God is in the Details
By Terance Clark February 21, 2025 5 Minute Read
Week 18
This Weeks Passage: Exodus 21:1 – 24:18
Have you ever heard the term “God is in the details”. This week we need to somehow explain this huge concept into this short blog. Last week we experienced the tremendous vision of God coming to His people to take them as His own and He then speaks the ten commands or commitments of the relationship and then immediately this week we are thrown into several chapters of legal rulings about slaves, personal injury, property rights and so on. It seems a little much and a little strange, but please take the time to understand them because the Hebrew language ensures us that both are meant to go together and helps us understand in greater detail how spiritual experiences need to be brought down to earth so to speak. Let’s see if we can make sense of it all.
Becoming the People of God
Up to this point no nation had ever had a personal relationship with God before. I don’t know about you, but I think I would have felt very uneasy and even a little afraid about what that actually meant. The Hebrew language in Exodus 20 says that every person heard the voice of God speaking in their own language when God came down on Mt. Sinai. With fire, wind, smoke and that crazy loud shofar blowing, and it says the shofar blast got louder and louder so that people couldn’t stand it. A supernatural experience with God can overwhelm us especially when you consider these people had been slaves prior to this. They had no grid for the God of the universe taking notice of them and wanting to take them as His very own people.
After expressing His faithfulness to Israel, He then makes it personal by taking them step by step through the process of how they were to treat one another and the strangers that lived among them and He tied the two together. God takes the experience of heaven and wants us to see it connects with the way we live here on earth. There is a saying today “As in Heaven”, which means that believers should bring the supernatural of heaven down to earth by expecting signs and wonders and living in that supernatural life. I don’t have a problem with that as long as we first understand what God instructed Israel to do and that is to treat others the way He treats us. If you read this weeks passage you’ll find how God expected kindness and care for one another and most importantly to the stranger. Why the stranger? Because they had been strangers and therefore should know how painful it is. In fact, we all have been strangers at some point in our lives and should not want anyone to experience it.
“We actually create heaven on earth by our interactions“
He didn’t want them to just experience some kind of spiritual high. He wanted them to live out their lives in the power of that experience by the way they treated others. God was giving very specific instructions for living out of our supernatural relationship through the day to day laws He gave with the expectation of regular teaching and instruction we would receive. We actually create heaven on earth by our interactions. As His children we can form pockets of heaven towards the hurting, the downcast, our friends and the strangers we encounter as well as to the animals we’ve been given charge to care for. In Israel, everyone was to know these passages so that law and justice would always be given to one another.
Another Mt. Sinai Experience
The details of these passages along with the books of Leviticus and Numbers help us to understand the enormity of Gods care for us. It’s really not law, it’s love for humanity, and that is what God provides to us. So it’s not surprising that on the anniversary of the Mt. Sinai experience about some fifteen hundred years later, that God did the exact same thing. The day of Pentecost is the anniversary of Mt. Sinai to the very day, and once again God came down speaking to everyone in their own language with fire, smoke and a loud shofar blast. Not only to remind His people, but to renew the promises made. This time rather than run away the people were ready for it and helped others to recognize that God loved them and wanted a relationship with them. The assembly grew by thousands that day and continues today to bring a collision between heaven and earth touching and transforming nations because God is in the details.