Exodus - Lesson 31

Dr. Carmen Imes 
Exodus 
OT605-31 
Summary of Exodus 
Lesson Transcript

Congratulations for making it through this entire course and through the Book of Exodus. It's been wonderful to have you along on the journey. We've realized as we've been filming that there are a few things that probably need some more attention, and so we decided to film this extra session to address some of the questions you might still be having about the Book of Exodus.

And the first thing I want to address is that I've been using some 25-cent words that might not be familiar to you. So I have a slide here with definitions of some of the words that I've been using that maybe you didn't know already, and maybe you were gathering what I was talking about, but here's kind of a one-stop place where you can look for what these words mean. So first of all, a theophany is a physical manifestation, a visible manifestation of God's presence.

It's from the Greek word pheos, which means God, and phanos, which means appear. So the appearing of God is what we call a theophany. A covenant is a technical term for a formal permanent pledge of loyalty between two parties that pledge exclusive loyalty to each other, and we've seen the covenant between Yahweh and his people.

The word dekalog is also based on Greek. Deka means ten, and logos means words or things or matters, so dekalog is the Ten Commandments. That's the way scholars often refer to it.

Stipulations are the requirements of the covenant to which both parties agree. So several times I mentioned on the stone tablets of the Ten Commandments are written the stipulations of the covenant, and that's what I mean. It's the requirements.

Here's what you're agreeing to when you sign on to the covenant with Yahweh. Ratification of the covenant refers to the official ritual that puts into effect the covenant. So the ratification of Israel's covenant happened in Exodus 24 at Mount Sinai when they set up the 12 stone pillars, and they had blood sprinkled on them and did sacrifices, and they had a hearing of the whole book of the covenant that Moses wrote down and read for them, and they said, everything Yahweh has said we will do.

That was the moment of ratification. We might think of ratification in terms of a wedding ceremony when a bride and groom are married. There comes a point in the ceremony where the officiant says, I now pronounce you husband and wife.

That's the moment that puts into effect the marriage. Everything else has been preamble. Now it's real.

They're married, and that's what happens in Exodus chapter 24. Tabernacle is also a word we don't tend to use to talk about anything other than this special authorized tent in Exodus that houses God's holy presence for worship. This is a place people bring sacrifices.

Interestingly, it's not a place that they gather and sing songs necessarily. It's not a place they go every Saturday, every Sabbath day. Sabbath is something they do at home just resting with their families, but the tabernacle is the centralized location of God's presence, and it's the place they bring their sacrifices.

The priesthood is the official tabernacle service by authorized men from the tribe of Levi, so not just anyone can sign up to work in the tabernacle. You have to be a Levite. You have to be an able-bodied male between the ages of 30 and 50 in order to serve in the tabernacle, and there are specific rules about who you can marry and what you can eat and what you can wear and all of that.

So that is the priesthood instituted by God at Sinai. Ordination is the name given to the official ritual in which someone becomes a priest. So just being born as a male in the tribe of Levi doesn't make you a priest.

You have to go through this ordination ritual that officially starts your service as priest. The word consecrate is the verbal form of holy. It's to set something apart or make something holy.

That is, it's dedicated to Yahweh rather than just for common use. So if a vessel is consecrated, like let's say this mug is consecrated, then I can't just drink tea out of it. It's only to be used in the tabernacle if it's consecrated.

And so the ordination ceremony of the priests consecrates them for Yahweh's service. When they sprinkle the anointing oil on all the furnishings of the tabernacle, that consecrates it so that it's actually sacred space. We've talked about the word liminal.

Liminal space is in between one place and another, the threshold, but it's usually used in a metaphorical sense to talk about the in-betweenness of identity development in between one identity and another. I used a marriage ceremony as an example for ratification and it's also a good example for liminal space. A wedding ceremony is liminal space because as a couple comes in to be married, they're singles.

You have a man and a woman who are both single and by the end of the ceremony, they leave and they're married. But for the duration of the ceremony, they're not quite not married and they're not quite married. It's this in-between space in which they're being remade.

Their identities are being reshaped around one another as they make this mutual commitment of loyalty. And finally, the word metonymy. I used in an earlier session and this is a kind of figure of speech in which something concrete stands for something more abstract.

You use metonymy all the time, even if you don't understand what the word means or you wouldn't have used that term to describe it. One example that I like to use is the White House issued a statement. And when you hear someone say the White House issued a statement, you don't scratch your head and say, really? I didn't know houses could talk.

