Tonight, in Family Scripture Study, we read that, while waiting to receive the commandments from God, Moses waited on Mount Sinai for 40 days. That sounds like a long time, if not for him, then certainly for the Israelites. After a certain period of time, I think I'd start to wonder if I was really in the right place, if I was really doing what God wanted me to do. I might even start to wonder if I had somehow gotten the wrong mountain. 40 days is a long time to wait for an answer. Now, Moses' time might have been filled with conversing with angels or with the Lord, for all we know, but the Israelites just had to wait for Moses to return, and I'm not sure it's surprising that they started looking for other ways to fill the void left by their missing religious figure. I wonder how long I'd wait at the foot of Mount Sinai before I made myself a golden calf.
God sometimes asks us to wait, for periods of time that may seem unreasonable to us and to our human timescale. 40 days were apparently a few too many for the Israelites, but perhaps we'll be wiser. We each need to decide and find out for ourselves how long we'll be willing to sit at the feet of Mount Sinai, waiting for the next message from God to come. We can hope we'll hold out longer than the Israelites did, but the only way to really know how long we'd wait for God's message to come is to actually sit and wait for it.
No comments:
Post a Comment