Wednesday, February 6, 2013

February 6 – Exodus 22-24

Today’s reading comes from Exodus 22-24. Before reading I invite you to pray and asked God to speak to you as you read his word.

Have you ever thought how it would be to find a Buick in a pyramid? I hadn’t either until I heard Jeff Walling give this illustration. Just imaging you were on an archeological dig in Egypt and you have come accost a pyramid that hadn’t been unearthed. No grave robber, no treasure hunter, no historian, no human being had entered this tomb since the Egyptians closed it up nearly thirty-five hundred years ago. You walk into the tomb, and yours are the first set of human eyes to spy all the shinning gold, the sparkling emeralds, the well-defined statues, and the 1957 Buick sedan.

You completely look over the beauty of the objects in the room as you scratch your head as you stare at this mint condition Buick sedan. You examine the room but you find no signs of anyone ever entering it in the last fifty-six years. The layers of dust on the Buick are the same as all the other objects. There are no relatively fresh tire marks. There are no doorways big enough to get that car in there. Your team later does all the carbon dating that can be performed and it dates to the time you thought the Pharaoh was buried in the tomb. This is a mystery you just cannot wrap your head around.

What you think if I told you the Bible contains many Buicks in a pyramid? The Buicks presence in the tomb makes no sense to us. In today’s reading we begin to encounter the Laws that God gave to his people to live by. Yesterday we read the Ten Commandments. Today we read about how to develop good relationships with others and what to do if we mess them up. Throughout the Laws we will read guidelines to the people that seem really odd and strange. However, with our modern science we know they were really good directives.

Take circumcision. God ordered his people to circumcise baby boys on the eighth day. Circumcision was a symbol of the covenant God struck with Abraham. But did you know the eighth day was the perfect day to circumcise. It isn’t until the eighth day that breast milk has reached its full capacity. It is on the eighth day that mom is producing all of the anti-bodies needed to protect the healing of the circumcision. That my friends is a Buick in a pyramid. It makes sense to us why God ordered it, but not to the people it was given to. They didn’t know the science behind it.

Or we can use certain foods that they were to abstain from. We know today that pork needs to be cooked more fully than other meets because it is more susceptible to bacteria and disease. They didn’t have our modern science and FDA but they had God and he knew best. He placed the Buick in the pyramid for their protection! What an awesome God we serve. While these Laws may not make sense to us today God put many of them in place to offer safety and protection to the Israelites.

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