I’ve written before about how I appreciate that Judaism and Christianity are founded on divine revelations given to many people, not just an individual who you have to believe in order to accept the revelation. A startling perspective is given by Steve Maltz in his “How the Church Lost the Truth: And How It Can Find It Again”.
Not only has YHWH’s revelation been given to forty authors over 66 books, but what’s recorded is perhaps the only time there was “a national revelation”. At Mount Sinai, six hundred thousand men and some uncounted number of women and children—probably between 2.5 and 3 million people total—heard God’s voice from Mount Sinai. “And the Lord said to Moses, ‘Behold, I am coming to you in a thick cloud, that the people may hear when I speak with you, and may also believe you forever.” (Exodus 19.9) After this, the Law was given. As God told Moses the Ten Commandments and everything else, the people below heard it. The same number of people as reside in Minnesota’s Twin Cities or Chicago or Houston…and more than Philadelphia or San Diego or San Antonio or Phoenix.
You might be able to discount one person’s testimony but not three million. Not a whole Chicago’s worth of testimony.
This, of course, did not prevent future problems. While God is speaking to Moses, and the people are hearing it, they get impatient and resort to learned-from-the-Egyptians-and-Canaanites practices by forging a golden calf to worship while they wait.
Oh, we have a hard time learning new things. Christ recognized this when saying new wine needed to be in new wine skins, not old ones or they will burst. However, “No one after drinking old wine desires new, for he says, ‘The old is good.’” (Luke 5.39) If the old is good, why try the new?
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| Watercolor by Nikki Kutil 2019 |
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