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Intro
Narrator / Intro
Welcome to Read the Bible in a Year with Matt and Hannah, a weekly podcast from Fairfax Bible Church where we explore Scripture together, uncovering its themes and design patterns. We’re glad you’re here.
Here are your hosts, Matt and Hannah.
Matt
All righty. We are here. This is Read the Bible in a Year with Matt and Hannah. This is episode four.
Hi, Hannah. How are you?
Hannah
Good. How are you, Matt?
Matt
All right. All right. So this week we cover Exodus 13 through 34, if you’re keeping up with us on the Bible reading. You also would have read Psalms 22 through 28.
I think it’s a lot of fun because these psalms correspond really well to the Exodus passages we’re reading. I won’t belabor that right now. That’s a little bit nerdy, but it just brings me joy.
And we had such a good time last week with our friend Angelique.
Hannah
Yeah, we—
Matt
—did guest with us. What a wonderful conversation. We have another guest today. Do you think people will be excited about this?
Hannah
I think so. I think most people probably know our guest.
Matt
Well, why don’t you introduce him, just so people don’t have to wait any longer?
Hannah
Okay. Well, this week we have the honor of having Pastor Matthew Nicosia with us. Welcome, Matthew.
Matt
Hello.
Matthew
Hello, my friends. It’s so good to be a part of your conversation here today. I’m really excited to talk and nerd out about the Bible with our friends who’ve been reading with us.
It’s been a great journey here for the first month of 2026.
Matt
Yeah. Well, Matthew, I know people know you, but they don’t know everything about you. You obviously have a prominent role in our church.
As a Bible reader, what’s your story? How do you like to read the Bible? What’s been your experience reading Scripture? I know you have theological education and you’re a pastor by trade, so you spend a lot of time in the Bible.
But just as a Bible reader, what’s your deal?
Matthew
Yeah, I think my deal is that I don’t like having big questions unanswered. There are times when I come across a big question and I don’t always have time to dig into it as deeply as I’d like.
But I also don’t just glaze over it and move on. I want to say, “You know what? Let’s try to find some reasonable answers to this.”
Over time, reading through the Bible from cover to cover several times has really helped me start to see those hyperlinks. And the more hyperlinks you see, the more they come alive to you, and you begin to connect the dots.
And for me, I’ll never forget there was one time in college. I earned a Bible exposition degree from The Master’s College in Southern California, and I had a project where I had to write a paper on the book of Hebrews.
I was so intimidated by Hebrews in the New Testament. It’s a pretty technical book.
But I’ll never forget spending one afternoon just reading through it in my dorm room. All my roommates were away at class, and I remember getting to certain parts in Hebrews where you see the beauty of what Jesus has done.
I remember tears rolling down my face, just being in awe of what God has done and how it’s revealed in Scripture.
I started running all over the dorm, saying, “Man, have you ever read this before?” And I think that was one of the first moments in my life where I really realized, this book is alive. It’s amazing, and I can’t get enough of it.
I’ve been on a journey like that ever since. That’s kind of my deal when it comes to reading Scripture.
Just falling in love with the God of this Word and being in awe of it. So that’s my deal.
Matt
Awesome. Well, I’m so glad you’re here. I really appreciate that we talked a little bit while getting the running order set up about some insights you have and some study you’re doing for our sermon series through Romans, and how that might feed into this conversation. I’m really excited to learn.
All right, I do have a little warm-up story, but I want to save that for just a second.
Hannah, can you catch us up so far? Where are we in the story? What’s happened so far, and where do we find ourselves now?
Hannah
Yeah. So as a reminder, last week we started the book of Exodus. The Israelites were in slavery in Egypt, and we were introduced to Moses. He himself was delivered through the chaotic waters of death as a baby.
Then God chooses him to lead his people through the chaotic waters of death by parting the Red Sea.
God liberates his people from slavery and death. Our reading this week begins with Israel in the wilderness after all of that has happened.
