Set In Stone
What do you think of when I say the phrase, “set in stone?” You probably think of something that can’t be easily changed or altered. It may be a date such as a wedding date. When Judy and I decided to get married in February 1987, she had already decided that our wedding date would be April 16, 1988. There was actually a moment when the venue and the pastor changed but that date never wavered. For Judy, April 16, 1988, was going to be our wedding date no matter what; it was “set in stone.” You may also think of things such as tombstones, sculptures, and monuments. I also think about the Hollywood Walk of Fame and Mt. Rushmore. These things are literally set in stone, and it would be hard to change or alter them.
But why are these things: dates, monuments, Mt. Rushmore, etc. set in stone in the first place? What was so important that we felt the need to make them so they could not be changed or altered? It’s because they are important to us. Our wedding date was so important to Judy and I that it probably didn’t matter where we were married or by whom as long as it was on April 16, 1988. Or they were set in stone to commemorate something or someone. The Washington monument was built to commemorate George Washington, a Founding Father and first president of the United States. The Hollywood Walk of Fame commemorates achievements in the entertainment industry, bearing the names of musicians, producers, directors, theatrical/musical groups, athletes, fictional characters, and others. Mt. Rushmore features the 60-foot-tall heads of four United States presidents: George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt, and Abraham Lincoln. They were chosen respectively to commemorate and represent the nation's foundation, expansion, development, and preservation. And tombstones are usually set in stone to commemorate our lives.
The things we permanently set in stone are our testimony to others of what we believe to be important. And this morning, we are going to see the Lord set some things in stone to commemorate the covenant He made with His people. The laws and statutes the Lord set before the Israelites are important and will be set in stone so that they will know what they are and will obey them. By obeying these laws and statutes, which is their true worship of Yahweh, the people testify that they love God and have faith in Him as their Lord and Redeemer. That brings us to our big idea that God desires His people’s worship to be a true testimony of their love for and faith in Him. This is why we are here this morning and every Sunday. If we are not engaging in true worship of the Father, then there is no reason to be here. If we are coming to just check off a box and not to testify that we love God and have a sincere faith in Him, there is no reason to be here. So, let’s be people who engage in true worship of God that testifies to our love for and faith in our Lord Jesus Christ.
Let’s pray:
Our first point is Covenantal Rites, found in Exodus 34:18-26. This is what God’s Word says, “Celebrate the Festival of Unleavened Bread. For seven days eat bread made without yeast, as I commanded you. Do this at the appointed time in the month of Aviv, for in that month you came out of Egypt. “The first offspring of every womb belongs to me, including all the firstborn males of your livestock, whether from herd or flock. Redeem the firstborn donkey with a lamb, but if you do not redeem it, break its neck. Redeem all your firstborn sons. “No one is to appear before me empty-handed. “Six days you shall labor, but on the seventh day you shall rest; even during the plowing season and harvest you must rest. “Celebrate the Festival of Weeks with the first fruits of the wheat harvest, and the Festival of Ingathering at the turn of the year. Three times a year all your men are to appear before the Sovereign Lord, the God of Israel. I will drive out nations before you and enlarge your territory, and no one will covet your land when you go up three times each year to appear before the Lord your God. “Do not offer the blood of a sacrifice to me along with anything containing yeast, and do not let any of the sacrifice from the Passover Festival remain until morning. “Bring the best of the first fruits of your soil to the house of the Lord your God. “Do not cook a young goat in its mother’s milk.”
