Exodus 34:1-27--God GIves The Law A Second Time

Moses Makes New Tablets​
34 The Lord said to Moses, “Cut for yourself two tablets of stone like the first, and I will write on the tablets the words that were on the first tablets, which you broke. 2 Be ready by the morning, and come up in the morning to Mount Sinai, and present yourself there to me on the top of the mountain. 3 No one shall come up with you, and let no one be seen throughout all the mountain. Let no flocks or herds graze opposite that mountain.” 4 So Moses cut two tablets of stone like the first. And he rose early in the morning and went up on Mount Sinai, as the Lord had commanded him, and took in his hand two tablets of stone. 5 The Lord descended in the cloud and stood with him there, and proclaimed the name of the Lord. 6 The Lord passed before him and proclaimed, “The Lord, the Lord, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, 7 keeping steadfast love for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, but who will by no means clear the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children and the children's children, to the third and the fourth generation.” 8 And Moses quickly bowed his head toward the earth and worshiped. 9 And he said, “If now I have found favor in your sight, O Lord, please let the Lord go in the midst of us, for it is a stiff-necked people, and pardon our iniquity and our sin, and take us for your inheritance.”

The Covenant Renewed​
10 And he said, “Behold, I am making a covenant. Before all your people I will do marvels, such as have not been created in all the earth or in any nation. And all the people among whom you are shall see the work of the Lord, for it is an awesome thing that I will do with you.

11 “Observe what I command you this day. Behold, I will drive out before you the Amorites, the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites. 12 Take care, lest you make a covenant with the inhabitants of the land to which you go, lest it become a snare in your midst. 13 You shall tear down their altars and break their pillars and cut down their Asherim 14 (for you shall worship no other god, for the Lord, whose name is Jealous, is a jealous God), 15 lest you make a covenant with the inhabitants of the land, and when they whore after their gods and sacrifice to their gods and you are invited, you eat of his sacrifice, 16 and you take of their daughters for your sons, and their daughters whore after their gods and make your sons whore after their gods.

17 “You shall not make for yourself any gods of cast metal.

18 “You shall keep the Feast of Unleavened Bread. Seven days you shall eat unleavened bread, as I commanded you, at the time appointed in the month Abib, for in the month Abib you came out from Egypt. 19 All that open the womb are mine, all your male livestock, the firstborn of cow and sheep. 20 The firstborn of a donkey you shall redeem with a lamb, or if you will not redeem it you shall break its neck. All the firstborn of your sons you shall redeem. And none shall appear before me empty-handed.

21 “Six days you shall work, but on the seventh day you shall rest. In plowing time and in harvest you shall rest. 22 You shall observe the Feast of Weeks, the firstfruits of wheat harvest, and the Feast of Ingathering at the year's end. 23 Three times in the year shall all your males appear before the Lord God, the God of Israel. 24 For I will cast out nations before you and enlarge your borders; no one shall covet your land, when you go up to appear before the Lord your God three times in the year.

25 “You shall not offer the blood of my sacrifice with anything leavened, or let the sacrifice of the Feast of the Passover remain until the morning. 26 The best of the firstfruits of your ground you shall bring to the house of the Lord your God. You shall not boil a young goat in its mother's milk.”

27 And the Lord said to Moses, “Write these words, for in accordance with these words I have made a covenant with you and with Israel.” 28 So he was there with the Lord forty days and forty nights. He neither ate bread nor drank water. And he wrote on the tablets the words of the covenant, the Ten Commandments.

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I put these two passages together today, because I think it is important for us to not disassociate God's name and character from the Law that He gave.  His commandments like His works naturally flow out of who He is and since He is unchanging, and immutable, then we should not expect His laws to change.

Moses cut new tablets like the first ones to replace the ones that were broken--remember though, God's intent was never for the Law to be written on the tablets of stone and be something external, we know that His intent was always for the Law to be etched on the hearts of His people where it would not be something external that they would have to be taught, but that they would have new and clean hearts that would desire to do the things that God desired instead of being controlled by the flesh which was in opposition to the Spirit of God and His will and works--stealing the glory for self that only God deserves.

