5) The last one was called Chuppah - it's a Jewish marriage altar. It was a covering. They thought of it as a ‘covering of God's presence’.
The Ketubah would be signed; we would do the little: “I'll go to prepare a place for you” thing, I would go back and I would make a marriage chamber. When my father approved the marriage chamber, we would come back to get the bride; and we'd go to the place where the marriage chamber was, to have a wedding.
This wedding ceremony would happen, and after the wedding ceremony - we still weren't married! I would then take my wife to the entrance to the wedding chamber, and I would catch her up. Do you do that in New Zealand - carry your wife under/over the threshold? Yeah, it's a good thing for some; and a bad thing for others... you know!
I would carry her under the threshold; and the groomsmen would have taken a prayer shawl - which they thought of as ‘the covering of God's presence’ - and with four stakes, and they would make it over the bed. That's a Chuppah!
They would leave, and then I would ‘catch her up’ (that's where we get the word ‘rapture’ from). I would take her into the marriage thing, and we would consummate our relationship - with everybody waiting outside!
So everybody's waiting there like - and then we would come out, and now we're married! Now the wedding party could start! That was the basic process.
Exodus 6:6 – “Therefore say to the Israelites: I am the Lord, and I will bring you out from under the yoke of the Egyptians. I will free you from being slaves to them. I will redeem you with an outstretched arm, and with mighty acts of judgement. I will take you as my own people” – Lakah. “I will take you as my own people” - Lakah.
Exodus 19:5 – “If you obey me fully, and keep my covenant, then out of all the nations you will be my treasured possession” - Segullah.
To the Hebrew people, you didn't have to explain to them: this is a wedding. They're like: Lakah? Segullah?
For a girl to hear: “I want to make you my own” - it's kind of like aaawe! “I'm going to make you my treasured possession” - double aaawe! This is like romantic sort of language.
Exodus 19:10 – “And the Lord said to Moses: consecrate them today and tomorrow. Have them wash their clothes”. “Wash” - Mikveh.
We've got: Lakah, Segullah, Mikveh – next comes the Ketubah. We're in Exodus 19, and in Exodus 20 - the Ten Commandments - which would be a Ketubah.
The Ten Commandments are not conditions for God to love you. They're proof that He already does. It's a marriage proposal. You don't propose to people you don't love already. This is proof that God already loves us, and wants us to have the best life.
He's proposing to a group of people that hardly have their stuff together. He later had to tell them: don't throw your children in fire - that's a bad plan. He had to later tell them: don't have sex with your mother - it's a bad idea! Read Leviticus, and you'll see the things that He had to make clear to them. You're like really - that was a problem?
These people did not have their stuff together - and God was proposing to them anyway - because God wanted to marry them, and then clean them up. God wanted to marry them, and then spend a lifetime journeying with them to make them clean and whole. So if we look at the Ten Commandments as a marriage proposal, it really helps us.
“You should have no other Gods before me” - that makes sense. If we're going to be married - I'm going to be it. I'm going to be the ‘one and only’.