Biblical Framework
Charles Clough
Lesson 50
Tonight I’m going to
just show a few slides at the beginning here.
This is just a cover a book.
It’s an artist’s conception of the Noahic flood and it’s the day when it
happened, it’s just to get in your mind’s eye that we’re talking about a major
catastrophe. This gives an idea of on
Christian’s imagination of what that event must have looked like if you were
there. This is one of those details of
the text of the Word of God that unless you look carefully at the text you miss
it, but this is a diagram of what we call the hydrodynamic stability of the
ark, you take the cross section of the ark’s dimensions and you compute the
center of gravity of that body and you say, okay, how far does it has to tip
before it rolls over, and the ark is very, very stable. This is important because if you take the
same dimensions from the fables, from the myths of the floods in the ancient
world and you try the same task, compute the center of gravity and tip it and
see how fast it rolls over, you’ll find it rolls over very easy. For example, Babylonia example of Noah’s ark
is a cube well, a cube rolls. This is
extremely stable and as you can see, even at that point when it tips that bowl
will ride itself, so it’s one of those realistic details of Scripture that tell
us and gives the assurance that we’ve got real data there.
This is a scale model I
built years ago based on the text of Genesis and I made it out some balsa wood
and some plaster but again it was to conceptualize what it must have looked
like compared to the usual cartoons and Sunday school quarterly. Notice how low, that was one way I
deliberately built it to scale, and I built the ark one eighth of an inch to
the foot so you could compare in your mind’s eye a boxcar to the size of that
ark and I think it gives you a conception of a pretty good railroad boxcar,
there’s the ark and that’s just half.
This is the center of the ark and this is the height of the ark compared
to the height of a railroad car so it gives a graphic illustration of the
volume of what we’re talking about here.
This is not a little pet carrier that went down to a veterinary hospital
or something. If you compute the volume
of that, there’s 400 and some standard boxcars can fit in that thing, so it was
a quite a carrier, it had a lot of volume in it.
This is some Egyptian
art, it’s the same kind of paintings that I showed you on the overhead
projector. The reason I showed that
particular one, it gives you an idea that the artists always pictured the
Egyptian pharaoh as their leader and I remind you of that because if you accept
the existing chronology of history, Pharaoh couldn’t have been leading his
armies through the Red Sea because all the Pharaoh candidates for the Exodus
that have been suggested by scholars based on the standard chronology of
history all along didn’t work out. So I
go back to my contention, I believe the Pharaoh of the Exodus was killed and I
believe the standard of chronology of history is wrong.
Now a little
introduction of Mount Sinai. This map
gives an idea of how strategically located Israel was in the ancient
world. This is the eastern end of the
Mediterranean. These black lines are the main trade routes. Now if you think about where God located
this new nation that was born in the Exodus, just visualize this in the light
of a world map. What continent is to the
northeast? Asia. What continent is to the northwest? Europe.
What continent is to the south?
Africa. Now isn’t it striking
that God chose His people to set up a nation of testimony on the crossroads of
trade in the world. This is something
that people don’t think about when they read about Israel in the Old Testament,
they just think, oh well, it’s just another country in the old world. Well, it was more than a country in the old
world. It was strategically located on
the lines of communication between the continents. It was no accident because God is going to do something with his
people and He wants the Word of God to go forth and so where does He do
it. He puts it right smack dab at the
center of the crossroads. Sinai is this
little area of land, this is a modern map of Israel. The Dead Sea here, the Red Sea here, the Gulf of Aqaba here, and
the Suez Canal here. So this is an
enlargement of the Sinai peninsula, basically it’s shaped like a triangle and
you want to visualize this because the event we’re going to study happened in
here. The Exodus happened somewhere up
in here, the people came across and along the edge of the Mediterranean, this
is a coastal point even today, because this is a map for today, you can see
where the roads are. All of the roads
are along here. And in particular, this
is an area that is very, very flat and maneuverable and in the ancient world,
the armies would move rapidly through here on horses and chariots.
And in the modern day,
armies moved in the same exact roads with mechanized infantry and armor
division. In fact, in 1948, one of the
Israeli generals was concerned because the Egyptian armored column was moving
along this coastal road as a penetration.
The Egyptians in 1948 were coming to destroy Israel and so the idea was
they were going to run their armored columns up here to Tel Aviv and destroy
the Jews. What happened was that there
was a guy who had his PhD in Biblical history and archeology who also was a
general in the army reserves and he said, what we have to do is cut their flanks
and ambush them somewhere along that road.
The problem is, how do we get our armored tanks, instead of having a
head-on collision with them this way, which we’d give away our position, what
we want to do is cut them off by a flanking maneuver. How do you get the tanks up from here over to here and with his
knowledge of history, he went back and found out where the Romans roads were
because the Romans had built some roads across the sand, they were under the
sand, and through detecting devices they discovered where the Roman road was,
kept the cover of the sand so the aerial photography wouldn’t show it and then
drove the Israeli tanks along on top of the Roman road to get over here and
surprise the Egyptians on their right flank. So there’s an example of a
maneuver that was done based on history and based on the fact that these roads
don’t change.