These may seem like just a bunch of random laws to us and admittedly, they have all been mentioned previously in Exodus in one way, shape or form. But we need to remember what has been happening to realize the context these words were spoken in and why. The first set of Ten Commandment were given by God to Moses and His people. They committed idolatry with the golden calf and Moses smashed the tablets into pieces signifying that the covenant had been broken by the people. Moses twice interceded for the people. God first relented from killing them and second promised to go with them and dwell among them. The Lord showed and spoke His glory and name to Moses, stating His character and how He would interact with His people. Then the Lord promised that the covenant would continue, and He would do wonders they had never seen before. Two weeks ago, we learned that the Lord would drive out the inhabitants of the Promised Land before the them and they would possess it. Then they were given a number of negative commands. They were not to make treaties with those who lived in the land. They were not to worship any other gods for the Lord, whose name is Jealous, is a jealous God. God knew that the Israelites would be tempted to eat sacrificial meals with the Canaanites and tempted to give their sons in marriage to the Canaanite daughters, leading to the worship of their gods. So, in verse 17, God again reminds them to not make any idols. Those negative commands were to keep the Israelite people from worshipping other gods so that they would focus on worshipping Him alone.
In our scripture today, the Lord continues to issue commands but this time they are positive commands. The purpose again was to help them focus on worshipping the Lord. By obeying these laws their relationship with God would be strengthened. This would be accomplished as they obeyed His pattern of worship, as they obeyed His holy rest, and as they gave their very best back to Him. By observing and obeying these laws the Lord would give them all the needed for their life and godliness. We see the same thing said to us in 2 Peter 1:3. I am reading from the MSG translation: “Everything that goes into a life of pleasing God has been miraculously given to us by getting to know, personally and intimately, the One who invited us to God. The best invitation we ever received!” Getting to know Jesus, our Lord and Savior, personally and intimately, allows us to worship Him in the way He desires that testifies to those around us that we love God and our faith is in Him. It will be the same for the Israelites as they obey these commands from the Lord (Big Idea).
We are going to be skipping around today’s verses instead of taking them in order. I want to begin with verses 18 and then 22-24 which show us the pattern of worship the Lord wanted them to observe. First, they were to celebrate the Festival of Unleavened Bread. This festival occurred around the beginning of the barley harvest and was a reminder of the Passover, when God saved them from slavery and brought them out of Egypt. For the seven days of this festival, they were to eat bread made without yeast. This signified their hasty departure, their trust in God’s deliverance, and represented purity. By getting rid of all leaven, they were purposing to walk in purity with the Lord and would be ready to worship Him in the way He desired. They were to observe this festival each year at the exact time they came out of Egypt, the fifteenth day of the month of Aviv. Now, let’s move down to verses 22-24. The Lord commanded them to celebrate two more festivals every year. They were to celebrate the Festival of Weeks by bringing Him the first fruits of their wheat harvest which happened around the middle of their harvest season. The reason it was called the Festival of Weeks was because they counted off seven weeks and one day from the Feasts of First fruits which occurred during Passover. For us this corresponds to Pentecost when the Holy Spirit came upon the disciples, and the church was born. The third festival is the Festival of Ingathering or The Feasts of Booths. They celebrated this by bringing their best of the harvest from their fields, orchards and vineyards. This was observed at the “turn of the year” or at the end of the growing season after the harvest had already been brought in. It also commemorated the Israelites’ forty-year journey through the wilderness, as they would live in temporary shelters or booths for the seven days of the festival. As the Israelites celebrated all three festivals each year it would set them apart from the other nations and remind them they were set apart to do God’s work and will.
God then commanded that three times a year, at the times of these three festivals, the Israelite men were to appear before the Sovereign Lord, the God of Israel. Three times a year they were to come together wherever their place of corporate worship was in the Promised Land, later it would be in Jerusalem, to worship the Lord. These festivals would have required them to be away from their families and fields for about five weeks a year with only the women and children left behind to fend off their foreign neighbors and enemies. There was a fear of their foreign neighbors adjusting the boundary lines virtually stealing their land and the fear that they would be invaded by their enemies and supplies and family stolen or abducted, while they were away. So, the Lord immediately took care of this fear by promising to drive out the nations, enlarging their territory and not allowing their neighbors and enemies to covet their land when they went up three times to appear before the Lord. Talk about an incredible promise. If they obeyed these laws of worship and trusted in the Lord, He would make sure their land and families were not stolen or harmed. The Lord wiped away every barrier and excuse they might have for not worshipping Him properly.
