When we say something is written in stone we are speaking about its’ having the quality of permanence. Did you know there is one part of God’s Word that was originally written in stone and by the very finger of God Himself? And when that portion of God’s Word was destroyed by none other than Moses, God rewrote that portion and again wrote it in stone with His own finger!
“And He (God) gave unto Moses, when he had made an end of communing with him upon Mount Sinai, two tables of testimony, tables of stone, WRITTEN WITH THE FINGER OF GOD” (Exodus 31:18). “And the tables were the work of God, and the writing was the writing of God, graven upon the tables” (Exodus 32:16).
These stone tablets were smashed to pieces by a frustrated Moses shortly after he had received them from the hand of God, as “it came to pass he came nigh unto the camp that he saw the calf (the golden idol calf that Aaron had made), and the dancing. And Moses anger waxed hot, and he cast the tablets out of his hands, and broke them beneath the mount” (Exodus 32:19).
“And the Lord said unto Moses, ‘Hew thee two tables of stone like unto the first, and I WILL WRITE UPON THESE TABLES the words that were in the first tables, which you broke'” (Exodus 34:1).
And just what was written on those two tablets? “And He (God) wrote upon the tables the words of the covenant, THE TEN COMMANDMENTS” (See Exodus 34:28).
Notice that after smashing the first two tablets, Moses was ordered by God to carve out two replacement tablets, yet still God Himself re-wrote the Ten Commandments with His own finger!
There is one other interesting and very revealing circumstance involved in the giving of the Ten Commandments: “And the Lord spoke unto you out of the midst of the fire (on top of Mount Sinai). YOU HEARD THE VOICE of the words, but saw no similitude (no shape, no physical manifestation), only YOU HEARD A VOICE. And He declared unto you His covenant, which He commanded you to perform, even Ten Commandments, and He wrote them upon two tables of stone” (Deuteronomy 4:12-13).
The entire nation of Israel stood transfixed as the voice of their Creator God boomed from Mount Sinai the Ten Commandments one after another. But a voice becomes only a memory when no more is spoken, so God, with His own finger, wrote the Ten Commandments on one of the few substances that can last through the ages – solid stone!
Thousands of years later when Jesus Christ began His public ministry, in His first recorded sermon, He begins citing the Ten Commandments and says plainly and clearly that as long as heaven and earth endures not one iota of the Ten Commandments will ever be changed! (See Matthew 5:17-28).
So, folks, common sense screams in my ear that there must be a great and awesome deceiving spirit power at work to convince good-hearted, clean-living, well-intentioned Christians that one of the Ten Commandments was definitely changed, the only commandment that God with His own finger prefaced with the word REMEMBER, “remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy!” And, of course, Satan has scriptures he directs men and women to recall that seemingly, on the surface, tend to show that God did change the Sabbath to Sunday. He blinds them to the fact that God Himself wrote the Ten Commandments twice with His own finger. He blinds them to the fact that the oral recitation of the Ten Commandments was the ONLY time Israel heard the voice of God. He blinds them to the fact that the fourth commandment, the Sabbath commandment is the only one of the ten God emphasized must be remembered. And he blinds them to Jeremiah 17, Isaiah 56, Matthew 5, and a host of other scriptures that clearly reveal God’s holy, eternal Sabbath can never be changed in any way. He blinds them to Peter’s written warning that the apostle Paul wrote some things not easily understood and that those who neglected using the Hebrew scriptures to formulate their doctrine and spiritually unstable would be led to believe Paul was saying something he was not saying at all in some of the epistles he wrote. (See 2 Peter 3:15-17).
So, does Satan really exist? Is he still at work today in this modern space-age world blinding and deceiving intelligent, sincere, God-fearing men and women? Indeed, He does exist and he most certainly is still doing his thing today all around this planet 24/7. We need to take heed to one other warning given us by the apostle Peter: “Be sober, be vigilant, because YOUR adversary the devil, as a roaring lion, walks about, seeking whom (anyone, anywhere, at any time) he may devour” (See I Peter 5:8). Fail to heed that warning and you will pay dearly for it just as dearly and quickly as you would suffer loss should you fail to heed a posted warning sign saying, “Bridge Out Just Ahead.”
Christ’s Faithful Servant (Galatians 1:10-12),
Donald Wiley