The World and the Word

                                     The Israelites

Although God has provided salvation by His grace as a free gift completely apart from any human good works and based solely on repentance and faith in Christ as one's Savior, God has also provided a lesser form of salvation for the good works of humans which emerge from their living souls and spirits that God put into them when He created them. Romans 2:6-7; John 5:28-29; Matthew 16:27; Revelation 22:11-12; Genesis 1:27. But the good works that God put into every human for them to do alone cannot save them because they are stained with sin. Faith is the only good work that a human can do to be saved because faith acknowledges that only God can accomplish one's salvation. Only God can do all of the self-sacrificial work necessary to cleanse all the sin and evil from every person's life whether saved by God's higher form of salvation which is grace or His lower form of salvation which is by His mercy. Humans can only take credit for choosing to do the good works that God put into His image in them, not for the origination of them. Ecclesiastes 9:1; Ecclesiastes 7:29; Isaiah 26:12; Romans 2:14-16. God can never lose the good lives of all humans that He created or the good works and faith that He put into every one of them. Ecclesiastes 3:14; Luke 20:38; Psalm 36:6; Psalm 111:7-8; Psalm 138:8; Psalm 145:14-17; I Timothy 6:17-19.

In Exodus 20:20, Moses reassured the Israelites that God had not directed His fiery wrath toward them but toward the sins that they would commit. God made them afraid of Him to make them afraid to sin. God only desired to test them to prove that they would try to obey His laws and offer the proper sacrifices for when they failed.

In Exodus 20:21-22, Moses demonstrated that he had no eternal fear of God when he walked into the darkness and talked with God directly. In order to do this, Moses must have had some faith in God as his Savior which put him in a state of grace. Humans saved by grace can have no fear of God's eternal wrath, but only of His temporal punishment. God deals with humans saved by grace as family. Hebrews 12:6-7.

In Exodus 20:23, God informed the Israelites that all the laws of God resulted from the first law. Evil causes all sins, and all evil results from loving something else more than one loves God. Lucifer's excessive pride stemmed from the fact that he came to love himself and ceased to love God. Deuteronomy 6:4-5.

Because the people had rejected God's covenant of grace, God told Moses to mention only the burnt offerings and peace offerings in his address to the people in Exodus 20:24-26. The blood sacrifices always preceded the burnt offerings, but God knew that very few Israelites would ever come to some faith that the blood sacrifices symbolized God's salvation by grace. God provided a lesser form of salvation for the majority of the Israelites, as well as the rest of humanity, by the use of His consuming fire which the burnt offerings and the peace offerings symbolized. Most of the Old Testament mentions the burnt sacrifices more than the blood sacrifices. Leviticus 5:10; I Corinthians 3:11-15.