So where we left off in our last lesson was we ended with God's grand promises to Abraham as the father of a multitude of nations, that he made promises of a land for his descendants. God made promises to the descendants to keep them and to bless them. He gave a sign of circumcision. God also had this warning in Genesis chapter 15 saying, your descendants won't just have prosperity. They're going to go into a foreign land. They're going to be trapped there. And in that foreign land, I will bring them out. I will judge the nation in which they're in." So that's what we see now for the Mosaic Covenant, or God's covenant with Moses, God's covenant with Abraham's descendants, some 400 years after Genesis 15. That's what we see as the context surrounding what takes place here at Mount Sinai. So building up then, we've made it through the book of Genesis, and now we're beginning in Exodus. So we see Exodus 2, the murmurings of Israel, and they're complaining, saying, we're under oppression. Does God not see us? Does God not hear us? And we see that indeed, God does hear their cries. And he doesn't just have pity on them as a people, but he has pity on them as Abraham's descendants. God remembers his covenants that he made with their fathers. He remembers the work that he's made with their fathers. So if you'll imagine then, Abraham at this point in time for Israel, it would have just been a story that Abraham and Isaac and Jacob and their interactions with the Egyptians and how they got to this point of being enslaved, it would all be a sort of just, well, that's just a story we heard growing up. That maybe there was some degree of faith in God, but these people with whom God contracted these covenants with, it would have been really just like, that's just a story to us. It would have been a very distant memory. So God does something significant when he begins to work in that he preserved the life of Moses and Moses' early days we can read in Exodus. And he goes on, Moses leaves Egypt and Moses is called by God. He's met with him at a burning bush. So if you have your Bible, turn with me to Exodus chapter 6. Exodus chapter six, this is in the midst of God bringing up Moses saying, I've got this plan, I've got this people that I need you to go and get for me. I'm going to work through you, I'm going to use you in mighty ways. In Exodus chapter six, I'll read verses one through eight. It says, Then the Lord said to Moses, Now you shall see what I will do to Pharaoh of Egypt, for under compulsion he will let them go, and under compulsion he will drive them out of his land. So however God is going to work, he's going to push his people out of Egypt, and Pharaoh isn't going to be reluctant. He's going to be the one who drives them out. He's going to be an instrument of the Lord. Verse 2, God spoke further to Moses and said to him, I am the Lord. And I appeared to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob as God Almighty. But by my name, Lord, I did not make myself known to them. So that's a very short verse, but it's very significant. So sometimes in English, I know that I myself will use the words God or Lord as sort of interchangeable, referring to the same person of the Godhead, that it's sort of like I can use one or the other and I mean the same thing. But in this case, in the Hebrew specifically, the word God is a different word from the word Lord. God is more of a general term for a God, but also is used by God with other words describing God's characteristics, his attributes. So we have phrases like the God who sees, the God who provides, and that's all the same root word of God in the English. But in this case, God makes a significant declaration to Moses and he says, I'm not just God, but I'm giving you a new name for me and for your people. It's the word Lord. So it's significant in that that's the covenant name that God gives. It's not just, I'm a God like some nations think they have a God, but I'm the Lord. I am your covenant maker and covenant keeper who will watch over you. Verse 4 continues, I also established my covenant with them to give them the land of Canaan, the land in which they sojourned. Furthermore, I have heard the groaning of the sons of Israel, because the Egyptians are holding them in bondage, and I have remembered my covenant. Say, therefore, to the sons of Israel, I am the Lord, and I will bring you out from under the burdens of the Egyptians, and I will deliver you from their bondage. I will also redeem you with an outstretched arm and with great judgments. Then I will take you for my people, and I will be your God, and you shall know that I am the Lord your God, who brought you out from under the burdens of the Egyptians." And lastly, verse 8, I will bring you to the land which I swore to give to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and I will give it to you for possession. I am the Lord. So in the midst of God making these promises, we can think back and remember God's promises to Abraham. We can think back and remember God saying, I'm going to give