Reading the Bible Together

The Passage for the Day

3 Then Moses went up to God, and the LORD called to him from the mountain and said, “This is what you are to say to the house of Jacob and what you are to tell the people of Israel: 4‘You yourselves have seen what I did to Egypt, and how I carried you on eagles’ wings and brought you to myself. 5 Now if you obey me fully and keep my covenant, then out of all nations you will be my treasured possession. Although the whole earth is mine, 6 you will be for me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.’ These are the words you are to speak to the Israelites.”

7 So Moses went back and summoned the elders of the people and set before them all the words the LORD had commanded him to speak. 8 The people all responded together, “We will do everything the LORD has said.” So Moses brought their answer back to the LORD

Points of interest:

•  ‘You yourselves have seen what I did to Egypt’—a few things have happened and a few hundred years have passed since yesterday’s passage.  Here’s a quick recap: Abram, renamed Abraham, does indeed have a son, named Isaac; Isaac, in turn, has a son named Jacob (also called Israel); Jacob’s family moves to Egypt to avoid a famine; they become a numerous people, as God had promised; the Israelites become slaves of the Egyptians; and God sends this man named Moses to rescue them from slavery.
• ‘This is what you are to say to the house of Jacob‘—after Moses rescues the Israelites from Egypt, he leads them to a mountain in the Sinai desert, where they meet God to get further instructions.  What we have in this passage is God’s plan for the Israelites.  Although they had some since of group identity before now, you could say that it is during this passage that the Israelites really become a nation.  God’s promise to make a great nation of Abram’s descendants is coming true.
•  ‘and keep my covenant’—a covenant is like a contract or an agreement.  God is inviting the Israelites into a partnership here.  In what follows, God will have his part to play, and the Israelites will have theirs.
•  ‘out of all nations you will be my treasured possession’—God basically repeats his promise to Abraham.  The Israelites, Abraham’s descendants, will have a special place in God’s plan. 
•  ‘a kingdom of priests’—here’s what God has in mind for them.  Usually, priests are a very small proportion of the population; they’re especially close to God, and they serve as intermediaries between God and everyone else.  But in Israel, everyone is meant to be a priest, everyone is close to God.  If everyone is a priest, for whom exactly are they mediating?  I think the answer is the rest of the world.  Just like every individual nation has a priesthood, the world as a whole has one priestly nation.    This idea of the priestly nation reminds me of God’s promise that Abram’s descendants would be blessed, not to the detriment of other nations, but to the benefit of other nations.  I think the Israelites are meant to be a blessing to other nations in two ways.  As a model nation:  Kind of like a model home, they’re God’s demonstration of what he can offer to a nation that decides to enter into a covenant with him.  As spokespeople: they’re meant to spread the word about just how good a god God is.  God plans to start the blessing with the Israelites, and have them pass it on.
• ‘We will do everything’—this is like the Israelites’ signature.  They agree to the covenant God proposes.

Taking it home:

•  For you: Consider the idea that God would like your life, or the life of your family, to be a model of what God can do when given a chance.  What features of your life would you recommend to others?  What would you like to be able to recommend?  Ask God to give you more of the life you really want, and would really want others to have.  Also, ask God to give you the chance to boldly and humbly pass along the things that have worked well for you.
• For your six: Before God asks Israel to enter into a covenant with him, he gives them a free sample, as it were.  He rescues them from Egypt, in order to demonstrate both his willingness and ability to bring some tangible benefit to their lives.  Pray that God would do the same for your six.
• For America: It seems like the trick of being a good priest is not to lose contact with either God or a nation’s people.  If our nation’s people are becoming more secular in culture (as I proposed in the introduction), perhaps that means that being priests to our nation requires adopting some of the features of that secular culture.  Pray that we as a church would be good priests: that we would strongly identify with our nation’s secular culture, without by any means losing touch with God.

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 5th, 2009 at 4:00 am and is filed under God and the Nations. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.