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Old Testament 21 Exodus Stage 3 Liberty Home Bible Institute HL Willmington
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In this lecture, the speaker discusses the journey of the children of Israel as they leave Egypt and cross the Red Sea. They travel southeast to avoid the Philistines and encounter bitter waters at a place called Mara. God sweetens the waters with a tree and makes a covenant with the Israelites. They continue their journey to Elim and then to the wilderness of Zin, where they begin to complain and desire to return to Egypt. God provides them with manna, a heavenly bread, for sustenance during their time in the desert. The speaker also addresses the Sabbath and clarifies that it was given to Israel and not to the church. This is number 21 in a series of 80 Old Testament lectures, and during this lecture we're going to continue the study of the children of Israel as they left the land of Ramses, Egypt, and they crossed now the Red Sea, the second greatest miracle in all the Bible, and actually the greatest miracle in the Old Testament, and they make their way now south into the Sinai Peninsula. As we said before, if you take a map, and by the way, you will be getting, of course, by this time, maps with your studies, and we encourage you to look over the atlas that we'll be sending you and to check the maps concerning the Exodus stage. But as you'll see on your maps, if you are leaving the land of Egypt and going to the land of Palestine, you would go in a direction that is north and east, and yet here we say them going southeast, and the reason being, of course, as we've already suggested, there were two reasons for this. Number one, God desired to have them draw apart for a while and rest. He had some things that he wanted to, as it were, chat with them about, and then the second reason is that if they would have gone the normal straight direction, they would have run right into the Philistines, and the Philistines were a very ferocious warrior-like people, and of course, the Israelis just being captured or just being out of captivity, out of the Egyptian bondage, would not have been able to meet such opposition at that time, and God knew that, and that's why he did not take them through the land of the Philistines. God does not put heavy things upon the new convert. He gives the new believer a chance to mature and to grow, and then he allows him to be subjected to temptations that he would not allow him to be right after his salvation. Now they go south, and they cross the Red Sea, and they make their way now on down to a place called Mara, which is just a few miles south of perhaps the exit of the Red Sea, and they come to some very bitter waters. It's hot, and wouldn't you know it, all the Howard Johnson restaurants are closed at that time of the year, and so they see this pool of water, and they excitedly go up and kneel down and begin to drink of it, but as soon as they get a mouthful, they spew it from them, because the Bible says, when they came to Mara, they could not drink of the waters of Mara, for they were bitter, therefore the name of it was called Mara. So here again now, they begin to complain against God and murmur, and they said, you know, first you tried to drown us, and now you try to poison us, and that's about the attitude they had. Well, the Lord forgives them of this, and in Exodus 15 verse 25, Moses cried unto the Lord, and the Lord showed Moses a tree, which when he had cast into the waters, the waters were made sweet, and there he made for them a statue and an ordinance, and there he proved them. So here we have, I believe, a type of the cross, and the power of the cross, as demonstrated in Calvary, and we know it can sweeten the bitter things in our life. And then in the next verse, God says, If thou wilt diligently hearken to the voice of the Lord thy God, and wilt do that which is right in his sight, and wilt give ear to his commandments, and keep all his statutes, I will put none of these diseases upon thee, which I have brought upon the Egyptians, for I am the Lord that healeth thee. And here we have an example of the Messiah's Medicare plan, and unfortunately the Israelis did not take advantage of this, because later on they did not hearken, of course, unto the voice of the Lord, and they did have to suffer with these diseases that the Egyptians and all other kinds of people were subjected to. Well from Marah, they continue on southeast now, to a place called Elim, E-L-I-M, and the Bible says, And they came to Elim, where were twelve wells of water, and threescore and ten palm trees, and they encamped there by the waters. And then from Elim to the wilderness of Zin, in chapter 16, again we find them murmuring against God. You may want to count these times of bickering and rebellion, because in Numbers chapter 14, God says, You have murmured against me these ten times, you see God was keeping track, and the whole congregation of the children of Israel murmured against Moses and Aaron in the wilderness, and