We want to visualize
the Jews coming across in the Exodus and they had to go somewhere and God did
not have them go along the coastal road because of reasons, which if you read
the book of Exodus you’ll see there’s a little comment in there, don’t do that
Moses, take them down here into the wilderness. So this whole area is wilderness and down here is the traditional
site of Mount Sinai, Jabal Musa, or the mountain of the discipline, or the
mountain of the teaching. This is the
gulf of Aqaba, this is the Sinai peninsula, this is where Mount Sinai is, this
is a coastal road. I’m going to show
you some pictures what the terrain looks like when you go into this road
towards Mount Sinai. This is a close up
of the approach to Mount Sinai today.
Here’s an example of an oasis in that area and you’ll notice there’s a
combination of terrain there. There’s
the flat land and then out of the sand, which is pretty level, you get these
mountains that suddenly jet up, very dry, everything’s hot, it’s obviously very
sparse and you can always tell where the water is because it’s the only green
around for miles. In the book of
Numbers when you read the numbers about the Jews, can you imagine a million
people wandering around out in this stuff, you’ve got a little logistics
problem. And we forget that Exodus
wasn’t the only miracle. The miracle
was the supply line. God had to feed
and water over a million people in that terrain every 24 hours.
An example, when Desert
Storm took over, we had 450,000 troops in the desert. People forget, it’s not the weaponry ultimately that determines
the war. What really determines the
outcome of the war is the logistics, and if you stop to think what a mess it is
to serve 450,000 soldiers, three meals a day, plus all their water, plus all
the gas and oil for the vehicles. Now
you figure out the kind of a problem that you’ve got. Now multiply that three to four times. That’s the problem God had in keeping the Jews together in this
wilderness area. So don’t think of the
Exodus as an isolated miracle. It was
one of a whole set of miracles that was done in this. That’s a typical oasis. See the little black thing hanging in the
tree, that is clothing of a Bedouin and in all this heat, these people walk
around in black wool; I don't know how they do it, but they do it and they’ve
done it for centuries. But that guy
left his cloak there. He can leave it
there in the desert and nobody touches it.
You know why? Because you touch it
and you steal it, if they catch you, they cut your hands off. The Bedouin’s
feel perfectly secure in the wilderness, nobody bothers them because they have
their own form of criminal control.
There’d be a lot of one-handed people around here. There’s an example of coming and going
inward to that center of Sinai. That’s
the pass going there and all of sudden you begin to see a much more rugged type
mountain terrain.
This is an example of some of the rocks that
are there. That’s kind of sandstone type
of rock and there’s graffiti on it and it’s interesting that the graffiti
that’s scratched in the rock is many different languages going back centuries
and you can actually go back in history.
You see some Latin graffiti, those were the Romans, you see some of the
Greek graffiti, you can see hieroglyphic graffiti; they spray billboards today
with graffiti, it’s nothing new. Here
in the ancient world they had graffiti too.
They wrote all over the rocks, so human nature hasn’t changed. It gives you an example that there were real
people living at the time of this book, living at the time these stories that
put that graffiti on there. This is a
basaltic type rock formation.
In the distance is the
area where the traditional Mount Sinai is.
I say traditional because I think that’s the real one, most people do
but there are some Christians that don’t believe that this is the Mount. This is at the base of Mount Sinai. Cecil De Mille in the Ten Commandments
actually used this as a prop for the movie. The real Mount Sinai or Mount
Horeb, as this is called, Jabal Musa is pictured in that movie. The Sinai itself is this, this is a big
mountain right here, here’s Sinai, off here’s a little monastery and in the
front there’s a little mound of dirt, looks like a little mound, actually it’s
about 50 feet high. Now what happens
when Moses was up here? What were the
people doing? Party-time and in
particular who was leading the party?
Aaron. And what did Aaron
do? He built an idol, while Moses was
up there he built this idol and Moses came down, asked what happened, he said,
gee, I don’t know, people had their jewelry and we put it in the fire and this
just happened, you know. This is the
way he explains himself but to show you the irony, the classic site that they
believe that Aaron set the golden calf at was this. Now, how ironic that he cast gold from people’s jewelry to stick
up on an idol so high on this little pedestal so everybody could see it, but
look at this pedestal and who’s on it.
It’s a big religious gimmick.
That’s an example of Sinai.
Let’s read Exodus 19:2
together and then think on what we’re looking at here on the screen. “When they set out from Rephidim, they came
to the wilderness of Sinai, and camped in the wilderness; and there Israel
camped in front of the mountain.” So Israel’s camping right there and there’s
the front of the mountain. You’ll also
notice in v. 17, “Moses brought the people out of the camp to meet God, and
they stood at the foot of the mountain.
