandments on the new tablets as he did on the first. The IM asks the question “Did both sets of tablets contain the same material?” and gives a VERY long answer about it, but the answer essentially boils down to “the Joseph Smith Translation of Deuteronomy 10:2 makes it clear that the two sets of plates contained the same thing, with one exception: ‘And I will write on the tables the words that were on the first tables, which thou brakest, save the words of the everlasting covenant of the holy priesthood, and thou shalt put them in the ark.’”

From that perspective, it seems like God had intended to make the priesthood a more widespread issue with the initial covenant, instead of the way it ended up with only the tribe of Levi holding just the Aaronic priesthood. I’ve seen this theme in different places in the scriptures, like for instance, the other day I was in the end of Mosiah where Limhi and Alma both escape bondage type of situations by divine deliverance. The difference is that Limhi had to have people come out form Zarahemla to rescue his people before they could leave, whereas Alma simple left when God said that it was time. The main difference between these two groups by this point was that Alma’s group had the priesthood with them and Limhi’s group did not. The priesthood in my life has been wielded toward me only by VERY unworthy and abusive men who used it as a weapon, so while I’ve thought about it some, I’ve never felt at a disadvantage because as a single mom I’ve never had it in my home. So it’s interesting to go back and consider here, if I was in a situation like Limhi or Alma, would the method of my deliverance be contingent on a righteous priesthood holder being in my home? I don’t think so, so it’s just interesting to think about, how would widespread priesthood ordination change Israel, if they had been able to have them moving forward.

34:4-17 - Moses goes up into the mount by himself, and God meets him up there and starts talking about himself and his own personal characteristics which are “merciful and gracious, longsuffering, and abundant in goodness and truth.” He also states that he’s forgiving. I think about why these statements would have been necessary for God to give to Moses but again it’s important to remember that I’m coming at this from 4,000 years more hindsight than Moses of even the Israelites have right now. What they know about the nature of divinity is what they knew from their time in Egypt, and the ancient gods were fickle and emotional and disloyal, not invested in the lives of humans at all and you had to basically trick them or trap them to get them to work in your favor, so for the people to know anything different about this new God that they were following out into the desert, God would have had to be very explicit with them about why he’s different.

Moses takes the information God gives him about who he really is and uses it to beg for forgiveness for the Hebrew people. God accepts and agrees to “make a covenant” but additionally he “will do marvels, such as have not been done in all the earth, nor in any nation.” Let’s keep in mind that the “marvels” that God is talking about now will have to rival all the wonders that he did while bringing them out of Egypt and all that he did anciently, like flooding the earth. He promises to drive, miraculously, the people that are currently inhabiting the land of Canaan, out so that Israel can just have it, and that’s a big deal. But when God does this, Israel has to destroy all the remnants of worship of any other kind of god, like their “altars” “images” and “groves”. They have to stay isolated, they can’t worship the gods of these other people, they have intermarry with these other people, they have to be completely isolated from all of it.