the children of Israel said unto them, to Moses and Aaron, and notice what they're saying, Would to God we had died by the hand of the Lord in the land of Egypt, where we sat by the flesh pots, and where we did eat bread to the full, for ye have brought us forth into this wilderness to kill this whole assembly with hunger. And here they're desiring to go back now to the flesh pots of Egypt, they had all so soon forgotten how miserable life had really been in Egypt, and how they had cried out for deliverance, but now they're desiring to go back to their old ways. Well, in these next few verses in Exodus 16 verses 14 and 15, beginning at this time and continuing for the next 40 years, God would feed them six days a week with a heavenly food, a heavenly bread called manna. Now manna is the Hebrew word which simply means, what is it? And the Hebrews went out one morning and they saw this bread, this substance from heaven all around, and they didn't know what it was, and so they began to cry out excitedly, manna, what is it? What is it? And the name stuck. And this land, or this manna rather, would follow them all through the desert in spite of their rebellion and their sin, and at times their downright anarchy, and it would only cease when Israel entered the promised land in the book of Joshua chapter 5. Now this manna, by the way, was not some fruit that grew on a bush as some naturalist would have us believe, because I have been in the Sinai Peninsula, and I've seen this, what they said to be manna, and even tasted a little of it, but I'll guarantee you that it would not have satisfied a human being for 40 years in the wilderness, and besides that, the natural fruit of this little plant that they say might have been manna only grows in remote parts of the Sinai Peninsula and not all over the place, but Israel marched all over the place, and again, it was hardly sufficient, not only to keep one man alive, let alone tens of thousands and perhaps several million, an entire nation, and so this was very undoubtedly, it had to have been a miraculous event. And it is suggested that it would have taken at least 40 boxcars full of this substance to feed the children of Israel for just one day, and they could not have in a thousand years picked this much off of the berries, or off this little branch, this bush that they say perhaps was the manna supply. Now, the manna was to be picked up each morning, and it was to be eaten that same day for six days, so each morning, they would do this, and then on the sixth day, a double portion was to be taken for the seventh, when no manna would fall, and Jesus, of course, would later apply this event to his own ministry in John chapter 6, where he says that I am that heavenly bread that came down, he said Moses fed you with that earthly bread in the Old Testament, but I am that heavenly bread that came down, and I desire that you partake of me. And Dr. John Davis, in his very helpful book, entitled Moses and the Gods of Egypt, has written this, and these words concerning the subject of manna, he said it should not be assumed from these passages that manna constituted the only part of the diet of the Hebrews during that forty-year period. We know that the Israelites had sheep and cattle, and they continued to possess these not only in Sinai, but had them when they reached Edom and the country east of the Jordan years later. It appears that on some occasions the Hebrews bought food and even water from the Edomites. Then he says that wheat and meats were available, is clearly implied in such references as the Exodus 17, Leviticus 8, and Numbers chapter 7. But this did provide their staple basic daily diet. About this same time here, right before they arrive at their destination at Mount Sinai, which is in the very base, the very bottom of the Sinai Peninsula, something very significant takes place. In chapter 16, verses 23 to 30, Moses is instructed to tell Israel this. He said, See for that the Lord hath given you the Sabbath, therefore he giveth you on the sixth day the bread of two days, abide ye every man in his place, let no man go out of his place on the seventh day, so the people rested on the seventh day. So here in the book of Exodus chapter 16, we have the first mention of the Sabbath as a religious institution. And we need to take a few minutes now, perhaps, to go through this doctrine of the Sabbath. There are some Christians and some cults that are somewhat confused on the matter of the Sabbath today. And they tell us that worshiping on Sunday is the mark of the beast, and this was changed by the Romans in the first century, or at least by the time of Constantine in the third century A.D. of church history, and that we have no right to change the Sabbath and we ought to worship God on Saturday. Well, I don't think it hurts to worship him on Saturday and Sunday, and I don't think it hurts a bit if you want to worship him every now and then on Monday. Of course, the point of the matter is we should worship him at all times. But what about the biblical Sabbath? Well, the