We see God again forbids anyone and anything other than Moses from approaching the mountain.  This time though, there will be no wild parties down below while Moses is up on the mountain.  Moses goes up the mountain while the people wait and once again the cloud envelopes Moses and hides him from the sight of the people.  There God speaks His name and His covenant to Moses and Moses makes intercession for the people of God, asking God to continue to send "the Lord" (not the LORD) before them--I talked about what I think this means--and for Him to continue to go up with His people and be with them, even though they are rebellious, stubborn and stiff-necked, and to continue to take them for Himself as an inheritance from among all the peoples of the Earth.  God responds by renewing His covenant once again with Moses--a covenant that we know should never be in doubt because God cannot lie and His words are consistent with His character, and once He has chosen a people for Himself, He does not abandon the--but the people at that time did not know God like we do, because they had not had the benefit of Jesus coming in the flesh to show, demonstrate and teach all these things.  Even though it had been hundreds of years since God had revealed Himself to Abram (later Abraham), and Isaac, and Jacob (later Israel), the nation is still in its infancy when it comes to its relationship with God and is still figuring out who God is, what pleases Him, how serious He is about His rules and the threats that He makes about punishments for those that break the rules, and everything else--much like a child figuring out his parents and how the relationship between the child and parent changes over time and grows eventually to the point where (hopefully) the child loves to do what pleases the parents and hates to do the things that the parent hates or that hurt the parent and they incorporate the values and nature of the parent--in a way, they become "one" with the parent and people can look at the child and know who they belong to because they look, act,  and sound so much like their parent(s).

Then the Law is given for a second time, and like the first time, God reminds the people of who He is and what He has done and this time what He is going to do.  Before God ever asks us to accept His Law, He wants us to first have experienced the transformation that comes from experiencing the Passover and the passing through the Red Sea--in other words, the Law was never meant for those who had not been "born again" and given a new identity.  We fail at understanding the Law when we think it was an external force to try and make the immoral nations of the world into moral people without those people first turning and repenting and believing in a living God that controls even life and death and brings His people out of their slavery to sin and causes them to pass from death to life--even if it means them wandering in the wilderness with Him leading them every step of the way and giving them manna from heaven and water from the rock and all other kinds of miraculous signs.  They worshiped a God that did not live in one place and was not attached to a land or to an idol--this was quite different and unique for the people around them.  "...The LORD your God will be with you wherever you go." (Joshua 1:9)

God tells them specifically to not make a covenant with the inhabitants of the land of Canaan (we see later the Gibeonites would trick them into doing this anyways, but this should be a warning to modern-day Israel as well).  The people of that land would be a snare for the people of God and would lead them to worship false gods, so the Israelites were to tear down and destroy all the idols and high places.  Our God is a jealous God who will not allow the glory that He deserves to be given to any other, nor will He be okay with us coming to Him in worship with pagan practices that glorify man and sin and the forces of evil, nor should we partake in sacrifices that were made to idols (Paul will come back and address this again in the New Testament, but it's clear looking at both places that this command is given for the good and protection of God's people to keep them form getting mixed up in idolatry.  Paul makes the argument that some of us will be able to eat meat that's been sacrificed to false gods without being tempted to worship or pay homage to the false gods, but that something that each man's conscience and the Holy Spirit will let them know--God would permit this so that the gospel would go forth into regions where idolatry had a stronghold, but God's people should never be identified look like the "go along to get along" crowd that appears to participate in the practices of the world during the week only to come to church and worship God one day out of the week.  Our lives should be marked and different every day of the week, including who and what we make peace with and associate and identify with).  We should only be known as God's people as God is a jealous God and He's specifically jealous about His name which now resides on and in us.

