The God Who Legislates (Ex. 20)

Listen or read the following transcript from The Gospel Coalition as D. A. Carson speaks on the topic of Biblical Theology from Exodus 20.

Hello. I’m Don Carson. This is the fourth in a series of 14 talks surveying a lot of what the Bible is about. When people have lived under a decaying political regime characterized by increasing anarchy and its accompanying violence, unpredictability, and injustice what they begin to long for is structure, law and order, accountability, and the reliability of institutions made possible by wise legislation.

Many centuries after Abraham died, his heirs, called Israelites, constituted a small nation at the eastern end of the Mediterranean Sea. How God brought about this result, according to the Bible, is full of interest and surprise, but one huge part of these developments was the law God laid down. In other words, God is presented not only as the Creator, not only as the God who in mercy did not wipe out his rebels, but as the God who legislates.

To be frank, many people today are repulsed by this depiction of God. “Surely,” they say, “this exposes any religion based on the Bible as a wretched straightjacket. God is in the miserable business of thundering, ‘No,’ and ‘Thou shalt not,’ and spoiling all our fun.” But for the next few minutes I’m asking you to think hard about law in the Bible. You may begin to look at what God has commanded with new eyes.

Last night, Session 1: The God Who Made Everything. Session 2: The God Who Did Not Wipe Out Rebels. Session 3: The God Who Writes His Own Agreements with an introduction to what the Bible means by covenant. This morning, The God Who Legislates. I suspect one of the most common objections against Christians and against Christianity in the West today is that Christians are intrinsically narrow and bigoted.

They hold that certain things are true and certain things are not true. They distinguish between heresy and orthodoxy. They have their own rules of conduct, of morality. Some things they approve and some things they disapprove. This is arrogant. It is divisive. Instead of building up civic community and establishing a genuinely tolerant society, it has the inevitable result of proving divisive.

For those who are brought up in some of the strongest postmodern trends under the influence of, let’s say, Michel Foucault then all claims to speak the truth are really claims to power. They’re forms of manipulation. Instead of fostering freedom, they merely engender constraint. Yet, when you look at the claims on the surface, they are problematic. No community is completely inclusive.

Tim Keller in New York likes to give this example. Supposing you have a gay/lesbian/transgender committee working in some big city working at inclusiveness, they get along pretty well together and they’re trying to strengthen their hand. Let us suppose one of their number comes to one of the committee meetings one day and says, “This is a bit embarrassing, but I’ve had this strange religious experience.

I met this odd bunch of people. They’re Christians and my whole life has been changed. I just don’t view things the same way. I’m not convinced anymore homosexuality is merely an alternative lifestyle.” The others say to him, “Well, we think you’re dead wrong on that, but you’re welcome to your views. We still want to cherish you.”

As the weeks go by, the tensions build up because they’re heading in different directions and they have different values they’re espousing, until eventually the people on the committee say to this committee member, “You know, you really don’t espouse our views anymore. You’re heading in another direction. Your perceptions of right and wrong are different from our perceptions of right and wrong. We’re not sure you belong on this committee anymore. We think it would be a good thing for you to resign.”

They have just engaged in excommunication. It is impossible to be completely, endlessly open because even that very endless openness is predicated on the assumption that endless openness is a good thing, such that if somebody then begins to say it’s not a good thing to be endlessly open, they feel they have to reject that person precisely because they cannot be endlessly open to the person who does not have their view of being endlessly open.

In other words, in a finite world in any community, there are inevitably boundaries. There are inevitably inclusions and exclusions. Moreover, even appeal to truth is inevitable. In an earlier generation, often truth was analyzed to death under the rubric of psychiatry and psychology. That’s changing again now. A generation ago, the popular lyricist Anna Russell took the Mickey out of this “me” generation with its forms of explaining away all strange behavior:

I went to my psychiatrist to be psychoanalyzed

To find out why I killed the cat and blacked my husband’s eyes

He laid me on a downy couch to see what he could find

So this is what he dredged up from my subconscious mind

When I was 1, my mommy hid my dolly in a trunk

And so it follows naturally that I am always drunk

When I was 2, I saw my father kiss the maid one day

And that is why I suffer now from kleptomania

At 3, I had the feeling of ambivalence toward my brothers

And so it follows naturally, I poisoned all my lovers

But I am happy now I’ve learned the lesson this has taught

That everything I do that’s wrong is someone else’s fault

That was a generation ago. Now we handle things just a wee bit differently. Now we say truth is shaped by community. Truth, at the end of the day, is merely what some particular group or individual perceives, what is true for you may not be true for me, but, of course, if you hold that view then you are holding that perspective is true. At the end of the day, you simply cannot escape the notion of truth.

