Exodus 34:1

Hew thee two tables of stone.

The renewal of the two tables

I. That the moral law is perpetually binding. Having been broken, it must be renewed.

II. That the renewal of the moral law when broken entails duties unknown before. “Hew thee two tables of stone”; “and he hewed two tables of stone.” This fact is very typical and suggestive.

1. In the first inscription of the moral law upon man’s heart, the preparation and the writing were exclusively the work of God. When our first parents awoke to consciousness, the “fleshy tables” were found covered with the “oracles of God.”

2. When those tables were defaced and those oracles transgressed, the work of preparation fell largely upon man. Ever afterwards man had to prepare himself by acts of penitence and faith--not excluding Divine help, of course--but nevertheless those acts are acts of man.

3. But this renewal of the Divine law is accomplished in such a way as to deprive man of all ground of glorying, and so as to ascribe all the glory to God. The tables were of plain stone, all their embellishments were by the Divine hand.

III. That when the moral law is broken, God graciously offers to renew it upon man’s compliance with the revealed condition. So when man by repentance and faith “puts off the old man and puts on the new,” he is renewed in the image of Him that created him, on which the moral law is inscribed (Colossians 3:9).

IV. That these conditions should be complied with--

1. Speedily. “Early in the morning.”

2. Personally. This great work is a transaction between God and the individual particularly concerned.

3. Patiently. Moses waited again forty days and forty nights.

(1) Do not hurry the work over. What is being done is being done for eternity.

(2) Don’t despond if the work is not progressing as rapidly as you might wish. If God is writing on your heart, let that be your comfort, and let God use His own time. Learn--

1. The value of the moral law.

2. The importance of having that law not only on stone or paper, but in the heart.

3. The necessity of a public and practical exhibition and interpretation of that law in the life. (J. V. Burn.)

God re-writing the law

Can you think of a course more merciful than this? “Bring two tables of stone just like the first, and I will write it over again; I, God, will write over again the very words that were on the first tables that thou brakest in pieces.” There is no mercy like the mercy of the Lord; I never find any tenderness like His tenderness. You remember some years ago George Peabody gave half a million of money to the London poor; and I think some eighteen thousand people are sheltered in the houses that have sprung out of that splendid charity. I remember that when Peabody’s charity had awakened England to a sense of his goodness, the Queen of England rose equal to the occasion, and she offered this plain American citizen some title, and he declined the honour. And then she, with a woman’s delicacy of insight, and with more than queenly dignity, inquired if there was anything that Peabody would accept; and he said, Yes, there was, if the Queen would only write him a letter with her own hand; he was going to pay a last visit to his native land across the Atlantic, and he should like to take it to his birthplace, so that at any time, if bitterness should arise between these two nations, his countrymen could come and see that letter, and they would remember that England’s Queen had written it to a plain American citizen. The Queen of England said she would write him a letter, and she would do more than that--she would sit for her portrait to be painted, and he should take that with the letter; and she put on the Marie Stuart cap which, I think, she had only worn, perhaps, twice since the death of the Prince Consort, and she sat day after day in her robes of state, and the painter painted one of the finest portraits of the Queen that has ever been executed. When it was finished she presented it to Mr. Peabody, and he took it, with the Queen’s letter, away to his birthplace yonder. Now, suppose George Peabody, in some fit of forgetfulness, had torn the Queen’s letter up, and flung it into the fire, and dashed the portrait down and broken it to fragments; and suppose that, after that, somebody had told her Majesty that George Peabody was penitent, do you think she would have written him the letter over again? do you think she would have sat again for another portrait to be painted, just like the first one? Who can tell? Yet our Father in heaven, if you have broken the tables of your covenant with Him, bring your broken heart back again to His feet, and He will renew the covenant. (T. Guttery.)