Sabbath, as we said, was first mentioned in Exodus 16. Apparently, for the first at least 2,500 and maybe 4,000 years of human history, no one observed it, as far as we know, but God himself, and he observed it in Genesis 2, verse 2, we're told that he created the world in six days, and then on the seventh he rested on the Sabbath. Now, here we're told that the Sabbath was then given to Israel, and we read about this again in Exodus 31, who previously apparently knew nothing about it whatsoever. Now, to this day, according to Colossians 2 and Galatians 4, was never given to the church, never. In fact, the word Sabbath, the word itself has been the subject of some misunderstanding. It is not the Hebrew word for seven, but it literally means rest, or it means cessation. And Hebrew words meaning seven are other kinds of words, but the word Sabbath simply means seven. And in other words, I think we could say that a literal translation of the fourth commandment would be remember the rest day, remember the cessation day, and keep it holy, not just Saturday, not just the seventh. Because you see, there were many Sabbaths given to Israel, many days in which they were to rest, and often they did not fall on the seventh day of the week, on Saturday, and yet they are referred to as Sabbath. For example, in Exodus 20, of course, there was the weekly seventh day Sabbath, and that did come on Saturday. And it began at sundown on Friday at six o'clock, and it ended on sundown Saturday at six. And this was to be a day of absolute rest. There was to be no services, no gatherings whatsoever. And so if some of our friends who insist on worshiping on the Sabbath are going to be absolutely scriptural about it, then they should stay in their homes and cook no food, and simply just stay there until the day is ended. There'd be no worship services allowed whatsoever. If they're going to put themselves back under a part of the law, they should put themselves back under the total law. But I said there were a number of Sabbaths in the Israeli calendar that had nothing to do with Saturday. In Leviticus 23, we're told about a feast called the Feast of Trumpets. And I'll discuss that later, except to say that this was to take place on the first day of the seventh month. That was to be a Sabbath. And it didn't make any difference whether it came on a Monday or Tuesday or Wednesday or Thursday or Friday or Saturday or Sunday. Whenever the first day of the seventh month came, then that was to be a Sabbath, a rest day for them. And then in Leviticus 16, we're told that the 10th day of the seventh month was also to be a Sabbath. And Leviticus 16, we're told that the 15th day of the seventh month was to be a Sabbath. So here you have the first day of the month and the 10th day and the 15th day. And you check any calendar, of course, even in modern reckoning, and it's impossible for the first and the 10th and the 15th of any month of any year all to fall on a Saturday. And yet these were referred to as Sabbath days. And of course, there was to be a seventh year Sabbath. That is to say, in Leviticus 25, that the land itself was to be idle for an entire year every seven years. And then there was a 50th year Sabbath in Leviticus 25. And every 50 years, which would be seven times seven, of course, there would be a Jubilee year, and that was the Sabbath on the 50th year. Now, one of the reasons, and we'll discuss this a few lectures down the road, will be quite a few lectures down the road when we talk about the Babylonian captivity. One of the reasons for the length of the Babylonian captivity, which was, of course, 70 years, and the reason for that was primarily due to Israel's disobedience to observe these rest years. In other words, in approximately 500 years, Israel had accumulated, they had accumulated, I should say, the years had until Israel owed the promised land 70 years rest. What we're trying to say is this, that after Israel had been in the land for a while, they decided, well, we're not going to let the land remain idle this year. We've worked six years and haven't made enough money, and why should we, you know, just let that land go to waste for an entire year, the seventh year? So they worked it. Well, so that meant that they owed the land one rest year, and then the next seven years they did the same thing. They worked the Jubilee years until finally they owed God 70 years. So they owed the land, and so God presented his bill to them. He said, all right, I want to collect immediately. Well, they couldn't pay it, of course, so God allowed them. He said, you won't rest? I'll make you rest. And so one of the reasons for the duration, according to Leviticus 26 and 2 Chronicles 36 and also Jeremiah 25, one of the reasons for the duration was the fact that Israel had not observed all these rest years. Well, sometimes people say today, though, who gave the church the right to change the Sabbath? As far as I know, nobody gave us the right to change the Sabbath. As far as I know, the Sabbath has never been changed. As far as we know, the