This is just about where we got to last week. God spoke directly to the assembled Israelites, and He was communicating with them directly—even as I showed you that God communicated with Abraham ("the father of the faithful") directly—thus establishing a pattern that is going to be duplicated somewhere along the line. And it is going to be important to you and to me in terms of this government that we have come under.
God also communicated directly to Moses. Now here He is communicating directly to the children of Israel, but He did it in such a way as to inject a sense of the awesomeness of this privilege that He was extending to this people. That is, the privilege of having direct access to Him! Not through intermediaries, but He was offering them the opportunity to have direct access to Him. But He wanted them to know that this is a very great responsibility!
We see that they very quickly rejected it. And they asked Moses to stand between them and God. Moses, then, officially becomes "mediator." He was performing this function before, but now it is official—he will stand between them and God. So his responsibility was as an advocate of the people; that is, he laid the people's problems before God, but he was also an interpreter of God to the people. So, he was "the go-between."
At this time, brethren, when God was about to begin His formal governance of Israel, His people, those who had consented to be ruled by Him, there was nobody between them and God. There was no governmental structure. God spoke to them face to face, and they rejected it!
I believe that Exodus 20 was indicating that God was prepared to do for the entire nation of Israel the same as He had done with Abraham, with Moses, and with others as well. But He presented Himself in such a way as to impress upon them the weighty responsibility of such a situation. (Paul said, "Our God is a consuming fire.") And they quickly chose a mediator to stand between them and God.