[18] Now Mount Sinai was all in smoke because the LORD descended upon it in fire;
and its smoke descended like the smoke of a furnace, and the whole mountain
quaked violently. [19] When the sound of the trumpet grew louder and louder,
Moses spoke and God answered him with thunder, [20] And the LORD came down on Mount Sinai, to
the top of the mountain; and the LORD called Moses to the top of the mountain, and Moses went up. [21] Then the LORD spoke to Moses, ‘Go down, warn the people, lest when they break
through to the LORD to gaze, and many of them perish.’”
And he sanctified that mountain so that they would not come up
there. That’s the place where it
happened and hopefully this will give you a little bit of flavor for the text
there. I flipped the camera 180 degrees
so now what you’re seeing is the place that the people were and if you’ll
observe an interesting thing. When God
speaks, Exodus 20:18, “And all the people perceived the thunder and lightening
flashes and the sound of the trumpet and the mountain smoking; and when the
people saw it, they trembled and they stood at a distance.” Then they told
Moses why did you go up to it… talk about the fear of God. V. 21, “So the people stood at a distance,
while Moses approached the thick cloud where God was.” Moses later describes the scene in another
book Deut. 4:10, “Remember the day you stood before the LORD your God at Horeb, when the LORD said to me, ‘Assemble the
people to Me, that I may let them hear My words, so they may learn to fear Me
all the days they live on the earth, and that they may teach their children.
[11]And you came near and stood at the foot of the mountain, and the mountain
burned with fire to the very heart of the heavens, darkness, cloud, and thick
gloom. [12] Then the LORD spoke to you from the midst
of the fire; you heard the sound of words, but you saw no form—only a voice.
[13] So He declared to you His covenant….”
So what you have here is a million people assembled on this plain.
What’s striking about
it is, look what’s on both sides. Your back
is to Mount Horeb, so actually you’re looking northwest and the people are all
throughout here. This is quite a large,
large area. So, what would happen if
God spoke in a thundering voice from Mount Sinai, from on high, His voice comes
down across this valley. You’ve got
echoing going on, so you’ve got the people in like an amphitheater. It’s almost like a big triangle out from
Mount Sinai, where the people are and the voice of God bouncing off this rock
cliff. So it must have been a very
spectacular situation. This is what the
mountain looks like when you climb it, it gives you an idea of the utter
barrenness. It’s quiet, desolate and
barren. Ask yourself why, to a people
who were busy in Egypt building pyramids, busy doing this, busy doing that,
working farms, etc. when God wanted to get their attention, why did He take
them out here. Because He could get
their attention. I think there’s
something very powerful about this that when the Word of God was actually
spoken into space time history in Hebrew, you could take your tape recorder and
tape record the very voice of God, that happened here. When that happened, it was done in a total
wilderness that was quiet, no distractions, a perfectly quiet place. And I think if this is the way God teaches,
He wants our attention and I think this is an interesting classroom because
what you’re seeing here is the perfect teacher’s classroom.
Now we want to look at
the text and with that fill in we can get an idea that we’re looking at a real
event, it happened in a real place, under real conditions with real people, and
they heard a real voice. Question
asked: The elevation of Sinai? I don’t
know, it’s not a big mountain, of all of the mountains there, it’s one of the
bigger ones. It was a four hour hike up
to it but I really don’t know. It
wasn’t super impressive, high like the Rocky Mountains or anything.
We want to connect this
event with the previous events. As
we’re moving on now through the Old Testament all these events are like beads
on a necklace. They are all logically
interrelated so what’s going on at Sinai. Follow on p. 60 of the notes,
“Previous chapters discussed the progressive intervention of God’s plan into
the paganized Noahic civilization.” The
key word, at this point in Old Testament history, God is interrupting, He is
disrupting. Paganism is solidifying
like concrete is hardening, and before the concrete hardens and you get a total
paganization of the human race, God decides to start a new work in a separate
people, and that’s the story of Egypt.
It’s a story that started with Abraham. “First, there was the call of
Abraham through which we observe God’s election and justification working in a
way totally opposed to paganism autonomy and self-justification. Then we observed on a greater scale God’s
political and physical judgment upon Egypt and deliverance of Israel. Man’s proper response to these divine works
had to be by faith.” In the next paragraph,
“The next key … is the giving of the law to Israel at Mt. Sinai.”
So that’ the thing we
want to look at. We’re in Exodus, let’s
go back to Exodus 4. We want to catch
the flow of what’s going on here and the reason we’re doing this this way is because
you’ll notice on the right hand side of this chart, I list the three areas of
doctrine, the three areas of truth that we’re going to be looking at and we’re
going basically get an idea of what revelation is, what inspiration is, and
what canonicity is, very basic doctrines.