Again, the people are told specifically not to make any kind of idol for themselves--God doesn't have to spell it out like last time with saying not to make an idol out of wood, or stone, or metal and not to make an image of anything in the air or on the earth, or in the sea--they had just broken this law.  Just don't make any idols or graven images of anyone or anything.

Now we see something different--we normally think of the Law as the 10 Commandments, but we now see that God commands His people to keep the Passover (for the Church this would be for us to keep the ordinance/sacrament of The Lord's Supper/Communion/The Eucharist).  We don't normally associate this with the commandments of God because we focus on the version from Exodus 20, but this is one of the reasons we are told "not to forsake the assembling of ourselves together as some are in the habit of doing" in the epistle to the Hebrews and we are told to celebrate the Lord's Supper (that's the name I'll use for it because that's what my local congregation calls it) regularly and faithfully until the Lord Jesus returns.  We are not commanded a specific routine for it, but rather it is something it seemed that the early Church did whenever they got together, because it was part of celebrating their new identity and remembering what God had done in and through them by and for Jesus Christ.

We also see along with the Feast of Unleavened Bread that God's people are commanded to remember to redeem their firstborn which is also part of their Exodus story and keeps them focused on the story of the gospel--all of us are under a death sentence and need to be redeemed and covered by the blood of a Lamb

God then commands His people to keep the Sabbath (I wrote nearly a whole blog on this recently the first time that God gives commandments about keeping the Sabbath) and three pilgrimage festivals (we'll see later in Deuteronomy these are the festivals of Passover, Pentecost, and The Feast of Tabernacles/Booths).  These were the ones that most exemplified the gospel that God wanted to make sure that everyone participated in and that no one forgot them or missed them, because they pointed to what God did, what God is doing and what God is still about the business of doing until Christ returns, and they even point to truths about what God will be doing for His people in all eternity.  We'll try to specifically "camp out" on the Feast of Pentecost and The Feast of Tabernacles/Booths when we come to them like we've done already with the Feast of Passover.  There were other Fasts and Feasts,and other very important days on the Jewish calendar (like The Day of Atonement), but God had reason for the people to all be gathered in one place together for these events--and this may explain now why so many people were gathered together on the day of Pentecost in the book of Acts.  Pentecost is not a New Testament holiday, but it has come to its fulfillment through the coming of the Holy Spirit and it means something new to the Church (the fulfillment of the people of Israel as the elect from among the Gentiles have been grafted into the Vine that is True Israel to make the Church) than it did for ethnic Israel.

God commands the people not to bring any leavened bread to the altar where it will be mixed with the blood of the sacrifices used for atonement, because the people are supposed to associate "leaven" with "sin."  That which is offered to God as a sacrifice is to be different than everything the world has to offer and needs to be free from the corruption of sin.  Again, we cannot approach God in any way we want and give to Him in any way we want and expect Him to have to be happy with it.  We must approach God on His terms in a way that makes it obvious to everyone in the Church and outside the Church that He's a different kind of God that deserves a pure and holy sacrifice that is worthy of Him--that's not a sacrifice we can offer of ourselves though because we are tainted with the leaven of sin, so only Jesus can be that sacrifice for us.  He was The Bread of Life that was untainted by sin whose life could be given in a way where His life did not contaminate the blood offering of The Lamb of God that takes away the sin of the world.

God commands the people not to let any of the feast of Passover remain until morning--it is to be eaten quickly as one mean because the people could not take leftovers with them on their journey.  Everything that could not be eaten was to be shared with those who had nothing and anything leftover was to be burned in the fire.

God commands them to keep the sacrifice of the firstfruits and to always give God their first and best.

