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Law of God
115
There were but a few families that first went down into Egypt.
These increased to a great multitude. Some were careful to instruct
their children in the law of God, but many of the Israelites had
witnessed so much idolatry that they had confused ideas of God’s
law. Those who feared God cried to Him in anguish of spirit to break
their yoke of grievous bondage and bring them from the land of their
captivity, that they might be free to serve Him. God heard their cries
and raised up Moses as His instrument to accomplish the deliverance
of His people. After they had left Egypt, and the waters of the Red
Sea had been divided before them, the Lord proved them to see if
they would trust in Him who had taken them, a nation from another
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nation, by signs, temptations, and wonders. But they failed to endure
the trial. They murmured against God because of difficulties in the
way and wished to return again to Egypt.
Written in Tables of Stone
To leave them without excuse, the Lord Himself condescended
to come down upon Sinai, enshrouded in glory and surrounded by
His angels, and in a most sublime and awful manner made known
His law of Ten Commandments. He did not trust them to be taught
by anyone, not even His angels, but spoke His law with an audible
voice in the hearing of all the people. He did not, even then, trust
them to the short memory of a people who were prone to forget His
requirements, but wrote them with His own holy finger upon tables of
stone. He would remove from them all possibility of mingling with
His holy precepts any tradition, or of confusing His requirements
with the practices of men.
He then came still closer to His people, who were so readily led
astray, and would not leave them with merely the ten precepts of
the Decalogue. He commanded Moses to write, as He should bid
him, judgments and laws, giving minute directions in regard to what
He required them to perform, and thereby guarded the ten precepts
which He had engraved upon the tables of stone. These specific
directions and requirements were given to draw erring man to the
obedience of the moral law, which he is so prone to transgress.
If man had kept the law of God, as given to Adam after his
fall, preserved in the ark by Noah, and observed by Abraham, there