So they're all waiting outside while we're - you know? Yeah, you know. Then we'd come out and we'd have a party and that was a wedding. So the Hebrew people, they heard lakah, they heard segullah, they heard mikveh - that's Exodus 19. So what happens in Exodus 20? Ketubah. And what happens in Exodus 20? What's in Exodus 20? The Ten Commandments. The Ten Commandments is a marriage proposal. The Ten Commandments are not 10 conditions for God to love you; it is 10 proofs He already does. You're not proposing to people you don't love. Now think about the Ten Commandments from a marriage proposal standpoint. You should have no other Gods before Me; well that makes sense. In other words if we're going to be married I'm going to be number one and let me tell you something, just from a psychologist standpoint okay? If you took God out of the picture, if the Bible had not been discovered yet okay; if we had no instructions from God on how to live I can tell you as a psychologist that for a marriage to work the man has to be number one and the wife has to be the treasured possession. That's the only way for a marriage to work.
So God's like I'm going to be number one, you're not going to have anybody ahead of me. Is that fair enough? Yes, okay. You're not going to carry graven images or any likeness or anything okay? In other words if we're going to be married you're not going to have pictures of your old boyfriends. [Laughter] Oh, and you're not going to use My name in vain. In other words you're not going to sign cheques that I wouldn't sign. [Laughter] Yeah. You're not going - saying God's name in vain has nothing to do with saying you know, oh God or something - although it's probably distasteful and we probably shouldn't do it. It has everything to do with using God's name on something He wouldn't have used His name for - oh, and one day in seven it's just going to be Me and you. [Unclear 00.28.21] be a Sabbath, one day in seven. God had a way to keep His marriage together and what He did was one day in seven, seven times a year, it was just Him and His spouse. That's what happened.
That's how He tried to keep His marriage together with Israel - one day in seven and seven times a year, and they still were maritally unfaithful to the point that His anger burned against them to where there was no remedy. In the Book of Ezra it says He divorced them and He married the Gentiles, which should mess some of our theology up, yeah. So He did everything He could do and yet they were still maritally unfaithful, everything He could do. So this ketubah comes down and it's a marriage proposal, so what happens after the marriage proposal? Chuppah. Look at verse 18, this is so cool. It says now all the people heard - the actual word there is heard - they heard the thunder and the lightning and the sound of a trumpet. And the people saw the mountain filling in smoke, so they see - excuse me, they see thunder, lightning and billows of smoke, and they hear the sound of a trumpet.
They see thunder, lightning, billows of smoke; they witness thunder, lightning, billows of smoke. They see it. The word is see, we saw thunder and lightning. Now my question is how can you see thunder? You can't, so I went and looked it up. The word thunder is the word [kole, 00.29.59] which everywhere else in the Bible is translated voices or languages.
So the people are standing at the base of the mountain and they saw the mountain filling in smoke, chuppah. So they're standing there and a chuppah appears. They've already had lakah, they've already had segullah, they've already had mikveh, they've had a ketubah, and now they're standing there in a chuppah, a giant chuppah appears. They look up and they see languages inside lightning or fire. They see voices inside fire. The Talmud says that on this date in history God proposed to the entirety of creation through 70,000 tongues of fire. In 1856 there was this English sociologist that went to Rangoon, Burma to study the people there. This was before electricity, before phones, before internet, before cable, before any of that. He went to this tribe of people in Rangoon, Burma and he said who is your God? They said we serve a God named [Yaw 00.31.07] who proposed to us from fire in the sky.