The ten commandments are framed as negative statements. Does that mean that they are negative in purpose, and restrictive of freedom? Not at all:
“A negative command is far more liberating than a positive one, for a positive command restricts life to that one course of action, whereas a negative command leaves life open to every course of action except one.” (Motyer (paid link), page 215)
Looking at Exodus 19-24 for Sunday morning, I'm struck by the structure of the law there. It is anchored with back-references to the deliverance from Egypt in chapter 19 and 20:1-2, and the climax is a meal shared by 74 of the Israelites in the presence of God in chapter 24. They enter heaven, and they eat and drink without dying.
See Exodus 18.
I've long puzzled over Jethro's role in Exodus, and I think I'm making some progress at last.
Jethro features in Exodus 2 (as Reuel, where he welcomes Moses the refugee), in Exodus 4 (where he sends Moses back to Pharaoh in peace, although Moses hasn't been strictly honest about the nature of his mission), and in most detail in Exodus 18.
In the next week or two, The Well, the magazine that the church produces and distributes free of charge to all 5000 residents of our two parishes, will land on people's doormats.
As usual, page 4 has a letter from me:
Dear friends,
We’ve just come through the most unpredictable General Election for many years; people are talking not only of there being a new government but of a whole new way of doing politics. Time will tell what difference these changes will make, and whether they are great or small.
We find Exodus chapters 7 to 10 quite hard to read. When we ask why this is, Motyer (paid link) is surely spot on.
Another post quoting Alec Motyer (paid link) on Exodus. His introduction is extremely helpful at drawing threads together and helping to make clear how the details of the book go to make up the whole.
Alex Motyer (paid link) is not exaggerating when he describes how important the book of Exodus is in the unfolding story of the whole Bible:
“The point of all this is to underline the importance of Exodus in the Bible. It is as significant a turning point or new beginning as is Matthew at the start of the New Testament. To go no further than recall its revelation of the divine name or its story of the blood of the lamb is at once to give it the same place in the Old Testament that the coming of Jesus and the cross of Calvary hold in the New. It begins the normative Old Testament (and biblical) revelation of God's way of salvation; it underlines the nature of God as holy and of humankind as sinners; it explains the meaning of blood and sacrifice; it is a book of the grace which reaches down from heaven and of the law which teaches redeemed sinners to live in heavenly terms. While some of these great biblical truths are foreshadowed in Genesis, Exodus pulls them all together, giving them a shape and definition that the rest of the Bible will not alter. Under the simplest of forms, and by many a fascinating story, Exodus reveals fundamental truth and is, in fact, one of the Bible's great building blocks.” (page 23)
Alec Motyer wrote this very helpful paragraph in his commentary on Exodus (paid link).
Re-reading Exodus 1:1-7:7 a few times in preparation for next Sunday's sermon, I have been struck again by just how well-crafted the book of Exodus is.
Here are a handful of details that I observed in those chapters, that are reproduced here in the hope that they might intrigue a few people to read the book of Exodus again. What, I think, we need is to read the whole book (because it functions and speaks to us as a whole), but to combine that with close attention to the details.
Peter Leithart makes a wonderful observation about Jacob, Esau and Joseph.
He says this:
Esau is a “hairy man” (sa’iyr), something we learn only when Jacob dresses himself in goat hair to approach his father (Genesis 27:11, 23). Jacob becomes a hairy one, subbing in for his brother. The only other use of the word in Genesis is in 37:31, where it describes the “kid” killed to fool into thinking that Joseph has died. Both passages involve substitution, and both involve deception of a father.
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