I'll be completely honest with this next one--I have literally no idea what the command about not boiling a young goat in its mother's milk is about.  I'm pretty sure it does not mean that I can't eat a cheeseburger, which is what it's turned into with people that obey strict dietary laws (Kosher), but this commandment is given three times in the Law--twice in Exodus and once in Deuteronomy.  I have to assume that the people of the time knew what it was about and it's simply one of those things that you say, "Okay, don't understand it, but I'm going to obey it, because clearly it's important to you, God."  I've heard lots of people claim this had something to do with a pagan Canaanite ritual, but can find no hard of evidence of the specific ritual or practice anywhere.  The citations are ambiguous and cite nameless "credible" sources, so  I'm not inclined to believe that explanation without something that is scholarly and verifiable (I could do the same research as the author of the article and get the same evidence without making assumptions).  There is some believe that this is actually some kind of idiom that has lost its original meaning over the years.  Speculation for this is that it doesn't really seem to "fit" in the context of the other commandments when it's given.  When translated literally it feels like it came out of nowhere each and every time that the command is given.  It's possible that the command was clear to the people at that time, but is no longer clear to us.  The Bible is full of other idioms, some of which would make little to no sense to us when translated literally (and we've seen this issue with some Bible translations).  I don't love this answer because God is not the author of confusion and He works to preserve His Word and make it clear to us, so if I take this view, then I have to assume that whatever this prohibition is, the Holy Spirit keeps us from violating it to this day.  I'm not willing to write this off as being unimportant though simply because the commandment isn't repeated elsewhere in the Bible or in the New Testament.  We make much more out of commandments that are only given one time and this is given both times God gives the Law and again when the Law is given to the new generation of Israelites in the book of Deuteronomy.

One little bit more about this "strange" phrase and then we'll continue with the rest of the passage.  Each time the phrase is used, it seems to be used in connection with the offering of firstfruits and giving our first and best to God.  It seems most logical then to associate this phrase somehow with that commandment and to say that its original meaning probably had something to do with that command that is common in all three instances.  One possible explanation I've seen is to not try to mix the leftovers from last year's harvest with the "firstfruits" of this year's harvest to try to make make your offering less valuable--something we see that God specifically abhors later in the Old Testament, or "don't try and mix your old religion with the new thing that I'm creating" that's also fitting and something that we see repeated several other places including the parable of the wineskins that Jesus gave.  Again, I don't think it really has anything to do with eating meat and dairy at the same time and I'll happily eat my cheeseburgers and not be convicted of sin.

Let's take a moment to see what God didn't repeat here and see that the idea of God not repeating something meaning that it's not important is foolish.  God did not repeat the commands of:
"You shall not take the name of the LORD your God in vain," "Honor your father and mother," "You shall not commit manslaughter," "You shall not commit adultery," "You shall not bear false witness," "You shall not steal," or "You shall not covet."  The only commands that He repeated out of the 10 Commandments were the 1, 2, and 4--everything listed here was about how God's people were to be unique and different form everyone else and what it means to be God's covenant people and how they would be recognized by the world.  We are not recognized as God's people for not being thieves and murderers because every decent human being is expected to do those things, but how we worship God and the relationship we have with Him and why we worship--now those are unique qualities to God's people as part of His covenant relationship with us that the world does not share and cannot understand.  They can only view what we have and marvel and wonder at the mystery that is the gospel (even the angels see it and are in awe and do not fully understand).  (Some of my thoughts I've shared are in line with things I read on this article:; https://seekingscripture.com/do-not-boil-a-young-goat-in-its-mothers-milk-another-possibility/)

And Moses was on the mountain with God for forty days and forty night without food or water (much like Jesus was in the wilderness forty days and forty nights without food or water after His baptism and before His temptation).  This was definitely something supernatural, but it might be worth our time to investigate this connection later because Jesus comes back to the Law--to the book of Deuteronomy specifically--to thwart all three temptations of Satan.  Jesus being full of the Holy Spirit and driven into the wilderness by the Holy Spirit is probably in deep communion with God much like Moses was here (we're going to see the physical manifestation of that close communion next time) and God was preparing both Moses and Jesus for their mission that was ahead of them, but all of this was ultimately about preparing the people that they were leading to be the people that God had chosen them to be--a people fit for a kingdom not of this world.