In the wilderness, they start complaining about food and water, but God continually provides for them. Then they arrive at Sinai, where Moses meets with God on top of the mountain and God establishes his covenant with Israel.
God lays out his covenant promises, which he is going to fulfill, and he lays out the covenant expectations, which Israel is supposed to fulfill. We see all of these laws. We see the tabernacle blueprints, which are patterned after Eden, and we’ll talk a little bit about that.
We also see instructions for the priests, who are supposed to mediate God’s presence.
And Israel agrees to all of these covenant commitments.
Matt
Enthusiastically.
Hannah
Enthusiastically. But while Moses is still up on the mountain, he’s there for forty days. The Israelites are at the base of the mountain, and they decide he’s been gone too long.
They break the very first two commandments God gave them by making a golden calf and worshiping it. And this is all led by Aaron, who is supposed to be the first high priest.
God naturally becomes angry, but Moses intercedes for Israel. He even offers his own life in their place. He appeals to God’s own character and promises.
So God does not give up on his covenant partnership with Israel. We conclude with God recommitting himself to that covenant.
Matt
There’s a lot.
Hannah
Yeah.
Matt
There’s a lot. I remember last week saying we could spend four hours talking about all of this, and we’re kind of in the same place again. There’s just so much here.
I want to start with this idea of covenant, or partnership, by telling a story. There’s some family lore about my great-grandfather. His name was Simeon Foster Rumba. This took place in western Pennsylvania, specifically Titusville, which was a major town during the oil boom in the early 1900s.
Apparently, he was one of these oil barons and had a lot of money. My grandfather grew up with a lot of privilege. Multiple cars, big houses, all of that.
Then one day, my great-grandfather’s business partner just disappeared. He emptied all the business accounts and vanished. I don’t think anyone even knows where he went.
My great-grandfather was left holding the bill. He had to make good with all the creditors, take responsibility for the business, and he ended up going bankrupt. My grandfather went from riches to rags, from incredible privilege and wealth to basically having to take care of himself by the age of fifteen.
That story has been passed down in my family, and I think about it sometimes when it comes to partnerships and relationships.
You can put all of your trust in someone and experience great success. But if that partner turns out to be unreliable, things can go very, very wrong.
I think about my poor great-grandfather, Simeon Foster. God love him. There are other funny stories about him I’ll share some other time. But I appreciate his integrity in making good on his obligations.
At the same time, my heart goes out to him, because he put his trust in someone who couldn’t come through. When you get a bad partner, the fallout can be devastating.
I’ve been thinking about that as I read this week’s passages. God is clearly ready to invest a lot in this partnership with the Israelites, his people. He wants to form a covenant with them, but they turn out to be very poor covenant partners.
And it doesn’t take long. It’s not a gradual decline. Almost immediately, they show themselves to be incomplete and incompetent in the partnership.
So this raises the idea of covenant. Matthew, one of the reasons I wanted to invite you onto this episode is because we’re making a bit of a transition here. We move from a narrative-heavy story with lots of action and movement into sections where the story slows down and we get long passages of laws and agreements.
I’d love for you and Hannah to talk about how we should approach these laws, especially in the context of covenant. One thing new Bible readers often struggle with is encountering a random law about oxen falling into ditches and wondering, “Should I be driving around looking for oxen and ditches so I can obey this?”
How should a relatively new Bible reader understand passages like these?
Matthew
Yeah, that’s a great question. And it’s a question Christians have been asking for millennia throughout the life of the church. Here we have Holy Scripture. We have the Bible in front of us. What do we do with such a large section of it that’s so reliant on understanding the Law of Moses?
From here on out, from our reading in Exodus through the rest of the Hebrew Scriptures and even beyond, you see the impact this covenant, the Law of Moses, has everywhere. You can’t just toss it aside. You really have to wrestle with it and ask, What was the significance of the Law of Moses as God gave it to the original audience?
What did it mean to the generations of Israelites who followed for hundreds of years? And then, as we open the New Testament, how do Jesus and his people look back on this covenant and on the Law of Moses?