Moreover, freedom cannot itself be endlessly open-ended. Would you like to be free to play the piano extremely well? Then inevitably you must learn a lot of discipline that certain chords sound right and certain chords do not sound right. There are principles of the way music works. Do you want to be free to have a really, really excellent, trusting, joyous marriage? If you do, then you are not free to do certain things. In other words, an endless openness toward freedom becomes a kind of slavery.

All of these things have to be borne in mind when we come to the Bible and discover God, here in the passages we’re going to look at in this first session, legislates. He prescribes rules, and unless we’re willing to think outside of our own cultural Western box, we may find that somewhat offensive.

Yet, within the Bible’s storyline we discover it’s actually part of joyous freedom under the God who made us. Let me pick up on the Bible’s storyline from where we left off last night. Last night, we ended up with the patriarchs (Abraham, Isaac, Jacob) having been called by God to constitute a kind of new humanity that would enter into a covenant relationship with him.

They continued in the land of Israel, as it would later be called, in the land of Canaan as nomads looking after their vast herds until the time came when, because of famine, they moved down in a block to Egypt. As the centuries slipped by and their numbers multiplied, eventually they became serfs and slaves to the Egyptians.

There was still a heritage of this religion fostered by the God who had disclosed himself to Abraham the patriarch. This band of Hebrews multiplied. This band of people who ultimately became Jews, of Israelites, flourished, and yet they flourished under slavery. They flourished under captivity.

In due course, God raised up a man named Moses. Moses was a Hebrew, but through strange circumstances, he had been brought up in the royal court, and he thought he would side as a young man with his own people and ended up killing somebody and fleeing for his life. He spent most of his life as a shepherd on the back side of a desert, but at the age of 80 he hears the voice of God to go back and lead the people out of slavery out of Egypt.

In Exodus, chapter 3 (Exodus being the second book of the Bible), Moses gives all the reasons why he really shouldn’t go: He’s too old. He doesn’t speak very well. Somebody else should go. He is still a wanted man, surely, if he goes back there.… In chapter 3, verse 13, “Moses said to God, ‘Suppose I go to the Israelites and say to them, “The God of your fathers has sent me to you,” and they ask me, “What is his name?” Then what shall I tell them?’ God said to Moses, ‘I am who I am. That is what you are to say to the Israelites: “I am has sent me to you.” ’ ”

In other words, God does give himself a name (“I am who I am.… I am has sent you”), but it’s not a name that puts it in a box. He is what he is! “I am who I am.” He defines himself, as it were, for people like Moses, for people like us, as he progressively discloses himself across the centuries. He’s the eternal subject. He’s not somebody else’s object that can be categorized and delimited. He is what he says he is. He is what he discloses of himself. He is. “Tell them, ‘I am has sent you.’ ”

Eventually, then, Moses does lead the people out of slavery. You may have heard of the 10 plagues and the crossing of the Red Sea and so forth. He does lead them out, and eventually they come to a mountain, Mount Sinai, in the desert. They still have not gotten to the Promised Land, and on Mount Sinai, God constructs a covenant. He writes another agreement with them. There was, we saw last night, an agreement with Abraham, a covenant with Abraham that was grounded in promise of what God would do conditional merely on God being God.

God himself, if you recall, putting himself symbolically through the parts of those animals to say, “This is what I will do. It is unthinkable that anything else could be done. I will bless you. I will secure you. I will raise up your seed and make you a great nation. Ultimately, through your seed, all the nations of the earth will be blessed.”

Now God enters into a covenant with the entire nation. We sometimes call it the Mosaic covenant. In the New Testament, it is once or twice referred to as the old covenant because it’s the covenant that belongs to the people of God in the Old Testament. The covenant Jesus introduces is then called the new covenant.

This old covenant specifies forms of religion, how the nation is to organize itself, who the priests are, and so forth. We’ll come to some of those structures in a few minutes. Right at the heart of this covenant is a group of verses that provide us with the Ten Commandments. They are described in two places in the Old Testament. The place we’ll look at is Exodus 20 (still the second book of the Bible), and I’m going to read the opening verses, verses 1 to 17.

