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Full Episode
Hey, Bible readers, I'm Tara Lee Cobble, and I'm your host for The Bible Recap. Today we finished our fourth book of the Bible. We're 15% of the way through. And the even better news is that you guys are pressing through on the days that are tough. You know there's still something to learn on those days, and that even if you hit a dry patch, tomorrow's a new day with new chapters.
I'm really proud of you. We are many days into God's conversation with Moses on Mount Sinai during Visit 2.0, and today we wrap up this book and this conversation. Some of you are very excited to move into a new book, and others of you know that our next book is Numbers, and that does not make you excited. But I'm here to tell you that Numbers is one of my favorite books of the Bible.
We are about to enter some of my favorite passages in all of Scripture. We do have to go through a few census details before we get to those parts, but it will all be worth it, I promise. As God wraps up this covenant conversation with Moses, he does something that's pretty standard for a covenant agreement.
He sets out the expectations for blessings and curses based on whether the covenant is kept or broken. This was how most covenants in that day were written, giving all these footnotes at the end. In God's words here, we see that faithfulness to Him is a big deal. If Israel remains faithful to His laws and keeps His Sabbath, He will bless them in obvious ways—peace and abundance and security.
And even though they'll still have enemies, they'll have victory over them. But if they don't stay faithful to Him, He outlines five phases of curses that will follow their rebellion. If at any point they repent, He won't execute the next phase— These phases increase in intensity as they progress, with the final phase being exile and scattering from the land he promised to give them.
There are a lot of other terrible things that come along with this too. Hearts full of fear and paranoia, defeat at the hands of foreign armies, a lack of food so pronounced that it leads to cannibalism. And God says he will make their heavens like iron and their earth like bronze, which is to say the sky won't rain and the ground will be too hard to plant or grow food.
And it's in that setting that most of them would die, never returning from exile. And as a result of their sins, their children would be raised up in exile in the lands of foreign enemies, just like they had been. If they do break the covenant and these curses do come, it's clear that all these things are intended by God to wake them up and prompt repentance in them.
To repent means to turn away from their sins and toward God. Discipline is what God is working out here, not punishment. We see that in 26, 18, and 23. Discipline is the act of any loving father whose child is walking in rebellion. If this weren't discipline, if it were a casting off of these people altogether, God wouldn't be outlining their chance for repentance and redemption.
In chapter 26, Yahweh makes his vows to the people, and in chapter 27, we see details of the people's vows to him. There wasn't a lot of context for this, so let me explain briefly. People were either supposed to serve in the sanctuary or make a financial vow. If you were a Levite, you served, but if you weren't a Levite, you weren't allowed to serve, so you paid the vow.
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