God’s Supremacy.
How amazing is the triune God that we serve? Just sit for a moment and think about this!
Let’s roll back time to that moment when the Israelites were just coming out of Egypt. Society as the Jews knew it was dominated by idols and massive statues. The Jewish nation had been in captivity for 400 years, in slavery under their masters the Egyptians.
God sends Moses and pulls this ragamuffin group out from the supremacy of their Egyptian masters. There is absolutely no saving possible for the Jews without the supreme hand of God and his intervention. The Jews were nothing, they had nothing except God. It can be argued that they were not even a coherent nation.
Now the society, of Jews, only knows idols, pyramids, statues of lions cats dogs and all sorts of strange things that they have been carving for their masters. Each pharaoh wanted a bigger and better tomb or statue to have him remembered by.
Now we roll time forward to that moment that God gives the 10 Commandments in Exodus 20; (and remember and fathom that these are the written words of the Almighty God)
and God spoke to Moses saying ” I am the Lord your God, I brought you out of the land of Egypt, away from slavery and bondage. You are to have no other gods or idols before me. You shall not fabricate or make in any form shape or size any images or anything that is like anything that is in heaven above or on the earth below or that wonders in the expanses of the ocean. You shall not bow down or serve them because I the Lord your God am a jealous God.” (Para)
How ultimately awesome and pure is this command from God. It just does not make sense that this could have come from anywhere else except the very thoughts and mind of God himself. It is so perfect in every way. The society of Jews who found themselves now in the middle of the desert had been in a society which worshipped idols, built pyramids and a prolific number of statues. They did not live there, they were enslaved there, therefore their minds would have been tainted and skewed by this background. It would make sense to the Jews that their instinct would be to build the biggest possible statue or memorial for their God.
Yet completely out of context, and correctly, God commands no idols, no idols or memorials of any kind whatsoever. One of the amazing premises of this command is that it establishes the Spiritual existence and supremacy of our God. It also further falls in line with the amazing ability for us to find him anywhere and everywhere in the world. We who serve him do not have to pilgrimage to a stone pair of legs in the Sinai desert and bow there to find him. We do not need to enter Mecca or go to Jerusalem to be able to experience his presence.
God in his infinite wisdom has managed to churchify himself in the existence of our most sacred place, our minds and spirits.
Jesus comes and writes the final chapter, he the gatekeeper and custodian of the Holy Spirit brings us the Spiritual baptism. You become the sculptured Image of God. Your Christian brother needs your alms and each one of you become the brickwork that builds the greatest church that the world has ever seen.
The evidence speaks for itself, how can we possibly think or doubt the absolute truth of the written word of God. The ragamuffin Jewish nation saved from the clutches of the Egyptians could not, of their own accord, have written the words in Exodus. Having left Egypt, they would have had no formal social structure and God because he is God graced them with the 10 commandments and a new social structure. This was just grace upon grace and only as perfectly as God could do it. This Bible and the commandments as given by God formed the foundation of civilisation as we know it today.