DAY 35

ROUND TWO – “A DO-OVER”

Exodus 34 & 35 and Matthew 22:23-46

As you have been reading the Bible in this one year plan have you thought, “There is too much to take in a day?” If you have, then I have good news. From this point in Exodus to the end you are going to read what you have mostly already read. “Why” would be a reasonable question to ask.

The answer is because God is restoring, of if you prefer “making again” the Covenant with Israel. He repeats the Covenant, how he will drive out the inhabitants of the land, how they need to keep the three feasts, and how they must not worship other gods. They are reminded again of the Sabbath and they are instructed on how to build the Tent of Meeting with all its furnishings – and this time they build it apparently.

We know this is “new” because in 35:10 we read the present tense, “I am making…” God says.

Because we are “reading this again” I want to delve into just a few things. First I love the way God describes himself in 34:6-7. And when God passes before Moses in these verses and says “the Lord, the Lord” scholars tell us this repetition is meant to communicate intimacy and Douglas Stuart in his commentary suggests you could actually translate that as “your dear Yahweh” or “your dear friend”.

You might wonder, is it necessary for God to say all these things again. I think the point is we need to understand the seriousness of the “golden calf” event. They really turned away. To think they worshipped this idol and even proclaimed it delivered them out of Egypt – ouch! One way to understand the dynamics is to study how many times Moses pleads with God for the people. He, Moses, presses God to forgive sin and for God to remain in presence. God does and says He will, and so we are off to “redo” all again the establishment of this Covenant.

Now this is a little text, the bit about not boiling a young goat in its mother’s milk (the second half of verse 26 in the 34^th chapter (34:26b)). I mentioned on the January 30^th blog that I would share my thoughts in the future and that time has come. W short glance at it reveals what seems to be a weird text. I have written earlier that it is important to not “write off” and ignore these texts, but rather to try and understand them. That attitude is necessary if we to take the entire Bible seriously.

We know that the Canaanites did this, they boiled baby goats in the mother’s milk. We also know that the Canaanites surrounded the Israelites, so this cultural norm was everywhere. It is hard to appreciate how much the Canaanites, and others, were super Idolatrous. There were idols all over. The point of the Most High God is that idols wont’ save you; I, Yahweh will.

Back to the question: why did the Canaanites do it, and why should Israel not? To answer this question requires describing a form of religion, magic really. It can be called “sympathetic magic”. Voodoo is a form of it. In theory I can make a little doll of the Dean, say the right prayers, and then stick a pin in it which will yield a result in the actual Dean. Sympathetic magic is manipulating something in the real world to cause a reflection of it somewhere else in that same world.

Here is the situation: The ancient Canaanites and everyone except the Israelites believed something we would call “procreation creation”. It means everything is “born”. There is somewhere a mother-goddess giving birth to everything: your crops, your animals, your children – everything. You want this to continue. You want crops, you want your livestock to multiply, and you want to have children. So you practice “sympathetic magic/religion”. You link a mother to its offspring by the mother’s milk; this is done in a way that symbolizes the birth circle (the mother’s milk). The action is intended to stimulate the powers of nature, so that other goats would be born. (And yes the do something similar with children, think back to the almost sacrifice of Isaac).

Here we are with a long list of laws that I said earlier were about shaping a society. God is saying to Moses, “just a reminder one more time”, those Canaanite practices are not proper. They won’t lead to your rescue and they certainly won’t help your relationship to me.

I want to be your God and I want you to be my people. I want to walk with you in the cool of the evening in the Garden, I want to dwell, to tent, to tabernacle with you! God is imploring them, and us, be My People.

Jesus (in our reading today) of course is still “fighting for his life” as it were (even though he is within days of offering it to the Father). He sums up the Law beautifully. Love the Lord your God with all your heart, mind and soul; and love your neighbor as yourself. He is of course quoting Deuteronomy 6. We will have time in the future to examine this more. For now, as God in Exodus is giving the details, Jesus sums it up. In the end it is all about the same thing – God desires us to be his people – and He even gives “do-overs.”