We’ve looked at all these other doctrines. You can build a view of the
Christian faith just be looking at these events and just rehearsing them in
your mind. One of the things that is
not on this chart that Mount Sinai and the Exodus together show is the issue of
salvation and what sanctification is that follows that, and what the issue of
Lordship is. In evangelical circles
right now, and has been for the last 7, 8 or 10 years, a big debate going on
between one camp of free grace people vs. the Lordship salvation people and
they’ve been arguing about the terms of the gospel and this and that. We can’t argue with something among
ourselves, don’t bother arguing with the world, always arguing with the other
Christians. So we want to get a
perspective by looking at these events because the events, just the simple
events of the Exodus and Mount Sinai tell us something about this matter. So that’s what we want to look at.
We want to get in our
mind now what’s happened with Israel.
Israel now has been saved, the nation has been born and what is the next
step. In Exodus 4:22 God calls Israel
by an interesting name and that name here, the common noun that he uses defines
the relationship of this newborn nation to God. You notice he says, “Then you shall say to Pharaoh, ‘Thus says
the LORD,
Israel is My son, My first-born. [23] So I said to you, ‘Let My son go, that he
may serve Me; but you have refused to let him go. Behold, I will kill your son, your first-born.’” This defines
something and we want to watch this very, very carefully. If we don’t get this down, we’re going to
lose it when it comes to understanding the role of the law in the Old
Testament. The problem is, most of us
don’t read the Old Testament, we’ve only heard New Testament, New Testament,
New Testament. And we’ve heard the
contrast, law & grace, law & grace, law & grace, to the point that
we almost kind of demean law. The
problem is that in the New Testament times, the law had been misinterpreted, so
you have Paul against the Pharisees, Jesus against the Pharisees, and law kind
of has a bad connotation in the pages of the New Testament. But obviously God gave the law so the law
itself can’t be bad. So we want to
understand and interpret what’s going on here, and the key to interpreting it
is this word, that the “son” is identical and another name for the Israel the
nation. Now later on it’s going to be
obvious that the Son of God refers to the King of Israel, and then later on the
Son of God is going to be Jesus Christ.
So the term Son of God, or Son of the Lord, is a term that begins here,
but now identified because there’s no king yet, there’s no Messiah yet, but
this is the nation from which He will come, and that relationship between God
and Israel is called a father-son relationship.
We want to notice
something at this point. If this is the
Exodus event and this is Mount Sinai, let’s see if we can draw some conclusions
here, just preliminary. If God saved
and created the nation here and over here was when He told the nation what His
will for them was, how He wanted them to behave, then did the law save
Israel? No. Israel had already been saved before Sinai. Now watch this. This is how you can learn from the Old Testament. Powerful stuff
here, very simple to understand. Which
came first? Mount Sinai or the Exodus? God didn’t come to Israel inside Egypt and
tell them what He wanted them to do.
All He told them He wanted them to do in Exodus was get out. That was the message. Get out of the world. I’m going to save you, I’m going to deliver
you, out of the world system, out of this kingdom of man, out of Egypt. Now after I do that, after I do that, now I tell you what I
want you to do. So watch the sequence
of events and notice that once the nation is born through the Exodus, the
father-son relationship persists. The
father-son relationship is the basis of everything that goes on including the
law. So how are we going to interpret
the law? We want to understand it comes
after salvation here, after the nation’s been created.
I quote Dr. Kaiser, one
of our contemporary evangelical Old Testament scholars and he points out that
“son” is the technical word that is going to come to mean Jesus as history goes
on. He says, “Eventually, ‘My Son’ was
connected with the coming scion of the house of David (2 Sam. 7:14)…. This
designation, ‘My Son,’ became a technical term and an appellation that could be
applied either collectively to the nation as the object of God’s love and
election or specifically to that final representative person who was to come in
Christ.” So right here we have a set up
going on, very subtly, very slowly, but here it is. It’s taking place and this is the maneuver that’s going on that
will eventually culminate in the coming of Christ.
Now we want to look at
something else. If you turn to Exodus
22, we want to look at the law, just a little section of the law here. Exodus 22:1-4 and if I were to ask you, what
is the grammar, what is the structure that you see in every sentence, every
sentence is written sort of the same way there. How would you characterize that text? How is it set up? Let’s
look at v. 1-2, you can tell immediately from the first two verses. “If a man steals an ox or a sheep, and
slaughters it or sells it, he shall pay five oxen for the ox, and four sheep
for the sheep. [2] If a thief is caught
while breaking in, and is struck so that he dies, there will be no blood
guiltiness on his account. [3] But if
the sun has risen on him, then there will be blood-guiltiness on his account. He shall surely make restitution; if he owns
nothing, then he shall be sold for his theft.
[4] If what he stole is actually found alive in his possession, whether
an ox or a donkey or a sheep, he shall pay double,” etc. etc. etc. Obviously this is law code and it’s written
in an “if- then”, so watch the text and watch this. If, dot, dot, dot, dot, then, dot, dot, dot. That’s the way the law code is written. That’s the way many laws are written.
