“Then the Lord told Moses, ‘This is what you are to say to the Israelites: You have seen that I have spoken to you from have. Do not make gods of silver to rival me; do not make gods of gold for yourselves. Make an earthen altar for me, and sacrifice on it your burnt offerings and fellowship offerings, your flocks and herds. I will come to you and bless you in every place where I cause my name to be remembered. If you make a stone altar for me, do not build it out of cut stones. If you use your chisel on it, you will defile it. Do not go up to my altar on steps, so that your nakedness is not exposed on it.'” (CSB – Read the chapter)

While listening to a podcast segment in the car about the ongoing border crisis with our youngest the other day, we wound up in a conversation about national boundaries and how you knew which side of the line you were on. It was a good conversation from an astutely inquisitive mind. Rivers make easy natural boundaries, but when you have long stretches with no rivers, things are a bit trickier. With the Ten Commandments, God gave the people the big picture boundaries of a relationship with Him. He knew, though, that we live our lives in the small picture. As a result, once those were in place, He started giving them a whole bunch of signposts that were intended to help them know which side of the boundary they were on. Over the next few weeks, we are going to look at a whole bunch of these signposts. Some are fairly easy to understand, but some are a lot stranger to us. Let’s talk today about why this mattered and what these particular boundaries were for.

Perhaps the easiest way to unpack what we see here will be to go through it verse by verse. This closing section of chapter 20 opens with God’s repeating the second command to Moses with a tinge of the first command to it. There are two things to notice here. The first is the reason the people were not to make idols of silver or gold (or any other material for that matter). “You have seen that I have spoken to you from heaven,” God said. What is that supposed to mean? Because God’s origins are heavenly earthly materials are not going to be able to capture His image or essence. This is something He would make clearer to the people in later in the Law and more than once across their history. God is spirit and thus doesn’t have an image the way something physical or earthly does. Because of this, making an idol of some sort to serve as a physical representation of Him will necessarily lead us away from Him and toward this image. By definition it won’t represent anything about Him. Worshiping before this idol wouldn’t help Israel connect more with Him. It would do the opposite. It wouldn’t help them understand that He is different from all the other gods. It would leave them thinking He’s just like all of them. Nothing good could come from that. In order to save them from all of this trouble and confusion, He prohibited the practice entirely.

The second thing to notice is the doublet containing the actual prohibition here. God prohibits silver idols that are meant to represent Him and gold idols that are for the people. This looks like two different things, but it is really the same thing phrased in two different ways. He is making one point here: Don’t make idols. It doesn’t matter what the material is, don’t make them.

The next thing God talks about is the kind of altar they are to make on which to offer their sacrifices. This bit of instruction is a chiasm. (Remember talking about those last week? Here’s the link, and the additional link explaining what chiasms are and how they work is in the sixth paragraph after the opening verse.) God talks about a kind of altar they should make at the beginning (A). He talks about the kind of altar they shouldn’t make at the end (A’). In the middle He assures them of His blessing (B). The point here is that when they worship Him properly, they will receive the blessings that come from that. As for why, I could go on for several pages in response. I’ll limit myself to just a few thoughts.

We become like what we worship. When the people came to reflect God’s character more, being kinder and more gracious and generous with one another, they were going to reap the rewards of that. God is just. Worshiping Him faithfully and well would result in an outpouring of justice among them. That could only result in blessing. The blessings God references here should absolutely be seen as something active He would do for them, but they could – and should – also be understood as the natural result of worshiping Him, of remembering His name. When Israel remembered His name – which implied a recollection of His character and power – they were going to behave in ways that were different from how they behaved when they didn’t remember or know His name (and character and power and etc.). Blessings would flow from the one and not from the other.

There’s another thing here. And this may seem like mere semantics, but words matter. God’s Spirit inspired the words that were used to reveal Him on purpose. God said to Moses that He would cause His name to be remembered. It wasn’t that the people were simply going to call it to mind on their own from out of the blue. He was going to be the driving force behind the thing. We can’t know Him with His help. He is the initiator, not us. Now, I know this gets into the incredibly thorny matter of divine sovereignty and human responsibility, but the Scriptures as a whole pretty clearly hold both positions in tension and we have to be able to live with that. God would cause His name to be remembered when they worshiped Him properly. It was a both-and.

As for the parts about the kind of altar they were to use, God’s reasoning isn’t totally clear. This is one of those parts that’s a little harder to understand. Here’s one thought. the simpler the altar was, the more likely they were to keep their focus on Him and not the altar itself nor the ones who constructed it. This contrasts rather sharply with His later instructions to Solomon for building the temple. The reason for the difference is that the temple was supposed to direct the people’s attention toward Him. They were in a different place then when that kind of upward direction made sense. Where the Israelites were now in their infancy as a people, that kind of thing would be more of a hindrance than a help. So, God told them here to keep things simple. This doesn’t mean He later changed His mind or contradicted Himself. He was growing them step by step such that things that would make sense later didn’t make sense quite yet. I’d have to do some more research on this, but if the various altars in Egypt were made of cut stone, building similar altars could have taken the people mentally and spiritually back to their time there which God didn’t want for them because it would make establishing themselves independently of their captivity more difficult.

One last thing. God didn’t want priests going up steps to the altar so that they didn’t flash anyone worshiping down below them. People didn’t tend to wear undergarments then. They just wore a loose robe and a tunic. That sounds terribly uncomfortable, personally, but different cultures have different styles of dress. Later on in Exodus when God gives instructions for the creation of the priestly garments, He will direct them to make some shorts to wear under their robes, but we’re not there quite yet. For now, He wanted to help the people preserve their modesty. He didn’t want anything to distract the worshipers from their worship including seeing the private parts of the guy making their sacrifice for them.

Israel was supposed to be different from the nations around them. Their identity was to be defined by the character of God. In order to help them in this direction, God gave them a number of commands that were designed to help them stand apart from their neighbors. They were designed to make them weird, but in a good way. They were designed to help them remember that God was different from all the other gods. This idea is going to lie at the heart of much of what we will see in coming weeks, so keep it in mind. He still wants us to stand apart. Now, though, instead of needing so many physical reminders (although those are still not entirely without merit), our biggest points of distinction are spiritual and behavioral. More to the point, it is our love for one another that sets us apart. Everything He tells us is about pointing us in this direction. It always has been. So, let’s follow His lead.