God’s people have finally made it out of Egypt thanks to God’s mighty work. Between the plagues and a crazy miracle at the sea, the soon-to-be nation of Israel is setting out toward the Promised Land, and where do they find themselves?

In a desert. Great.

Immediately upon getting to the other side, the people break out into amazing songs of worship (Exodus 15), yet just sentences later, they are complaining.

It’s hot. There’s no water. What are we going to eat? Are we there yet?

Now, these are some legit questions—we do have physical needs that need to be met to stay alive, yet the people seem to think that, while God can rescue them from an evil empire, God can’t meet their daily needs. They have the audacity to say, “You have brought us out into the desert to die.” Right… it as if God did all that just so that they would die in the desert?

This is where the rubber of faith really meets the road. It is easy to turn to God and trust God when things are so big and so completely out of our control that it would take divine intervention to reach a resolution. So, we ask God to help us in emergencies, when people are sick, when we encounter extreme poverty and suffering, and countless other dramatic situations. Yet, once we are free of them and feel the slightest thirst or hunger pang, what is our first impulse? Do we trust God to take care of us, even in the small stuff?

God provided for the people food each and every day. The catch was, they had to gather just enough for the day but no more. They had to trust that there would be more tomorrow. If anyone showed a lack of faith in God by gathering too much or keeping some for the next day, they awoke to find it rotting. There was one exception—the Sabbath! The day before the Sabbath, the miracle food would be plentiful enough and last long enough so that no one had to do the work of collecting it on the Sabbath. It is as if God took the Sabbath seriously…

Anyhoo—the people of God end up at Mount Sinai, and here the presence of God calls Moses and the people into covenant. They would be holy (literally set apart), and they are called to be priests to the rest of the world. The job of a priest is to connect God to the people and the people to God. Thus, it was the job of the nation to connect God with the world and vice versa. This leads to all kinds of questions about how we can act as a set apart people with the calling to connect our campus with God.

This, of course, leads to the Ten Commandments in chapter 20. Instead of going into depth, the summarize: there are five commandments that deal with our relationship with God and five that deal with our relationship with other people. We are to focus on and care about both!

Lastly, it is easy to see rules and commandments, especially in a religious setting, in a negative light. Sure, there’s nothing outrageous in the Ten Commandments—not killing is a really good thing. Yet, we have this way of twisting rules and regulations to become overbearing and discouraging. We begin to feel that God has overwhelmingly unrealistic expectations and wants to keep us from having fun. But what if we viewed them differently—whether it be the Ten Commandments or instructions from the New Testament?

What if we looked at them more like the rules of football? These rules actually create a safe space within which we have virtually limitless creativity. They are meant, not to take away the fun, but to enrich the experience by keeping us from doing stuff that would hurt ourselves, others, or our relationship with God. Passages like the Ten Commandments are like God’s way of saying, “You want to be in relationship with me and with others? Well, here’s the best possible way to do that.”