A Journey Through the Bible: Exodus 19 and 20

Exodus 19:5—“Now therefore, if you will indeed obey My voice and keep My covenant, then you shall be a special treasure to Me above all people; for all the earth is Mine.” In one major sense, the children of Israel were going to be a “special treasure…above all people” regardless of what they did: they were the people through whom the Messiah was going to come. It is very important to understand this theme of the Old Testament. Back in Genesis 3:15, after man sinned, God promised that a Savior would come as a human. As we trace the development of this promise—as I did several times in my summary of the book of Genesis—we find the line going through Seth, Noah, Shem, Arphaxad, then Abraham, the father of the Jewish people. Thus, God chose the Jews to be this “special treasure…above all people.” Think of how many different peoples, races, cultures, etc. existed in the world at that time. The Old Testament itself delineates dozens—Girgashites, Hittites, Jebusites, Assyrians, Babylonians, Medes, Persians, Greeks, Syrians, Sabeans…the list is almost endless. And this, of course, doesn’t even touch any peoples living in Europe, Asia, North and South America, and Australia. There have been hundreds of thousands of different tribes and peoples on earth throughout history. But it was Israel whom God gave the Law, and the great honor of bringing the Savior of the world to mankind. The Old Testament hones in on those people, tells their story, because it is the most important story in the world. And the promise was fulfilled in Jesus of Nazareth, as the New Testament tells us. And salvation will come only through Him (Acts 4:12).

The Lord also promised that the Israelites would have special blessings and protections in the land of Canaan, “if you will indeed obey My voice and keep My covenant.” They didn’t do that, so they were taken into captivity by the Assyrians and Babylonians, then eventually lost all of their system of worship when the Romans destroyed their genealogical records in 70 A.D.—a punishment for rejecting Jesus as the Christ (see my posts on Matthew 24.  Follow this link:  Matthew 24).  The current return of Israel to Palestine has nothing to do with any promise God made to them in the Old Testament. See my article on the subject on my main Bible blog.

Exodus 20:11—“For in six days the LORD made the heavens and the earth, the sea, and all that is in them, and rested the seventh day. Therefore the LORD blessed the Sabbath day and hallowed it.” Not in six ages or six eons or six billion years. Six days. If God said “six days,” but really meant, as some teach, six eons of time (to allow for evolutionary progression), then God is being, at best, disingenuous. How would a Jew reading this in Moses’ day understand it? There is no doubt that they would have understood it as 24 hour days. And that is also the clear idea of Genesis 1 (each day had an “evening and a morning,” as 24 hour days do). The only reason some try to get around the six 24-hour days creation teaching is that they wish to compromise with Darwinian theory. There is no reason to do this. The theory of evolution is the biggest bunch of hogwash that man has ever concocted, being devised solely to free man from the necessity of obeying his Creator. It isn’t going to work on the Day of Judgment.