Commands I Can’t Keep If God Doesn’t Speak to Me

If God never speaks to me, it will be impossible for me to keep his commands to keep a soft heart toward his words, to hear and obey him "TODAY", while I am still hearing him. Beginning the discussion of entering God's rest today, while God is speaking to me--and the consequences of Israel's rejection of his voice.

If God never speaks to me, it will be impossible for me to keep his commands to keep a soft heart toward his words, to hear and obey him “TODAY“, while I am still hearing him, commands such as this one:

Therefore, just as the Holy Spirit says,

“Today if you hear His voice,
Do not harden your hearts as when they provoked Me,
As on the day of trial in the wilderness,
Where your fathers put Me to the test,
And saw My works for forty years.
Therefore I was angry with this generation,
And said, ‘They always go astray in their heart,
And they did not know My ways’;
 As I swore in My anger,
‘They certainly shall not enter My rest.’”

Hebrews 3:7-11 (NASB)

This obviously presupposes that I can hear God’s voice, just as the children of Israel did, that I may hear it today, and that, if I do hear God speaking to me today, I must choose today whether to listen to him or to harden my heart against him.

The example then given is a negative example of the children of Israel, who for forty years repeatedly hardened themselves against God speaking to them, with the end result that the whole generation that did so were denied entry into the Promised Land–God’s place of rest for them. Although the people had grumbled against Moses and the Lord previously–every time God brought them into a situation that required them to trust him, even though they did not understand how he would provide for them–their outright rejection of God’s voice started after they reached Mount Sinai.

At Sinai, God first told Moses to remind the people that he had “carried you on eagle’s wings and brought you to to myself.” He then promised “[n]ow if you obey me fully and keep my covenant, then out of all nations you will be my treasured possession. Although the whole earth is mine,  you will be for me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.” Exodus 19:3-6. In the New Testament, Peter quotes this promise as an accomplished fact, being fulfilled in and by the Body of Christ. 1 Peter 2:9. The whole emphasis of God’s words here was on their relationship with him: they were to be a whole kingdom of his representatives.

But what was their response to this promise? “We will do everything the Lord has said.” Exodus 19:8. This sounds like a good response, except that God had not yet told them to do anything but listen to him and obey when he spoke. God said “be mine” and their response was “we will do.” This was a familiar response, as the people had been slaves until only a few days before this. They know well how to do what they were told, how to give minimal compliance to “please” their owners, while all the time thoroughly distrusting them. But this was not the response for which God had asked.

So then God came to them on their own self-declared terms. If they would not trust him at that time and all be his priests, he would give them more reason to trust in Moses as his representative: “I am going to come to you in a dense cloud, so that the people will hear me speaking with you and will always put their trust in you.” Exodus 19:9. One way or the other, God was going to speak directly to his people.

But because he was speaking to people who did not trust him, who were going to have to be given a law to keep, it was at this point that God for the first time commanded that boundaries be enforced between his people and his visible presence. Exodus 19:11-13. God also at that time gave them things they were to do, and to abstain from doing, so that they would be “clean” enough to appear in his presence without dying. Exodus 19:10-11, 14-15, 20-25. None of these things had been required previously during their exodus from Egypt, even though, throughout that time, God had been visibly present among them in the pillar of cloud by day and pillar of fire by night that led them and camped around and among them, giving them light and their enemies darkness. Exodus 13:20-22, 14:19-20. Tellingly, the scriptures never indicate that any of the people died because of God’s presence among them during the period before they came to Mount Sinai.

From this, it is hard to escape the conclusion that God placed the restrictions on entering his presence at Sinai to overcome the people’s irrational fear that he would now–for the first time–start killing them if he spoke to them directly. He approached his people at the level of their misunderstanding–in much the same way he gave Adam and Eve clothes to relieve their fear in his presence–with the purpose of ultimately bringing all of his people into his presence with joy and without fear. 1 John 3:19-24 & 4:16-18; Jude 1:24-25. He did not impose the restrictions because it was his will to permanently restrict access to his presence. He even told the people at the time–and reminded their children forty years later, when Moses reviewed all that had happened–that God had spoken to them directly, and that Moses had thereafter “stood between the Lord and you to declare to you the word of the Lord,” not because the Lord wanted them to keep their distance, but “because you were afraid of the fire.” Deuteronomy 5:4-5

And God, at Sinai, quite quickly did two things to make this point. First, he spoke the core of his Law–the Ten Commandments–directly to all of the people. Exodus 20:1-17, Deuteronomy 5:6-22. The people, on hearing God, incorrectly believed that, if God kept speaking to them, they would die, and begged not to have God speak to them anymore: “When the people saw the thunder and lightning and heard the trumpet and saw the mountain in smoke, they trembled with fear. They stayed at a distance and said to Moses, “Speak to us yourself and we will listen. But do not have God speak to us or we will die.” Exodus 20:18-19. But the important point here is that, despite their fear, they did not die. God gave them his Law, speaking directly to each of them, and did not strike any of them dead.

