S4E11: Why there is organized religion, according to Exodus

“Organized religion” seems to have a bad rep nowadays. It’s associated with authoritarian hierarchies, dogmatic beliefs and rigid rules. Many of us instead want to identify ourselves as simply “spiritual”; we want to be people connected with some greater reality, some deeper truths and higher ideals, to something Divine, but without the confines of organized religion. Fair enough. 

And interestingly enough, in the Bible, the first heroes of faith—Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, did not belong to some existing “religion,” and neither did Moses, at least at the start. It was from Moses onward that we have something that we’d now call “organized religion.” And the book Exodus recounts why the ancient Israelites needed it, and the reason may surprise us. Because today, we tend to only see one side of this idea, without understanding the other—the side that we’ll begin to explore in this episode.

Also: “GOD”? What’s That? A Translation Guide on “God” for our Godless World is now on sale. 

Publisher’s webpage: https://wipfandstock.com/9798385244102/god-whats-that/

Chapters

• 0:00 Have you ever tried to teach something?
• 2:48 Why “religion” and “spirituality” needs “organization”
• 9:47 Usain Bolt, and the problem of teaching how to hear God speak
• 15:57 Jethro’s visit to Moses and why it led to “organized religion”
• 23:20 What God was calling Israel to become
• 27:48 What it means for God to “break out” against people

Transcript

Have you ever tried to teach something you know how to do very well, to someone who doesn’t? Like say, riding a bike to a child, or speaking English to foreign students, or using a smartphone or AI chatbots to your grandparents? Did you ever have a hard time teaching it, because though you know how to do it, you couldn’t quite explain what it is that you know. For example, can you—off the top of your head, without looking it up—explain when to add an article, like “a” or “the” in front of nouns like “cats,” and when not to? I mean you know how to do this; you can put them in appropriate times when you speak or write. But many of you probably can’t quite explain them to others.

In many of these scenarios, our go-to strategy of teaching these things will tend to be: well, go do them yourself, and practice. Of course, a good teacher would also be on stand-by to follow along and watch their practice, and correct them, if there’s need. You would normally supervise and watch your child when they first learn to ride a bike, and you’d check your student’s writing and correct their mistakes. But even so, they do need to start with some sort of basic teaching and explanation. General instructions, or a set of rules, and such. Practice, and ready-made rules. To learn, we need them both. 

That’s the challenge of passing on what you know how to do, to other people. And it’s no different when it comes to spiritual matters; when it comes to how we are to relate to God—that is, how to relate to reality that’s all around us personally, which speaks to us and journeys with us. And this challenge confronted Moses and Israel in the desert: how to teach, and how to learn, to follow in the footsteps of their ancestors, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, Sarah and Rebecca, and now, Moses—to live in the way that they who’ve journeyed with God did. That is the background of one of the pivotal moments in the Hebrew Bible, where God speaks to Moses the Ten Commandments. 

So, let’s explore the events that led to it and their meaning in this episode of…

 [ music / ] "What do you mean, God speaks?" where we explore important ideas, insights, and stories in Christianity, for the skeptics who want to understand religion, Christians who have questions about their own beliefs, and everyone in between. I am Paul Seungoh Chung, and this is our eleventh episode of the fourth season, “Why there’s organized religion, according to Exodus”  

[ / music ]

Organized religion. I’ve heard many people speak negatively of it. If you say something like “I’m spiritual, but not religious,” or, “I believe in something greater than ourselves, but I have a problem with actual religions,” then you’d be one of those people. My issue with such a sentiment is that sometimes—obviously not always, but sometimes—their talk about “spirituality,” or “belief in something,” is rather kind of vague. Not that our views should always be crystal-clear and precise, mind you—often, vagueness is unavoidable for something that’s difficult to define. So, I think it’s okay if we’ve thought through and wrestled with what we believe, and there still is something which seems unclear and vague—because things are often that way. But, vagueness can also be just the mask that hides the fact that we never really wrestled with it—that we were never serious about, well, the things we said we are serious about.