seventh day is still Saturday, but it has been set aside as a worship day. Now, the Bible and the New Testament is very clear on that. This is because the nation Israel has been set aside. In Matthew chapter 21, our Lord performs a miracle in verse 43, and this is one of the saddest miracles, I think, and perhaps the only sad miracle that he performed. I have found by carefully searching the scriptures 36 recorded miracles that our Lord performed on this earth. In Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, the gospel accounts, most of these miracles caused a great deal of joy to his heart when he walked on water and saved the lives of his apostles, and when he raised dead people and fed the multitudes, and cast out demons, and saw the gratitude of the people. I'm sure all the miracles that he did gave him great joy, with the exception of the 34th miracle. This is when he put a curse upon a fig tree, and the fig tree withered and died. Of course, this was symbolic of the nation Israel, and what he was doing here is setting aside the nation Israel. We know this to be a fact because in that same chapter in Matthew 21, later on that day of the last week, we're told, after he put a curse on the fig tree, he told the Pharisees, he said, the kingdom of God is taken from you and given to those nations bearing the fruits thereof. He was referring to Gentiles. But all that to say that God then began to remove the Sabbath as the official worship day of the week because he was removing his blessings, at least for a time being, from the nation Israel. All right, now, the question, I should say this, that according to Isaiah 66, the Sabbath will be observed again during the kingdom age. We read of this in Isaiah, as we said, chapter 66, verse 23. Now, here's another question. Where, then, does the church receive its authority to worship on Sunday? Well, the answer, of course, is this authority is laid out in pattern form throughout the resurrection, which occurred on the first day. And then later on, the offering was taken in 1 Corinthians 16 on the first day of the week. The apostles met together to break bread on the first day of the week. And many other important events in New Testament history took place, especially from the book of Acts on the first day of the week. And actually, I think we should keep in mind that the seventh day commemorated or celebrated one great event, and that was creation. Moses tells the Israeli people at the base of Mount Sinai in Exodus 20 to remember the Sabbath day and keep it holy. For in six days shall a man work, and the seventh shall he rest as God rested from his work. And so, the seventh day commemorates or celebrates a finished creation. But the first day celebrates or commemorates a finished redemption. And so, we're thinking in terms of redemption. And that's the reason that the church worships officially on the first day of the week. All right, now, from here, after they receive the Sabbath and the manna, they continue to move south, and they enter now into the wilderness of Rephidim. And here at Rephidim, Moses does a very significant thing. He strikes the rock. He'll do this twice in the next 38 years. And chapter 17, he does it, and this brings the blessings of God. Later on, he'll do it, and this will bring the judgment of God. We'll see the difference. But let me read about it. I should say that the fickle Israelites were almost ready to stone Moses again because of their thirst. And God stepped in, and he tells Moses in chapter 17, verse 6, Behold, I will stand before thee there upon the rock in Horeb, and thou shalt smite the rock, and there shall come water out of it that the people may drink. Last year, I had the opportunity to travel in this area, and I drank from the water that proceeded from that rock. At least they said that was the water, and it was very fresh and cold and pure and delicious. We were so hot. Well, the water comes gushing out now. And in the New Testament, in the book of 1 Corinthians, Paul says that rock that followed them was Christ. Now, about this same time in chapter 17 and verse 11, we find the first battle that Israel is confronted with, the first danger, and this was the Amalekites. This was a wild, raiding desert band. These were the descendants of Esau, Genesis chapter 36, and they've probably been tracking Israel for some time now, and they chose this moment to strike. And we read about this, and in verse 10, the Bible mentions now for the first time a very famous man, and we'll hear about him a little later on. You find him first mentioned in chapter 17, notice verse 10. So, Joshua did as Moses had said to him, and he fought with Amalek, and Moses, Aaron, and Hur went up to the top of the hill. Now, that Hur is H-U-R. He was a man and not a woman, not H-E, but H-U-R. We're not sure who Hur was. A number believe that he may have been the husband of Miriam. He then would have been the brother-in-law of both Moses and Aaron, but now, if you get the picture, Joshua is fighting the Amalekites in a little valley there in the Sinai