“You're not going to carry graven images, or any likeness of anything under heaven or under earth.” You're going to marry me, I'm going to be the one and only - and you're not going to carry pictures of your old boyfriends.
“Remember the Sabbath day, and keep it holy”. If you're going to be married to me, I expect one day in seven to be just between you and me - which is good marriage advice. One day in seven is just between you and me.
And the marriage feast - there's this feast, the Seven Feasts; it says: “these are my appointed feasts”.
In Hebrew it says: “these are my rehearsal feasts”. Before you have a wedding, you have wedding rehearsal. The Bible ends with the “marriage supper of the lambs”! He's like: seven times a year, we're going to practice this: once a week; and seven times a year - we're going to get together, and it's just going to be Me and you. It's going to be our weekend together - which is really cool.
“Don't use my name in vain”. If you marry me, you've got a Power of Attorney to sign my name - but don't put my name on things that I wouldn't. So this ketubah comes down.
In Exodus 20, the Ten Commandments are given; so if we've got: Lakah; Segullah; Mikveh; and Ketubah - then next comes... Chuppah!
Exodus 20:18 - “When the people saw the thunder and lightning, heard the trumpet, and saw the mountain in smoke, they trembled with fear!”
They're seeing 3 things: Thunder; Lightning; and Billows of Smoke; and they're hearing 1 thing: Trumpets.
How do you see thunder? You can't! In Strong's Concordance, it's the word ‘Kole’ - which in every other instance in the Bible is translated: ‘voices’ or ‘languages’. So they look up and they see: ‘languages’; or they see ‘voices inside lightning’.
The word ‘lightning’ is the word ‘glorified fire’. It's the same word that is used with the burning bush.
So they look up and see ‘languages inside fire’. We see this again in Acts 2 - on the same day, just way later.
They see ‘languages inside fire’; and it says they saw ‘billows of smoke’ – spelt with the word ‘chuppah’.
They're standing at the base of the mountain, the Ketubah comes down; then God creates this giant marriage altar, and they look up and they see languages from the sky. Those languages are saying: “will you marry me”?
They stayed at a distance and said: “speak to us yourself Moses, and we will listen - but do not have God speak to us, or we will die”. After hearing the Ketubah - they didn't think they could live up to it. They said: no, no, no, we don't want this. We can't live up to this. We'll die! We can't do this!
The rabbis taught that at this point: “God proposed to the whole of creation through 70,000 tongues of fire”.
In the mid 1800s, there's this sociologist from England, who went to Rangoon, Burma. This is in the mid 1800s - like before electricity okay. When you're studying a social group of people the first question you ask normally is: “who is your God?” - because you've got to learn their belief system. They said we serve a God named ‘Yah’ who spoke to us from fire in the sky thousands of years ago. Like whoa! 70,000 tongues of fire - but they rejected the proposal of God.
They rejected it because they thought they weren't worthy; so God said: every year, on this day, you've got to remember this - and it was called the ‘Feast of Weeks’ or the ‘Feast of Pentecost’.
It's the only place in the whole Bible that they were commanded to bring an offering of bread made with yeast. Every other place in the bible, they had to eat unleavened bread; but on that day, they had to bring an offering of bread to God - made with leaven.