you a land, I'm going to give you a people, I'm going to do all these things. And here in Exodus 6, we have it laid out of God constantly saying, I'm going to do this. I am the Lord. I'm going to do this. I am the Lord. So God's declaring not just what He'll do, but He grinds it in who He is. He grinds it in Himself as God Almighty, as the covenant Lord of Israel. If we go on in Exodus, we don't have a lot of time to go through it, but there's so much in this. It's almost like Genesis is sort of the beginnings of the entire Bible, that everything is tied back to that first three chapters of Genesis. But if you consider just the first five books, what some call the Pentateuch or the Torah, that this action that God has in raising up Moses and bringing out Israel and taking them out of Egypt and having the Passover and the new calendar God creates. God refers back often to this as, this is how I began the nation of Israel. This is what I've done for you. And he uses it as a means of reminder for them. Exodus chapter 14 through 18, we see that Israel has been taken out of Egypt, that Pharaoh sent them away, they crossed the Red Sea on dry ground, they're wandering and God is providing for them. And then finally, the final bit of context to get us to the covenant at Sinai with Moses is we see Exodus 19, that Israel is finally at Mount Sinai. So turn there with me and we'll read just a few verses. So we see that it's three months after they left Egypt. So they've been wandering around maybe in circles, maybe in a straight line. They're being led literally by God who's leading them by fire, by cloud. That in verse two of Exodus 19, Israel is camped at the mountain. So let me read just verses starting in verse four. of Exodus 19, it says, You yourselves have seen what I did to the Egyptians, and how I bore you on eagles' wings and brought you to myself. Now then, if you will indeed obey my voice and keep my covenant, then you shall be my own possession among all the peoples, for all the earth is mine. And you shall be to me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation. These are the words that you shall speak to the sons of Israel." So that was God speaking to Moses who was on the mountain saying, go down and tell Israel this, that there's this great declaration that I have that these people, if you will hear and obey my voice as God, as the covenant Lord, then you will be my people. I will be your God. You will be my treasured possession among all the nations. He says that he'll make them a kingdom of priests and a holy nation. So in every conceivable way, he'll distinguish them. He'll set them apart from those around them. He'll give them a specific land that he's leading them through the wilderness to find. That's the covenant itself, the ratification. God's saying, here's my covenant. So we can ask, what are the blessings and the curses? What are the promises of life and the warnings of death if you break or keep the covenant? Well, if we were to go on reading in chapter 19, we would see that it's not just a calm, still, and quiet morning that's going on, that there's a fearful event as Israel is sitting encamped at the base of the mountain. There's probably lightning and thunder, the mountains quaking, that the people become scared, that they say, We don't want anything to do with this God. Moses, please go up and talk to him for us. Please intercede for us. Please protect us from having to see him face to face. That there's warnings that you can't touch the mountain, Mount Sinai, or you will die. So there's this idea then that God doesn't do that just to scare the people and say, oh, well, look what I can do. I'm God. But God does that as sort of a blessing for them. It's a warning for them that it's not just, you know, fear this God and don't touch him, don't talk to him. But it's, in many ways, a violent demonstration so that the people would see that demonstration. It would be memorable in their minds. They would hold on to it. They would tell their kids about it. And it would cause them to walk for hopefully many generations in the fear of the Lord, remembering the power of God, remembering the might of God, but also knowing that because he had this covenant made with them, that he was a gracious and a good God. So going on then, we have Exodus 20 onwards that you're probably familiar with the Ten Commandments. So it's sometimes literally ten words is how it's described if God lays out. The first four commands that we have are commands of life before God. So it's a vertical relationship of keeping the Sabbath, of not making graven images, of not worshiping other gods, not taking God's name in vain. And the second six, sometimes called the second table, is sort of a horizontal relationship. So having the first four of life before God and order, you have the second six of life with others. And it's significant, these Ten Commandments, because this so far, up to this point, through Genesis into Exodus, this is the most significant set of laws that we have given. So you'll remember that we