YOU ARE STANDING AMID a great multitude—perhaps two or three times the population of Adelaide—and staring wide-eyed and open-mouthed at the most fearsome sight you have ever beheld. Mount Sinai, to which your nation’s leader, Moses, has brought you, is in a state of upheaval. Bolts of lightning are crashing down on it like cosmic missiles. Thunder is reverberating out from above it and rippling across the darkened sky. The whole mountain is shuddering violently; you can feel it in the air and under your feet. The summit of the mountain is covered in a thick cloud and immersed in fire. Plumes of smoke are billowing up from it as from a furnace, and an ear-splitting trumpet blast is piercing the atmosphere (Ex 19:16-18). Your whole body is filled with alarm. You don’t know whether to continue gawping at the frightening scene unfolding before you, or turn on your heels and flee.

The LORD Almighty, who pledged Himself on oath to your nation’s fathers (Gen 12:2-3; 15:5,18-19; 17:4-8; 22:16-18; 26:3-4,24; 28:13-15)—Abraham, Isaac and Jacob—has descended upon the mountain to establish His covenant with you. Inside the fiery cloud, the sovereign Creator of the heavens and the earth is personally dictating to Moses the commands and decrees by which you, His chosen people, are to live. With one voice, you have already agreed to do everything He tells you (Ex 19:8; see also Ex 24:7)—a prudent decision in view of the fearful display in front of you and His spectacular efforts to rescue you. He sent signs and wonders—great and terrible—on your former captors, the Egyptians, forcing Pharaoh to let you go (Ex 7:14-11:10; 12:31-32). And when the army of Egypt came after you in anger, you saw the power of the God of your ancestors at work once more: He divided the mighty Red Sea and shepherded all of you safely across on dry ground, drowning your pursuers behind you (Ex 14:5-22).

‘You yourselves have seen what I did to Egypt,’ the LORD has said, ‘and how I carried you on eagles’ wings and brought you to myself. 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, you will be for Me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation’ (Ex 19:4-6).

THE REQUIREMENT TO BE HOLY

Before God declared you holy, He showed you His kindness and favour: He saved you from slavery in the land of sin and brought you to Himself. More than that, He promised to give you the lush land of Canaan (Ex 6:8) as your very own—His fulfilment of the oath He had sworn to your ancestors (Gen 17:8; 26:3-4; 28:13). Now He wants you to obey Him—not to pay Him back for His goodness to you, but as a key part of what He wants to give you: the gift of holiness, so that He can come near to you. He has already come down, down, down from the heights of heaven to the top of the mountain. Incredibly, though, He wants to come down even further and live among you, right in the beating heart of your community. But that will be no simple thing: the pure radiance of His holiness would reveal your unholiness and your resulting ineligibility for His hallowed presence. You would not, could not, endure. If God is to be your neighbour, you must be holy. But how? You surely can’t make yourselves holy; only God is holy in Himself. There is but one solution: you will have to be made holy by God (Ex 31:13; Lev 20:8; 21:8; 22:32).

God, however, won’t be content to arbitrarily stamp your foreheads with the word ‘Holy’ like a bureaucrat blindly implementing a public policy; He wants you to cooperate with Him by living according to His law—in Hebrew, tôrâh, meaning ‘direction’ or ‘instruction.’ That’s why God has called Moses to the top of the mountain: to provide instruction on the way of life that you, His people, are to follow and so be holy (Lev 11:44,45; 19:1; 20:7,26; 21:6; Num 6:5) in practice. Unlike the pagan nations, who don’t love their gods and are not loved by them, your obedience is to be prompted by deep, authentic, reverential love. God has already shown you His love (Ex 20:6; 34:6-7; Num 14:18-19; see also Deut 4:37; 5:10; 7:8-9,12-13; 10:15; 23:5; 33:3). Now you are to love Him (Ex 20:6) in reply—‘with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength.’ And since God loves your neighbour too, so must you: you are each to love your neighbour as yourself (Lev 19:18).

THE LAW IN SUMMARY

The twofold theme of love for God and neighbour is the pillar on which the whole law hangs (Matt 22:36-40; Luke 10:25-28). It is unmistakably evident right from the law’s opening synopsis, the revolutionary Ten Commandments (Ex 20:3-17; Deut 5:7-21), written by God Himself on two tablets of stone:

Love God:

• You shall have no other gods before Me.
• You shall not make for yourself an image in the form of anything in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the waters below. You shall not bow down to them or worship them.
• You shall not misuse the name of the LORD your God.
• Remember the Sabbath day by keeping it holy.