“And God spoke all these words: ‘I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery. You shall have no other gods before me. You shall not make for yourself an image in the form of anything in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the waters below. You shall not bow down to them or worship them; for I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God, punishing the children for the sin of the parents to the third and fourth generation of those who hate me, but showing love to a thousand [generations] of those who love me and keep my commandments.

You shall not misuse the name of the Lord your God, for the Lord will not hold anyone guiltless who misuses his name. Remember the Sabbath day by keeping it holy. Six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord your God. On it you shall not do any work, neither you, nor your son or daughter, nor your male or female servant, nor your animals, nor any foreigner residing in your towns. For in six days the Lord made the heavens and the earth, the sea, and all that is in them, but he rested on the seventh day. Therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy.

Honor your father and your mother, so that you may live long in the land the Lord your God is giving you. You shall not murder. You shall not commit adultery. You shall not steal. You shall not give false testimony against your neighbor. You shall not covet your neighbor’s house. You shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, or his male or female servant, his ox or donkey, or anything that belongs to your neighbor.’

When the people saw the thunder and lightning and heard the trumpet and saw the mountain in smoke, they trembled with fear. They stayed at a distance and said to Moses, ‘Speak to us yourself and we will listen. But do not have God speak to us or we will die.’ ”

These are the Ten Commandments. They are often said to be divided into two tables. The first four have to do with the people’s relationship with God, and the second table covering six has to do with relationships among each other (not committing adultery, telling the truth, and so forth). It’s worth going through them quickly, at least the first four.

1. The first of the Ten Commandments enjoins us to recognize the exclusiveness of God.

“You shall have no other gods before me.” Notice the context in which that is given. “I am the God who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the land of slavery.” In the broader account so far, he’s the God who has made everybody. He’s the God to whom we give an account, who gives us life and breath and health and strength and everything else.

That’s true for all human beings, but these particular human beings have actually been brought out of slavery, and in that context God says, “You shall have no other gods before me.” This is a fairly constantly reiterated theme in the Bible. Two chapters further on: “Whoever sacrifices to any god other than the Lord must be destroyed.”

A chapter after that: “Do not invoke the names of the gods. Do no let them be heard on your lips.” A chapter after that: “Do not worship any other god, for the Lord whose name is Jealous is a jealous God.” Again, in the Psalms (Psalm 45:6), “I am the Lord and there is no other.” Again, “Surely, God is with you and there is no other. There is no other God.”

Amongst ourselves, we’re worried a little bit about the notion of a jealous God. Do you want your mate to be constantly jealous? Yet, even within the context of marriage, surely you want some kind of jealousy, don’t you? Or is it going to be the kind of open marriage where both parties are allowed to sleep around with no repercussions and everybody is happy with that?

Isn’t there a sense in which, if you really are committed to each other, a certain kind of jealousy to preserve the relationship is seen to be a good thing, a healthy thing, a wise reaction? That’s amongst pairs. That’s between peers. Now you have God, the one God who made everything. We’re back to the situation we discovered in Genesis 3. The very nature of the first rebellion was idolatry.

What is God supposed to say? “Make it up as you go along. Choose your own god. I don’t really care.” It denies who he is. It denies his role as Creator. He sustains all of life. We are all dependent upon him. Now what shall he say? “This is really cute; you can make your own gods”? The Lord whose name is Jealous …

The fact of the matter is this is also for their good. This is for their good. If he were to say, “You can do what you want,” they will simply slide into endless self-exoneration, self-love, self-focus. They will be indistinguishable from the pagans all around them. Pretty soon they will be offering their children to Moloch, the god we described last night. “Why not? The neighbors are doing it.”

This God-centeredness God insists upon is for their good. It is, in fact, an act of love, of great generosity. “I am the Lord your God who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery. You shall have no other gods before me.” The first of the Ten Commandments enjoins us to recognize the exclusiveness of God.

2. The second of the Ten Commandments enjoins us to recognize the transcendence of God.

Verses 4 to 6: “You shall not make for yourself an image in the form of anything in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the waters below.” The prohibition preserves the distinction between Creator and created thing.

As soon as you start saying, “God looks like this,” whether a fish or a mountain or a human being, somehow God gets reduced. He becomes something we can encapsulate, domesticate, and thus, in some measure, control, but we saw from the beginning that’s not the way it should be. There is but one Creator and he is to be distinguished from all of the created order. God must not be domesticated.

