Before the Lord hands the tablets over He issues another reminder about observing the Sabbath. "Then the Lord said to Moses, 'Say to the Israelites, 'You must observe My Sabbaths. This will be a sign between Me and you for the generations to come, so you may know that I am the Lord, who makes you holy.'" (Exodus 31:12-13)
Something important we need to note is that it's not the observance of the Sabbath that makes the people holy. It's not the keeping of any law or commandment that makes them holy. It's the Lord who makes them holy. No one but the Lord can consecrate the heart, which King David admitted in a prayer of repentance: "Create in me a pure heart, O God, and renew a steadfast spirit within me." (Psalm 51:10) Church attendance is good for us as long as we remember that just warming a spot on the pew isn't saving our souls. The Apostle James pointed this out when he warned his readers, "Do not merely listen to the word, and so deceive yourselves. Do what it says." (James 1:22) If we attend church we're going to hear the word of God but unless we allow it to have its way with our hearts we aren't going to benefit from it. Not everyone in the church is of the church. There are other reasons why a person might attend church other than having faith in the Lord. If they continue to attend and hear the word of God preached over and over but don't yield their hearts to it, their hearts are still impure because church attendance doesn't make them right with God----allowing God to transform them from the inside out (from the heart) is what makes them right with God. In this same way, the Israelites are to observe the Sabbath not because observing the Sabbath saves them but because observing the Sabbath honors the God who saves them.
"Observe the Sabbath, because it is holy to you. Anyone who desecrates it is to be put to death; those who do any work on that day must be cut off from their people. For six days work is to be done, but the seventh day is a day of sabbath rest, holy to the Lord. Whoever does any work on the Sabbath day is to be put to death." (Exodus 31:14-15) The observance of the Sabbath is so important for the people's sake that violating it leads to very harsh penalties such as death or excommunication. The Lord doesn't specify here what He considers a "desecration" of the Sabbath, but my background study indicates that many mainstream scholars believe this desecration means carrying out any type of idolatrous rituals. If that's the case then it would seem that the death penalty could be carried out upon anyone caught doing any of the following things on the Sabbath: praying to a pagan god, bringing an offering to a pagan god, observing any of the religious rites of the heathen tribes of Canaan or of Egypt where they so recently sojourned, or engaging in any type of occult practice including astrology, fortunetelling, or acting as a medium in an attempt to contact the spirit world.
Imposing the death penalty may sound like an extreme measure to us, but I think we have to keep in mind that idolatry leads to a far worse penalty than physical death. Idolatry leads to the death of the soul (not literal death but spiritual death: eternal excommunication from the presence of God) and that it may have been necessary to impose the death of the body upon anyone polluting the Israelite community with false doctrines. If false doctrines were allowed to creep in, more and more people would have gone astray and would have spent their lives alienated from God and would have had to spend eternity separated from Him. If one person in the community had to die to prevent many more from being lost and undone, then that is a penalty that is judged proper and fair by a holy God who wants no one to perish but wants everyone to come to repentance. (2 Peter 3:9) If a wicked, subversive doctrine can only be eradicated from the community by ridding the community of the idolatrous person perpetrating this deception, then that is what God says they must do. Thankfully we are not called to carry out such a penalty under the new covenant, but during the years when Israel was moving into and taking over the promised land from the idolatrous tribes there, they had to be constantly on guard against falling into idolatry themselves. They would never have become a nation at all if idolatry had been allowed to take root and grow, so the Lord gives them permission to uproot it wherever they find it.
The penalty for things that are considered "work" was also death in the early years of Israel's formation as a nation. Later in the Bible we'll get into what was considered "work" on the Sabbath. Certain tasks were necessary even on the Sabbath. People and animals still had to drink water and eat food on the Sabbath. The basic needs of people and animals still had to be taken care of and various small tasks had to be carried out in order to supply these needs. Mercy was intended to supersede the law, so a person wasn't to let his fellow man or his farm animals to go thirsty or hungry on the Sabbath. But by the time Jesus was born, the religious leaders had added to the list of prohibited activities until a person could barely do anything on the Sabbath---not even helping a person in desperate need. They had broken down and taken apart every single aspect of the law until they were worshiping the law more than they worshiped the God who gave it. They would go out of their way to observe all the stipulations they'd added to God's law, even if that meant denying mercy. This is why in the New Testament we regularly find them criticizing Jesus for healing people on the Sabbath and this is why we find Him calling them hypocrites. The religious leaders, of all people, should have been loving their fellow man and showing mercy to their fellow man. But instead they had lost the heart of the law and were concerned only with the letter of the law. They had let go of their personal relationship with God in favor of legalism. They had lost their compassion for their fellow man in favor of continually finding fault with their fellow man.
"The Israelites are to observe the Sabbath, celebrating it for the generations to come as a lasting covenant. It will be a sign between Me and the Israelites forever, for in six days the Lord made the heavens and the earth, and on the seventh day He rested and was refreshed." (Exodus 31:16-17) The Lord doesn't grow weary, according to the Scriptures, so He didn't need to "rest" in the way humans need to rest. He took the Sabbath day off because His creation work was complete. God was not finished working on behalf of human beings but His work of creating the universe and everything and everyone in it was finished. He took the Sabbath off to bask in the beauty of what He had created and to focus His sights lovingly on mankind. So as an example to us He rested on the Sabbath, for He knew if we didn't set aside a day of the week to focus on Him and to study His word and to grow in our relationship with Him, we might never set aside time to do these things. Our lives are very busy. We could find something to occupy us every minute of every day. It would be easy for us to drift away from spending any time with the Lord at all, so He set an example for us to follow so we would consider one day of the week holy.
Think of this: the God who created us and who loves us and who focuses all His attention and energy on us only asks for one day of the week where we give our attention back to Him! He deserves so much more than that from us, yet He doesn't demand it. What a precious display of humility this is on His part! I see God the Son in this attitude, don't you? The Lord Jesus Christ said that anyone who had seen Him had seen the Father (John 14:9) and right here we get a glimpse of what He meant. Everything the Lord Jesus said and did was a display of the character of God the Father, and here we see that it wasn't only God the Son who had a humble attitude. God the Father, Almighty God, the Most High God, the Everlasting God, the Maker of all things, humbly asks us for just one day of the week to set aside all the things of the daily grind and focus our minds on Him. How can we not do this simple thing? It takes a great deal of arrogance to be unwilling to set aside some time out of our week to focus on the living God. It takes a great deal of arrogance to call upon Him only when we need help and to ignore Him the rest of the time.
"When the Lord finished speaking to Moses on Mount Sinai, He gave him the two tablets of the covenant law, the tablets of stone inscribed by the finger of God." (Exodus 31:18) Moses is about to head back down the mountain with the tablets but all is not well in the camp. Things have taken a very bad turn while he's been gone and we'll take a look at what has happened and we'll discuss some reasons why it happened.
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