Exodus 19

v1-8: As Moses, Israel’s mediator, brought God’s words to the people, and “brought the words of the people back to God,” so does Christ, who is the Mediator between us and God. “As a prophet,” He “reveals God’s will to us,” in His precepts and promises. “Then, as a priest offers up to God, our spiritual sacrifices, not only of prayer and praise, but also of devout feelings, and godly decisions,” which are “the work of his own Spirit in us.”

v9-13: No longer are we kept at a distance. Through the blood of Jesus we may with boldness approach God.

v14-15: The people of Israel, “as a sign of their cleansing [of] themselves from all the pollution of sin that they might be holy to God, they must wash their clothes.” While they were doing this, they were “to think of washing their souls in repenting from the sins they had become infected with in Egypt and since their rescue.” We don’t need to wash our clothes in this way, but we do need to repent of our sins and trust in Christ who cleanses us from all the pollution of sin that we might be holy in God’s sight.

v16-25: Let us live within the limits that God has set for us. “We must not wrongfully desire to know more than God wants us to know.” Remember “a desire of forbidden knowledge was the ruin of our first parents.” What we need has been written down for us in Scripture and we are not to go beyond this, “and encroach on what he does not allow for us.”

Exodus 20

v1-2: Previously, God had written His law on people’s hearts, “but sin had so defaced this writing, that it was necessary to revive knowledge of it in this way” through the giving of the Ten Commandments. For those who “had been eyewitnesses of the great things God had done in order to rescue them,” was anything “too much to do for him who had done so much for them?”

v3: It is our duty to worship God, that is, “to give to him the glory due to his name, the inward worship of our soul,” and “the outward worship of reverent attentiveness.” We must be completely faithful to him, not giving our worship to any other gods, “either one of [our] own invention or one borrowed from” the world around us. Anything that we honour, love, fear, serve, delight in, or depend on, more than God, we have made into a god.

v4-11: God is not to be worshipped by means of idols or images of God in our imagination, because that is to imply “that God has a body, whereas he is an infinite spirit.” He is to be worshipped “with all possible reverence and seriousness,” and “one day in seven is to be specially dedicated to his honour and spent in his service.”

v12-17: The last six of the Ten Commandments, concern “our duty to ourselves and to one another,” and give practical instruction concerning the meaning of the second great commandment, which is that we love our neighbour as ourselves. An essential part of the faith is “righteousness toward others.”

v18-21: “Once God tried to speak to the human race directly, but it was found that they could not bear it. It drove them from God rather than bringing them to him.” We should therefore be satisfied with the instructions He gives to us “by the Scriptures and the ministry” of the Word, not thinking, if only “God were to speak to us in thunder and lightening, as he did from Mount Sinai.”

v22-26: The promise that God will come to His people and bless them in every place has now been fulfilled as “wherever God’s people meet in his name to worship him, he will be in the midst of them, he will honour them with his presence, and reward them with the gifts of his grace.