Then, there’s the problem of what we really mean by “religion” anyway. That term is infamous in the field of religious studies for being nearly impossible to define—yes, that’s ironic, I know. But most definitions we go by don’t quite catch everything we identify as religion; for example, belief in some sort of “god” don’t quite capture swathes of schools in Buddhism or Jainism—not to mention that it doesn’t properly deal with the idea of “God” with a capital-G. If anything, such default definitions almost seem to make arbitrary distinctions from what’s “religious” and what’s not. But definitions that do seem to include every religion, tend to also include things we don’t identify as “religions,” like materialism, humanism, communism, or even things like nationalism or sports fandom. 

And it turns out that the very term, “religion,” as we use it today, is a rather modern invention. What do I mean? I mean the way we think of “religion,” as something that’s separate and distinct from things like culture and art, politics and society, or intellectual pursuits like philosophy or even science. So “religion” as some separate domain from all of that, as some set of privately held beliefs—that meaning of religion never existed until just a few hundred years ago. At least, that’s the consensus among historians today. [1] Even the English word, “religion,” comes from the Latin word, “Religio,” which means “the sense of what’s right,” and this is the case even in other languages. For example, in Chinese, Korean, and Japanese, “religion,” literally means the “first teachings.” So, all in all, I think the closest modern equivalent for this original sense of the word, is something like the “core” of our “worldviews”—whatever that may be. 

So, what happened? Well, a couple of hundred years ago, in Europe, people who were hostile to religious authorities like the Church made a concerted effort to undermine and demean its status in society. To do that, they tried to first find and identify some “natural, universal religion” that everybody supposedly had, before it got corrupted and became those actual religions that they were railing against. And they tended to argue that this was some inner sentiment or feeling—except everyone everywhere somehow had the same thing—yet unlike existing “religions,” it had no connections with other things in our lives, like culture, society, or pursuit of knowledge. But then, when we tried to find this inner feeling that everyone had, disconnected from everything else, we came up zilch; we found no such thing. But still, this failed idea sort of got stuck in our culture today, as our idea of what “religion” and “spirituality” is supposed to be about. 

But our interest in this episode isn’t about how we’ve got the meaning of the word “religion” all wrong. I wanted us to first understand that it originally referred to something much more expansive and interconnected to everything in our lives. As I said, “Religion” is something like whatever that is at the “core” of our “worldviews”— from how we perceive and experience and think about everything, to how and why we value certain things or act the way we do. It’s much more than some feeling or some private set of beliefs, and it applies to secular ways of living, just as it does to things we now call “religions.” To put it in a different way, it’s about how we relate to reality as a whole—which brings us to that old refrain of this series: God… is Reality. 

However, there’s something unique to how we humans come to relate to reality that’s all around us—something different than how most other species do this. Because for us, we don’t relate to reality by just following our instincts, nor do we learn how to do so solely from humans who’re immediately around us, like our parents. For example, wolf cubs learn from adult wolves how to survive in the wild or hunt for food; but humans do something more. We pass along our knowledge about the world and how we are to live in it, through our complex language. We tell stories, give instructions, set up rules; and communicate these things not just by speaking it, but by drawing pictures, and writing them down. And then, before we take what we’ve learned into real life, we first practice doing it, often under supervision. That is, we also simulate what we learn—the stories, the instructions, and the rules. That’s how we learn from not just the people around us, but from people we’ve never met, from the other side of the world, or from a time that’s centuries before we were born. This is also what the Bible does for us in Christianity, as we’ve explored back in Season One; the Bible is a mosaic, composed of life-stories of the people whose experience and journey with God was passed down to the next generation, who added their stories, for the generation after, for two thousand years. 

And that’s key to understanding why religion is “organized.” It’s hard to pass along what we learn if the content is utterly disorganized—in a state of disordered chaos. We learn by starting with what we can grasp; rules, set of instructions, memorable stories serving as clear examples. An organized, ordered teaching. Now, these things alone will not let us master everything we need to know—far from it. But it’s where we start.