Now let’s turn to verse 21. The Lord reiterates the Sabbath law here. They were to work for six days a week and then spend the seventh day of every week in God-focused rest for what He had done for them and would continue to do for them. This was God’s way of giving them a rhythm of life and work so that they would be sustained physically. But it was also God’s ordained way of giving them a time of rest to be renewed spiritually in their relationship with Him. This rhythm was to take place no matter what and there were no viable excuses they could make. Even during the busiest seasons of plowing and harvesting they were to obey His holy rest every seventh day. Again, this was the way they were to worship the Lord, testifying to their faith and trust in Him to provide what they needed when they needed it. God has given us an abiding spiritual principle in Matthew 6:33 which speaks to this. “But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well.” If we are seeking the things of God, observing the Sabbath being one of them, then God will provide everything else we need. Ryken says, “Anyone who is too busy to keep the Lord’s Day holy should take a Sabbath to rethink his or her priorities.” In the life of the New Covenant believer, the things of God, worship, observing the Sabbath, prayer, Scripture study, and Christian service must take precedence over all worldly things. Seeking first the thing of God is a test of our trust that He will provide for us and our confession to the world of whom we love and put our faith in. That brings us to our first next step which is to Seek first the things of God testifying to my love, faith and trust in Him.
As we turn to verses 19, 20 and 25, 26, we see laws teaching the people that God deserved and desired their very best, and they were to contribute back to Him a portion of what He had entrusted to them. He reiterates the Redemption of the Firstborn which would have reminded them of Passover. God is the giver of life so every firstborn male offspring of every womb, human and animal. belongs to Him and must be redeemed. They were to give back to God their very best symbolized by every firstborn male offspring. When the Angel of Death passed over Egypt, he killed every firstborn son and animal of those who did not put the blood of the sacrifice on their doorpost. So just like the blood of the perfect sacrifice saved their firstborn from death in Egypt, the blood of a perfect sacrifice would be needed to redeem their firstborn males in the Promised Land.
To explain this law God uses a donkey as the example. The donkey was an unclean animal and so was not essential in the worship of the Lord at the tabernacle. It was only good as a beast of burden for the Israelite families. So, they could keep the firstborn donkey by redeeming a lamb. If they did not want to redeem it then they needed to break its neck so they could not use it. In this way either a lamb was sacrificed, or the donkey was killed, redeeming it to the Lord as commanded. It is interesting that God uses a donkey here. Donkeys are symbolic of us in our sinful condition. We are stubborn, willful, and unable to come to God for Hs grace. We are unclean and deserve to die in our sins. If we are to be saved, we must be redeemed by a perfect sacrificial lamb, which of course was Jesus. Then they were commanded to redeem all their firstborn sons. Under no circumstances were they to kill them. The reason for this goes back to the Lord’s command to not worship any other gods. The Canaanite gods required child sacrifice to be appeased, but this was not the Lord’s way. He was teaching them to worship Him in the proper way.
Then the Lord commanded that no one was to appear before Him empty-handed. If they obeyed the Sabbath and Festival laws everyone would have something to give to the Lord. In verses 25-26, we see various laws regarding their worship practices and what it meant to not show up empty handed. In celebrating each of the three festivals, a sacrifice was to be made, no matter what. The laws in verse 25 seem to have Passover and the Festival of the Unleavened Bread in mind. Not showing up empty-handed meant presenting the right kind of offering before the Lord. First, they were not to offer the blood of “My” sacrifice with anything containing yeast or leaven. By calling it “My” sacrifice, God is alluding to Christ’s sacrifice on the cross. As I mentioned before, yeast and leaven were symbolic of sin. When they came before the Lord in worship they were to be without sin. Sin would pollute their sacrifices and offerings rendering them unfit for the Lord. This reminds us of coming together in worship and asking for the Lord to convict us of our sin and to help us to confess it, so when we come before Him, we come with clean hands and pure hearts. This ensures we are bringing our very best worship before the Lord.
