- 8 - Travelling in a pillar of cloud, Christ led the Israelites, and out of the cloud he spoke to Moses, protecting the people from the pursuing hosts of Egypt. The good spirit world divided the waters of the sea and made the waves as a wall on the right hand of the people and on their left. Putting their trust in him who spoke from the pillar of cloud, the children of Israel fearlessly walked upon dry land in the midst of the sea. They received their first baptism unto Christ, with full faith in the ‘Angel of the Lord’, who was none other than Christ himself. God and Christ led Israel through the desert; at their behest the good spirit world brought forth water from the rock and provided manna. Hence Paul says, rightly: I Corinthians 10: 1-4: ‘I do not want to leave you in ignorance of the fact that our fathers were all under the protection of the cloud, and all passed through the sea; and all were baptized in the cloud and in the sea as followers of Moses; and all ate the same food and drank the same spiritual drink: for they drank from a spiritual rock that accompanied them, and the rock was Christ.’ God and Christ, as well as the good spirit world, gave the people whatever advice and instruction were necessary. It was God Himself who issued the Commandments on Mount Sinai. “The long sojourn in the desert was necessary in order that the people might be tested, to show whether their faith and belief in God were strong enough to enable them to withstand the perils that would threaten them from the pagan inhabitants of the country that they were later to take over. It was imperative that this people preserve its faith in God, since otherwise all the previous efforts would have been in vain. Still another menace to their faithfulness to God had to be eliminated. It was greed for worldly belongings and excessive attachment to material things, which tend to drive men into the arms of evil. Christ resorted to every measure that would prevent, or at least diminish, these dangers, taking radical steps to cure his people of these failings by enacting laws whereby the Israelites, as the Hebrews eventually came to be known, • were obliged to pay a tithe. • Furthermore, they had to offer their first fruits, or to redeem these with some other offering. • and in addition, they were called upon to make numerous sacrifices of beasts and fruits, such as burnt-offerings, meal-offerings, peace-offerings, sin-offerings and trespass-offerings, for which only unblemished gifts were accepted. • When harvesting, they were forbidden to reap their fields completely or to gather up the gleanings of the harvest; they had to leave them for the poor and for strangers. • Every seventh year they were not allowed to till their land. • Every fiftieth year they had to ‘return unto every man his former property’.
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