Me and Moses

So I'm reading Exodus this summer in Scripture. I'm just at the point where Moses is getting ready to climb up the mountain and get the big Ten. Only I realized this time around that it's not just the big Ten that Moses gets on the mountain. It's chapters and chapters and chapters of commands, ordinances, and the like. We're going to be here for a while.

I was talking with a good friend on Saturday about reading Exodus and the law. He asked me if I ever cynically wondered if Moses just made it all up.

I told him that I didn't think Moses made it up--it seemed too weird for one person to make up. What I do struggle with is this: I've got some questions that feel pretty important. There are issues in our world and culture that I wish the Scriptures spoke more concretely to, more clearly about. And instead I've got...regulations regarding intentional and un-intentional bull gorings?

But here's the deal: if I'm going to follow this God, he gets to make the rules, not me. If my most pressing questions are not the ones addressed in Scripture, then maybe what's gone wrong is not the Scriptures but my questions. Maybe I need to relax, take a step back from the tyranny of what feels urgent in my times, and allow the bigger, more timeless picture of God's priorities speak into the chaos of today--which will be different than the chaos of tomorrow.

I was reading a book by N.T. Wright yesterday, Evil and the Justice of God. His argument is that the Scriptures don't explain where evil comes from or why it exists. Instead, the Scriptures are the story of what God is doing about evil. And throughout the Scriptures, it's clear that God acts decisively to limit evil and remove the curse supremely in Christ but secondarily through his people. One man Abraham to the nation of Israel to the person of Christ to the Church.

So what's God saying about the larger problem of evil in the midst of accidental bull goring regulations? That he's going to create a people who will be his people, his agents, his light to the nations. He is committed to dealing with each and every generations' sins and brokenness and disasters and politics through a living, breathing, holy, faithful community of people.

And to a group of run-away slaves who have never known anything but slavery--over 400 years in Egypt as a slave-people, think about how much has happened in our history since 1600--God is helping them to live as a community, as a real nation. He is shaping and forming a people who will give birth to the Savior, who will change the world, conquer sin and death once and for all, unlock the way back to the Father, bring us home.