May 6, 2024, Day 2 of Week 6 Daily Dose of Hope

Daily Dose of Hope
May 6, 2024
Day 2 of Week 6
 
Scripture – Exodus 19-21; Psalm 33; Ephesians 5
 
Welcome back!  This is the Daily Dose of Hope, the devotional that complements New Hope Church’s Bible Reading Plan.  Let’s get right into our Scripture for today.
 
We have come to the passage in which God covenants with his people.  Moses has led the Israelites out of slavery in Egypt, through the Red Sea, and into the desert.  They have finally made their way to Mt. Sinai, located on the Sinai Peninsula in northeastern Egypt, very close to Israel.  It's here that God's covenant is offered to his people through Moses. 
 
What is a covenant?  God makes binding agreements with people, promising to do certain things and asking his people to do the same.  Covenant agreements were quite common in the ancient near east so basically God uses a concept that was already meaningful to the people.  He uses what already makes sense to them. 
 
God made a covenant with Abraham and with Noah.  Now, he is making one with Moses, on behalf of the Hebrew people.  God uses covenants to begin to reconcile human beings to himself, to begin to fix what went wrong in the Garden of Eden.  Through each covenant that God makes, we see how God attempts to be in relationship with stubborn human beings, demonstrating his deep love for creation, and wanting them to understand that, and so badly wanting them to reciprocate. Through these covenants, God is beginning to reveal his plan of salvation. 
 
Today’s covenant with Moses and the Israelite people is what’s known as the Old Covenant.  We read in Exodus 19 how God calls these people to be a holy nation and a kingdom of priests.  If they keep up their end of the agreement, the covenant, then they will be God's treasured possession.  They agree to do so.  Today’s reading is only the beginning of the Scripture describing the Old Covenant.  It starts in Exodus 19 and basically runs through the remainder of the book of Exodus. 
 
What does life under God's Old Covenant look like?  Well, there are some very specific boundaries and guidelines which God provides his people and it's what we call the law. This includes the Ten Commandments, which we read about in Exodus 20, but also so much more.  God's law in total contained 613 commands, and they were both blessings and curses.  This points to how this was a conditional covenant.  If the people obeyed, they would be blessed by God; if they didn't obey, then they would be cursed.  We have a tendency to want to separate the law into pieces (the ceremonial laws, worship laws, the food laws, the moral laws, and so forth) but the law was a unit.  If you broke one piece of it, you broke it all.
 
The covenant was with the whole nation of Israel.  It wasn't with one person--it was for Israel as a whole.  This is important-it wasn't for Gentiles and Gentile nations.  It wasn't for the church.  It was for Israel.  If someone wanted to be a Jew, then they had to agree to live under the covenant, which included becoming circumcised for men.  A couple more things about the law: Sometimes, especially in Christian circles, we think of the law as bad.  We read about the legalistic Pharisees in the Gospels and we read through Paul's letters and we think about how horrible the law was.  But that is really the opposite from the truth.  The law, this Old Covenant, was good.  When God's people came out of Egypt after generations of living in a pagan world, having adopted pagan ways, they didn't know who God was.  They didn't understand at all who they were as God's people. 
 
After redeeming them the Israelites from bondage, God gave them guardrails in the form of the law.   Have you ever driven on a mountain road with no guardrails?  It can be really scary!  I had this happen when we were in Rocky Mountain National Park.  It felt like an eternity I was driving on these incredibly steep mountain