In that sense, these
sections of the Mosaic Law are identical to modern law codes. And we call this format casuistic. That means its cases. It shows you a principal by giving
cases. Here’s an example, God says if
this happens, then you do this, if that happens, you do this, if this happens,
you do this. So it’s casuistic in
format. There were a lot of codes that
were casuistic in format. Hammurabi’s
code, the code of [not sure of word, sounds like: Eshnuna], there are all kinds
of ancient documents that had this casuistic structure, but we want to observe
that God, when He gave the law, didn’t exclusively use the casuistic
format. As, for example, let’s right
after the ten commandments, Exodus 20:22.
Is this casuistic, look at the sentence structure here. We’re going to drive to a point and it’s a
very important point about the Old Testament law. “Then said the LORD to Moses, ‘Thus you shall say to the sons of Israel, ‘You yourselves
have seen that I have spoken to you from heaven. [23] You shall not make other gods besides Me; gods of silver or
gods of gold, you shall not make for yourselves. [23] You shall make an alter of earth for Me, and you shall
sacrifice on it your burnt offerings and your peace offerings….’” Now there’s no if- then there, is
there? That’s also a part of the law
and that part of the law we call by another form, personal exhortation.
Now here’s the
principle. Formal law codes don’t have
number one, but they don’t have number two.
The uniqueness of the Old Testament law is that it not only has number
one type format, it has this number two type format. It has this personal exhortation. Let’s see if we can find a case where there’s personal
exhortation. Exodus 23:13, [Now
concerning everything which I have said to you, be on your guard; and do not mention the name of other gods, nor let
them be heard from your mouth.”] How do you interpret that? As an ethical rule for private practice as
well as public practice or do you view it as purely a public thing. In other words, what I’m getting at here is
there are, in the personal exhortation of the law, there are commands that in no
way could any police force enforce. The
if-then all formal law, that obviously you have a police function and you have
a court function that can enforce them.
But if you read the law carefully, there’s gobs of it that it just
wasn’t practical. I mean, you can’t
have a policeman reading people’s thoughts and going around tape recording
everything they said.
We want to think about
what does this mean as far as quote, “the law” in the Old Testament. What is this thing called the law? Is really the same thing as what we call by
the word l-a-w, a law code formally passed in a legislature and codified, etc.
for the courts? Is it the same? Turn to Deuteronomy. In Deuteronomy we get to the commandments of
Moses. Deut. 12 is in the thick of
it. V. 1, “These are the statutes and
judgments which you shall carefully observe in the land which the LORD, the God of your fathers, has
given you to possess as long as you live on the earth. [2] You shall utterly destroy all the places
where the nations whom you shall dispossess serve their gods, on the high
mountains and on the hills and under every green tree. [3] And you shall tear
down their altars and smash their sacred pillars and burn their Asherim with
fire, and you shall cut down the engraved images of their gods, and you shall
obliterate their name from that place. [4] You shall not act like this toward
the LORD your
God. [5] But you shall seek the LORD at the place which the LORD your God shall choose from all your tribes, to establish His name
there for His dwelling, and there you shall come.” And then it describes the
kind of worship that goes on there, etc. It describes the dietary codes. Now you’re getting into dietary codes in
this chapter. Is this going to be
enforced? Well, obviously some of it can
be enforced, but do you see what I’m getting at that there’s a component to the
Old Testament law that goes beyond what you and I would normally think of as a
law code.
Now how do we explain
that? This is a challenging
question. That’s the question we want
to look at for the remaining few minutes and also next week because I want to
impress upon you how an Old Testament person in Moses’ day at Mount Sinai
instructed by the priest should have understood what he was listening to and he
should have understood it in a different way than the pagan would have
understood Hammurabi’s law code.
There’s something different going on here with this law than normal
law. For example, in Deut. 10, [blank
spot, he’s probably referring to v. 16, “Circumcise then your heart, and
stiffen no more.”] … let’s be
realistic. Is a policeman going to come
along and arrest you because you haven’t circumcised your heart? Are you going to have a public trial over
the circumcision of your heart. Think
about this. What is the law getting at
here? Something’s different here, this
is not a regular law code. Can anybody
hazard a guess, because I want to work through this. We’ll eventually come to a nice neat way of looking at this, but
I want to exercise your thinking a little bit.
What is this telling about God’s relationship to this nation? He’s the ruler, He’s laying forth as king
His law code. But what do you observe
about the law code that is different from a pagan law code. [someone answers] Exactly. Remember what I
said when I started this whole thing off.
Its a father-son relationship and the evidence that there’s a personal
relationship going on here are these things.
I mean, you go from a casuistic law to personal exhortation, back to
casuistic law, back to personal exhortation.