Love your neighbour:

• Honour your father and your mother.
• You shall not murder.
• You shall not commit adultery.
• You shall not steal.
• You shall not give false testimony against your neighbour.
• You shall not covet (desire) your neighbour’s house. You shall not covet your neighbour’s wife, or his male or female servant, his ox or donkey, or anything that belongs to your neighbour.

(Note that some of these commandments are stated in abridged form.)

Other parts of the law emphasise the need for you to celebrate God’s saving action at set times of the year, to live morally, to obey your earthly masters faithfully, to treat your slaves with dignity, to rest the land regularly, to provide compensation to those who suffer undeserved injury or loss, to conduct your business honestly, to attend to the needs of the poor and defend their cause, to judge cases in the law courts fairly, to punish the guilty according to the gravity of their crimes, to be ceremonially and hygienically clean, and to seek forgiveness for your sins by bringing lambs and bulls without blemish or defect to the LORD your God and sacrificing them to Him in the proper manner.

THE LAW IS A LIGHT

God’s law is imbued with principles of righteousness, mercy, justice and love—values and practices that speak of the eternally holy character of God. As such, the law is trustworthy guidance in holy living. One of your nation’s future kings—David, a man after God’s own heart—will celebrate the law with these poetic words of delight:

The law of the LORD is perfect, refreshing the soul. The statutes of the LORD are trustworthy, making wise the simple. The precepts of the LORD are right, giving joy to the heart. The commands of the LORD are radiant, giving light to the eyes … The decrees of the LORD are firm, and all of them are righteous. They are more precious than gold, than much pure gold; they are sweeter than honey, than honey from the honeycomb. By them your servant is warned; in keeping them there is great reward. (Ps 19:7-11)

There will indeed be great reward for you and your compatriots if you keep your promise to God and do everything He tells you. Virtuous living in His sight will be ample reward in itself, yet there will be further reward: God will bless your nation greatly (Deut 5:29,33; 6:1-3,17-19,24; 7:12-15; 8:1; 15:4-6,10; 23:20; 24:19; 28:1-13; 30:9-10,16; 32:46-47; see also Josh 1:7-8; 1 Kings 2:3; 3:14; 9:4-5; 11:38), set you in praise, fame and honour high above all the other nations that He has made (Ex 23:25-26; Lev 25:18-19; 26:3-12; Deut 26:19) and walk among you as your God (Lev 26:12). All this God will gladly do for you if only you will fear and love Him with all that you are, always being careful to obey Him.

DISOBEDIENCE AND FAILURE

The heart-rending truth, however, is that God won’t get His wish—not yet, anyway. Your nation’s story will soon degenerate into a pitiful saga of disobedience, moral decay, and ultimate failure. Even before Moses comes down from the mountain, you will begin worshipping idols (Ex 32:2-6). In the days that follow, you will grumble against your God-appointed leaders, pine for the ‘good old days’ of Egypt, and refuse to enter the Promised Land. Forty years later, God will usher your children into the land, but most of their descendants will rebel. They will spend century after wretched century worshipping pagan gods, practising depravity, pursuing dishonest gain, exploiting the poor, shedding innocent blood, ignoring the LORD’s festivals and sabbaths, and engaging in insincere religion. For all but a few fragments of your people’s history, you will decline to love God and neighbour as the law requires. God will send scores of prophets to you, each with a warning—‘Repent from your sins or suffer the consequences!’—but you will stubbornly decline to change your ways. Some of those prophets you will mistreat; others you will kill.

Finally, the verdict will come in: Though God gave His law to your nation with the good intention that you would obey it and be His holy people, you persistently flouted it—and so it will condemn you as guilty. What a disaster! Salvation history is in tatters on your account. Of all the peoples on the face of the earth, God chose you to be His treasured possession—but you abandoned Him and chose instead to worship other gods.

What does God do in response? The law itself contains hints of it (Ex 13:2,12-13; 22:29; 34:19-20; Lev 16:3-34; Num 3:13; 35:6-28; Deut 15:19; 21:23; 25:5-6). Nearly one-and-a-half-millennia later, at just the right time, God makes His move…