Because you understand that White House, because it's the place where the president lives and works, is standing in for the president himself or perhaps his spokesperson who is giving an announcement that he wants the whole nation to hear. So you could say the White House issued a statement and you really mean this is what the president thinks or says. Hopefully that's helpful.

We've had a lot of conversation around these things throughout the lectures. So hopefully this helps you tie up any loose ends and put together the pieces. We thought it might be helpful to just spend a few moments reflecting on the difference between Yahweh and other gods in the ancient Near East.

If you've grown up in the West, if you've grown up in the church, your picture of God has been so deeply formed that it's hard to imagine someone different or something different than how you think about God. I argued in this course that the law is good news. That the Israelites would have been happy to have the law.

They wouldn't be thinking of it as, oh man, look at all this stuff we have to do. But they would actually be really grateful that God is telling them what he expects of them. And to illustrate this, my favorite way to illustrate this is an Akkadian prayer.

So this would be a prayer from the people of Babylon. A prayer to any god that you can find in translation by Benjamin Foster in his book Before the Muses, which is an anthology of Akkadian literature. This is just a very short section of a very long prayer that goes on and on and on, in which a worshiper is expressing his sense of angst because he clearly has done something to anger some deity somewhere, but he doesn't know which deity he's angered and he doesn't know what it is he did to anger the deity.

And the ancient Near Eastern people, the various religions in the ancient Near East, were full of this kind of angst where they were always kind of trying to guess what they had done to anger the gods and then guess and check. Okay, maybe I should have done this. And they try it.

Maybe I should have done this. And so they try different kinds of sacrifices, all trying to hit a target in the dark that they don't know how to hit. So let me read you the prayer of this anxious worshiper as he's trying to figure out what it is he's done wrong.

He prays, Oh my Lord, many are my wrongs, great are my sins. Oh my God, many are my wrongs, great my sins. Oh my goddess, many are my wrongs, great my sins.

Oh God, whoever you are, many are my wrongs, great my sins. Oh goddess, whoever you are, many are my wrongs, great my sins. I do not know what wrong I have done.

I do not know what sin I've committed. I do not know what abomination I have perpetrated. I do not know what taboo I have violated.

And it goes on and on like this. This is probably less than a quarter of the prayer in which he's trying to cover all his bases. You can just imagine that that sense of never quite knowing when you're breaking a rule or when you're doing something wrong and you just find out afterwards, which is an awful feeling when you get in trouble for something that you didn't know was wrong.

And so this is what characterized ancient worshippers. And in contrast to that, Yahweh shows up and says, here's who I am. And here's what I want you to do.

And here are the penalties for not doing it this way. And there's just a tremendous amount of clarity, which would have brought a lot of peace and joy to the Israelites. In that repetition at the beginning of the prayer, are there actually different words for God? Or is he just simply saying the same thing over and over again? It's Lord, God, Goddess.

And God, Goddess, those are actually different words. But then the rest of the line is the same every time. He's like, OK, this is a standard prayer.

He wants to confess. I know I'm a sinner. I don't know what it is I've done, but something.

Clearly I've done something because my crops aren't growing or because my child is sick and won't heal or whatever. They're diagnosing that there's something off, but they don't know what it is and they're not sure who to address. So he covers all his bases.

And this particular prayer does not insert the names of any gods. It doesn't say, oh, Marduk, oh, Ishtar. It's just very generic and maybe so that it would be useful in lots of different contexts.

It's really fascinating. The last issue that we wanted to circle back and spend a bit of time on is the relationship of Christians to the Old Testament law. I have tried to make the case in this course that Sinai still matters, that the laws at Sinai are still relevant for us.

In fact, we slowed down and read all the laws in chapters 20 through 23, and we talked about what are the principles here that we might apply to our lives or that we might seek to live out faithfully in our context. And for some of you, that might have felt a bit off because after all, doesn't Paul say we're done with the law? Isn't this a thing of the past that we can just discard now that we have Jesus? And Paul does say some pretty negative things about the law. So we thought it would be good for me to spend just a moment on this question.

I write more about this in my book, Bearing God's Name, Why Sinai Still Matters. I have a section on Hebrews and the law, on Jesus and the law, and on Paul and the law. But we thought we'd just give a taste of it here because inevitably some of you are wondering.