3. The third of the Ten Commandments enjoins us to recognize the importance of God.

Verse 7: “You shall not misuse the name of the Lord your God, for the Lord will not hold anyone guiltless who misuses his name.” In the ancient world, the name of a person was tightly tied to the identity and character of the person. For a person to misuse God’s name was, in some sense, to slur him. Thus, when the Bible enjoins us to give glory to his glorious name, as in Psalm 72:19, it is to give glory to God. It is to praise God himself.

In other words, the reason why we are not to say, “Oh, God,” or hit our thumb with a hammer and say, “Jesus,” is precisely because it diminishes God. If you turn to the person who has just used Jesus’ name because he has hit his thumb with a hammer and say, “I wish you wouldn’t use my Savior’s name like that,” if you were to say that he would probably reply, “I don’t mean anything by it,” but that’s the point!

It’s not profane because you have spoken a magic word you’re not really allowed to use. Only priests can say the right abracadabra. That’s not the point. It’s using the name in a common way. Profanity simply is the commoning of something, but we’re dealing with God, and to make him common is to diminish him and cheapen him.

4. The fourth of the Ten Commandments enjoins us to recognize God’s right of reign over every domain of life, including time in which we live and move and have our being.

“Remember the Sabbath day by keeping it holy. Six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord your God.” Indeed, we’re told this pattern was established in creation. We saw this last night. God, in creation, did his creative work in the creation week and then stopped on the seventh day. It establishes a kind of time cycle in the human order. There is a place for rest.

We could work through the rest of the Ten Commandments, but let me make some observations now just from the ones we’ve been through. Let me run through several things quickly. First, the chapter begins, “God spoke all these words …” He’s still the talking God, not only with a kind of speech that calls the universe into existence but with a kind of speech that interacts with his image-bearers.

Later on we’re told in the book of Deuteronomy, the fifth book of the Bible, “These are the commandments the Lord God proclaimed in a loud voice to the whole assembly there on the mountain from out of the fire, the cloud and the deep darkness; and he added nothing more.” He spoke.

Moreover, these Ten Commandments have a central place in the old covenant. They’re cited by later prophets: Hosea in the fourth century; Jeremiah at the end of the seventh and into the sixth century; the Psalms. They’re actually referred to in the New Testament. Moreover, these first four commandments lead to the next six. That is, because God is who he is, because he is to be honored and revered, therefore, we are to behave in a certain kind of way amongst ourselves.

Above all, the Ten Commandments are related to God’s self-disclosure in a gracious, redemptive act right at the very beginning. He is the God who called the people out of slavery, and then he says, “Therefore, you shall act this way.” These are the Ten Commandments but they are not the only kinds of laws God gives.

In addition to these laws, God sets up an entire structure of ritual. He ordains that a tabernacle be built, a big tent, a kind of prototemple, and it was to be built a certain way. He provides exactly the dimensions and the design, and they go ahead and build it. It’s basically a room three times as long as it is wide. Two-thirds of it is set off from the last third which is, thus, a perfect square. In fact, it’s a perfect cube. It’s as long and high and wide as the other dimensions. They are all exactly the same.

The first larger room is called the Holy Place. The second room, hidden from the first room by a veil, is called the Most Holy Place. Outside of the tent there is a place for sacrificing animals. Inside this tent, inside this tabernacle there is a variety of accoutrements: a lampstand, for example, a place where bread is set out week by week, and other matters we won’t go into.

Outside of all of this there are various courtyards where people gather. It’s a very simple sort of construction in many ways. Not exactly the kind of cathedral you get in Ely or in Canterbury, some massive structure. It’s a tent. Inside the Most Holy Place is a box. It’s called the ark of the covenant, the ark of the agreement, and it holds certain elements including a copy of the Ten Commandments.

On top of this box, this ark of the covenant, in the Most Holy Place something takes place once a year. What God does is ordain a special class of people, namely some priests. All of these priests are drawn from one of the tribes of the ancient Hebrews, and one of these priests once a year is supposed to take the blood of a slaughtered goat and the blood of a slaughtered bull and take it behind the veil and sprinkle it on the top of that ark. That happens on the day that is called the Day of Atonement.

Meanwhile, outside there’s another animal, another goat that has been taken out in the desert to wander away. You think, “What sort of religion is this with bloodied animals and goats?” These, too, are parts of the things God ordains. In this case, the description is found in the next book of the Bible, Leviticus, chapter 16.

