God wrote the two tablets with His own fingers. If God took pains to write — well may we take pains to read! 

Quote Source – Thomas Watson

Moses climbed the mountain twice, and both times he came down carrying something he hadn’t written himself. The tablets of the covenant weren’t a scribe’s tidy copy of something dictated to him. Scripture insists they were carved, letter by letter, by God’s own hand. That detail is easy to read past without pausing. Thomas Watson wouldn’t let us pass it by. If the eternal, self-sufficient God took the trouble to write, he says, we have no excuse for reading Him carelessly.

The Finger of God at Sinai

Exodus is specific about this in a way that should stop a reader cold. Twice the text tells us God wrote with His own finger.

And he gave to Moses, when he had finished speaking with him on Mount Sinai, the two tablets of the testimony, tablets of stone, written with the finger of God. [Exodus 31:18]

Moses shatters the first set in anger down at the foot of the mountain, and God doesn’t shrug and pass him a copy. He writes them again, by His own hand, a second time (Exodus 34:1). Twice, on stone that would outlast wind and sand and every excuse we’ve ever made for skimming. That repetition isn’t incidental. It’s a claim about how much the words matter.

Why Effort Belongs to Reading

Watson’s logic is almost embarrassingly simple. Effort on the writer’s side calls for effort on the reader’s side. Nobody skims a letter someone bled to write. Nobody half-listens to a person who crossed an ocean to say something in person. Yet plenty of us treat the Bible like background noise — a chapter scanned over coffee, a verse yanked out of context to win an argument, the cover closed again before the sentence finishes landing. If God carved these words into rock rather than letting them drift off on the wind, that ought to change how we hold the page.

Paul tells Timothy something close to the same thing: “Do your best to present yourself to God as one approved, a worker who has no need to be ashamed, rightly handling the word of truth.” Rightly handling isn’t glancing. It’s the posture of someone who knows exactly how costly the material in front of him was to produce.

Reading as an Act of Worship

None of this is about turning Bible reading into one more performance metric, one more thing to feel vaguely guilty about. It’s about recognizing what kind of book is actually in our hands. Careful reading is worship before it’s ever information-gathering. It says: I believe You meant what You wrote, and I care enough about what You meant to slow down for it.

That’s the difference between reading Scripture and merely consulting it. Consulting treats the text like a reference shelf — useful when a question comes up, otherwise left alone. Reading, the kind Watson has in mind, treats it as a letter from Someone who loved you enough to carve every word by hand rather than send it secondhand. You don’t consult a letter like that. You sit with it.

Watson’s point was never really about tablets, or ink, or stone. It’s about proportion. If the effort God poured into His Word matches the weight He put on Sinai’s mountain, then whatever effort we bring to reading it should at least live in the same neighborhood. Anything less makes light of a gift that cost far more than we usually stop to consider.