had the instructions to be fruitful and multiply, to not murder. Abraham was given the sign of the covenant of physical circumcision, and now we have these Ten Commandments. And much of the first five books of the Old Testament go through and explain, and God gives not just these Ten Commandments, but He, in many ways, expands them. He expounds upon what He means. What does it mean to love your neighbor? What does it mean to do this, to do that? So God goes on and he gives rules or laws for every area of society. So with Abraham, he was a wanderer in the land. He was a sojourner. There was no nation surrounding him that, you know, it was just his household, even if it was larger than some. He had no need for extensive ceremonial priestly laws. He had no need for rules of prophets. He had no need for rules of uncleanness and cleanness because he was just a wanderer. But now that God is fulfilling his promise to the nation Israel through Moses, through Aaron, and so on, they need a more substantial set of laws. They need these rules that will govern them that God doesn't approve of everything that he mentions in his laws, but he says, okay, in this scenario, do this. In this scenario, do that. And you know, sometimes the world will accuse Christians of not being obedient to God's word. They'll accuse us of being hypocrites. So I've heard so many times of people will say, oh, well, there's this law in Leviticus that you wore clothes that are made of two different kinds of cloths. Aren't you breaking God's law? And we can talk more in future lessons about how these laws apply to us, but seeing this in the context of God giving this covenant with Israel, not with me, with Israel, then you can see that there's this idea of these laws were for specific people at a certain time and a certain place. that the principles underlying them of reflecting God's holiness, reflecting God's character, of the Ten Commandments being a set of the moral laws just written down physically, those carry over in certain ways. But Christ has obeyed these laws for us in a way that they are no longer binding to us. We can also look at this covenant and ask ourselves, who's the head of it, who's in and who's out, who's the figurehead, so to speak. So we've seen previous covenants, and with Abraham, the head of the covenant was Abraham, and the promises made to Abraham were for him and also for his descendants. So this covenant is unique in that Moses is not the head of this covenant, that it's made with an entire nation, and that nation comes from Abraham. We see Moses acting more in like a pattern of a mediator. So he's one who stands, if you will. If you picture Israel at the base of the mountain, you picture God, you know, in the heavens speaking to Moses, coming down in clouds and obscurity. And you see Moses sort of standing between God and men. He's acting in that mediatorial role. Lastly, we can ask ourselves, okay, what are the signs of the covenant? What are the promises? What proof do we have to test God's promises? Well, these Ten Commandments, they weren't written on, you know, a paper like this. They weren't written on papyrus or something temporary. we see that they're written in stone. And that was significant to say, these are the laws that are binding and they're not going anywhere. That was God's proof of his relationship, was not just to make these declarations to cause a show on the mountain and to leave Israel with no instruction. But because God loves his people, because he wants to have that special relationship with them, then he gives them these peculiar laws of specific instructions for so many things and says, this is how, if you're going to be my people, that you should live before me. We see proof of God's work evidenced in the Exodus and doing that special work to bring the people out just like he had promised. God refers back to that so many times as the grounds for his relationship with them, as a reminder of the grace that he showed in preserving them when he caused the Red Sea to swallow up so much of the Egyptian army and Pharaoh. We also see, we can think of the laws that God gives, of the Ten Commandments, of even the laws that can be so hard and so confusing to read in Leviticus and Numbers and so on. We see them as an expression of God's covenant love for the people. So it's God not just saying, here's this law and do this and don't ask questions. God does demand, He desires our obedience as His creation, and even more so as His covenant people. God desires for us to be obedient to Him, to be willing servants to Him. But these are laws and rules and regulations, so technical, so precise, that God wants for us to see in those laws, to see God Himself. to see that he values orphans and widows, he values righteousness, he values these good qualities that God being in himself, he expresses those through his law. So lastly, we can ask ourselves, we've seen the context of this covenant, we've gone through just now the covenant itself and the different details pertaining to it. Lastly, we can see the