Peninsula, right next to Mount Sinai, or Mount Horeb, and so Moses and his brother Aaron, and perhaps his brother-in-law Hur, go to the top of this hill, and they go to intercede for Joshua as he fights the enemy below. Now, in verse 11, we read, And it came to pass, when Moses held up his hand, that Israel prevailed, and when he let down his hand, Amalek prevailed. But Moses' hands were heavy, and so they, meaning now Moses, Aaron, and Hur, and they took a stone and put it under him, and he sat thereon, and Aaron and Hur stayed up his hand, the one on the one side and the other on the other side, and his hands were steady until the going down of the sun. And Joshua discomfited Amalek and his people with the edge of the sword. Now, when Moses raised his hands in intercessory prayer, then God's people won the battle. That is to say, they were winning the battle. And when his hands became tired, then there was problems with the battle. And you know often in local churches, and I have been a pastor some 18 years before I came to Thomas Road in 1972 to assume the duties here of the dean of the Thomas Road Bible Institute and then later vice president of the Liberty Baptist School system here, and I speak as a pastor, as a former pastor, and I know sometimes there are problems in the church, and they're not caused by a pastor or a deacon or a Sunday school teacher, but sometimes the pastor's hands simply grow weary. And how thankful I was in the various churches that I pastored for the godly Aaron's and Hur's that would help me hold up my hands as I attempted under God to be the undershepherd of the flock of God. By the way, this is a very interesting chapter because of the last few verses. And let me read verse 14 of chapter 17. And the Lord said unto Moses, write this, that is to say, write down what happened here in this battle, for a memorial in a book, and rehearse it in the ears of Joshua. And the reason that's very interesting is this may have been one of the first sections, perhaps the first section of the Bible to be written. Now, we do not know, of course, when the book of Job was written, but we do know that Moses would write later the Pentateuch. The Pentateuch is a Greek word meaning five, and he wrote the first five books in the Bible, Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. Now, when he sat down and wrote all this, we do not know, but most believe that he probably wrote it right before his death. And he may have kept notes, sort of a diary as he made his way along here. But here we have an official declaration, command from God to write down the results of a certain battle, and this is included in the word of God here. So what we're saying is this, again, that this may have been the first part of the Bible to be written. Certainly, it was one of the early parts to be written. And in verse 15, Moses built an altar and called the name of it Jehovah Nisi, and this literally means Jehovah is my banner or Jehovah is my flag, one of the great names for God in the Old Testament. Genesis or Exodus chapter 18, Moses finally arrives at the base of Mount Sinai, and this is his old stomping grounds. He was here, he lived here, of course, for some 40 years before he left the land of Midian to go to Egypt and to lead the children of Israel out of the land of captivity. And here he salutes his family. He's greeted by Jethro, his father-in-law, and Zipporah, his wife, and now his two sons. We had one son mentioned, the last we heard about his family, and now the Spirit of God informs us that he actually had two. Gershom was his first, and Eliezer was his second. And they'll be now here at the base of Mount Sinai for some 11 months and five days. It was my privilege last summer, and that was the summer of 1975, to spend a part of that year in the Sinai Peninsula. I enrolled in the American Institute of Holy Land Studies located on Mount Zion in Jerusalem to take a course in biblical historical geography. So I took a secular tour for four days. We boarded a bus in Jerusalem and then made our way on down through Beersheba, and then, as the Israelis call it, Hebron, and then made our way past the fertile ground of Palestine right into the heart of the desert, the Sinai Peninsula. You can imagine a great huge V, like the letter V. And then we just followed right down into the base of that V, and the V would stand in this diagram for two bodies of water, and one would be the Gulf of Eilat, and that's on the right side of us as we went down, and the other would be the Gulf of Suez, and that's on the left, and on the left side of this V would be the land of Egypt. The top of the V would be the land of Palestine, and on the right side of the V would be Jordan and then Saudi Arabia. And so here we made our way on down, and what a trip it was. We went right on down to the base, and then at the base is the Red Sea, not the Dead Sea, but the Red Sea, the very sea that Moses, many, many centuries ago, let's see, around 14 B.C., that would make it 34 centuries ago, that he crossed, and so we went down to what the