Exodus 19:3-6 with notes from the Reformation Study Bible and Faithlife Study Bible.
The Exodus narrative continues as Israel arrives at Mount Sinai, and God prepares the people to receive the Law (Exodus 20:1-23:19). God’s sovereignty and power have already been demonstrated substantially to Israel by what He did to get them out of Egypt and bring them safely to Sinai – He even says, “I carried you on eagles’ wings.” While He clearly doesn’t mean that they had traveled to Sinai in luxury, they traveled under his divine protection. Now, after reminding them about the things they’d seen and how they’d arrived at Sinai, God says, “if you will indeed obey my voice and keep my covenant, you shall be my treasured possession among all people…” Not unlike Jesus words in John 14:15 that if we love Him we will obey His commands. Unfortunately, we are not unlike Israel will show themselves to be, because we also repeatedly show by our actions that we do not love God. Fortunately for us, His love does not depend on our merit, but on His sovereign will. Over and over again, God calls us back to Himself in a way that we cannot refuse, who can possibly refuse being released from slavery to sin? Who can resist being kept safe in the hands of a completely sovereign God?
If we authentically love Jesus for what He has accomplished on our account, we will keep his commandments, we will obey God, and we will hear His voice (first and foremost through Scripture). But we cannot authentically love as God loves, obey His commands, or hear His voice if we are not faithful students of Scripture. Fortunately when Jesus said that if we love Him we’ll obey Him, He followed up with the promise of a Helper, the Holy Spirit (John 14:16). Speaking of how the Holy Spirit helps us to understand Scripture, Joel Beeke says, “Knowledge is the soil in which the Holy Spirit sows the seed of understanding.” Not only does the Holy Spirit help us to understand God’s expectations in the first place, but He helps us to meet them, because we are so much like Israel in that we have absolutely no power within ourselves to meet those expectations.
Israel’s covenantal obligation to God was to obey Him, and God’s promised reward for obedience was that Israel would remain under the Abrahamic blessing and become God’s “treasured possession” (v. 5). Because we live in the Church age, that same covenantal blessings is extended to us, not because of any merit on our part, but because after God has called us to Himself, He gives us the Holy Spirit to enable us to obey Him and then receive His blessing. We don’t receive that blessing because we deserve it, and we don’t receive it only for the benefit of the Holy Spirit’s help, but because God called us in the first place. Going back to when God called Abraham (Genesis 12), God could have just as easily called Abraham’s father Terah, or his brother Haran. But God, in His own sovereign pleasure, picked Abram to call out of his homeland, and to bless. God picked Isaac, rather than Ishmael, to carry on his father’s blessing. God picked Jacob, rather than Esau, to carry his grandfather’s blessing. And on down the line until the nation of Israel is called to God out of Egypt, and out of all the rest of the world that God had made and that belongs to Him anyway.
We are blessed, as Israel was, for no other reason than that God called us out of the world, and out of our slavery to sin. Why Israel and not the rest of the world? Why the Church and not the rest of the world? We don’t know. But we do know that God’s thoughts and ways are not ours, and that His are higher than ours (Isaiah 55).
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