result. We can say, okay, now that Moses has been given these 10 commandments, the covenant has been ratified, God goes on to give laws, what happens? So the result is that God gives Israel rules for how to live life with God in the land. That we see the establishment of this permanent nation that, as I mentioned before, God is setting Israel up to be able to live life with God in the land that God will give. That he sets them up for success if they'll just simply follow him. We see the fulfillment of God's promises to Abraham that the small phrases and verses that we mentioned in Genesis that are now starting to be fulfilled as God sees Abraham's descendants coming out of Egypt, that God brought them out. He raised up Moses and Aaron to bless them, to fulfill part of his promise to Abraham. It's this covenant with Abraham's descendants. We also see more of a filling out of a picture of the seed to come. So all the way back in Adam, Genesis 3.15, we saw the promise of the seed. And then going on, we saw that it would be one born of a woman, that it would be now a descendant of Abraham. And finally, one who would be a covenant keeper that would follow these laws that God had given to Eti that he would be that great high priest that is called for. He would be the prophet that speaks God's word to God's people. He would be the king and the covenant to come with David that we'll see. We also see not just good things and positive fulfillment, but we see failure. We see in Exodus the golden calf that Israel made that Moses is up on the mountain in some ways wrestling with God and being dealt with and not eating food or drink for 40 days. He's spending as close as we've seen in the Old Testament to spending that time face-to-face with God. And while he's in that heated exchange and that glorious and wonderful experience, Israel is down at the base of the mountain. And they've so quickly lost faith in God that they've created themselves a graven image to worship, a golden calf. We also see, as soon as Leviticus 10, when God is giving the sacrificial rules to the people, he's laying out the order of the high priest, of cleanliness and uncleanness, of holiness and of lack of holiness. We see people who go into God's presence without heeding his warnings and they're killed. We also see later on that Moses, as great as he is, as great as he was used by God, that he's unable to enter the land. That whole first generation, because of unbelief, they can't go into the promised land. That's that second generation that God leads in. We also see the re-giving of the covenant, the final words of Moses where he warns the people and he says, here's this covenant, here's what God has done for you. Teach it to your children, write it on your doorsteps, put it in front of your eyes, do everything that you have to so that you remember this is your God and you will serve him. He warns the people, he says, your grandchildren, so in two generations from now, your grandchildren will forget the covenant. They'll forsake their God, they'll go after other gods. They will break this wonderful covenant that God has made with us. He warns them, he says, you will perish if you break the covenant. You'll be scattered from the land that in many generations to come, God will even exile the people out. But you see Moses instructs them and warns them so many times, he said, God is compassionate and he will not forget his covenant with you, even though you will forget him. So that's the covenant, that's the context, the ratification and the result. But we see something beautiful in this in that as Moses was standing at one point on the mountain before God and saying, God, please don't destroy Israel. Please take me instead. Please take me in their place. We also see other times that Moses was standing there and he came down from the mountain and his face was glowing. In Israel, instead of rejoicing with Moses and saying, wow, what a wonderful God, they said, hide your face, put a veil over it. But what we know now, if you're listening to this and you're in Christ, if you know something of God's saving work for you, of how he brought you from darkness into light, then you'll know that we no longer have the face of God hidden. We have it revealed most fully in the face of his son, Jesus Christ. But everything there is to know about God and His righteousness and His holiness, His purity, His love for justice and His love for His people is shown to us in the person of Christ. So we can gaze upon Christ not as hiding our eyes and shying away, but as ones who love their God, that God has made us to love Him and He loves us. And we can look, behold God in Christ's face. That's the greatest blessing and benefit of the new covenant, is there is no veil. It's been torn by the work that Christ has done for us. So thank you for watching this lesson. Again, if you have questions, you can comment below or send us a message through our website, and we'll go on through the covenants, making our way through the Old Testament. So thank you for watching, and God bless.