This is the covenant God made with Israel: He made promises to them, and they made promises to Him. It’s a worthwhile exercise to make note of all that God promised them and all that they promised to God. Don’t forget to include the Ten Commandments in the “everything He has said” that the people promised.
We will not understand Old Testament covenant ceremony without teaching on the subject. I’ll limit my comments to the fact that blood was part of the solemn ceremony. Neither God nor the people would take that lightly because it meant the death of an animal. So the people entered into binding covenant with God, and then Moses headed up the mountain to meet with God to receive instructions for what their relationship with God would look like – how they would worship Him.
Moses was gone forty days receiving these instructions. That’s what the next seven chapters are about. Those seven chapters feel like a long time because they aren’t the most interesting reading to us, and so the reader tends to miss how the events unfolded. You might want to take a peek at chapter 32, where the instructions end and the story picks up again to see what happens next. What happened to their commitment to God?! Does that teach you anything about yourself?
This description of God in chapter 24 is important because there are few people who actually saw God, and their accounts add to our understanding of what God looks like. Do you wonder why it only describes what was under God’s feet, and not God Himself? My guess is that they didn’t have words to describe what they saw, and that was the best they could do.
That is a challenge to my perception of God. If He seems less than what He says He is, if He seems like less than enough or less than wonderful to me it’s because I don’t know Him well. There’s no way we can know Him by our own efforts or desires – knowledge of Him comes only by the way He says. He has given us ways to know Him, and if we don’t take advantage of them, we’ll not know Him. Making up our own ideas of Him is not knowing Him. No, He is beyond our ability to imagine just as He was beyond their ability to describe.
What do you learn about God from today’s readings? Please ask Him to show you something new about Him in these various revelations He gives of Himself.