Second, they were not to let any of the sacrifices from the Passover Festival remain until morning. Why? It was probably to keep it from becoming unclean or spoiled. But also, because it was presented and dedicated to the Lord, signifying their salvation, and to let any of it remain until morning showed that His salvation wasn’t that important to honor it properly. They were to consume the entire sacrifice with reverence and without any waste during the appointed time. This would constitute giving God their very best. Then we see a law concerning the Festival of Weeks and the Festival of Ingathering. They were to bring the best of the first fruits of their soil to the house of the Lord their God. This was their tithe given to the house of the Lord to be used for His purposes. Everything they had was given to them by God first and so belonged to Him. He wanted them to trust Him to provide by giving back a portion of it to the Lord. Properly worshipping the Lord this way testified of their faith in Him to provide what they needed.
Of course, God wants our very best as an act of our true worship. Hebrews 13:15-16 says, “Through Jesus, therefore, let us continually offer to God a sacrifice of praise—the fruit of lips that openly profess his name. And do not forget to do good and to share with others, for with such sacrifices God is pleased.” God wants our worship and service, but He also wants the best of our resources. They all belong to him anyway, and we acknowledge this by giving the first and the best of our income to the church and to the poor. In 1 Corinthians 16:2, Paul talking to the Corinthian people about their tithes and offerings says, “On the first day of every week, each one of you should set aside a sum of money in keeping with his income.” Our tithing today should be taken from our gross not our net income. It should be presented to God, according to each of our means, as a prime obligation to be met before other bills are paid, and not an offering of spare change or a few dollars left over after all other financial obligations have been satisfied. Our giving should be regular, deliberate and done cheerfully. Stuart says, “What one offers to God reveals tellingly where one places God in one’s hierarchy of importance.”
But God wants more than our service, time, talents and treasures, as acts of our true worship. He wants our very lives; He wants all of us. Giving all of ourselves to Him testifies of our love for Him and our faith in Him to provide for us all that we need. This is from Ryken: “A beautiful example comes from the life of Corrie ten Boom, the Dutch Christian whose family saved many Jewish lives during World War II and who endured the horrors of life in a German concentration camp. Corrie had been a Christian for most of her life, but a significant turning point came when she unreservedly offered herself in loving service to God. She prayed, “Lord Jesus, I offer myself for Your people. In any way. Any place. Any time.” This is what it means to belong to God in the covenant—that mutual relationship in which God gives himself to us and we give ourselves to him in return. What God has given to us is far more extravagant than what he gave to Israel. He has given his Son to be our Savior. Now our work, our relationships, our families, our homes, our ministries, our bank accounts, even our vacations, all these things belong to him. It is when we finally learn this that we begin to serve and worship God the way he really wants to be worshipped and can love him the way that he has taught us to love. That brings us to our second next step which to Offer my entire self to the Lord as an act of worship, so I can serve and love Him the way He desires.
Lastly, we see this strange law that seems tacked on to the end of this section. But again, God does nothing random or without reason. The prohibition against cooking a young goat in its mother’s milk was to keep the Israelites from participating in Canaanite fertility rituals and other pagan practices. This is an example of the pagan worship practices that He wanted His people to abstain from. This was another warning to not to worship false gods. God is reiterating that true worship is the worship of Him alone. We notice that the Lord frames this section with “do not make any idols in verse 17 and a law against participating in false worship in verse 26.
That brings us to our second point, Covenantal Representative, found in Exodus 34:27-28. This is what God’s Word says, “Then the Lord said to Moses, “Write down these words, for in accordance with these words I have made a covenant with you and with Israel.” Moses was there with the Lord forty days and forty nights without eating bread or drinking water. And he wrote on the tablets the words of the covenant—the Ten Commandments.”
