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Week 9 Genesis to Jesus – Covenant with Moses

Part 1 – Moses – Detailed prefiguring of Christ

The covenant with God and Moses accelerates our salvation story into high gear. If we are not careful as we study this Mosaic covenant we might misunderstand why God chose the nation of Israel as His own. Some have accused God of spiritual favoritism, actually the opposite in true. To whom much is given, much is required. God did not pour out His grace on Israel so that they could selfishly revel in the blessings of God. Seeing this covenant through the eyes of our loving Father, we can clearly see that God has chosen Israel as His first-born son. First born sons certainly have a special place in the plan of God, but we can easily forget the tremendous responsibility that comes with being the first-born. God was blessing and positioning Israel so that they could then pass that blessing on to all the nations of the world. You and I have been blessed with the Catholic faith, the very fulness of faith on this earth, not so we can hoard it for ourselves. If we don’t give this faith away to others, we will be in danger of losing it for ourselves.

Once again, God reveals to us a pattern of how He worked through first born sons; Adam, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob later renamed by God as Israel. Jacob/Israel was not the first born, but remember he tricked Isaac into blessing him with the birth rite that should have been Esau’s. Israel and his twelve sons become an extension of the family of Abraham, as the twelve tribes of the nation of Israel. Each first-born son received undeserved blessings from God, with the expectation that those blessings would be multiplied and passed on to their immediate families, then to the nation of Israel, and finally spread throughout the whole world. Israel was good at receiving the blessings of God, but not so good and passing those blessings on.

It is very interesting that the word holy first occurs when God sets apart the Sabbath Day as a special day in the week to worship. But after chapter 2 of Genesis, the word holiness disappears for 50 chapters, and reappears in Exodus, and is all over the book of Leviticus. To be holy means, to set apart something or someone for a special purpose.

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Moses is drawn to God through the burning bush, and God tells him to remove his sandals, because he is standing on Holy ground. Israel is called on to be a holy nation, a royal priesthood. You and I have been set apart on this earth to live Holy lives dedicated to the work God has given us to do. You can really see God the Father working through His first-born son to bless the whole earth in the 4th chapter of Exodus, Exodus 4:22–23 (RSV2CE) 22 And you shall say to Pharaoh, ‘Thus says the LORD, Israel is my first-born son, 23 and I say to you, “Let my son go that he may serve me”; if you refuse to let him go, behold, I will slay your first-born son.’”

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Notice the phrase “that he may serve me”. Fast forward to Jesus, the eternally begotten first born Son, the first of many sons and daughters set apart from the world “to serve”. Even as His disciples entered the Upper Room to partake of the Last Supper, they were arguing amongst themselves about who was the greatest among them. What did Jesus do to bring that conversation to a screeching halt, He stripped to the waist, took a basin and towel and He began to wash their feet.

The Hebrew word for slavery or bondage is the word “abad”, the author or authors of Exodus uses this word to describe the slavery of the Jews in Egypt. Ironically that same word is used to describe God delivering Israel from Egyptian slavery, so that they can serve God, it is the exact same word “abad”. What is going on here, what is God trying to say? Slavery under Egyptian oppression is very different to slavery, or being a servant of God. Egyptian slavery is suffocating and oppressing and demeaning. Liturgical servanthood in service to God is just the opposite. Abad, or serving God, is true freedom and the fulfillment and meaning of our human life. We were made to serve God, so our freedom of choice allows us to pick the kind of slavery we want to live under, be a slave to sin and the vices of this world system, or choose to be a slave to righteousness and holiness. God is warning Pharaoh, let my people so they can “abad” Me, instead of you obeying you Pharaoh or your foreign gods, and if you don’t, I will slay your first-born sons. You could sum it up in this way, God is delivering Israel from the “abad” of Egypt, so that they can engage in the “abad” of God out in the wilderness away from Egypt, and He will accomplish this through the “liturgical abad” of the Passover Feast.

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All the plagues that God unleashed against Egypt were targeted for a specific god that Egypt worshipped, derived from various forces of nature. The river Nile was sacred to the Egyptians, so God turned it to blood. Frogs were a kind of deity, so God covered the whole land with millions of frogs.

The tenth plague is the real focus of all the plagues as God gives exact instructions on instituting the Passover, a liturgical event that would be comparable in importance to our Christmas, Easter, and Independence Day all rolled up into one, as the first month of year.