How do you explain those two mixed together like that? It’s because something is happening in the
Old Testament law that doesn’t happen in normal law. If you can grasp this, you’re going to see something very, very
powerful about righteousness in the gospel sense of righteousness vs.
self-righteousness and quote, “being humanly good.” We want to sharpen our understanding of this because it’s
essential to the gospel if we think we’re going to be humanly good, you know,
society’s going to be good, then we don’t need a savior. Now obviously we need a savior, so there’s
something with our whole idea of social good and yet there are parallels
here.
On p. 61 of the notes,
[short blank spot] …Jehovah or Yahweh and the twelve tribes. So we have the parties to the contract, God
and the nation of Israel. Different
contract, not the same as Abrahamic contract.
#2, each contract is signed. How
did God sign the Noahic contract? The
rainbow. And what did we say He got the
rainbow from? From the scenes where these saints like Ezekiel and John get
these rare glimpses into the very throne room of God, they report that when
they get into throne room of God and they observe Him on his throne, He is
surrounded by this rainbow, this cloud of glory. So what we see physically in the clouds is a piece, or an
analogy, to what God would look like if we could see Him. I mean it’s amazing. This optical phenomenon that’s caused by
water droplets in our atmosphere has actually been designed to be a picture and
a memorial to God’s throne. And every time you see a rainbow in the sky, you
should pause to take a look, spend 15 whole seconds just looking at it,
appreciating it, and thanking Him that He reigns, because that's what He’s
saying. When the rainbow is in the sky,
He’s saying, I’m reminding you people, you human beings, that I reign over
nature.
Then when He comes to
the contractual signing for the Abrahamic covenant, do you remember what the
contract was. There in the chart as I
point out was the Oath of Malediction.
Remember that amazing thing where God actually says in effect I will be
damned if I do not carry this contract out in history, an Oath of Malediction.
And that’s how He signed the contract.
Now when you come to the Exodus and the Sinaitic covenant, it’s a little
more problematic about what He signs.
The best example that I have of what He did here, Exodus 20, when He
gave the Ten Commandments and He structured the work week so that there would
be seven. By the way just for fun and
trivia, ask yourself if you’ve ever heard any country at any point in history
that had a week that wasn’t seven. Now
that’s interesting. You know when the
communists were in their height under Stalin in Russia, they didn’t like the
seven day work week because they thought it was inefficient. They tried a ten-day work week. It didn’t work. They had to go back to seven.
Stalin with all of his might and his secret police couldn’t change the
Russian work week from seven to ten days.
They figured, hey, one day in ten is a lot better than one day in seven
so we can get more work out of people.
But it doesn’t work that way.
So, this is built into the structure of who we are and in the Ten
Commandments, precisely in the middle v. 9 & 10 there’s an explanation. If you go down, verse 4, 5, 6, 7, there are
minor comments after each commandment.
But in 8, 9, & 10 there’s a major comment about the character God
and it says in v. 10, “But the seventh day is a sabbath of the LORD your God; in it you shall not do any work, you or your son or
your daughter, your male servant,” etc. Then v. 11, “For in six days the LORD made the heavens and the
earth, the sea and all that is in them,” by the way, this is the divine
interpretation of Genesis. People have a
whole bunch of problems about the days.
Well, I don’t think anybody that was at Mt. Horeb that heard this,
here’s God speaking in Hebrew from the top of Mt. Horeb and He’s saying I made
the world in six days, He doesn’t say six ages, He says six days. Now if I’m sitting there and I’m listening
to God say that He made it in six days, okay, hey, in six days, fine. I’m not
going to sit there and argue with God?
He was there, I wasn’t and it says six days. Now that is believed to be the signature. The keeping of the sabbath, the seventh day,
the keeping of the sabbath, identifies God over Israel, the king of Israel, as
the Creator.
This is why on p. 62 I
quote Dr. Meredith Kline who says that “It is tempting to see in the sabbath
sign presented in the midst of the ten words the equivalent of the [ancient
lord-kings] dynastic seal found in the midst … international treaty documents.”
We’ll get into international treaties later.
The point that Kline is making there is that under certain treaty
formats there would be a seal actually embedded, either a saying or actual
picture or seal, and it’s at this point where the seal of the Creator is
embedded upon the structure of his kingdom.
The people of his kingdom observe something that is integral to his very
character. So the signing of the
covenant is the sabbath rest, the sabbath day.
Now we come to #3 to
the fact that every covenant God makes with fallen man, every covenant God
makes with us since the fall is a covenant that is in the presence of shed blood. And here, when this covenant is
enacted…Exodus 24:4, “Moses wrote down all the words of the LORD. Then he arose in the
morning, and built an altar at the foot of the mountain….” [5] “And he sent
young men … and they offered burnt offerings and sacrificed young bulls as
peace offerings to the LORD. [6] And Moses took half of
the blood and put it in basins, and the other half he sprinkled on the
altar. [7] Then he took the Book of the
Contract [Covenant] and he read it in the hearing of the people,” and that’s
when they swore obedience [;and they said, All that the LORD has spoken we will do, and we
will be obedient!”] Then v. 8, “So
Moses took the blood and sprinkled it on the people”. So the covenant is enacted with shed blood; see the consistency. Once you see this consistency, the New
Testament just falls into place. The
things in the New Testament aren’t new.
Very little of the New Testament is new. Very little, once you know the Old.
Finally, I go to the
terms of the signing of the Sinaitic covenant, p. 62 and what I say there is
that it defines the quality of the relationship between God, king and his
nation. I want you for next week, to be
very careful of the verses I cite on p. 63.
I give you six elements. I’ve
done that because there is discovered in the last 30 or 40 years, scholars have
discovered a very, very interesting thing.
Back in the days of the old liberals this was not known. Back in the days of the old liberals they
thought, well, the Mosaic code is just like code of Hammurabi or
something. They’re finding out that,
low and behold, in the ancient world, there would be a so-called great king, we
would say today a super power, and he would make a treaty with a vassal king,
i.e., a lesser power, third world country or something. There would be a great king and he would
enter into a treaty with a vassal king.
It would be an international treaty.
The six parts you see on p. 63 characterize
those suzerainty-vassal treaties or those great king vassal-king treaties. Now these apparently, I believe they
occurred after, I think this is the original one, but some of the scholars say,
well, God used that, its format had been pre-established. Whatever, there’s six parts to those treaties. There is a stunning parallel with the Old
Testament and what we want to do next week is read those verses where I show
you how the Old Testament law code had the same six features in it that was
routinely used in international relations by the super powers when they locked
into obedience a lesser country. When
that treaty was made, it followed these kinds of things. It’s a fascinating revelation about this
father-son thing, so it all going to come together next week hopefully. We get with the father-son
relationship. What is unique about the
Old Testament law code that sets over against pagan law code? And what is this deal about it being more
like a treaty. So those are the things
we’re going to aim for and I think out of that we’re going to have a really
nice new appreciation for what we’ve got here, what a gift the Old
Testament law that is so rarely read,
so rarely preached, so rarely understood.
------------------------------------
We’re kind of changing
territory, changing the perspective a little bit. Question: It’s quite
obvious if you devote some thought to this that the law that is given here
can’t be enforced by anybody except God and if you’ll look at those six little
sections, one of them is blessings and cursings. I think I list under that
number six, the blessings and cursings.
If you look carefully at Leviticus 26 and Deuteronomy 28, those are the
two major Old Testament passages that define the cursings and the blessings. If you’re not well exposed to the Old
Testament, it may seem to you that it’s kind of unrelated to the New Testament,
because the New Testament all grace, etc.
Well, the blessings and the cursings turn out to be the outline of Old
Testament history. If you look
carefully at those passages, it’s a forecast of what is going to happen to the
nation of Israel. All of her history is
embedded in those chapters and see that’s this reason that liberal scholars,
when they come to the Old Testament, do so with scissors and paste. They can’t believe in prophecy so that
couldn’t have been written by Moses because Moses didn’t know what was going to
happen. That’s why they always try to
tear this out, and that Moses couldn’t read that etc., and then they rearrange
the text of the Old Testament, because they got to get rid of all this
stuff. But if it’s really true, then we
have a God-king who is the same one who created the universe. Then you read the blessings and the cursings
and you’ll see that they involve economics, they involve climate, they involve
disease, they involve things over which man has no control. So here you have the law that is being
addressed to hearts, not just social behavior, hearts! And then you have a God who threatens
enforcement with tools that far exceed that of any human king. See, the law from the beginning to the end
is all supernatural and it’s a fascinating study to me. It really opens up the whole Old Testament
and it really shows you why in the New Testament history culminates the return
of Christ because when He comes again, He fulfills the archetype of those
cursings and blessings. There are
certain people who will be cursed, there are certain people who are going to be
blessed, and there’s the forecast right there in that law code. So, there’s a lot of neat things right here for
us and we have zip through them like we're zipping through the whole
Bible. All we can do is just kind of
pause and look at the jewels and not touch them and feel them and not get
involved in all the details, but we can at least see where the jewels are so
maybe it’ll stimulate you sometime when you want to work on a particular jewel
to go focus on that one or this one or that one in the Old Testament
document.
The other thing you
want to notice about that is that on p. 63, element five, the invocation of
witnesses to the treaty. That’s
neat. Be sure when you read that,
element number five, I give you verses in Deuteronomy, but be sure you turn to
that last verse I quote from Isaiah, that Isaiah 1:2 passage. The reason I want
you to look at that is how many times have you thought and been taught that the
Old Testament prophets were guys who were kind of like social reformers going
around and preaching all about social ills, which they did. But what this does for Isaiah, Jeremiah,
Ezekiel and all the prophets is it makes them an invocation to the
witnesses. There are witnesses to this
document. We haven’t talked about the
witnesses, who the witnesses are, but when the Mosaic covenant was made in
history between Israel and God, there were a set of witnesses, and if you look
carefully at Isaiah, when he goes to preach he’s not like a social reformer
preaching just at social ills. What
Isaiah is, is the prosecuting attorney who is calling upon the witnesses to the
treaty and he’s enforcing the treaty sections.
