Joshua was on the brink of a new chapter in the history of the Israelites, who had spent forty years wandering around in the wilderness, and God instructs him to 'be strong and courageous' three times; reminding the prodegy of Moses to ‘obey all the law my servant Moses gave you' (Joshua 1:7 NIV). What follows in verse eight is a surprise.

Exodus 33 is one of those well known passages that has been talked about and written about for generations – for good reason. In the text the Israelites find themselves at Mount Horeb (probably Mount Sinai but it could equally be one of six or seven peaks surrounding the valley where the Israelites camped). Moses has just returned from Sinai, where he’d been for forty days, and in his absence things had started to descend into moral and spiritual chaos.

The story of Moses’ encounter with God on Mount Sinai is well known, but it is perhaps less understood that he ascended the mountain a total of six times. After the dramatic events of the first Passover the Israelites made their way from the familiar landscape of the Nile Basin into drier and less hospitable terrain of the Sinai Peninsula. Exodus 19 reports that ‘on the first day of the third month after the Israelites left Egypt – on that very day – they came to the Desert of Sinai’ (Exodus 19:1 NIV).

Keep your lives free from the love of money and be content with what you have, because God has said,

“Never will I leave you;
never will I forsake you.”’

The second half of the Hebrews 13:5 is one of those verses worth looking at in the original Greek.