“The Lord also said to Moses, ‘Write down these words, for I have made a covenant with you and with Israel based on these words.’ Moses was there with the Lord forty days and forty nights; he did not eat food or drink water. He wrote the Ten Commandments, the words of the covenant, on the tablets.” (CSB – Read the chapter)

Words matter. This is something we understand fairly well today. If something isn’t written down, there’s no sure record beyond our memory that it happened. When you make a big purchase like a home or a car, you have to sign a contract that likely runs into the thousands of words to guarantee you’ll pay for them or they’ll take them away from you. God’s covenant with Israel was recorded in words so that the people would remember it for sure. Let’s talk about why His word matters and what we see going on here.

The culture of Israel as with the culture of the ancient world more broadly up through several centuries on this side of the birth of Christ was an oral culture. Writing things down didn’t happen very often. Material to write on was expensive and not terribly easy to produce. And while many languages had written alphabets, most people didn’t know them or need to know them. As a result, they relied on their memories. Well, just like when you use a muscle all the time, that muscle is going to get stronger, when you exercise your memory all the time, your ability to remember things and memorize things is going to get stronger as well. And there are reports of feats of memorization that seem incredible to use today from out of the ancient world.

All of that is to say Moses could have brought back an oral report of what God had said and the people could have memorized it and faithfully transmitted it from one generation to another. God, however, wanted the people to understand just how big of a deal His covenant with them really was. They had already flagrantly violated it once. This was the tail end of the covenant renewal process God was doing with the people; an act of graciousness they surely did not deserve. Thankfully for them (and for us), graciousness is a fundamental part of His character, so rather than writing them off entirely, He punished them for their sin, and then started over with them once again, directing Moses to write everything down so that it was specially preserved for this and future generations.

God wants us to know His word. It is His primary means of self-revelation. It is the primary form of what theologians often call special revelation wherein He goes beyond merely the fact that He exists and some basic points about His character to His plans for our salvation and how we can take part in those through the new covenant in Christ. It is why He has preserved His word down through centuries and why after endless hours of study, we are able to have such a high level of confidence (far higher than for any other ancient document) that what we see in our Bibles is a faithful presentation of what was originally written down in centuries long past.

It is why giving our time and attention to studying His word is such a worthwhile endeavor. Now, this isn’t something we are going to find success at doing if we try to do it merely on our own and without the help of His Spirit. As the apostle Paul made clear to the believers in ancient Corinth, “We also speaks these things, not in words taught by human wisdom, but in those taught by the Spirit, explaining spiritual things to spiritual people. But the person without the Spirit does not receive what comes from God’s Spirit, because it is foolishness to him; he is not able to understand it since it is evaluated spiritually.” But with God’s ready help, we can understand and faithfully apply His words that lead to life. This doesn’t mean we are going to agree on every single point, but on the fundamentals there is broad agreement, and on the rest there is charity leading to the steady advance of God’s kingdom.

There are two other issues here I want to address, one briefly, and one a bit more thoroughly. The first is that the text here seems to indicate that Moses wrote down the words of the covenant on the tablets. With the first set of tablets, however, the text seems to indicate that God supernaturally inscribed the words. Why the difference? Did He leave Moses to do it since the people didn’t bother to keep the covenant the first time? No, I don’t think that is the case at all. Rather, Moses was always the one who did the actual physical work of writing down the covenant. He was doing it at God’s specific direction, though, so it was as if God Himself had done the writing. That was the case then, it is still the case here. The text simply gives us the more human perspective on the transcription process here. The two ideas are not in conflict at all.

The second question is how Moses survived his apparent super-fast. The text here says that Moses went forty days without food or water. Going forty days without food is possible. Jesus did it. I have known of others in more modern times who engaged in such a strenuous period of fasting. It is difficult and even dangerous for one’s health, but it is possible. Going forty days without water, however, is a physical impossibility. So, what are we supposed to do with this?

Our first instinct in a situation in the text like this one is to look for a natural explanation for the things we see in the Scriptures that don’t make sense at first. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but if we aren’t willing to factor in the existence and power of a supernatural God, then we’ll be left with a lot of things that we have to come up with silly explanations for or else declare couldn’t have actually happened as they are reported. Neither of those are particularly good options. If there exists a supernatural God, though, who is able to intervene miraculously in the world, temporarily suspending the normal laws of nature to advance His own purposes, then our range of explanatory options expands rather broadly.

Of course, the charge often leveled here is that Christians just retreat to a logically flawed “God of the gaps” argument whenever we can’t explain something. Yet in most cases this is a false charge. Or rather, it’s really not any different than science of the gaps, or, more generally, naturalism of the gaps. When there are gaps in our knowledge, our worldview commitments determine what we put there. So, when a skeptic throws that particular criticism at you, what they really mean is that they think a naturalistic worldview makes for a better understanding of reality. What it does not and cannot mean is that a naturalistic explanation is inherently better than a supernatural one that comes out of a theistic worldview that allows for the existence of a supernatural God.

As followers of Jesus who believe in a supernatural God, we actually have the advantage here. We don’t have to get bullied into accepting a non-supernatural explanation for a supernatural event. In this particular case, God supernaturally enabled Moses to stay completely focused on the task at hand without the need for food or water for forty days. If a supernatural God does indeed exist, that wouldn’t even be hard for Him. It is a perfectly fine explanation unless you are limited to a natural explanation because of your prior worldview commitments. As Christians, we are perfectly free to accept a natural explanation if that is indeed the most correct, but we aren’t ever limited to that. In this sense, the Christian worldview has more total explanatory freedom both for what we see in the Scriptures as well as of what we see in the world around us.

As a case in point here, take the creation of the world. On naturalism, the world as we know it could have come into existence only by means of chance or necessity. That’s it. It’s either one or the other. And, one or the other of these means created something out of nothing which we know to be a scientific impossibility. And the dedicated skeptic might insist that claiming ignorance is the most honest explanation, but this doesn’t change the fact that, philosophically speaking, there is still only chance and necessity as a means of explanation for the naturalist. The trouble here is that neither of those options makes the first bit of sense philosophically or scientifically. In fact, the scientific problems with chance as an explanation are even greater than the philosophical problems. Naturalism is a limited worldview framework that forces its adherents into positions that don’t make sense.

In the bigger picture, though, we don’t have to get sucked down into debates over the mechanics of how something could have happened in the Scriptures, letting an ideological opponent corner us into finally admitting that such and such couldn’t have happened at all, when in reality the conversation should be about whether or not there exists a supernatural God who can do supernatural things. Worldview comes first, then the explanations.

What’s more, the real debate we should be having is always the philosophical one. That means we don’t have to get drawn into a debate strictly over evidence or what the defender of naturalism insists counts (or doesn’t) as evidence because of the worldview commitments he has made. Stick with the higher and truer debate over philosophy and don’t get distracted by questions that come subsequent to that. And remember, even the existence of the supernatural itself is not primarily an evidentiary question, but a philosophical one. That is, it is a matter of worldview, not evidence. The worldview determines what is accepted as evidence because worldviews also determine epistemological views and understandings. Worldview lies at the bottom of all the debates we have. So, let’s make sure we have the right one because they aren’t all created equal.