When I was doing much of my training in seminary, and Hannah, I’m sure you’re encountering this too, one of the ways scholars talk about Scripture is in terms of continuity and discontinuity. Is there continuity between the Law of Moses and what comes after, or is there discontinuity?
How much carries over? How little carries over? Does any of it carry over? Does all of it carry over?
Think about it, Hannah. “Old Testament” and “New Testament” are really just words for Old Covenant and New Covenant. So understanding what is old, what is new, and how they relate to one another is absolutely vital to this conversation.
Hannah
Yeah, and just like you were teeing up, Matt, the covenant is all about partnership. That’s the theme you’re highlighting. And that partnership is rooted in the Eden ideal, where God chooses to partner with humanity to be his images or representatives, reflecting his character into the world.
So when we think about the law, we can’t separate it from that foundation of covenant partnership and what that partnership is meant to look like.
We’ve already seen two explicit covenants before this story. The covenant with Noah and the covenant with Abraham. Now we arrive at the covenant with Israel, mediated through Moses.
Covenants involve terms or vows. God promises certain things, and he expects certain commitments from his covenant partners. That’s the framework for understanding these laws.
Matthew
Yeah, and we see partnerships like this all the time. One of the most fundamental partnerships on a human level is marriage.
I’ve heard it described this way, and I like the language: God is almost like he’s taking vows with his people, and he’s expecting them to make vows back to him.
The sad part of the story, which we’ve seen illustrated so well in some of the Bible Project videos, is that image where God extends his hand in partnership. He does this with Adam, with Noah, with Abraham, with Israel through Moses, and later with David.
Over and over again, the partnership on the human side fails. And as we’ve been reading these past days and weeks, Israel fails in this partnership again and again.
So I don’t know if we want to stop there to set the table for understanding covenant and law, or if we want to move into the question of how much of the law applies to Matthew and Matt and Hannah here in Northern Virginia in 2026.
But I wanted to frame it within covenant first, because I think that’s really helpful.
Matt
Yeah, I do want to get into that. Because whether you’re relatively new to the Bible, or you’ve been reading it for a long time but still struggle with these passages, I want to help people think through what this means on a Monday morning.
But before we do that, if a covenant is a partnership, why does God even want a partner? If he’s really who he’s cracked up to be, why does he want to deal with us at all? What does he need us around for?
What does he need a partner for?
Matthew
Hannah said it so well before we got on here. God doesn’t need anything. He doesn’t need partners.
This covenant is another manifestation of God’s grace toward humanity. He created humanity to live in fellowship with him. He didn’t need it. He already existed in perfect fellowship within the Trinity. God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit.
Creation itself is an act of grace. And when God calls people into partnership with him, he’s inviting them to enjoy the fellowship that God himself enjoys.
He doesn’t need partners, but he graciously invites us into the task of partnering with him, of being part of this incredible mission where his glory shines throughout the world.
One of the most striking things is that one of the very first commitments in the Ten Commandments is that you shall not make images. And that’s not only because it’s wrong to bow down to objects made of metal or wood.
The deeper reason is that God has already created us to be his image bearers. We’re meant to image him in the world. When we create idols, it doesn’t just demean God, it demeans humanity. It says we’re unwilling or unable to be the image bearers we were called to be.
Instead, we hand that responsibility over to created things and bow down to them.
So God invites us into this partnership and says, “Through you, I’m going to image my goodness to the world.”
We still see little glimpses of this even in our fallen state. We see reflections of God’s shalom, kindness, compassion, and righteousness in people. And that’s part of what it means to bear his image.
It’s remarkable when you think about it, that God would entrust us with something like this. Who is this God who would invite us into such a partnership?
Matt
To the extent that I can wrap my head around this, and I’m genuinely asking, not just using a rhetorical device, it always comes back to God’s great love.
He is so full of steadfast love, his hesed, as Hannah could pronounce better than I can. Love wants to give. Love wants to be shared. God doesn’t have to do this, but he wants people to experience his love, to receive it, enjoy it, and live in it.