Leviticus is a book that describes many of the priestly sacrifices and what they signify and so forth, but it’s worth taking a moment to read what is to happen on the Day of Atonement. This, too, is prescribed by God, the God who legislates. “The Lord spoke to Moses after the death of the two sons of Aaron …” Aaron was Moses’ brother.

“The Lord said to Moses: ‘Tell your brother Aaron he is not to come whenever he chooses into the Most Holy Place behind the curtain [the veil] in front of the atonement cover on the ark, or else he will die, for I will appear in the cloud over the atonement cover. This is how Aaron [who is the high priest] is to enter the Most Holy Place: he must first bring a young bull for a sin offering and a ram for a burnt offering.

He is to put on the sacred linen tunic, with linen undergarments next to his body; he is to tie the linen sash around him and put on the linen turban. These are the sacred garments; so he must bathe himself with water before he puts them on. From the Israelite community he is to take two male goats for a sin offering and a ram for a burnt offering.’ ”

Then the entire ritual is described. One goat, the one that is not to be killed.… He puts his hand on the goat’s head. It’s a way of signifying the sins of himself and his family, the sins of the people, are being transferred, as it were, to this goat who then takes the sins away. He goes out of the desert.

The sin of the other animal, the ram, coupled with not only the ram goat but a bull are both slaughtered, and their blood is captured in a little pan and taken in and sprinkled on top of the ark of the covenant, which is a way of saying someone has died, someone has paid the price of death for the sins of the priest and his family and for the sins of the people. That is to happen once a year every year. That’s the only time the priests are allowed into the Most Holy Place, into that perfect cube of a room.

I’m mentioning these details because you will see by the end of this series all of these details are picked up later in the Bible. The fact that the room is a cube is picked up in the Bible. The ark of the covenant? It’s picked up a little later. This blood of bull and goat picked up a little later. Do you see where we are in the developing story line?

God has displayed himself as a God who holds his people to account. He has already sent Adam and Eve away from his presence. How do you get back into his presence? How do you get reconciled to this God? In fact, what you discover is all of these sacrifices are needed in some sense to indicate death is still going to prevail because there is still so much sin even amongst the covenant people.

Abraham was a sinner. Isaac and Jacob were sinners. The patriarchs were sinners. Now the people of God, this covenant community, this people with whom God establishes his covenant, they’re terrible sinners, too, which brings us to another passage in this collection of books, one of the most shocking, Exodus 32, 33, and 34. This is the second book of the Bible. Three chapters.

What is depicted here is the descent of Moses from Mount Sinai when he is first bringing down the Ten Commandments chiseled onto tables of stone. He’s accompanied by a young man at this juncture, a young man named Joshua who will ultimately become his successor. As they approach the camp, they hear a lot of noise, and Joshua doesn’t know what it is. “Is this a happy sound? Is this a good sound?”

Moses discerns what it is in chapter 32:18. “It is not the sound of victory, it is not the sound of defeat; it is the sound of singing that I hear.” They discover while Moses was away for a period of time (some weeks), this people who had just been saved from slavery and who had been exposed to God’s gracious self-disclosure, this people who were on the edge of moving into a Promised Land and being constituted as a nation, somehow they reduced this God who had done this to an image of a calf.

“We don’t know where this Moses is. He has been away for several weeks now. We’re not convinced this God is so transcendent, and we would like some image that portrays him. Can’t we have a god we can look at and touch like the neighbors all around us?” Aaron, Moses’ brother, who has been left in charge, is frightened by what is going on and he says, “Well, give me your gold earrings and gold rings and we’ll see what we can do.”

He eventually produces a lovely little gold calf, and the people are having a wild party around this god, a kind of pagan worship that becomes more and more and more enthusiastic. It’s the sound of singing Moses hears as he comes down from the mountain, but not singing of adoration and worship of the God who is there but now the domesticated god that can be touched and kissed and fawned over. “This is the God that brought you out of the land of Egypt,” they sing.

In the horrible scenes that follow, God threatens to wipe out the entire nation and start over again, perhaps with Moses. Moses intercedes with God in prayer. You find this in chapter 33. Moses feels terribly alone, let down by his own brother. In chapter 33, verse 12, he prays, “You have been telling me, ‘Lead these people,’ but you have not let me know whom you will send with me.”

