God's
Sixth Covenant with Man
Moses
c.
1300 BC.
Index
Ratification of the
covenant
(Exodus 24)
Moses
himself was told, “Come up to the Lord, you and Aaron, with Nadab, Abihu, and
seventy of the elders of Israel. You shall all worship at some distance, but
Moses alone is to come close the Lord; the others shall not come too near, and
the people shall not come up at all with Moses.
When
Moses came to the people and related all the words and ordinances of the Lord,
they all answered with one voice, “We will do everything that the Lord has told
us.” Moses then wrote down all the words of the Lord and, rising early the
next day, he erected
at the foot of the mountain an altar and twelve pillars for
the twelve tribes of Israel. Then, having sent certain young men of the Israelites to offer holocausts and sacrifice young
bulls as peace offerings to the Lord, Moses took half of the blood and put it in
large bowls; the other half he splashed on the altar. Taking the book of the covenant, he read it aloud to the people, who answered, “All that the Lord
has said, we will heed and do.” Then he took the blood and sprinkled it on
the people, saying. “This is the blood of the covenant which the Lord has
made with you in accordance with all these words of his.”
Moses then went up with Aaron, Nadab, Abihu, and seventy elders of Israel, and they beheld the God of Israel. Under his feet there appeared to be sapphire tilework, as clear as the sky itself. Yet he did not smite these chosen Israelites. After gazing on God, they could still eat and drink.
The
Lord said to Moses, “Come up to me on the mountain and, while you are there, I
will give you the stone tablets on which I have written the commandments intended
for their instruction.” So Moses set out with Joshua, his aide, and went up to
the mountain of God. The elders, however, had been told by him, “Wait here for
us until we return to you. Aaron and Hur are staying with you. If
anyone has a complaint, let him refer the matter to them. After Moses had
gone up, a cloud covered the mountain. The glory of the Lord settled upon
Mount Sinai. The cloud covered it for six days, and on the seventh day he
called to Moses from the midst of the cloud. To the Israelites the glory
of the Lord was seen as a consuming
fire on the mountaintop. But Moses passed into the midst of the cloud as
he went up on the mountain; and there he stayed for forty days and forty nights.
Past Favors Recalled
(Deuteronomy 29)
Index
Moses
summoned all Israel and said to them, “You have seen all that the Lord did in
the land of Egypt before your very eyes to Pharaoh and all his servants and to
all his land; the great testings your own eyes have seen, and those great signs
and wonders. But not even at the present day has the Lord yet given you a mind
to understand, or eyes to see, or ears to hear. ‘I led you for forty years in
the desert. Your clothes did not fall from you in tatters nor your sandals from
your feet; bread was not your food, nor wine or beer your drink. Thus you
should know that I, the Lord, am your God’ when we came to the place, Sihon,
king of Heshbon, and Og king of Bashan, came out to engage us in battle, but we
defeated them and took over their land, which we then gave as a heritage to the Reubenites, Gadites, and half the tribe of Manasseh. Keep the terms of this
covenant, therefore, and fulfill them, that you may succeed in whatever you do.
All Israel Bound to the Covenant.
“You
are all now standing before the Lord, your God – your chiefs and judges, your
elders and officials, and all of the men of Israel, together with your wives and
children and the aliens who live in your camp, down to those who hew wood and
draw water for you – that you may enter into the covenant of the Lord, your God,
which he concluded with you today under this sanction of a curse; so that he may
now establish you as his people and he may be your God as he promised you and as
he swore to your fathers Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. But it is not with you alone
that I am making this covenant, under this sanction of a curse; it is just as
much with those who are not here among us today (including their
descendants) as it is with those of us who are now here present before the
Lord, our God.
Warning against Idolatry
“You
know in what surroundings we lived in the land of Egypt and what we passed by in
the nations we traversed, and you saw the loathsome idols of wood and stone, of
gold and silver, that they possess. Let there be, then, no man or woman, no
clan or tribe among you, who would now turn away their hearts from the Lord, our
God, to go and serve these pagan gods! Let there be no root that would bear
such poison and wormwood among you. If any such person, upon hearing the words
of this curse, should beguile himself into thinking that he can safely persist
in his stubbornness of heart, as though to sweep away both the watered soil and
the parched ground, the Lord will never consent to pardon him. (This
unfaithful Israelite will cause God to punish the good with the wicked, to root
out the good plants growing in irrigated soil, together with the worthless
plants growing in the dry ground). Instead, the Lord’s wrath and jealously
will flare up against that man, and every curse mentioned in this book will
alight on him. The Lord will blot out his name from under the heavens and will
single him out from all the tribes of Israel for doom, in keeping with all the
curses of the covenant inscribed in this book of the law.
Punishment for Infidelity
“Future
generations, your own descendants who will rise up after you, as well as the
foreigners who will come here from far-off lands, when they see the calamities
of this land and the ills with which the Lord has smitten it – all its soil
being noting but sulfur and salt burnt-out waste, unsown and unfruitful,
without a blade of grass, destroyed like Sodom and Gomorrah, Admah and Zeboiim,
which the Lord overthrew in his furious wrath – they and all the nations will
ask, ‘Why has the Lord dealt thus with this land? Why this fierce outburst of
wrath?’ And the answer will be, ‘Because they forsook the covenant which
the Lord, the God of their fathers, had made with them when he brought them out
of the land of Egypt, and they went and served other gods and adored them, gods
whom they did not know and whom he had not let fall to their lot: that is why
the Lord was angry with this land and brought on it all the imprecations listed
in this book; in his furious wrath and tremendous anger the Lord uprooted them
from their soil and cast them out into a strange land, where they are today.’
(Both what is still hidden ((the events of the future)), and what has already
been revealed ((God’s law and the punishments in store for those who break it.
Leave the
future to God; our business is to keep his law)) concern us and our descendants
forever, that we may carry out all the words of this law.)
Terms of Covenant
Our Responsibility:
You will be my people
and I will be your God.
Obey God with the reward of life.
Disobey God with the punishment of Hell.