Last evening as Jonathan and I sat around unwinding, he had a few thoughts from his morning Torah study he wanted to share.  As we were looking at verses in Deuteronomy 4, I suddenly had a brainstorm.  First, the verses,

¹² Then the Lord spoke to you from the midst of the fire; you heard the sound of words, but you saw no form—only a voice. ¹³ So He declared to you His covenant which He commanded you to perform, that is, the Ten ^[a]Commandments; and He wrote them on two tablets of stone. ¹⁴ The Lord commanded me at that time to teach you statutes and judgments, that you might perform them in the land where you are going over to possess it.

We noted several things…  The covenant is to be performed.  I.e., maintaining it is an action, not a belief.  (Faith without works is dead…)  The covenant is not just the Ten Words, as Christendom often teaches, but rather included much more than that.  Just refer to Exodus 20-23.  And, the covenant was to be performed not just before crossing the Jordan, but afterward as well.  (I’ll write on some of this later in terms of the symbolism and Christendom’s understanding of ‘crossing Jordan.’)  But something else stood out!

You may recall a very interesting and important post about eban, or אבן as a picture of Messiah.  After that, I wrote a follow-up post with more references to ‘stone,’ but always in connection with ‘uncut’ stone.  Of course, Messiah is/was not to have human works  added to Him.

So, when I saw ‘stone’ in the context of this passage, because it was graven with the commandments, I hesitated only to show Jonathan what I had discovered last year about uncut stone.  Then it hit me!!

The stone tablets are another neat picture of Messiah!!  Consider:

• The stone tablets were entirely the creation and engraving of YHVH.  (Ex. 32:16)  Yeshua is the begotten of the Father.
• The stone tablets displayed/revealed the Word.
• The ‘stone tablets,’ in two parts, reveal the Father and the Son, both in the word ‘evan’ and in their absolute unity of message and commands.  (If you’ve seen Me, you’ve seen the Father.)
• Israel broke the covenant resulting in the stone tablets being broken.  (Ex. 32:19; Picture of Messiah broken for Israel.)
• As Messiah was resurrected and now stands in the Presence, so the stone tablets were ‘resurrected’ and placed in the Ark of the Covenant in the Presence.
• The ‘resurrected tablets’ did not reveal a different set of commandments, just as Messiah does not.

One item we pondered/puzzled is that the second set of tablets was cut by Moshe, not YHVH, which surely is a picture in the remez.  YHVH does write upon them…  (Ex. 34:1-5)  I still have to think through the possible implications, but may be a picture of YHVH writing upon our hearts the commandments.  I’m just not sure how it fits in the picture we see above.

Thoughts?  Or, do you see more connection?

Shalom.