The Lord brings this part of His continued establishment of the covenant between Him and the Israelites to an end. He has reiterating that they are not to make idols like the golden calf, and they are not to worship the false gods of the Canaanites. These laws needed to be reiterated and stressed because they would be tempted to commit spiritual infidelity with the Canaanite gods. The Lord commands Moses to “write these words” which are probably the laws He has commanded from verses 10-26. By writing these words down they became law, they were “set in stone” for the people. The reason Moses wrote them down was because they were from the Lord, the ultimate author of Scripture, and so they could learn them, write them on their hearts and obey them without fail.
Next, we are told Moses was on the mountain with the Lord for forty days and forty nights and that he fasted, not eating or drinking, for that period of time. This is the second forty days and nights period He has spent with the Lord on Mt. Sinai and fasted. This is seen in Deuteronomy 9:9. The first time was to receive the law from God. This time it was to intercede for the sin of the people. Deuteronomy 9:18 says, “Then once again I fell prostrate before the Lord for forty days and forty nights; I ate no bread and drank no water, because of all the sin you had committed, doing what was evil in the Lord’s sight and so arousing his anger.” The number forty in the Bible means a period of probation, trial or chastisement. God may have been testing the Israelites to see if they would conjure up another idol like the last time Moses was gone for so long.
Moses’ forty days and nights fast was completely a unique and supernatural feat by God allowing Moses to be sustained for that period of time. We are again reminded that Moses is a type of Christ for us. Matthew 4:3-4 it says, “The tempter came to him and said, “If you are the Son of God, tell these stones to become bread.” Jesus answered, “It is written: ‘Man shall not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God.” Jesus fasted in the wilderness for forty days and nights and was engaged in spiritual warfare with Satan. During that time, He used scripture, words out of the mouth of God, to combat him. Moses was also sustained by the words and laws that proceeded from the mouth of the Lord. The Lord was using Moses to point us again to our covenant mediator, Jesus, who came to save us from our sins.
Lastly, we come full circle from verse 1 where God told Moses to “chisel two stone tablets like the first ones and I will write on them the words that were on the first tablets which you broke.” It is hard to understand who is doing the writing on these stone tablets, but the NKJV rightly translates the he with a capital “H.” This is confirmed in Deuteronomy 10:4, “The Lord wrote on these tablets what he had written before, the Ten Commandments he had proclaimed to you on the mountain, out of the fire, on the day of the assembly. And the Lord gave them to me.” The Lord’s laws and commandments were set in stone.
Observing all these laws would be a testimony and confession to those around them that they were putting their faith and trust in Yahweh and not in their false gods. It also showed their love for Him (Big Idea). Loving their gods would have been a foreign concept to the Canaanite peoples. They used their gods to get what they wanted, and they feared their gods but not in a reverent way. These laws were designed by the Lord to strengthen their walk with Him and to help His people avoid idolatry and spiritual infidelity. These laws were instituted at this time and place by God because they had worshipped the golden calf. If they would observe and obey the Sabbath laws, the day of rest each week would nourish their love for Him and keep them from idols. If they observed and obeyed the three festivals a year, there would be communion, fellowship and joy between God and the people and would keep them from idols. If they gave the very best of the best they had willingly and joyfully, God would display His extravagant love for them, which would rekindle their love for Him, keeping them from idols.
Just like the Israelites, what keeps us from worshipping the false gods in our lives, is the consistent worship of our Lord Jesus Christ and falling deeper in love with Him. This will confess to the world around us that we love and have faith in the one true and living God of the Universe. He has given us a pattern of worship, given us His Holy rest and he desires us to bring Him the best of our very best. As we do these things it strengthens our love relationship with Jesus. That brings us to our last next step, which is to Engage in worship, accept His holy rest, and give Jesus my very best so my love relationship with Him is strengthened.
