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Exodus 34

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1 And Jehovah said unto Moses, Hew thee two tables of stone like unto the first: and I will write upon the tables the words that were on the first tables, which thou brakest.

2 And be ready by the morning, and come up in the morning unto mount Sinai, and present thyself there to me on the top of the mount.

3 And no man shall come up with thee; neither let any man be seen throughout all the mount; neither let the flocks nor herds feed before that mount.

4 And he hewed two tables of stone like unto the first; and Moses rose up early in the morning, and went up unto mount Sinai, as Jehovah had commanded him, and took in his hand two tables of stone.

5 And Jehovah descended in the cloud, and stood with him there, and proclaimed the name of Jehovah.

6 And Jehovah passed by before him, and proclaimed, Jehovah, Jehovah, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abundant in lovingkindness and truth,

7 keeping lovingkindness for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin; and that will by no means clear [the guilty], visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children, and upon the children's children, upon the third and upon the fourth generation.

8 And Moses made haste, and bowed his head toward the earth, and worshipped.

9 And he said, If now I have found favor in thy sight, O Lord, let the Lord, I pray thee, go in the midst of us; for it is a stiffnecked people; and pardon our iniquity and our sin, and take us for thine inheritance.

10 And he said, Behold, I make a covenant: before all thy people I will do marvels, such as have not been wrought in all the earth, nor in any nation; and all the people among which thou art shall see the work of Jehovah; for it is a terrible thing that I do with thee.

11 Observe thou that which I command thee this day: behold, I drive out before thee the Amorite, and the Canaanite, and the Hittite, and the Perizzite, and the Hivite, and the Jebusite.

12 Take heed to thyself, lest thou make a covenant with the inhabitants of the land whither thou goest, lest it be for a snare in the midst of thee:

13 but ye shall break down their altars, and dash in pieces their pillars, and ye shall cut down their Asherim;

14 for thou shalt worship no other god: for Jehovah, whose name is Jealous, is a jealous God:

15 lest thou make a covenant with the inhabitants of the land, and they play the harlot after their gods, and sacrifice unto their gods, and one call thee and thou eat of his sacrifice;

16 and thou take of their daughters unto thy sons, and their daughters play the harlot after their gods, and make thy sons play the harlot after their gods.

17 Thou shalt make thee no molten gods.

18 The feast of unleavened bread shalt thou keep. Seven days thou shalt eat unleavened bread, as I commanded thee, at the time appointed in the month Abib; for in the month Abib thou camest out from Egypt.

19 All that openeth the womb is mine; and all thy cattle that is male, the firstlings of cow and sheep.

20 And the firstling of an ass thou shalt redeem with a lamb: and if thou wilt not redeem it, then thou shalt break its neck. All the first-born of thy sons thou shalt redeem. And none shall appear before me empty.

21 Six days thou shalt work, but on the seventh day thou shalt rest: in plowing time and in harvest thou shalt rest.

22 And thou shalt observe the feast of weeks, [even] of the first-fruits of wheat harvest, and the feast of ingathering at the year's end.

23 Three times in the year shall all thy males appear before the Lord Jehovah, the God of Israel.

24 For I will cast out nations before thee, and enlarge thy borders: neither shall any man desire thy land, when thou goest up to appear before Jehovah thy God three times in the year.

25 Thou shalt not offer the blood of my sacrifice with leavened bread; neither shall the sacrifice of the feast of the passover be left unto the morning.

26 The first of the first-fruits of thy ground thou shalt bring unto the house of Jehovah thy God. Thou shalt not boil a kid in its mother's milk.

27 And Jehovah said unto Moses, Write thou these words: for after the tenor of these words I have made a covenant with thee and with Israel.

28 And he was there with Jehovah forty days and forty nights; he did neither eat bread, nor drink water. And he wrote upon the tables the words of the covenant, the ten commandments.

29 And it came to pass, when Moses came down from mount Sinai with the two tables of the testimony in Moses' hand, when he came down from the mount, that Moses knew not that the skin of his face shone by reason of his speaking with him.

30 And when Aaron and all the children of Israel saw Moses, behold, the skin of his face shone; and they were afraid to come nigh him.

31 And Moses called unto them; and Aaron and all the rulers of the congregation returned unto him: and Moses spake to them.

