What an incredible gift! The Lord our God is a God of second chances. His ways are so much higher than our ways. Time and again His people seem to miss His Plan A. He is such a loving and gracious Heavenly Father that He then institutes a Plan B that appears to return us to His Plan A.
Take for instance, God’s people at Mount Sinai. When Moses led God’s people forth from Egypt, they already knew that their arrival at Mount Sinai was going to be the climax of their exodus. I Am That I Am foretold Moses at the burning bush: “I will be with you, and this shall be the sign to you that it is I who have sent you: when you have brought the people out of Egypt, you shall worship God at this mountain” (Exodus 3:12 nasb). Significantly, their objective at Mount Sinai was to purely worship our Heavenly Father in Spirit and in Truth.
So, our Creator God chose to identify Himself in time and history six full weeks after the Israelites left Egypt. At Sinai, for the first and only time to date, God spoke to all of His people simultaneously. This is where everyone was supposed to become part of His priesthood of all believers.
The nation of Israel foreknew that its moment of fulfillment would be at the mountain of God. Indeed, God’s people became a nation after they arrived there. Earlier encampments were tainted with grievances against Moses and God, but here at Sinai the people didn’t complain—a miracle in itself. The people knew that they had arrived at the place of their corporate destiny. God’s people finally had arrived at their place of promise. They had been filled with impatient anticipation for the day when they would finally reach Sinai.
But in their impatience, God’s people tragically misinterpreted what was meant by “forty days” (Exodus 24:18; 34:28). When the people gathered around Aaron to pressure him to rise up and “make us gods that will go before us,” they used the excuse that we don’t know what became of Moses. They thought Moses had been delayed or something awful had happened to him.
The people had their eyes more on man than god, even after the mind-blowing encounter with the Lord only thirty-nine days earlier at Mount Sinai (Refer to Exodus 19). Evidence is supplied by Israel’s own words: “this fellow Moses who brought us up out of Egypt” (Exodus 32:1). Moses was merely a servant of the Most High God, and he knew that it would have been impossible for him to even pry the Israelites out of Pharaoh’s hand, let alone bring His people out of Egypt. God’s people impatiently wanted to get to their destination—the Promised Land. Not understanding that the Giver of the Promised Land was the ultimate fulfillment of the Promised Land. The Lord Himself is the greatest promise of all, but His people wanted the benefits of the Giver, not necessarily the Giver Himself.
It was the thirty-ninth day of forty. All the people could still actually see the cloud of God’s presence on the summit of Mount Sinai, and they had seen Moses ascend up into it. The cloud of His presence had miraculously remained on Sinai the entire time, but it seems that this incredible atmospheric sign of the Lord’s manifest presence was not enough. The people wanted something more tangible, something familiar to their senses, something earthly that would feed their carnal nature.
The golden calf Aaron fashioned was borrowed from the ordinary way in which the favorite Egyptian divinity Osiris was mystically represented. This sacrificial yearling calf, bull, or ox in Egypt was called the Apis. God’s people invented their own representation of God, presuming that they were pleasing Him (Exodus 32:4). After all, didn’t their leader Aaron build an altar to God as the Lord had instructed in Exodus 20:24? And didn’t their leader proclaim: “Tomorrow is a feast to the Lord” (Exodus 32:5)? Maybe Aaron thought if He used God’s name and parts of his instructions it somehow justified any wrong he might do. But no matter how much they tried to please the Lord by their own inventions and imaginations, as evidenced in the golden calf, God’s people could not get around the fact that they had all heard the second commandment against idolatry directly from God’s own awe-inspiring voice.
Instead of a priesthood of all believers raising up in Moses’ Day at Mount Sinai, a radical tribe arose – the Levites – due to their encounter with the sin of the Golden Calf. That doesn’t mean that God abandoned His Plan A for having a priesthood of all believers. It meant that He created a Plan B that would eventually will bring His people back around to His original intent – His Plan A.
Today is the day that God’s priesthood of all believers rising!!! “You also, as living stones, are being built up as a spiritual house for a holy priesthood, to offer up spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ. … But you are a CHOSEN RACE, A royal PRIESTHOOD, A HOLY NATION, A PEOPLE FOR GOD’S OWN POSSESSION, so that you may proclaim the excellencies of Him who has called you out of darkness into His marvelous light; for you once were NOT A PEOPLE, but now you are THE PEOPLE OF GOD; you had NOT RECEIVED MERCY, but now you have RECEIVED MERCY”(1 Peter 2:5:9-10 NASB).
Give em heaven!!!
Robin Main
www.sapphirethroneministries.com
www.santa-tizing.com
www.mysticmentoring.com
Written July 23, 2019 – Sapphire Throne Ministries – Robin Main. Copyrighted – If you are going to copy this, please copy it right by giving attributions to this source.
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RESOURCES AVAILABLE:
• Ascension Manual book =>https://www.amazon.com/dp/0578188511
• Understanding the Order of Melchizedek: Complete Series book =>https://www.amazon.com/Understanding-Order-Melchizedek-Robin-Main/dp/0998598240/
• MEL GEL Study Guide book =>https://www.amazon.com/dp/0578188538/
• MEL GEL Study Guide: Volume 2 book =>https://www.amazon.com/dp/0998598232/
• SANTA-TIZING: What’s wrong with Christmas and how to clean it up book =>https://www.amazon.com/SANTA-TIZING-Whats-wrong-Christmas-clean/dp/1607911159/
• Set of Hebrew Living Letter Flash Cards => https://www.sapphirethroneministries.com/flashcards
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