TEN COMMANDMENTS OF LOVE : TEACHING THE ISRAElITES TO LIVE IN THE BLESSING !

TEN COMMANDMENTS OF LOVE : TEACHING THE ISRAElITES TO LIVE IN THE BLESSING ! LEARINING TO COVENANT CONDUCT : it was there God appeared to him and said: "I am the God of thy father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.... I have surely seen the affliction of my people which are in Egypt, and have heard their cry by reason of their taskmaster; for I know their sorrows; and I am come down to deliver them out of the hand of the Egyptians, and to bring them up of that land unto a good plan and a large, unto a land flowing with milk and honey (Exodus 3:6-8). When God told Moses He wanted to bring His people into a good land... A land flowing with milk and honey, He wasn't just saying He had a particular piece of real estate He wanted to give them. He was saying much more than that. He was declaring His intentions to restore to Israel the conditions Of the Garden of Eden--- conditions which can come only by THE BLESSING. To do that, God would not only have to take the Israelites out of Egypt, he would have to get Egypt out of them ! That's why God didn't just pull the Israelites out of Egypt and take them straight into the Promised land. And many of God's dear people still have the Egypt mentality and thinking that God is supposed to support your way of thinking. He took them by way of the wilderness to teach them that He was there source of BLESSING. And if you do not know, that God is your only source, then you are still missing it. When they were hungry, he That gave them manna from heaven to eat. When they were thirsty, he That poured millions of gallons of water out or a rock. And the rock, is a type of Jesus. He shaded them with a cloud by day and lit their camp with His fire by night. He gave them supernatural victory over the Army of the Amalekites (Exodus 17:8-13). Then, he camp that did the most important thing of all. He called Moses to the mountaintop to give him the commandments. The tone of those commandments and the reason God gave them has been totally misunderstood through the years. People have assumed God gave them with a threatening voice and clenched fist. They've seen the commandments as legalistic wipes God used to keep His people in line. But nothing could be further from the truth of what man-made religion has taught. God gave those commands to Israel to teach them what Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and Joseph had once known. He wanted to teach them to live by faith in THE BLESSING. God's tone was not, "You had better do these things or else !" He was saying, "here's how people who have a covenant with God conduct themselves. Here's how BLESSED people act in a land of milk and honey." God's heart wasn't to burden them with restrictive rules that will make their lives difficult. No, that's man-made religion. He wanted to help them learn how to live in covenant with Him and keep THE BLESSING intact. I remember when I first saw that. I'd been reading the instructions God gave the Israelites in Exodus and noticed He used the words commandments and covenant interchangeably. In Exodus 15:26, for example, Moses said, "If thou wilt diligently hearken to the force or THE LORD thy God, and will do that which is right in his sight, and wilt give ear to his commandments, and keep all his statues...." A few chapters later, in Exodus 19:5, God expressed the same idea by saying, "Now therefore, if you will obey my voice (words) indeed, and keep my covenant..." That puzzled me. "Lord, I don't understand," I said. "How is a commandment a covenant ?" After praying about it a little while, I heard THE LORD-- not audibly but in my spirit-- say, Bobby, when those words were written, I'd already made covenant with those people. I'd being in covenant with them for 400 years--- ever since the time I declared THE BLESSING over Abraham and his seed.