I think it’s a testimony to his great love that he wants to share his glory. He wants people to see who he is and experience him.
He’s so patient and gentle with us, even though he chose terrible partners. And honestly, we’re not much better on this side of things.
Matt
So to establish this covenant, God lays down what we’ve come to call law. In our modern context, when we hear the word “law,” we think of federal codes, state laws, and standards of behavior that help maintain order and protect society.
This is actually a biblical theme, bringing order out of chaos. Laws help sustain that order.
The most prominent example in the text is what we call the Ten Commandments in Exodus chapter 20. Most of us learned these in Sunday school. You might even be able to recite them in order. I’m not sure I still can.
But there’s more going on here than just ten random rules. These commandments tell us something about the covenant partnership God wants with his people.
They begin with laws oriented toward God himself. You shall have no other gods before me. Don’t divide your allegiance. Don’t create idols. As you said, Matthew, creating idols devalues not just God but ourselves, because we were called to be the image bearers.
Then we see commands about behavior. Do not murder. Do not steal. Some of these seem obvious, though maybe that’s an unfair assumption, since Cain apparently needed to be told not to murder someone.
So there’s clearly more happening here than just a list of rules. You mentioned earlier this idea of a moral law, something deeper beneath these commandments.
You can explain it better than I can. So tell the people.
Matthew
You’re sorry, I appreciate that. Yeah. So, like I mentioned before, this is a question that generations of God’s people have been wrestling with for hundreds, if not thousands, of years.
When we look at these laws, we have to ask ourselves: Are these Ten Commandments, and more broadly the Law of Moses, a full description of all of God’s law? Or is this God giving a version of his law to a certain group of people, at a certain time, for a certain purpose?
We just read this in Exodus chapter 19, before we even get to the Ten Commandments. God tells Israel, “You’re going to be my people.” In Exodus 19:5–6 he says:
“Now therefore, if you will indeed obey my voice and keep my covenant, you shall be my treasured possession among all peoples, for all the earth is mine; and you shall be to me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.”
Understanding what God is saying to that original audience is really important. God is saying, “I am giving you these commandments and these laws for this time because I’m going to set you in my place, the promised land.”
But what’s interesting is that even before God gives the Ten Commandments, God actually commends another person for obeying his law. If you go back to Genesis chapter 26, we read about Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. God reiterates the covenant with Abraham and then with Isaac. In Genesis 26:4–5 God says:
“I will multiply your offspring as the stars of heaven and will give to your offspring all these lands, and in your offspring all the nations of the earth shall be blessed, because Abraham obeyed my voice and kept my charge, my commandments, my statutes, and my laws.”
That should make us pause. What commandments did Abraham have? What law did Abraham have? And yet God commends him for being faithful and loyal, even while living among people who bowed down to other gods and idols.
So when I read Scripture, I see a law that is large, grand, and universal for all humanity. What we see beginning in Exodus 19 and continuing through Leviticus and the rest of the books of Moses is God making a covenant with Israel for a specific time, place, and purpose.
If we assume the Law of Moses is the entirety of God’s law, we’ll miss the point. We’ll start asking questions like, “If I own a field, do I need to leave part of my harvest uncollected?” or “Should I avoid trimming the corners of my beard?” These laws can seem strange to us because we’re not Israel, we don’t live in that time, and we’re not under that covenant.
I believe Paul, the apostles, and even Jesus make it clear that we are not under that covenant in the same way. And yet, we are still beholden to God’s law in a broader sense.
One of the clearest expressions of this comes from Micah 6:8:
“He has shown you, O humanity, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God?”
That’s much bigger than Israel. That’s God’s law for all humanity. Israel was called to live out a specific expression of that universal law through the Law of Moses.
So I think of God’s law as something big and universal. The Mosaic Law is a covenantal reflection of that law for a specific people, at a specific time, for a specific purpose. Israel was meant to be a kingdom of priests to the world, and they failed. But we shouldn’t be too hard on them, because we’ve all fallen short of God’s glory.
