CHAPTER V
GOD DECLARES SUBSTITUTION IMPOSSIBLE
When the Israelites under Moses came out of Egypt they were obviously merely a race of slaves, without culture or education or knowledge of a cultural kind. They had been kept in the most abject slavery. How could God reveal Himself to them? Only by talking to them in language they could understand. They were primitive in their feelings, totally unspiritual. The revelations that came to them through Moses had to picture God in the terms of a man such as they could respect, capable of anger and revenge. Therefore God was presented to them then, and in later writings of the Old Testament, as one who took vengeance of their inventions. The law proclaimed from Mt. Sinai was given in a tempest of flame and thunder in order properly to impress a savage race.
But the basis of the covenant which God made with them through Moses was the Ten Commandments. If they kept the Ten Commandments, they would be prospered and happy. If they did not, the curses outlined in Deuteronomy would fall on them and their children. A tabernacle was built expressly under the direction of Moses to provide a holy place for the Ten Commandments. God said He would dwell with them there. It was a picturization of the fact that God would dwell with them as they kept the Ten Commandments. Let us keep in mind that Israel agreed keep the Ten Commandments and that was the basis of the covenant.
But they kept the Commandments no better than we do. They had to have something external in the way of worship to satisfy the savage love of the spectacular, something to appeal to man's love of the sensuous. Their father Abraham had worshipped God back in Ur of the Chaldees by means of animal sacrifices. He kept it up when he came into Canaan. He had also been an idolater, but was called upon to worship One God in the new land into which he came; yet it was not possible for him to have the true
