It is not easy to see the parallel between the story in The Parable of the Minas and Moses coming down the mountain with God’s instructions – The Ten Commandments. Moses comes down the mountain for the first time with the word of the Lord saying, “So Moses went down to the people and told them. And God spoke all these words: …” Jesus is that “word made flesh”. Much later, Moses comes back down the mountain to a morally impure people who needed correction. Upon seeing this and the Golden Calf, Moses shatters the tablets on which God had written The Testimony (or maybe The Promise) – inscribed by the finger of God.
Paul writes that Jesus will come back to an apostate church – a church with a morally impure spirit without understanding and in need of correction but, by then, it’s too late. Both stories here, in Exodus and the Minas, portray an angry God (king) wanting to kill them all. Later, in Exodus 34, God has Moses chisel out two more tablets on which God writes the words that were on the first two tablets. Then in short order, God instructs Moses to write out the words of the covenant on tablets – The Ten Commandments. Seems like there were two sets of tablets – one The Testimony inscribed by God and the other – The Covenant inscribed by Moses.
God put this connection in my head as I was writing “The Land of The Promise” and it is worth repeating. The lawlessness and moral decay in our world is so apparent that the Golden Calf represents the love of money and disobeying God’s Law and it may be that the apostate church is today’s Golden Calf. Reading through this passage in Exodus is most informative. From chapters 19 to 34 we go from the word-of-mouth delivery of The Ten Commandments to Moses actually inscribing them on tablets of stone.
Moses comes down from the mountain twice with two tablets inscribed by God with The Testimony. I like to think that The Testimony is The Promise God made to Abraham. All this The Holy Spirit revealed to Paul. The Promise which Paul shares with us in the first three chapters of Gelation’s so vividly including, “If you belong to Christ, you are Abraham’s seed and heirs according to The Promise”. The shattered tablets in front of The Golden Calf represents the breaking of The Promise. To get the same message across, I used the image of a broken arrow on the cover of “The Death of The Promise”. At that time, I had not made the connection that I am making now.
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