[ Pendulum ]

In everything we do, there are often individuals we recognize as “masters” of their craft. They are the superstars of sports, or music, towering figures in culture and the arts, pioneers in scholarship, technology, or business. We study their accomplishments and strive to become like them. Except that often, we find a chasm between us and them. Here’s a humorous example: Usain Bolt, a Jamaican sprinter, an eight-time Olympic gold medalist and world-record holder, who basically redefined human speed. In his races, he didn’t just edge out his world-class competitors; he was often strides ahead. And I once read this humorous story about him—which was almost certainly made-up, but somehow had this “feel” of authenticity. When asked by aspiring runners how to be an Olympic gold medalist, he replied, “Move your arms and legs really fast.” Which is not exactly the most helpful advice a master can impart to his pupil.

But I think the joke hit, because for many people, that was the only thing he seemed to be doing to win. Because his running form looked all wrong; he was really tall, often towering over other runners, making his movement seem, well, lumbering rather than running, not to mention that his gait seemed imbalanced and almost clumsy, which was due to a physical condition that left his right leg shorter than his left. Yet, it worked. He kept winning, even with the way he ran; for everyone else, he just seemed to move his arms and legs really fast, but that made him a champion. Problem is: this isn’t very helpful to the next generation of sprinters who want to run as fast as he does.

While not as this extreme—maybe—similar problem confronts the people of Israel in the Exodus account. There’s an individual who’s exceptional in his relationship with God; God speaks to him, and reality unfolds what was spoken; he prays and God responds, and the whole world seems to move, to match their conversation. The man declared about the plagues that would strike Egypt, and they struck as he said; the man stretched his staff over the waters of the sea—the primordial stuff of chaos, the terrible, boundless possibility of the cosmos—and then those very waters parted open. When they were starving and thirsty in the desert, the man prayed and heard God speak in response; and the next day, white, sweetened flour-like substance covered the ground, which they gathered, baked, and ate. He was guided to a desert rock, which he struck, and a stream of drinkable water sprang forth from it.

That man was Moses. He had a special relationship with God—all of reality seemed to speak to him and respond to his prayers. But if you were to ask him how it is that he can converse with God, so that he can do all those wonders, he’d probably just say: “I don’t know; God just speaks to me. Ever since He first spoke from that burning bush. And then… He kept on speaking.” Not exactly helpful if you want to be like Moses.

But the thing is, Moses’s relationship with God was formed, then refined, through his specific life-journey. God had placed him in a unique position, rescued from a river as an infant, raised as royalty in the Egyptian court, placed above his fellow enslaved Israelites, only to be rejected by his own people when he tried to help them. Yet it seemed none of this truly quenched the “fire” of concern and love he had for his people. For after years of living as an exile in a desert, he encounters God that spoke to their ancestors, God who called to him in the form of that very fire now set alight upon a bush on a mountain, speaking the promise of rescue for his people. 

And even then, it took quite some time—and persuasion from God—for Moses to follow what was spoken to him and set out for Egypt. And we followed those many steps in our previous episodes of this Season—the tentative and fearful steps that he took in faith, which led him to experience what God unfolded in his life and to Israel and Egypt. Moses didn’t start with some unshakable faith regarding what God was speaking to him. It came to him, step-by-step; hearing that Pharaoh who had ordered his execution was now dead, then meeting his brother Aaron, just as God said, then winning the support of the elders of Israel; it stalled when he became dismayed at how the new Pharaoh hardened his heart against what God spoke to him; and then, it pushed him to confront the Pharaoh again, though he was discouraged and afraid, to declare what God spoke to him regarding the coming plagues; then, it was vindicated when the plagues struck. 

The trajectory of life Moses had led, had formed his current relationship with God; and many of the steps and turns that his life had taken were unique to him; they were things that reality unfolded—that God brought about—specifically in his life and no one else. In that sense, God had specially chosen him. I mean it’s not like he could tell the Israelites who hope for the kind of relationship with God that he had, to be rescued out of the river as infants or receive a mission to relay God’s message to Pharaoh and then rescue an entire people from their enslavement! That was unique to his life.

But this raised a new problem in the Exodus account. And it was a problem that no one seems to have noticed, including Moses, until his father-in-law, Jethro came to visit him.