Exodus 12:1–13 (RSV2CE) 1 The LORD said to Moses and Aaron in the land of Egypt, 2 “This month shall be for you the beginning of months; it shall be the first month of the year for you. 3 Tell all the congregation of Israel that on the tenth day of this month they shall take every man a lamb according to their fathers’ houses, a lamb for a household; 4 and if the household is too small for a lamb, then a man and his neighbor next to his house shall take according to the number of persons; according to what each can eat you shall make your count for the lamb. 5 Your lamb shall be without blemish, a male a year old; you shall take it from the sheep or from the goats; 6 and you shall keep it until the fourteenth day of this month, when the whole assembly of the congregation of Israel shall kill their lambs in the evening. 7 Then they shall take some of the blood, and put it on the two doorposts and the lintel of the houses in which they eat them. 8 They shall eat the flesh that night, roasted; with unleavened bread and bitter herbs they shall eat it. 9 Do not eat any of it raw or boiled with water, but roasted, its head with its legs and its

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inner parts. 10 And you shall let none of it remain until the morning, anything that remains until the morning you shall burn.

11 In this manner you shall eat it: your loins girded, your sandals on your feet, and your staff in your hand; and you shall eat it in haste. It is the LORD’s Passover. 12 For I will pass through the land of Egypt that night, and I will strike all the first-born in the land of Egypt, both man and beast; and on all the gods of Egypt I will execute judgments: I am the LORD. 13 The blood shall be a sign for you, upon the houses where you are; and when I see the blood, I will pass over you, and no plague shall fall upon you to destroy you, when I strike the land of Egypt.

God instructs each family to take a spotless lamb into their home on the 10th day of the month, and on the night of the 14th day of the month, the day of the Passover each family was to take the perfect lamb and slit its throat, catching the blood so they could smear that blood on the door posts of their house with hyssop branches. They were then instructed consume all the roasted meat of the lamb, standing up and fully dressed for travel, with a staff in their hand and sandals on their feet.

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This was the day of freedom they had been waiting for, freedom from crushing poverty. Finally, after the death of Pharaoh’s first-born son, he lets them go, only to change his mind and pursue them with his army of chariots as they are backed up against the Red Sea. What happens next is a picture we have seen before, God saving his people through water…first Noah, and now Moses. But this time God takes them through the water instead of floating on top of it. The Apostles and the Early Fathers jumped on the understanding of the cross being pictured by Abraham taking his son with wood on his back up on the mountain, and now God prefigures our baptism twice, first through the great flood and now Israel crossing the Red Sea.

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And as they come to Mount Sinai God tells them their new national identity, and here is yet another Old Testament picture of the New Testament Church, concealed in the Old Covenant and revealed in the New Covenant.

Exodus 19:5–6 (RSV2CE) 5 Now therefore, if you will obey my voice and keep my covenant, you shall be my own possession among all peoples; for all the earth is mine, 6 and you shall be to me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation. These are the words which you shall speak to the children of Israel.”

This new nation is not to be first and foremost a military power, their true meaning as a nation and a kingdom on this earth, is to be a kingdom of priests and a holy nation. God is creating a nation, not to coerce the rest of the nations into obedience, but instead to convert the nations through the witness of their lives as servants of God, into His kingdom. But can you guess how that is going to turn out for the next several generations. As Scott put it, it is a lot easier to take Israel out of Egypt than to take Egypt out of Israel, they have absorbed the pagan idol worship of their slave masters over the 400 years of their captivity.

Exodus 20:18–19 (RSV2CE) 18 Now when all the people perceived the thunder and the lightning and the sound of the trumpet and the mountain smoking, the people were afraid and trembled; and they stood afar off, 19 and said to Moses, “You speak to us, and we will hear; but let not God speak to us, lest we die.”

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It is shocking to realize how quickly Israel falls back into their old sinful ways, it took only 40 days after the giving of the Holy Law of God, the Ten Commandments written by the very finger of God. And what do we read in Exodus 32 as Moses is delayed up on the Holy Mountain? God’s holy nation of so-called priests have talked Aaron into making a golden calf as they plunge back into the darkness of their previous idol worship. Moses cries out in anger breaking the tablets of the Law, who will stand with me and with God, shockingly only the Levites make that commitment to obey God. You can see the very roots of this apostacy way back when Israel approached the Holy Mountain of God the first time.

The early rabbis saw that the golden calf was to the nation of Israel, what the forbidden fruit was to Adam and Eve. They turn their backs on God’s declaration and go back immediately to idol worship, with only the tribe of Levites responding to the call of Moses, “who will stand with God”. We will soon see that God once again, in His unlimited grace, does not abandon them, even though they refuse His national blessing over them to become a kingdom of priests.

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God’s master plan of a holy nation and an entire kingdom of priests living under the Holy Law of God is now reduced to one tribe, the Levites, and they become the priestly tribe in behalf of the rest of the tribes. The entire book of Leviticus is God now setting up priestly laws and practices for the Levites to serve as priests in the soon to be built tabernacle. Once again God keeps His covenant vows, and his people break theirs, and the kingdom of priests and holy nation are still a long way off.