Galatians 3, 23 to 25, recounts Paul saying that the law is our guardian that kept us until Christ came, and now we're not under that guardian anymore. And at face value, that sounds like, okay, we don't need to worry about the law at Sinai. We can move on.

Paul even goes on to associate Sinai and its laws with Hagar and Ishmael, the rejected son of Abraham, calling readers to come out from under the Jewish establishment in Jerusalem and live in freedom. Again, if the law is Hagar and we're rejecting that now, then why would we pay attention to what it says in those chapters in Exodus? However, Paul also says the law is holy and the commandment is holy, righteous, and good. Jesus himself says that he's not come to abolish the law, but to fulfill it.

And so it's important for us to to take a step back and recontextualize these statements that Paul is making. Part of what Paul is doing is he is, when he talks about the law and he says negative things about it, I believe that Paul is not disagreeing with Moses and with what Moses expressed to the people at Sinai or what God expressed through Moses at Sinai. I don't think Paul disagrees with that, and I don't think he would say the law at Sinai is a problem.

Instead, he's disagreeing with the way people in his own generation are trying to live out the law, the way they're treating the law, the way they're responding to it. And so when Paul says law, it's actually metonymy for the way the law is being interpreted and understood in his generation. We can't just map it over onto Sinai directly.

The law was only ever a means to an end, and Paul recognizes this. The law isn't in and of itself the thing we should focus on. The law is our means to participate in God's mission and to maintain a right relationship with God.

If we want to be effective in the work that God's given us to do as his segala, then we need to be rightly related to him living in the way that he's asked us to live. In the New Testament, Christ offers us a model of embodied obedience to the law. He shows us in living color how to be faithful, and he invites us into deeper relationship.

Christ's obedience then becomes the basis for our acceptance by God and our participation in his mission. So for us to continue to focus on, okay, this is what I have to do, without looking to Jesus as the example of how to do it, and recognizing his faithfulness becomes our faithfulness, that would be to miss what Christ has offered. God set aside the tabernacle system, providing a perfect sacrifice in Jesus.

The law was never meant to offer salvation. It was merely the means of maintaining what had been given. Redemption was always made possible by God's gracious gift.

So now it's clear the gracious gift is Jesus himself. He's offered his own obedience and his own self-sacrifice and his death on the cross and resurrection, and that is what we're supposed to be looking at. So to reject that and to fixate instead on the law would be a return to Egypt.

Many Christians have a misunderstanding of the law that it's bad news. I've heard sermons myself about this. The law is bad.

It's impossible for us to fulfill it. The bar is way too high. Its job is to show us that we're miserable failures, and then we get to the New Testament, and phew, the New Testament does away with it, and so we can safely ignore it.

That is what I've heard from the lips of Christians throughout my life, and my study of the book of Exodus and tracing these themes on into the New Testament has convinced me this is not an accurate representation of what the scriptures say about the law. What I see in the scriptures is that the law is good news. It's God's gracious gift to a people redeemed from slavery.

It shows God's people how to fulfill God's mission, and it tutors Christians even today, even on the other side of the cross. It tutors Christians in how to honor God in every area of life. We talked when we were in Exodus 20 to 24 about how a particular law, say a law about a goring ox, might be relevant to owners of pit bulls or other dogs today, and what dog owners can learn from bull owners in the Old Testament, and how we can think about the value of human life.

So while we might not be taking each law and trying to implement it directly, these laws show us what matters to God, and especially valuing the lives of other people and holding people accountable for their sin, deterring the kind of sin that dismantles or affects society in negative ways. Many people have asked, is there some kind of grid that I can use to determine which laws are still relevant and which ones aren't? And I would love to tell you that you could just take a black sharpie and go through the laws and cross out all the ones that don't apply anymore, but that's actually not how the New Testament authors handle the Old Testament law. There are various categories that we can see in retrospect.

These categories would not have made sense to ancient Israelites, but people sometimes talk about there being moral and civil and ceremonial laws in the Torah, and that when we separate them into those categories, it's easier to see which ones are still relevant. Ancient Israelites would have been baffled by those comparisons because all of life was sacred, all of life was religious, their religion was civil, and ritual purity affected their everyday life, so they would not have made these distinctions. But it's true that when we look back from the other side of the cross, we look back on Exodus, that there are some things that change, or maybe putting it this way, if you send the law through the prism of Christ, it separates things out into different categories that have been affected in different ways by Christ.

So here are some categories that we can think about. Some of the laws related to the tabernacle or temple, that would include ritual laws, laws about ritual purity, which you especially find in Leviticus, and it would include sacrificial laws, such as those in Leviticus 1 through 7. Here's what to sacrifice when. Now we don't have a tabernacle.

Christ has made the once for all sacrifice, so we no longer have to make sacrifices. And so why don't we just cut these out of our Bible? Well, they are very instructive in helping us understand what Christ came to do. So if we got rid of them, we would miss out on so much of the resonance of what Christ is doing in the New Testament.

They're essential. In fact, Christ's healing ministry relates to ritual laws. Christ's death on the cross relates to sacrificial laws.

We can hardly understand Christ without these parts of Leviticus, so we need to keep them. They tutor us and prepare us for Christ. Other laws make an ethnic distinction, where it's separating the Jewish people from other nations and reinforcing that separation so that there's not intermarriage and worship of other gods.

So one example of this is the dietary laws. We saw hardly any of these in Exodus, but there's a whole chapter in Deuteronomy 14, for example, that outlines what they're allowed to eat and what they're not allowed to eat. And the primary purpose of these laws, as I see it, is to separate the Israelites from other nations.

So when we get to the New Testament and after the resurrection of Christ, the early church begins to wrestle with the question of, okay, now there are Gentiles who want to follow Jesus. How do we do this? And God reveals to Peter in a vision, in Acts 10 and 11, that Peter is no longer to call unclean what God has called clean. He, in effect, removes the dietary laws because those are making a barrier between Jews and Gentiles so that they can't have fellowship with one another around the table.

And they can't come together to faith in Christ and eat together because they have these different laws. So I see chapter 10 and 11 of the book of Acts as removing those dietary laws so that Gentiles can come to Christ. It's clear in chapter 15 of Acts, when the early church meets, that circumcision is no longer a requirement for covenant membership.

Peter brings the gospel to a man named Cornelius, who's a Gentile living in Caesarea. Now, Cornelius is God-fearing, but he has not converted to Judaism. He's not circumcised.

He doesn't follow the food laws of the Torah. But Peter comes and preaches to him about Jesus, to him and his household. And all of a sudden, without Peter even trying to do anything, the Spirit of God falls and the people come to faith in Christ.

And there's a clear evidence that the Spirit is among them. And so Peter concludes from this, and he reports back to the church in Jerusalem in Acts 15, that God is apparently not making a distinction anymore between Jews and Gentiles. Anyone can come and follow Jesus as long as they have faith in Jesus, no matter their ethnic background.

One would expect that if you had to become Jewish first and convert to Judaism, that the Spirit would wait to fall until they've converted fully to Judaism. The presence of the Spirit is the sign that God no longer makes this distinction. And then the believers turn to the Old Testament for justification for this.

And it's really fascinating how this happens, because it connects back to what we saw about bearing God's name. So in Acts 15, verse 12, it says, the whole assembly became silent as they listened to Barnabas and Paul telling about the signs and wonders God had done among the Gentiles through them. When they finished, James spoke up.

Brothers, he said, listen to me. Simon, or Peter, has described to us how God first intervened to choose a people for his name from the Gentiles. So the Spirit falling on Cornelius and on those gathered in his house is now being interpreted by James as him choosing a people for his name from the Gentiles.

In other words, if you have the Spirit, that's the sign that you bear God's name, that you're a covenant member. So he then turns to the Old Testament for justification. He says, the words of the prophets are in agreement with this as it is written.

After this, and he's quoting here from Amos chapter 9, after this, I will return and rebuild David's fallen tent. Its ruins I will rebuild and I will restore it, that the rest of mankind may seek the Lord, even all the Gentiles who bear my name, says the Lord who does these things. This is the one passage in the entire Old Testament that James could have quoted that indicates that there are Gentiles who bear God's name.

Bearing God's name, as we've already talked about, is a covenant status. It means you belong to God, you're part of God's covenant family. And James is looking ahead to a time when God will bring in the Gentiles who bear his name, and that's exactly what happens when Peter preaches in Cornelius's household.

The Spirit falls, indicating that, oh, these are Gentiles who bear God's name. Now they have the Spirit. So that was a fun rabbit trail to try to reinforce the idea that the laws that are there to make an ethnic distinction, which would include dietary laws and circumcision laws, are now obsolete in Christ.