[ Short pendulum ]

While living as an exile in the desert, Moses had been taken in by a tribe of Midianites, the descendants of Ishmael, who if you remember was older son of Abraham. So they too knew of the God that spoke to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Some historians even speculate that the name “Yahweh”—not the full name, nor the meaning of that name, which is “I am that I am,” but a root sound for that name—may have come from one of those desert tribes. Because ancient Egyptian records mention a desert people called the “Shasu of Yahu.” And Moses had married into one such tribe, to a daughter of Jethro, who was both the chieftain of a Midianite tribe, as well as the priest of the God they worshipped—God they believed had spoken to Abraham, their ancestor.  

Now, the last Jethro heard from Moses was that he was just going to go to Egypt to meet up with his relatives, now that he was no longer under the threat of execution there. Again, that was likely because Moses himself was still not quite sure what really was going to happen if he were to follow what God was speaking to him and went to Egypt. Then sometime later, his daughter and her two sons with Moses had returned home without Moses. Eventually, Moses returned too, but he was not alone. 

Jethro took his daughter and grandsons to meet him, and saw an entire people camped out in the desert. And he could now finally hear the full story of what happened. And he was greatly impressed, to say the least.

“Praise be to Yahweh, who rescued you and your people from Egypt,” he exclaimed. “Now I know that Yahweh is greater than all other gods, because He has done this to those who treated Israel so arrogantly!” Again, you need to remember that in those days, the basic belief was that the world had many gods—many powers that presided over various cosmic domains and natural forces, and also worshiped as patrons and guardians of nations and peoples. Greater gods, presumably, guarded greater nations, which is what made those nations, well, “great.” Yet the greatest of them all, Egypt, was brought to judgment before the God that spoke to Moses; cosmic powers and natural forces—believed to be governed by these other gods—surged forth to obey what this God spoke, and had struck Egypt. It meant that this God, “Yahweh,” was something that was somehow “more” and “above” the gods of the world—perhaps the “strongest” of them all, if you think about it simplistically. But here was yet another piece that will eventually later become the idea we’ve been exploring: God is not an entity in reality; God is Reality—all of reality—with which all of us are engaged with, at all times.

But what we are interested in is what happened next in this story. Jethro worships God together with Moses, and then Aaron and the elders of Israel join them for a celebratory dinner. Next morning, Jethro chills—ok, that’s not actually in the account, but that’s what he seems to have done, as he sort of watches on his son-in-law is does for the day. And he sees this long line of people waiting to speak to Moses. Then from early morning to late in the evening, Moses simply met one group after another, answering questions about a wide array of everyday concerns and judging between people for all sorts of disputes. As Moses finished, likely quite exhausted, Jethro went up to him and said, “Umm. What. Are you. Doing?”

Moses answered, “Well, people come to me to ask what God’s will is. And they come to me when they have a dispute, so I can tell them what God’s judgment is on that.”      

And that was the problem. God spoke personally to Moses; he was connected, in ways no one else was, to “That which unfolds all of history, and speaks all truth”—to Reality. And everyone of us wants that sort of connection: to know what’s real and know what to do, not just for some colossal history-changing, ocean-splitting events, but for our life everyday, about what to do in our work today, who’s in the wrong and who’s the right when we get into fights; we’re afraid of what awaits us tomorrow, and we’re desperate to know what we need to do, so that we won’t be. And Moses could hear the answers, for God spoke to him. But he was unique; he was the Usain Bolt of relating to reality. So everyone in the camp just came to him, waiting in line all day long.

And sometimes an outsider can see a problem much more clearly, because they have not become used to it like those who’ve just lived with the problem for a long time. So Jethro said, “Yeah, this is not good at all. Just look, this workload is going to kill you, and everyone who comes to you. This just can’t keep up! Here’s what you need to do.”

And his solution was: that’s right. Organization. 