32 And afterward all the children of Israel came nigh: and he gave them in commandment all that Jehovah had spoken with him in mount Sinai.

33 And when Moses had done speaking with them, he put a veil on his face.

34 But when Moses went in before Jehovah to speak with him, he took the veil off, until he came out; and he came out, and spake unto the children of Israel that which he was commanded.

35 And the children of Israel saw the face of Moses, that the skin of Moses' face shone: and Moses put the veil upon his face again, until he went in to speak with him.

   

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Exodus 23:24

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24 Thou shalt not bow down to their gods, nor serve them, nor do after their works; but thou shalt utterly overthrow them, and break in pieces their pillars.

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Arcana Coelestia # 7290

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7290. 'When he says, Perform a wonder' means and they therefore wish to receive proof. This is clear from the meaning of 'wonders and signs' as proofs or corroborations of truths, dealt with in 3900, 6870. With regard to the wonders and signs described in what follows from here onwards, it should be realized that they were performed among the kind of people whose worship was external and who had no wish to know about internal worship. For those whose worship was like that had to be coerced by means of external things. This explains why miracles were performed among the Israelite and Jewish people, for their worship was entirely external and not at all internal. What is more, since they had no liking for internal worship, external worship was the kind they were required to engage in, to the end that they might represent things of a holy nature within their external observances. This would establish a channel of communication with heaven as if through something of a Church. For correspondences, representatives, and meaningful signs link the natural world to the spiritual world. This then was why so many miracles were performed among that nation.

[2] But no miracles are performed among those whose worship is internal, that is, who have charity and faith residing with them, since miracles are harmful to them; for miracles compel one to believe, and what one is compelled to believe does not remain but is thrown to the winds. The internal constituents of their worship, which are faith and charity, must be implanted in freedom; for then they make them their own and what they make their own in this way remains, whereas what is implanted under compulsion remains outside the internal man, in the external man. This is because nothing passes into the internal man except by way of ideas seen in the understanding, that is, seen rationally, since the soil which receives what is implanted in the internal man is enlightened reason. This is why no miracles are performed at the present day. One may also conclude from this that they are harmful, for they compel a person to believe something and give the external man fixed ideas about the truth of it. If after that the internal man refuses to believe what the miracles have proved, the internal man and the external become opposed to and clash with each other, and when at length the ideas implanted under the influence of miracles are driven to the winds, falsity becomes joined to truth, that is, profanation occurs. This shows how harmful miracles are at the present day in a Church in which the internal qualities constituting worship have been made known. This is also what is meant by the Lord's words to Thomas,

Because you have seen Me, Thomas, you have believed; blessed are those who do not see yet believe. John 20:29.

This shows too that they are 'blessed', those whose belief is not induced by miracles.

[3] But miracles are not harmful to those whose worship is external, devoid of anything internal, for with them no opposition between the internal man and the external is possible, nor thus any clashing, nor consequently any profanation. The fact that miracles do not make any contribution towards faith becomes quite clear from the miracles performed among the Israelite people in Egypt and in the wilderness; those miracles had no effect whatever on them. Although those people had not long before seen so many miracles in Egypt, after which they had seen the Sea Suph divided, and the Egyptians drowned in it, with the pillar of cloud going before them by day and the pillar of fire by night, and with the manna raining from heaven each day; and although they had seen Mount Sinai smoking and heard Jehovah speaking from it, and other miracles besides, nevertheless, while yet in the midst of such wonders, they fell completely away from faith, and from worship of Jehovah to calf-worship, Exodus 32:1-end. From this one may see what effect miracles have.

[4] They would have even less effect at the present day when nobody acknowledges that there is anything which has its origin in the spiritual world, and when anything miraculous that occurs and is not attributed to natural causes is refused recognition. For a refusal to recognize that the Divine flows in and governs on earth reigns everywhere. If at the present day therefore one who belongs to the Church were to witness utterly Divine miracles, he would first deduce that they had a natural origin and sully them with this, then dismiss them as fantasies, and finally mock whoever attributed them to the Divine and not to natural causes. The fact that miracles have no effect at all is also clear from the Lord's words in Luke,

If they do not hear Moses and the Prophets, neither will they be persuaded if someone rises from the dead. Luke 16:31.

  
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Thanks to the Swedenborg Society for the permission to use this translation.