Deuteronomy 9:23
Likewise when the LORD sent you from Kadesh-barnea, saying, Go up and possess the land which I have given you; then ye rebelled against the commandment of the LORD your God, and ye believed him not, nor hearkened to his voice. Likewise when the LORD sent you from Kadesh-barnea, saying, Go up and possess the land which I have given you; then ye rebelled against the commandment of the LORD your God, and ye believed him not, nor hearkened to his voice.
The verse stands in Moses' rehearsal east of the Jordan of what God had done for Israel and of the laws given them before they crossed over, recalling lessons from their forty years in the wilderness when they often rebelled. The sending from Kadesh-barnea with the command to go up and possess the land given them was met by refusal on the report of the spies, and that refusal was rebellion against the commandment of the Lord their God, failure to believe Him, and failure to hearken to His voice. That rebellion, unbelief, and disobedience brought them under sentence of destruction.
After Moses broke the first tables of stone when the people made and worshiped the golden calf, he hewed a second set, carried them into the mount, and at the end of a second forty-day period received them again from the Lord with a second copy of the law written on them. Moses' forty days and forty nights before the Lord, as at the first, were spent interceding that God would not destroy the people for their sin after He had said He would destroy them. His forty-day interview with God was thus an intercession to turn aside destruction for sin.
He pleaded that God, after doing so much for His people and bearing so long with them, should not now destroy them. He pleaded further that God should show mercy for the sake of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob and not regard only the sin of the present generation. He pleaded also that God must not give the Egyptians occasion to think He was unable to bring His people into the promised land. The intercession succeeded.
Because the law was thus once publicly proclaimed by God's voice and twice written on tables of stone by His finger, the Sabbath shares that honor with the other precepts. It has the added signal honor of being founded upon the example of the Almighty Himself. The case stands as a monument to the value of intercessory prayer. It encourages Christian patriots to pray for their country, pious souls to pray for the reviving of religion in a time of declension, and every saint to pray for sinners in danger of perdition.