Gentiles do not have to follow these laws in order to follow Jesus. That opens up the possibility of unity between Jew and Gentile and fellowship between us. So again, I wouldn't take out a black sharpie and cross them out because they still help us understand the New Testament context and understand what is happening, this dynamic, as it changes in the early church.

But there are many other laws that retain a more direct relevance for us. One set of laws are those that deal with religious distinction. So the prohibition of intermarrying, you know, don't marry the Canaanites.

Remember, why they were told not to marry these other nations is not because they're another ethnicity. It's not because we're trying not to mix blood here. It's because they might lead you astray to worship other gods.

And that is off limits. And so what we can learn from that is that it's still important for us not to practice intermarriage with someone who does not share our faith in Jesus. The prohibition of intermarriage of marrying other nations can now be translated into, it is really not a good idea for you to marry someone who's not surrendered their life to God and entered into covenant with him.

Because then you have competing allegiances in your home where you're trying to do the will of God and they have a different set of values and they're pulling in a different direction. Other commands have to do with moral distinctions. We saw laws about social justice, about caring for the vulnerable in Exodus chapter 21 and 22.

We saw laws about economic justice, not keeping someone's cloak overnight if they give it to you in pledge. We saw laws about sexual integrity, and there are many more of them actually in Leviticus and in Deuteronomy. But we saw a few of them with relation to the female ama or female servant who comes into your household.

You may not just use her and discard her. So those laws about sexual integrity have implications for our own sexual lives. There's laws about proper worship of God that can help us to think about how to approach God reverently.

There are laws about work practices and about neighborly behavior. These remain relevant for us. We should be talking about them and thinking about them and trying to see how can I run my business in a way that reflects the character of God? How can I engage in my community? How can I participate in government or in civic leadership in ways that honor God? These are all the kinds of questions that I think the Old Testament law remains a really generative source of wisdom for us, and so we should not just discard them or cross them out.

Any other questions that you want me to address? I just want to make sure I understand your last point. You're basically contextualizing the law. Yes.

So that even if the sacrificial system is completely fulfilled in Christ so we don't sacrifice, the sacrificial system still teaches us things to help us understand the atonement. Yes. That you can have a substitution.

Yes. Okay. Yes, and it's not just helping us understand the atonement.

The sacrificial laws do that, but other laws end up functioning in interesting ways in the New Testament. If you think of Paul in his instruction to pay Christian workers their due, he uses the command about not muzzling an ox while it's treading the grain, and you could easily say, well, I don't have any oxen, I'm not a farmer, so this one doesn't relate to me, but he says he's treating it as though there's a principle here that we should carry in over and contextualize. The principle of not muzzling the ox is that you're being humanitarian.

This beast of burden is doing work for you so that you can eat. Because he's working for you, he should benefit from that work. He should be allowed to eat while he's working.

Similarly, if a pastor or Christian worker is serving you with their time and with their energy, then they should be able to earn a living from that, too. And so Paul makes that really interesting transformation, and I think those are the kinds of transformations we can make as we think about the law. I think the one that's the most difficult for me is stoning the disobedient son.

How do you contextualize that? So one thing that I mentioned in a previous session is that the penalties associated with the laws are always the maximum penalty, not the minimum penalty. So stoning a son, what this is saying is that a rebellious son is serious enough that it could merit the death penalty, but it doesn't force parents to give the death penalty. We saw this in the example with the goring ox.

If an ox gores someone, the family is allowed to say we're not going to press charges and have you experience the death penalty. You can just pay a fine instead. They're allowed to do that.

So I think that's one thing that helps with that verse for me, that we're not told we have to stone our children. The other part of that law that maybe needs better contextualization is that this is not a little chap who's being rebellious. The son is most likely an adult son, and his rebellion is such that it's leading the community astray into the worship of other gods, or there's some kind of throwing off the covenant.

The covenant community cannot tolerate someone in their midst who is not willing to be loyal to Yahweh. It affects and endangers the entire community. So in our context, as we translate that over, in a church community, we can't tolerate someone living in flagrant disobedience to God, throwing off God's rules, and being arrogant about it, and sticking around in the community.

That behavior is not welcome here. So rather than stoning them, I would think in our context, we would say we would disfellowship them. When you're ready to be serious about your faith, you can come back if you want to sign on.

But right now, you're leading everyone astray.