Jethro tells Moses, to put it in our terms, to set up a curriculum. The people of Israel needs to be taught a general set of rules and guidelines and basic teachings. And everyone needs to learn them. Of course, these would be something that God speaks to Moses, but then again, every truth is us hearing God speaking. And many of the truths that we hear don’t need to be some special personal messages from God. They’re usually things we just learn in various ways and from people around us. And once everyone learns these basic things, Moses won’t have to repeat the same teaching and say the same answer dozens of times each day to different people. 

Then Jethro also tells Moses to delegate. Find people who fear God—which is the old way of saying they know very well that all things are judged by God, who unfolds everything that happens, and so, they won’t mess around like fools; and they would be fair and just, careful and wise. And based on those general rules and teachings, they’d guide others and judge over disputes between people. Only when they encounter a case that they feel is beyond them, that they would bring it to Moses to consider. In a sense, the point was: other people can earnestly strive to hear God speak to them—not to the extent that Moses does; they just haven’t lived that life yet. But that doesn’t mean they can leave all of that to him. See, not every race needs Usain Bolt to participate; he shouldn’t be racing, for example, in primary-school athletic meets. Unless we want to discourage every kid who’s learning to run. And the same goes with Moses.   

[ Pendulum ]

What is remarkable is that in the Exodus account, this visit from Jethro, and his advice, is followed by God meeting the people of Israel on a desert mountainside, to give them the Ten commandments and the Laws.

So, here’s what happened: Moses follows Jethro’s advice—or rather, he follows his second advice, by setting up leaders and judges among the Israelites. Then, Jethro goes home, and the Israelites, led by Moses, head together to a mountain in the desert of Sinai—the very mountain where Moses first encountered God speaking to him from the flame of the burning bush. 

There, God calls out to Moses and speaks, “Tell this to the descendants of Jacob, the people of Israel. You yourselves saw what I did in Egypt; and how I have protected you  and brought you here. Now, if you follow what I am going to speak to you, and keep the promise we’ll be making between us, you will become something special among all the nations. For although the whole world is mine, you will be a nation of priests.”

This title, “nation of priests,” is a special term—it isn’t about bestowing some religious title. In the ancient days, priests were considered the go-between of humanity and the Divine. Which is to say, they were to represent humanity to God, and God to humanity. They were to converse with God, on behalf of the rest of humanity, and in turn, they are to speak what God speaks to others who can’t hear. Which is what Moses had done for Pharaoh, the ruler of Egypt, who ignored him at terrible cost. And it was what Moses was now doing for the people of Israel. And God was saying, the entire nation of Israel is to become that for the rest of the world.

Again, remember the previous episodes of this Season. The plagues that struck Egypt weren’t simply some sort of punishment; they were warnings—warnings that even the greatest, wisest, and the most enduring civilization humanity had known so far, Egypt, had been falling short of what it needed to be before God. Because it turned out to be corruptible, and became incapable of hearing God speak, becoming more unjust, and cruel, and deceitful. Just like the world in the time of Noah, which unraveled into the Flood. And yet, God had promised that such all-encompassing judgment would not strike humanity again. But how? Well, according to Genesis, God then called Abraham who’d become the ancestor of a nation, which would ensure that humanity’s connection with God—with Reality—will not be severed again in that way. They would tether humanity to God—That which unfolds all things in response to the kind of world we build, and which speaks to us regarding how we are to build a world that leads to Life, and not Destruction. That was why keeping Israel enslaved, keeping them from this task, brought about the plagues. The plagues were the preview, of the precipice that Egypt, along with the rest of the world, were racing toward without such a people.

And Moses was the first and foremost of those who would be this people—the nation of priests before God. The first and greatest in his generation who can hear God speak. But for others to follow in his footsteps, they also needed to be taught. 

See, Jethro asked for the curriculum. But Moses did not provide one. Because God was now going to. After all, this wasn’t something Moses had somehow just learned by himself; it wasn’t like he just trained alone in a cave or something, to reach some sort next level of psychic consciousness. It was God who initiated the conversation, not Moses; it was God who moved Moses and led him, and continued to speak to him. What Moses learned was how to listen and follow what God is speaking. And that curriculum was God’s to teach; Moses was the most senior student, now become the tutor for the rest. And God invites his first student, Moses, up on the mountain. 