That is, God had sent his brother with him and now Aaron’s not there. “You have said, ‘I know you by name and you have found favor with me.’ If you are pleased with me, teach me your ways so I may know you and continue to find favor with you. Remember that this nation is your people.”

That is, he’s saying, “I didn’t choose them! I didn’t take them out of the land of Egypt! I’m just your spokesperson. You have to do what needs to be done with them. I can’t change their hearts! I can’t finally save them! I can’t redeem them! They’re you’re people; they’re not mine! Meanwhile, who will you send with me?”

In fact, God had promised he wouldn’t go with them anymore. If he went with them anymore, then their sin in proximity to his transcendence and holiness would simply mean he would end up destroying them. Instead, the Lord replies, “My Presence will go with you, and I will give you rest.” Rest? Where did we hear that language before? Do you remember at the end of creation week God rests?

Going into the Promised Land is often depicted as going into the land of rest. Now God promises, despite the sin, he will go with the people. He will be forbearing. He will lead them into rest. “Moses said to him, ‘If your Presence does not go with us, do not send us up from here.’ ” Do you see? What any people must have is the presence of the living God!

It’s not enough in Bethlehem Baptist Church or in any other place simply to have the right ritual and the right sermons and the right kind of music. If God does not manifest himself in some way, if he is not present, then what’s the point of the whole exercise? Is religion merely something that is structured into a kind of ritual heritage, or is it bound up with being reconciled to the God who made us who holds us to account?

If your presence does not go with us, what’s the point in the exercise? “How will anyone know that you are pleased with me and with your people unless you go with us? What else will distinguish me and your people from all the other people on the face of the earth?” There’s no point in merely being different because we have rules. We must have God!

“And the Lord said to Moses, ‘I will do the very thing you have asked, because I am pleased with you and I know you by name.’ Then Moses said, ‘Now show me your glory.’ ” It’s one thing to walk by faith, to know God has spoken. “But please,” Moses says, “can’t I see something of the manifestation of your transcendence? How spectacular you are, can’t I see that? Can’t I have more of that?”

“And the Lord said, ‘I will cause all my goodness to pass in front of you …’ ” Pay attention to those two lines. Before this morning is over, we’ll come back to them again at the time of Jesus. “Now show me your glory.” “I will cause all my goodness to pass in front of you …” God’s glory manifested somehow in his goodness.

“… and I will proclaim my name, the Lord …” The Lord in capital letters. Have you noticed that? That’s because in Hebrew there is a set of four letters, YHWH, that are related to the name God has disclosed himself by. “I am who I am. I will proclaim my name. I am who I am. Yahweh. I will proclaim my name in front of you.”

God naming himself amidst all the plural gods in the neighborhood. God saying, “This is who I am. This is the God who is there. I will proclaim my name, the Lord, Yahweh, in your presence. I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I will have compassion.”

Isn’t that what we saw last night? How do you deal with a God with whom you cannot barter, who has no needs? It must be a work of sovereign grace. So also here. God say, “I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I will have compassion, but if you what you are really asking for is that you may see me up close and personal, face to face, then you cannot see my face, for no one may see me and live.”

Note this passage well. We’re coming back to it at the end of the morning. “Then the Lord said, ‘There is a place near me where you may stand on a rock. When my glory passes by, I will put you in a cleft in the rock and cover you with my hand until I have passed by. Then I will remove my hand and you will see my back; but my face must not be seen.’ ”

Then you get this unbelievably spectacular account in chapter 34. Moses hides himself, and the Lord goes by somehow and intones certain words, and after the Lord has gone by, Moses is permitted to peek out and see something of the trailing edge of the afterglow of the glory of the Lord. That’s what he’s allowed to see.

As the Lord goes by, not seen as it were face to face, the words he intones are these (verse 6): “The Lord …” That is, Yahweh, the I am who I am. “The Lord, the Lord, the compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness, maintaining love to thousands, and forgiving wickedness, rebellion and sin. Yet he does not leave the guilty unpunished; he punishes the children and their children for the sin of the parents to the third and fourth generation.” That’s what he intones.

We could easily spend the rest of our 14 hours together merely unpacking all the things God says of himself. “I am who I am.” Now he begins to flesh in what he is. God, as he presents himself in the very first part of the Bible, he already exists. He is not defined in advance and then proved in a mathematical theorem. He is, and who he is and what he is becomes progressively disclosed with time.

