If this is your first viewing, please see my Introduction before reading this.
29 January. Exodus chapters 33-35
At the end of what may have been many years in the desert at or around the holy mountain of Horeb/Sinai, Moses is now told that his people have to move on. The land of Canaan will be given to Abraham’s descendants, as God had always promised, but not to this generation, whose place in salvation history had been to accomplish the Exodus and receive the law, a task that had been beset by many difficulties and setbacks. For now on the people of Israel would have to journey without God’s visible presence for a long time.
The first lesson for us here is that we cannot expect to continue one particular form of relationship with God indefinitely. In church today we marked the festival of Candlemas, which celebrates the dedication of Jesus in the Temple but also marks the end of the long Christmas/Epiphany season with its teaching about God’s light and revelation in Jesus, and starts to look forward to the ‘darker’ days of self denial in Lent.
The second lesson is that our experiences and our work are not for ourselves and contemporaries only, but for the future generations. The people of Israel in Moses’ time gave sacrificially of their jewellery and golden ornaments to make the tabernacle, and accepted the covenant of God’s law, even though it meant their life would have to be poorer and bound by the rules of the covenant, but from this the patterns of God-centred living and worship would be formed that would pass down the generations to come.