So what God is doing through the Old Testament of prophets is completely
misinterpreted by people who don’t look at the Old Testament as an entity. The prophets of the Old Testament are not
social preachers. They are prosecuting
attorneys of the treaty. The treaty
terms are now being applied to the nation and these prophets rise up, they are
God’s attorneys who are applying the code.
They’re not saying this is just bad.
They’re saying that you have violated the ordinance of God and you were
told back in Moses day that this would happen to you. Now I’m here to tell you that phase one of Leviticus 26 is
starting in my day and then another prophet will come along and say, you people
have violated the treaty, now what I’m here to announce that in my ministry I’m
invoking phase two of Leviticus 26 and then another prophet would come along
and he’d say I’m invoking phase three.
So all these prophets that were raised up by God were actually speaking
his voice of prosecution. When you see
that, it begins to tie now the prophets to the law. Remember those three parts of the Old Testament: the law, the
prophets and the writings. What’s the
relationship of the prophets to the law?
They are the prosecuting attorneys.
They are not people who were just raised up because the society was
bad. They are men who stand in the
stream of the enforcers of the treaty.
Personally they may not have thought that, but the Spirit of God that
was working in them was the actual enforcer who called the men up, Amos, Josiah,
called those guys out of their lifestyles, made them do things that were just
utterly unheard of in the ancient world.
Nobody walked into a king, you didn’t walk into Pharaoh and accuse him,
like Nathan accused David. You didn’t
do that. If you did, you’d have your
head severed from your body in about three seconds. What you find is that this treaty secularizes the power of the
king; it’s one of the great fruits of the Bible.
Do you know where our
limitations and political power came from.
It came from men and women in the western civilization who read
this. When we get to that point, I’m
going to bring in a book that I got out years ago out of Harvard library and
it’s [sounds like Lex Rex by Samuel Rutherford], written in 1644 against the
British claim, the British monarch claimed divine right, i.e., is absolute
power, he claimed that God had called him into existence and that parliament
and the church were under his personal control because he was God’s king. And all this is very powerful if you were
weak spiritually you’d say, okay, and go along with it. Well, the Christians who were knowledgeable
of Scripture didn’t go along with that,
didn’t go along with absolute power plan and they went back and they picked up
the stream of Old Testament thought that curtailed the power of the king and
made the king, the human king, subservient to the grand king or the law. So it was always God, the treaty, and the
king. So the human king was always here
and that was the thing that has given us political freedom. That’s where political freedom came
from. It didn’t come from Aristotle and
Greek democracy. It came out of the
law, this law. So, there’s lots of neat
parts in it and that’s what we started tonight. This personal relationship means that that law has a quality to
it that no other law code on earth has ever had a quality like that.
Question: Clough:
I can’t get into a hairy discussion about it, but perhaps we can get a
little, Hebrews and some of the New Testament passages pointed out because
God’s nature hasn't changed. Those
particular curses though are national curses and we have to be careful how you
interpret the Old Testament. This is a
treaty. America isn’t in that. The Sinaitic covenant isn’t made with
America. The Sinaitic covenant isn’t
made with Germany; it isn’t made with Italy; it isn’t made with France; it
isn’t made with Japan. It’s made with
only one nation and so the literal text of that treaty does not apply to this
country in the sense that we’re not a part of the covenant. But, the God who is behind is the same God
yesterday, today, and forever, so as the law reflects His character, then we
sit here asking for wisdom what’s the best way at organizing our communities
and our society. We certainly go here
to find out, basically what we’re doing is we're going here and we’re saying,
God, when you reigned in one nation, here’s how you reigned, what can we learn
from that. And I hope that you will be
curious enough over the next three or four weeks that you’ll pick up your
bibles and just randomly skim through sections of Exodus, and Deuteronomy and
Leviticus, especially Deuteronomy. Just
read a chapter or two and what I’d like you to do as you do that is ask
yourself what areas of life are addressed here. What I’d like you to discover, come to the discovery of seeing
just how all encompassing this law was.
Ask yourself if there was any area of life that’s unaddressed in this
law. We’ve got diet, what you eat. We’ve got Sabbath laws, how long you labor
and work. We’ve got criminal laws,
define what crime is. We’ve got laws
that define how the judges administer punishment, by the way jail isn’t one of
them. And we have moral codes that tell
about clothing, what to wear. We have
codes that define the relationship of parents to children and children to
parents. We’ve got laws that relate to
homosexuality, to divorce, to all this.
Every modern social issue is addressed in that law. Just amazing! We even have how much you can be in debt, the issue of credit and
debt and personal finances is addressed here, so it’s just amazing. And it gives you an idea that all of those
areas of life were of concern to the king.
Not just personal religious things.