Law of God
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their children in the law of God. But many of the Israelites had wit-
nessed 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 cap-
tivity, 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 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. 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 any one, not even his angels, but spoke
his law with an audible voice in the hearing of all the people. He did
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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, and would not leave them,
who were so readily led astray, with merely the ten precepts of the
decalogue. He required Moses to write as he should bid him, judg-
ments 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 re-
quirements 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 would
have been no necessity of the ordinance of circumcision. And if the
descendants of Abraham had kept the covenant, which circumcision
was a token or pledge of, they would never have gone into idolatry,
and been suffered to go down into Egypt, and there would have been
no necessity of God’s proclaiming his law from Sinai, and engraving