WARNING!! … This is a long one! But please stick in there with me. You may be blessed by what God has given me to share today. And please see my BLOGGER'S NOTE below.
Passage of the Day: Reference of Today’s Chronological Bible Study: Exodus, Chapters 22-24 … To study these chapters, go to this link -
Exodus 24: 1-8 … : … [God’s Covenant Patience] ... 1 Then the Lord said to Moses, "Come up to the Lord, you and Aaron, Nadab and Abihu, and seventy of the elders of Israel. You are to worship at a distance, 2 but Moses alone is to approach the Lord; the others must not come near. And the people may not come up with him."
3 When Moses went and told the people all the Lord's words and laws, they responded with one voice, "Everything the Lord has said we will do."
4 Moses then wrote down everything the Lord had said. He got up early the next morning and built an altar at the foot of the mountain and set up twelve stone pillars representing the twelve tribes of Israel.5 Then he sent young Israelite men, and they offered burnt offerings and sacrificed young bulls as fellowship offerings to the Lord. 6 Moses took half of the blood and put it in bowls, and the other half he splashed against the altar.7 Then he took the Book of the Covenant and read it to the people. They responded, "We will do everything the Lord has said; we will obey."
8 Moses then took the blood, sprinkled it on the people and said, "This is the blood of the covenant that the Lord has made with you in accordance with all these words."
My Journal for Today: Today, in reading through and meditating on Chapter 22-24 of Exodus [linked for your reading above] in my chronological Bible reading plan for 2012, I encounter, along with God’s instructions through Moses to His people after presenting them with The Ten Commandments (in Exodus 20), the instructions God gives to His children about how they must live to be festivals of living sacrifice. If you go back to my journal entry for Feb. 3, 2012 at this linked website, you can read how God wanted His people to remember what the Lord had done for them in delivering them from bondage in Egypt and how their lives should become “living sacrifices” in faithful remembrance of His redeeming faithfulness. And here in these chapters – for today’s reading – we read of how God gave His children specific instructions as to how they must live to become the living remembrance to Yahweh’s faithful deliverance and His patient, covenant love.
Now, in today’s highlight passage, copied above, we read of the ceremony which God presented for the people, through Moses, Aaron, and the Elders of the twelve tribes. However, in this elaborate covenant ritual, Moses was the only one whom God would allow to approach the altar of worship. And then note the corporate response of God’s chosen people when God’s instructions were presented to them by Moses. They said in accord, "Everything the Lord has said we will do." Well, I’m no Bible scholar; but I have read through THE BOOK, and I’m sure you know as well as I that these people would not live up to their part of God’s deal for them.
Yes, God, being our omniscient Lord, knew that His children, still under the influence of their Adamic nature, would fail Him; but He still needed to establish the ground rules for the game of life, re-establishing and ceremoniously re-setting in motion God’s part of His deal with His people. And in part of this ceremony, which we read about in today’s highlight passage, we see the importance of “the blood” in this covenant ritual. And now, being New Covenant believers, from our reading of God’s completed “Book of the Law,” our Bible, we know all about what was being pictured in this re-establishment of God’s Covenant with His people.
We know (or should know) that without the shedding of blood, there is no remission of or redemption from sin [see Hebrews 9, especially verse 22; and this ceremony, we read about above, was God’s way of giving a ceremonial picture, which He established through the rituals of blood sacrifice in the Old Testament times, to foreshadow what was to come when His Son would become the Messianic blood sacrifice, the Lamb of God, shedding His blood, once and for all, to “seal the deal” God was making with His people from the Old Covenant.
And now we who are established and sealed by the New Covenant blood sacrifice, will live with our Lord and Savior forever because He, as the final blood sacrifice, the Lamb of God, shed His blood to cover us and release us from our past bondage to our sin nature.
If you’re reading along with me, can I get a resounding “HALLELUJAH?!!”
However and hopefully, we can be more faithful to our part of the New Covenant fulfillment than God’s children were when they declared that they would be obedient to God’s original covenant. Prayerfully, we can live as living sacrifices more in remembrance of God’s promised and fulfilled sacrifice than did those in Moses’ time when the people saw His glory and yet balked in trying to fulfill their covenant promise to their God.
My Prayer Today: … Lord, though we are sinners and don’t deserve Your blood, You shed it for me, and all who receive Your blood in faith, that we may be saved by Your grace and mercy, through our faith in the shedding of Your blood for our forgiveness. Oh, Yahweh, …thank You … and … HALLELUJAH!!! Amen
Blogger’s Note: I want to declare here, for any who might be willing to read along with me, that God is giving me far more than I prayed for … and WAY MORE than I deserve … as I’ve been reading through His word this year. In the beginning of 2012, I desired – and prayed for – God to fill me up with His wisdom as I made the commitment to do the chronological reading plan which our local church was promoting for 2012. But to be quite honest, I felt under obligation – more than real commitment – as an Elder in our church to model this reading plan. But nonetheless, I prayed that God would give our church flock – and me too – His wisdom, light, and direction from this reading of His word. And if you know God’s promised from both Psalms 37: 4 and James 1: 5-6 as well as Isaiah 55: 11, seeking to know God and His mind through the study of His word will ALWAYS be productive – WAY MORE than we could fathom [see Eph. 3: 20]! … And that has truly been the result of my reading thus far, chronologically, through the Bible this year. So, as with today’s journaling above, I’m more than encouraged – I’m excited! – to continue on being filled up every day by reading, studying, and meditating on God’s word. Oh, how I pray others will find the Ps. 37: 4 treatment as well from committing and reading through the Bible in 2012.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment