“I wonder if God knows He’s standing on top of me?” I asked myself. “Did He cause His glory to weigh down on me because He knew I was here, or did His glory descend and I just happened to be in the way?” Not that it mattered, unless I was actually going to be allowed to speak to Him, in which case my opening line would be important.
I didn’t have to wonder much longer. Slowly His weight lifted from me, and I knew He was giving me a chance to escape. I was torn between going and staying. What should I do? If I tried to approach Him instead of fleeing, as I was sure He was allowing me to do, He might be angry, and my window to get away could suddenly close, and who knew what would happen to me then? I couldn’t chance it. I raised myself up and flew as fast as I could.
I will never know what might have been if only I’d had the courage to stay.
I
WAS IN NO
hurry to return to the second heaven only to tell Satan I’d been right again about the intercession. I needed something else to report so it wouldn’t seem like I was gloating about being right. Satan doesn’t respond well to gloating from anyone else, although he himself is in a constant state of gloat. I figured God was sure to speak to Moses again with better instructions about going forward. I didn’t dare miss anything, so I hung around the camp and waited for God to show up again.
Moses was sitting outside the door of his tent, appreciating the cool of the evening and apparently not expecting God to drop by. He jumped abruptly when God spoke to him, almost knocking me off the bench I was sharing with him.
“Cut out two tablets of stone just like the first set, and engrave on them the words that were on the original tablets you smashed.”
God often started a conversation in the middle of a paragraph, so it was not surprising that Moses had to think for a minute before knowing exactly what God was talking about. God paused a moment until Moses got that clear look in his eyes, which signaled he was now tracking and all systems were go for God to continue with the rest of the paragraph.
“Be ready in the morning to climb Mount Sinai, and get set to meet Me on top of the mountain. Not a soul is to go with you; the whole mountain must be clear of people, even animals. Not even sheep or oxen can be grazing in front of the mountain.”
Moses stayed up half the night cutting two tablets of stone just like the originals. He got up early in the morning and climbed Mount Sinai as God had commanded him, carrying the two tablets with him. Just as He said, God descended in the cloud and took up His position there beside Moses and then did what I thought was an odd thing. God began to call out
His own name.
Don’t ask me why. I’d never seen Him do anything quite like this before, and believe me, I’d seen some odd things.
God turned, and with His back to Moses, He passed in front of him and called out, “God, God, a God of mercy and grace, endlessly patient. So much love; so deeply true; loyal in love for a thousand generations; forgiving iniquity, rebellion, and sin. Still, He doesn’t ignore sin. He holds sons and grandsons responsible for a father’s sins to the third and even fourth generation.”
Why was God talking about Himself in the third person? I looked around to see if there was anyone besides Moses and me to whom God might have been making these declarations. It didn’t seem like He was talking to Moses, and He certainly wasn’t talking to me. I didn’t see anyone else, so when God started talking again, I had to deduce that Moses was His only intended audience. God soon stopped with the third-person talk and spoke to Moses as if nothing at all strange had happened.
“As of right now, I’m making a covenant with you. In full sight of your people I will work wonders that have never been created in all the earth, in any nation. Then all the people with whom you’re living will see how tremendous the work will be that I’ll do for you. Take careful note of all I command you today. I’m clearing your way by driving out all of your enemies.”
Moses really perked up at that last part. I once heard him tell Aaron privately that he feared the day his ragtag militia of ex-slaves would have to face on its own a real army. Even though they’d been successful in that earlier skirmish, Moses worried what might happen if they ever came up against a foe whose defeat God had not predetermined.
As far as Moses was concerned, the conversation couldn’t get any better than hearing how God intended to remove his enemies before him, so he stood up, anxious to get back down the mountain to tell Aaron the good news, but God was not finished.
“Moses, listen to Me.”
Moses stopped his exit attempt as he realized God’s tone had changed from exuberant to somber.
“Stay vigilant. Don’t let down your guard lest you make covenant with the people who live in the land that you are entering and they trip you up.”
“I don’t understand, Lord.” Moses seemed confused by this warning. “I thought You just said You were going to drive Your enemies—our enemies—out before us.”
“I did, but I’m going to use you as the instrument in My hand to accomplish what I promised.”
Moses’s face fell as if such a thought had never crossed his mind.
“Oh, come now, Moses. How else did you think I would do it? You know I have limited Myself to working through these people of yours.”
“I just thought that when You said
You
were going to do it, You meant
You
were going to do it; that’s all.”
“If I were going to do everything Myself, I wouldn’t need you, now would I?”
“Can You be a little more specific about what You expect us to do to drive them out?”
“Sure. Tear down their altars, smash their phallic pillars, and chop down their fertility poles.”
“Oh, well, nothing to it.” Moses ventured a little sarcasm but quickly recovered. “This isn’t going to be easy, is it? They’re going to fight back, aren’t they?”
God ignored his questions but continued with a stern warning as to what Moses must be uncompromising about.
“Don’t allow My people to worship any of their gods. I, the Lord, am jealous for My children. Be careful that you don’t make a covenant with the people who live in the land lest the Israelites be tempted by the sex-and-religion abomination of their worship. Don’t join them in meals at their altars. Don’t allow your sons to marry their women. Those women will take up with any convenient god or goddess and will get your sons to do the same thing.”
“Is there anything else?” Moses asked.
“Don’t make any more molten gods for yourselves.”
“That wasn’t me. Aaron allowed that to happen.” Moses seemed to immediately regret implicating Aaron. “I shouldn’t have blamed him; it was my watch.”