This framework helps me understand that those laws were for that people at that time, while I am still accountable to God’s universal law revealed throughout Scripture. Jesus brings this out clearly in the Sermon on the Mount.
In Matthew 5, Jesus says, “You’ve heard that it was said, ‘You shall not murder,’” but then he goes deeper. He addresses anger, insults, and the heart behind the action. It’s almost like Jesus is another Moses, standing on another mountain, speaking to a new covenant people.
He’s saying, “You’ve heard this law. You’ve seen that covenant fail. Now I’m giving you God’s law for a people larger than Israel, for all who come to me through faith and allegiance.”
That’s why I think God’s law is much bigger than the Law of Moses.
Hannah
Jesus’s reflection on the Law of Moses has been really helpful for me as I think about how to read and understand these laws.
In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus clearly has a different vision of righteousness. He’s not just concerned with outward conformity, but with the deeper wisdom beneath the law and the transformation of the heart.
That makes reading these laws challenging, because there’s so much cultural and covenantal context. It takes real work to discern the wisdom principle beneath each law. But when we do that work, we can apply that wisdom within our context and within the new covenant.
Matthew
That connects directly to where we’re headed in Romans. In Romans 13, Paul builds on Jesus’s teaching and says:
“Owe no one anything, except to love each other, for the one who loves another has fulfilled the law.”
He lists several of the Ten Commandments and then says they’re all summed up in this: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”
Love does no wrong to a neighbor. Therefore, love is the fulfilling of the law.
That’s bigger, broader, more beautiful than the specific Mosaic covenant. That covenant reflects God’s wisdom, but it’s just a subset of God’s larger vision for humanity: loving God and loving one another as his image bearers and partners in the world.
Matt
One of the things God does through the law is reveal his character. We see how he views humanity, especially the marginalized.
Even passages like Exodus 21, which talk about slavery, would have been striking to the original audience. God is saying, “You have to treat people with dignity.” That tells us something profound about how God sees those on the margins of society.
Matthew
That wisdom has been foundational for some of the most free and prosperous societies in the world. God’s law, even as revealed in the Law of Moses, has been an incredible blessing because God is good and generous in giving it.
Matt
I remember walking past the law school at Syracuse University and seeing a statue of Moses holding the Ten Commandments. That image captures how foundational this moment in Scripture has been for how we understand law itself.
Hannah
When Moses goes up the mountain for forty days, the people lose patience. They make the golden calf, repeating the Genesis 3 pattern of seeing, taking, and doing what seems good in their own eyes.
Matt
That forty-day pattern shows up all over Scripture, and it’s another layer of meaning in the story.
Hannah
The tabernacle instructions are patterned after Eden. The outer court, inner court, and Holy of Holies reflect the structure of Eden. The cherubim, the lampstand shaped like a tree, and the seven lamps all echo creation imagery.
The tabernacle is a heaven-and-earth space where God’s presence dwells among his people. It’s a gift, and the priests mediate that presence.
Matt
Once you see the Eden pattern, those passages come alive.
Hannah
Exodus 34:6–7 is God’s own summary of his character: gracious, compassionate, slow to anger, and abounding in faithful love. These verses are quoted more than any others in the rest of the Bible.
Matthew
John echoes this in John 1:17: “The law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ.” Jesus embodies the gracious, faithful God revealed in Exodus.
Matt
As we wrap up, next week we’ll finish Exodus and move into Leviticus. There’s real beauty there, especially as it points forward to Jesus.
Hannah
We’ll look at sacrifices, priesthood, and purity, all of which help us understand God’s holiness and presence.
Matthew (Prayer)
Our Father in heaven, you revealed yourself as gracious and compassionate, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love. Thank you for that grace, embodied in Jesus Christ.
As we continue reading Scripture, give us endurance and open our eyes to behold wondrous things from your law. We pray this in Jesus’ name. Amen.
Matt
Amen. Thanks everyone, and we’ll see you next time.
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