Arabs call Sharm el-Sheikh, and then we started north again, northwest, and we went about 30, 40 miles, and then we got out of our air-conditioned bus, and it was bumpy enough that at least it was air-conditioned, and we got on a bus that I mean to say was the worst thing you could possibly imagine, and when I spoke here at Thomas Road some time ago, I said it was so bad that, dilapidated, that we wouldn't use it for a Sunday school bus here, and we had some junkers that we used from time to time in bringing these boys and girls in. But we got on this bus then, this old dilapidated bus, and made our way due east, right into the desert itself. Now, we'd been in the desert for some days now, but we left the main road. In fact, there was no roads, and we went through dried-up riverbeds, and sand trails, and camel trails, and whatever the driver thought it was fair at the time, and we traveled 60 miles, and it looked like the back side of the moon. What a rugged country. And finally, after four hours, because it took us four hours to go 60 miles, 15 miles an hour, 118 degrees in the sun, and there was no shade, we finally then made our way to the base of Mount Sinai, and here we spent the night in the oldest building in the world, St. Catherine's Monastery. This was built by the Greek Orthodox Church in the 6th century A.D., so this had been standing some nine centuries before Columbus set sail for America. Well, I was weary, and all I wanted to do was to have some coffee and go to bed. It was about 5 p.m., but the monks wanted to show us around, and my, I'm glad that they did. I saw something in a dungeon downstairs at the basement there of Mount Sinai in the St. Catherine's Monastery that I thought I would never see, and probably hope I never see again. I saw a pile of human skulls arranged like apples, 3,000 in number, all with their pepsodent smile. Three thousand. And before I could recover from that sight, I looked to my right, and I saw a pile of human feet and human legs stacked up like cordwood clear to the ceiling, and before I could recover from that sight, I looked again to my extreme right, and I saw another pile, like wood, of human hands, some with the fingers still on them, and human arms packed right and stacked up to the ceiling. So our guide says, perhaps you're wondering what all this is about, and I'll admit that the thought had entered my mind, you don't see that every day. He said, these belong to the monks who have lived and died here since the 6th century A.D. He said, many years ago, they had an agreement. They said, let's get our heads together here, and it probably sounds corny when I tell it, and it sounded even worse down there in that dark dungeon, and so what they did was this. He said, when one died, they did not embalm the body, but they dug a shallow grave and put the body in the grave, and then some three years later, when they felt the body was done, they dug up the grave and dismembered the body and put one part in one pile, and then the feet in another pile, and the hands in another pile. And I thought to myself, I don't know how many of those were saved, but I thought at the rapture, there's really going to be a beehive of activity as all these bones get together to meet the Lord Jesus in the air. Well, I stood around there watching, and I turned around, and I saw some more skulls in back of me. They were facing this great big pile of skulls, but these skulls were in individual birdcage like affairs, and so I asked the guide, I said, why are these separated, and they're not with the other pile of skulls? And he said, well, these belong to the chief abbots and the monks and the bishops and the head leaders of the order here, and of course, even in death, you know, I thought there was a pecking system there, you know, they just had to have a private room. Well, I was the last one out, and I stayed there for a few minutes, and it was getting dark now, and so I know you're not supposed to touch the dead, but there was one that by himself there in this cage that his smile just wasn't quite as big as the others, and so I just couldn't help it. I reached in there, and I patted him on the cheek, and I really thought that, or at least where it had once been his cheek, and I thought that help matters, and later on, my wife said, you know, didn't that bother you, touching a dead skull like that? And I said, at the time, it didn't. But I said, you know, I wandered around a little bit there, and you know how your mind can play tricks on you, and I thought sure about five minutes later that as I was standing there by myself that I heard a deep, still, quiet voice coming from that area of the room which said, thanks, I needed that, and I want to tell you that I hurriedly, and I mean hurriedly made my way up the steps and joined the other party, and that night, after a very brief meal, we went to bed, and I don't think I got to sleep until around two in the morning. I was homesick and way out there in the desert, 500 miles from civilization, and I got thinking of those 3,000 skulls just 