40 Days: Shattered

Years after the event, Moses tells the Israelites of his agony when he came down Sinai's mountain after receiving the instructions from God - including the Ten Commandments.:

 16 And  I looked, and behold, you had sinned against the Lord your God. You had made yourselves a golden1 calf.  You had turned aside quickly from the way that the Lord had commanded you. 17 So I took hold of the two tablets and threw them out of my two hands and broke them before your eyes. 18 Then I  lay prostrate before the Lord  as before, forty days and forty nights. I neither ate bread nor drank water, because of all the sin that you had committed,  in doing what was evil in the sight of the Lord to provoke him to anger. 

This is a truly astonishing intercession: God tells Moses that He's had enough of the Israelites (and what a grumbling, ungrateful, rebellious bunch they were).  God proposes getting rid of them and starting again, as He had previously done with humanity in the days of Noah and The Flood.

It is relatively difficult to understand 40 days and nights of prayer on any account.  People have done it in a repentant penitence for their poor, cold souls: leaders have done it for spiritual revival in their congregations and communities.  But here Moses does it just to save a people that God indicates he will rightly give up on.

Doing Lent for myself is a big ask; doing Lent for the Israelites would definitely be beyond my spirituality.  Yet there in heaven in a constant intercession, my Saviour makes the case - more eloquently and sacrificially than Moses of old - for those called in his name to be saved.

He deserves better.

And I don't.