Moses – God Teaches His People How to Love
The promises of the covenant with Abraham were to unfold through history. As his descendents grew, God took care of them. He sent Joseph to Egypt through the jealousy of his brothers to help the Hebrew people survive a great famine. While in Egypt, Abraham’s descendents did indeed multiply. They grew so numerous that the Pharaoh feared their growing power, so he enslaved them. God raised up Moses to call the Hebrew people back to the covenant. In the end, calling them back to the covenant meant freeing them from Egyptian slavery. However, this was not God’s primary intention. He first asked Pharaoh to allow the Hebrew people to go into the desert to worship God, not to let them go free. The most important thing to God is his relationship with humanity.
God used the process of freeing the Hebrew people from slavery to reveal to them His name, His power, and finally His Law. To reveal His name was an act of incredible intimacy. In the Hebrew tradition, a name was more than just a label. A name contributed to a person’s very identity. When God asked Adam to name the animals, He was inviting Adam to participate in their creation. God’s name revealed to the Hebrew people His identity in an act of incredible intimacy.
God’s power revealed to them that He was the true God. The plagues were not just tortures that God visited on the Egyptians to convince Pharaoh that the Hebrew people were not worth the trouble. The plagues directly challenged the power of the Egyptian gods. God’s power did not only impress the Egyptians, it also caused word of God’s power and care to spread across the land. Moses’ father-in-law asked to be made part of the covenant because he heard of God’s great acts. Later, in Jericho, Rahab says that the
people of Jericho have heard about God’s might and His care for the Hebrew people.
Finally and most importantly God takes the rescued Hebrew people to Mount Sinai and there reveals to them His Divine Law. Today’s culture tends to see law as a necessary evil – restriction imposed by an outside authority in an attempt to control the population. However, the Hebrew people saw the Law of God very differently. When they received the Law, they threw a party, exclaiming, “Whose God is as great as our God? What other God has revealed His mind to the people?” The purpose of the Law was to teach the Hebrew people how to love God, how to live in the Covenantal relationship with them. While the laws God laid down seem harsh to us, they were merciful to the Hebrew people. In other cultures, people had to figure out how to please their gods all by themselves. They lived in constant fear of displeasing the gods by breaking some unknown taboo. God revealed to the Hebrew people exactly what a relationship with Him would demand. Furthermore, the purpose of the Law was to draw the Hebrew people beyond the Law into authentic love of Him – a concept still unheard of in today’s religions.
The Deuteronical Law, epitomized by the Ten Commandments, represented the bare minimum law required to love God. However, the Hebrew people proved to need more than minimum guidance. The creation of the Golden Calf was a return to the Egyptian gods and a forsaking of the God who had led them out of slavery. So, God added two sets of laws to the Deuteronical Law. One set was added for the people, to more tightly control their desire to return to the pagan gods. These laws included
sacrifices of the very animals that the pagans (especially the Egyptians) revered. Then God separated the Levites, the only tribe that did not participate in the worship of the Calf, and made them into a tribe of priests with their own special set of laws. Originally, the entire Hebrew people was being called to be a priestly people, but after their betrayal of the Covenant the Hebrew people became a microcosm of the world as a whole. God called the Hebrew people to learn how to love so they could lead the whole world to God, so God needed to call the Levites to lead the Hebrew people.