100 yards down the road, and so about three o'clock, I think I fell asleep, and they got us up at 315, and after a quick cup of coffee, we started climbing Mount Sinai with flashlights. Well, Mount Sinai is 7,400 feet high, but that didn't bother me because I knew that we were already up some 5,000 feet, and I thought 2,400 feet, that isn't very high, and I know it didn't take a 747 very long to do it, but then I got to thinking, that's over twice the height of the Empire State Building, and so I climbed, and I climbed, and I climbed, and finally, four hours later, we began climbing at 330, and around 730, we arrived at the summit of Mount Sinai, and oh, what a sight I saw. To my left, I could see the land of Egypt. To my right, I could see the land of Jordan, and behind me, I could see Saudi Arabia, and right in front, there was the valley below, where on one occasion, so many years ago, tens of thousands of Israelis had waited for Moses to come down, and I was the only Christian on board that bus. I was the only Gentile, in fact, apart from a Korean girl, and she was not a saved, so I was the only Christian, and so I got by myself, and I had my copy of the Word of God, and I read out loud for the angels, and the Lord, and myself, and what few mountain goats were there, I read the Ten Commandments that Moses once received, and I could sort of empathize with the tremendous rapport that Moses must have had with God at that time, but then I got thinking, Moses received these commandments that I'm reading some 34 centuries ago, but God has given me something far more precious than the Ten Commandments, because the Bible says that the law was given by Moses, but grace and truth came through the Lord Jesus, and there in the stillness of that beautiful desert sunlight morning, I knelt and rededicated and reconsecrated my life to the Lord again, so Moses now arrives with the children of Israel at the base of Jebel Musa, the Arabs call it, the Mountain of Moses, Mount Sinai. Now, as I said, that they were to remain here for 11 months and five days, and during this time, three major events took place. Number one, there was the commandment of the law, the giving of the Ten Commandments, and then secondly, the corruption of the golden calf, and they worshiped the golden calf, and then thirdly, the construction of the tabernacle, so there was a giving of the Ten Commandments, and that's the requirement for fellowship. There was the corruption of the golden calf, and that was the ruination of that fellowship, and then there was a construction of the tabernacle that was for the restitution, or I should say restoration, of that broken fellowship, the giving of the commandments, and then the golden calf fiasco, and then the building of the tabernacle. All right, let's very briefly go through these Ten Commandments as they're given to us in Exodus chapter 20, and you find them also in repeated in Deuteronomy chapter 5. We'll read them briefly, and then we'll begin to comment on them. I do not think we'll have time this lecture to finish all ten. The first one, thou shall have no other gods before me. The second, thou shall not make unto thee any graven image. Third, thou shall not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain. Fourth, remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy. Fifth, honor thy father and thy mother. Sixth, thou shall not kill. Seventh, thou shall not commit adultery. Eighth, thou shall not steal. Ninth, thou shall not bear false witness. Tenth, thou shall not covet. And we notice, class, the first four of these commandments are man's obligation to God, one, two, three, and four. And commandments five through ten, the remaining six, are man's obligation to man. And so the first four are vertical in nature, the last six are horizontal in nature. Now, let's examine at least the first few in the remaining moments of this lecture. Thou shall have no other gods before me. Later on it says that I am a jealous God. Sometimes we feel that jealousy is a bad trait, but it isn't. There's a tremendous difference between jealousy and envy. Envy is always sin. Jealousy may not be sin. Jealous means to be zealous for one's own property. To be envious means to desire the property of someone else. Now, jealousy can be bad, but it need not be bad. For example, a man should be jealous or zealous concerning his wife. He takes a dim view of another man becoming over-friendly with his wife because she belongs to him. And by the same token, she can become jealous or she can take a dim view if another woman expresses too friendly interest in her husband because he belongs to her. So to be zealous or jealous means to be zealous for another's property. And this is, I mean, for one's own property. And this is good and it is right. Now, God says, I am a jealous God, and therefore thou shall have, you shall have no other gods before me. Father, we pray that this will be our prayer, that no other interest would come before thee and us. For Jesus' sake, Amen.
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