But no one else was to come with him except when explicitly invited. Because no one else was ready to meet God yet. In fact, if anyone tried, they would die. Now, we’ll get into this topic again in later episodes too, but there is an old idea among humanity that the most sacred of places, the holiest place, where one meets God, is also terrifyingly dangerous. The wording in Exodus is that if anyone tried to forcibly enter that space, God—Yahweh—would “break out against them.” Which is an odd phrasing, really. Not that God will strike them dead; not that they will be cursed; but Yahweh—the name again which means, That which Is, and unfold all things—“will break out” against them, like water from a dam bursting, or a wildfire spreading across a bone-dry forest. 

Anthropologists have given the idea the term, “Mana”—though in this case, it refers to something more impersonal, a kind of divine energy or force that permeate the world. But the idea is, you don’t mess around with this; you make a mistake with it, it can kill you, like how electricity can if you grab a live wire unprotected. And it’s even more so in the case of God in the Bible. Even with Moses, when he first heard God speaking from the burning bush, he was afraid to look. 

Because, if you think about it, that’s how Reality is. We all live in it; we all engage with it at all times; but we also know that if we approach it carelessly—in how we live, how we act, in what we believe—if we do this wrongly, catastrophes can strike us. Isn’t that the fear, for example, regarding our environmental degradation or climate change that the scientists have been warning us? And isn’t that why, at our individual level, we are sometimes afraid to really look at our reality; really look at our lives, at what we’ve been doing and what we’ve become, and the world we’ve been making. Such as how we can become afraid of how badly our relationship with our loved ones has eroded; or the dishearteningly poor result of our work performance—we’re afraid to find that Reality is about to “break out” against everything we’ve done and everything we’ve made.

[ Music ]

And so, God speaks to Moses that no one else is to come with him yet. Then, a vast, dark cloud descends upon the mountain, with thunder and lightning streaking across it, and the whole earth begins to rumble and quake. Sounds like blasting trumpets begin to ring, and the mountain rumble violently, belching up thick plumes of smoke. Again, notice that these are the examples of the most terrifying aspects of our natural world —well, other than the trumpet-sounds—that can “break out” against us. storms and thunder, earthquake, fire, and volcanoes. The imageries of the terrors that reality can unfold. 

And from there, God calls Moses to come up. There, God would speak the curriculum that this aspiring nation of priests who would hear God, would need to learn and follow. And so, this people, who had followed Moses into the desert, gathered at the foot of the mountain, to gaze at this terrifying yet awe-inspiring sight, unable to go further. And Moses departed from them and began to climb. 

And as he set out, Exodus reports that God descended in fire, so that the whole mountain was set alight. Moses had began his journey from this very mountain, when God spoke from a single flame set alit on a bush before him. Back then, that flame was the flame for a single man, a lost man, encountering that spark that connected him to God. But now, what the voice that spoke to him from that very spark had come true; he had returned here with an entire people, rescued from their slavery, ready to join him in his journey. And what they, together, saw was the flame that now set alit a whole mountain, to speak to them. 

So join me next episode, in this long-delayed continuation of the fourth season, to explore what God was making this people into, and what journeys still lay ahead of them. A journey which we’ll investigate and explore. 

Thank you for listening, and please follow, subscribe, and share this series with others, and rate it on your Apple podcast and other platforms. You can also support this series at buymeacoffee.com—which you can go to by clicking on the line, “Support the show” in the episode description.

(sigh) And I do apologize for this continued wait and thank you for your patience. Some time later this Season, I hope to also update you on what’s been happening, especially with the book and other related projects. But this series is the root of them all, so it will continue to the end, even if it has to crawl to get there!

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[1] The critique today that our contemporary meaning of the word, “religion,” is mostly a modern, and largely problematic construction, has developed and become established in the last few decades. One of the earlier works is the landmark 1962 book The Meaning and End of Religion, by Wilfred Cantwell Smith. More recent are Genealogies of Religion, by Talal Asad in 1993, and Brent Nogbri’s Before Religion: A History of a Modern Concept in 2013.