He’s the I am. He is what he is. On the one hand, he is compassionate and gracious. Why? If he had not been gracious and compassionate, at the end of Genesis 3, the human race would have ended right there. There would have been only judgment. Death was the promise and God, instead, is forbearing.

He abounds in love and faithfulness (we’ll come across that before this morning is over, too), maintaining love to thousands and forgiving wickedness and rebellion and sin. Yet, although he’s a God of forgiveness, he does not fit into that model we saw last night, that first model where God is really like a super-granddaddy with a long white beard whose whole business is merely forgiving and being nice.

He’s also the God who does not leave the guilty unpunished. Ah! There’s tension built right into that, isn’t there? We’ve just been told he does forgive sin, and we’re also told he can’t pretend it’s not there. “He does not leave the guilty unpunished; he punishes the children and their children for the sin of their parents to the third and fourth generation.”

This is because sin is social. Sin is never merely individualistic. Sin is social. You cannot commit any sin, no matter how private, without it having repercussions, not only in your own life but in the community where you live. Maybe it’s a very private, secret focusing on porn, and you think it’s not doing any damage to anybody but you if it’s doing any damage there at all.

But, of course, you focus in secret on porn and it changes how you view the opposite sex, which changes your family dynamics, which changes what effects there are on children. Your modeling, your conduct, your sin has social implications to the second and third and fourth generation, and God transcends it all.

On the one hand, he is said to be the God who forgives, and on the other hand, he is said to be the God who cannot leave, who does not leave the guilty unpunished. The closest you get to resolving it in the old covenant, in the Mosaic covenant, is that once a year this priest places his hands on the head of a goat and sends it off to symbolize sin being removed.

Then he takes the blood of another goat and of a bull and takes it into the very presence of God in this Most Holy Place over the ark of the covenant and sprinkles it there. God manifesting himself in some sense of glory saying, “We deserve to die, but these animals die in our place. Will this do? It’s what you prescribed. Will this do? Will you not have mercy on us in our sin, our defection?”

For the truth is, although law is extraordinarily important, the law finally cannot save. You see, the people were idolaters before the law was given, and when the law comes along and says, “But you’re not supposed to do that. You’re not supposed to make images of me. There is no other god beside me. You’re not supposed to commit murder, and you’re not supposed to do …”

In fact, the people have already been drowned in forms of idolatry for countless years. Now what the law does is formalize it. It multiplies the transgression. It makes us see it’s defying God. Some people, no doubt, try to hue the line a little bit better, and then when there is sin the law provides these animals to somehow cover sin, expiate sin, or cancel sin. Is that any long-term solution?

Do you know the most remarkable demonstration you find in the Bible to show the law cannot finally reconcile us to God? What are the first five books? Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy. They’re often called the books of Moses. At the very end of the last of them (Deuteronomy, the last chapter), Moses himself does not get into the Promised Land.

Moses was called the meekest man who ever lived. Moses, who is the one who mediates this covenant. Moses who was a hero in his old age organizing the nation, setting up a system of judicial structure, setting up justice and integrity, leading the people again and again, but he blows it here and there. He sins too, gets violent with God, and in consequence even he doesn’t get in the Promised Land.

The law cannot finally save, but what it has provided is the vehicle in which God has disclosed himself again as the One who pursues his own people, provides a sacrificial structure, a vehicle in which God and his nature, his desire to forgive, his insistence that sin be punished, all be brought together until a millennium and a half later this side of the death of Jesus, another writer writes a book in the New Testament, the last part of the Bible (we call it the letter to the Hebrews).

He invites his readers in chapters 9 and 10 of that book to look back on the old sacrificial system and say, “Don’t you understand? That sacrifice of a bull and of a goat can’t ever deal finally with sin.” How can it deal finally with sin when they have to do it again and again year after year, year after year, year after year? How can the blood of a bull and a goat actually pay for sin, in any case? In what sense does the bull itself offer a sacrifice? Does the bull come up and say, “All right, I’ll die for you; slit my throat”? Where, precisely, is the moral value in this sacrifice?

The author points out, “Listen! Intrinsically the blood of a bull and goat can’t take away sin!” No, the old Day of Atonement held every year is passed because we have the ultimate sacrifice for sin, Jesus himself who did shed his blood on our behalf. A perfectly moral sacrifice, he offers up his life, and he takes our death and bears our sin away in a way no animal ever could. The law pointing forward to that sole means of reconciling rebels to himself. Here is the God who legislates, and even in his legislation, he points us to Jesus.