Moses may have thought they were through with the important stuff, but God wasn’t anywhere near done. He went right on listing the things the Israelites could or could not do. Moses might not have understood why God was suddenly issuing dozens of new rules, but I did. He was trying to cover every possible way those stiff-necked people could get themselves into trouble.
Moses must have thought it was never going to be over. At least that’s what I was beginning to think. God kept him up there forty days and forty nights, and I had to stay for every minute of it. I didn’t dare miss a word because you could just never know which one of God’s words might shift the power balance in the whole universe. Moses didn’t eat any food, and he didn’t drink any water. And he wrote on the tablets the entire time, until the words of the covenant, the Ten Commandments, were inscribed in the stone.
It must have seemed like an eon to the waiting people back at the camp. I was sure Aaron was beginning to sweat. When Moses finally came down from Mount Sinai, carrying the two tablets of the testimony, with me following along right behind him, the elders raced to greet him. I wondered what it must feel like to have others miss you and be glad to see you when you returned from duty.
No one ever hurried to meet me when I returned to the second heaven to report to Satan. Nobody was ever happy I’d come back. No one cared what I had to report, or at least they pretended it wasn’t important. Since the humans couldn’t see me anyway, I hurried and got in front of Moses and pretended all those cheering people were coming to greet me. I tell you, I was almost misty-eyed there for a moment.
Not having a mirror handy, Moses didn’t know that the skin of his face glowed because he had been speaking with God. When Aaron and all the Israelites got near enough to see Moses’s radiant face, they pulled back, afraid to get closer to him. Moses called out to them to reassure them even though he didn’t know what they were nervous about.
“Don’t be afraid. God is for us, not against us.
“Come close and listen carefully to what He has said because He loves us.”
Aaron and the leaders in the community came slowly back at Moses’s reassurance that they weren’t in more trouble. Moses talked with them and told them everything the Lord had commanded for them. Later that afternoon, the rest of the Israelites came up to him, and he passed on all the commands to them that God had told him on Mount Sinai.
And, of course, they promised to obey every last one of them.
I
S
H
E NEVER
going to be done with them?”
Satan stood on the rim of the second heaven, staring down at the bulging camp of the Israelites far below. He had convinced himself that God would wipe them out after the golden calf affair. He refused to believe me when I tried to tell him how God would give the people a pass even for idol worship—all because of Moses’s intercession. It happened just like I predicted, but I didn’t dare say anything that sounded like “I told you so.”
“How can He do anything else, sir? You have the rest of the people on the earth in bondage. The Israelites, pitiful as they may be, are the only team God has. If He gives up on them, game over; He has nothing.”
“I can still win. I’ve watched these miserable humans for centuries. God has overestimated their potential. He might get them through the desert to Canaan, but they’ll never be able to stand up to our forces there. How many do we have?”
“The Amorites, Canaanites, Hittites, Perizzites, Hivites, and Jebusites, sir.”
“Just as I thought; my strategy is working.”
“What strategy would that be, master?”
“What are you, blind? Why do you think I haven’t sent forces after them in the desert? I
want
them to get across. I don’t know which I look forward to the most—seeing them slaughtered at the border or seeing them seduced by the sex priestesses in my temples.” He paused as if relishing both possibilities.
“I think I’ll have them go lightly on the slaughter.” The smirk continued. “It gives me much more pleasure to see them defile themselves with those sex perverts than to see them dead. Whatever angers God the most, that’s what I want to see. He will regret the day He took me on as an enemy.”
“Uh, Your Majesty … ” I struggled with whether I should tell him what God had said about all those “ites.” If I didn’t tell him and he found out later, it could only be much worse for me than if I just told him now and gave him time to get over it. He turned and looked at me as if daring me to contradict his plan.
“What is it?”
“Well, sir, to be perfectly honest, God mentioned those people to Moses while they were up on the mountain.”
“Go on.”
“He told Moses that He—God—would drive them out before him—Moses. To be exact, what He said was He intended to use Moses to drive them out, but He would be behind the whole thing.”
Satan did not respond right away so I thought he might need to be reminded about the rules of engagement.
“It’s like this, sir: God can do anything He wants on the earth, but He has to do it through human beings.”
“Really?” The sarcasm dripped from the word. “I didn’t know that.”
He pushed me aside as he stomped back to his den. Since he didn’t order me to follow him, I didn’t. Instead, I climbed upon my perch and looked at the earth. I kept an eye on the Hebrew’s activities, but it didn’t seem to me there was much going on there that anyone except God would care about.
Moses was still hearing from God on a daily basis with a new set of regulations to govern the lives of the people. I suppose He wanted them to have a fully functional form of government when they reached their destination so no time would be wasted in political scuffling. It would be easier for the people to fight if they knew in advance what they were fighting for. It takes a government to overthrow a government, not a band of vigilantes. That would certainly be the case once they crossed into the enemy territory where all the governments were under the reign of Satan. That had to be God’s reasoning behind all the rules.
However, it did not explain the tabernacle. God ordered Moses to gather the artisans and craftsmen from among the people to begin the construction of a tabernacle, a tent of meeting, and a box. If I thought God was meticulous on the rule giving, it was nothing compared to the detail He insisted upon for this new building project. The attention to every thread, every color, and every building material that was to be used would boggle the mind of human or demon. Fascinating as it all was, what most captured my attention was the box.
God referred to the box as the ark, not to be confused with the boat Noah built by the same name. (Don’t even ask. I don’t know why He didn’t call it something else for simplicity’s sake.) God was in every detail of how it was to be constructed, how it would be carried, and what would be in it. This is where it began to get interesting. God told Moses to put the tablets of the covenant in the ark. No particular big deal; he had to keep them somewhere. But it’s what God said next that thickened the plot.