Just a thought……….We don’t often hear the Old Testament readings in church, but the two for 4th and 11th October are particularly worth looking at. In chapter 19 of Exodus, the people of Israel have gone out of the land of Egypt and are camping in the wilderness of Sinai. Moses has gone to the mountain and God has called to him. In brief, God wants the people of Israel to be a holy people, but, fast-forwarding to chapter 20 where God has asked Moses to come up the mountain, bringing Aaron with him, but not allowing the priests and the people to follow. God spoke to Moses, giving him what we know as the Ten Commandments – ten bullet points summing up the guidelines for living the kind of life God required them (and us) to live.

There were “thunderings and lightenings and the sound of the trumpet and the mountain smoking”, causing the people to be afraid. The people asked Moses to speak to them, but not God because they feared they might die. So the people stood far off and Moses “drew near to the thick darkness where God was”.

Then follows 11 chapters of detailed instructions to Moses. By the beginning of chapter 32, the people were restless and beginning to think Moses had abandoned them. The Lord told Moses to “Go down; for your people, whom you brought up out of the land of Egypt, have corrupted themselves; they have turned aside quickly out of the way which I commanded them;”. God is angry and tells Moses to leave him alone, so that his “ wrath might burn hot against them and I may consume them;”. But Moses pleads with the Lord and he “repented of the evil which he thought to do to his people”. Moses then went down the mountain with the two tablets of the testimony in his hands. The tablets were the work of God and were written on both sides.

The reading set for 11th October doesn’t take us quite as far as this, so we don’t hear what Moses had to say to the people when he saw what they were doing! Maybe another time.