Not long after that, God invited Aaron, his sons, and seventy of the elders of the people, to come partway up the mountain with Moses to worship. Exodus 24:1-2. There, these elders “saw the God of Israel. Under his feet was something like a pavement made of lapis lazuli, as bright blue as the sky.” And all of them survived to tell the people about it: “But God did not raise his hand against these leaders of the Israelites; they saw God, and they ate and drank.” Exodus 24:9-11. This was a second great demonstration that the fear that kept the people away from God was not what God had intended. He was not going to kill them for coming to him!

But the people did not understand. Their fear that God would kill them if he spoke to them directly persisted. They continued to insist that God separate himself from them–note the order in which that was said, it was the people, not God, who insisted on separation–and that God speak to them only through Moses. This follows the pattern of sin and separation from God from Adam to the present: God is not our enemy, but we perceive him as an enemy “in our minds” because of our “evil behavior.” Colossians 1:21. This is shown in the story of the Sinai encounter by the Hebrews’ self-contradiction in making their final request that God not speak to them directly any more:

And you said, “The Lord our God has shown us his glory and his majesty, and we have heard his voice from the fire. Today we have seen that a person can live even if God speaks with them. But now, why should we die? This great fire will consume us, and we will die if we hear the voice of the Lord our God any longer. For what mortal has ever heard the voice of the living God speaking out of fire, as we have, and survived?

Deuteronomy 5:24-26

Note that they admitted the undeniable fact that God had spoken to them and all of them had survived the encounter. The fear came from within them, not from God, who had given them no objective reason to believe he intended to kill them. Instead, they were afraid to hear God speak for the exact same reason we are afraid to hear him speak–they did not want to obey him. They did not want to give up their sin (singular), their rebellious determination to remain solidly in control of their own lives. And they were aware that stubborn disobedience to a God of whom they were presently aware likely might kill them.

So, instead of giving moment-by-moment control to God, they asked God to give his requirements to Moses and promised that, if God would not be so obviously present in their lives, they would do whatever he told Moses they should do:

Go near and listen to all that the Lord our God says. Then tell us whatever the Lord our God tells you. We will listen and obey.

Deuteronomy 5:27

This was not exactly what God wanted. He ultimately desired to walk among them and be their God. But he recognized this was the most he could expect of his people at that time, given their poor understanding of him. As Paul later explained, the people needed the Law as a schoolmaster, to show them their need of a savior and of an intimate relationship with him. Galatians ****. And so he agreed that what the people said was “good,” not perfect, but “good:”

The Lord heard you when you spoke to me, and the Lord said to me, “I have heard what this people said to you. Everything they said was good.”

Deuteronomy 5:28

It was “good” that the people promised to obey what God told Moses. But God knew that they would fail to keep that promise, because the life God requires must come from him, and from the hearts of those who hear him:

“Oh, that their hearts would be inclined to fear me and keep all my commands always, so that it might go well with them and their children forever!”

Deuteronomy 5:29

And, as they would demonstrate repeatedly, the hearts of the Israelites were still “evil,” in that they really did not believe God:

Take care, brothers and sisters, that there will not be in any one of you an evil, unbelieving heart that falls away from the living God.

Hebrews 3:12 (NASB)

Very shortly after God declared his most central commandments directly to them, and they promised to keep those commandments and anything else he told Moses to tell them, if only he would stop speaking to them directly, the people had given up on Moses, made a golden calf, and started to worship it. Exodus 32. They even gave the golden calf God’s personal name! When he proclaimed the first feast to the golden calf, Aaron called the feast “a festival to the LORD (YHWH)!” Exodus 32:5. Thus, they very quickly flagrantly broke the first two Commandments–on which all of the other Commandments hung–by converting the LORD, in their own thinking, into an image of a god they could manipulate by carrying it with them wherever they wanted to go and using it to excuse any excesses they wished to commit: “Afterward they sat down to eat and drink and got up to indulge in revelry.” Exodus 32:6b.

As we shall see in later posts, this was neither the first nor the last time the people tested God by putting his words out of their minds–and it cost them entry into the “rest” God had prepared for them.

Next (for now): “You are Not the One to Build”

The Voice of God (God Speaking to Us) Outline