Living Words

Sermon for the Second Sunday in Advent

Romans 15:4-13 and St. Luke 21:25-33

by William Klock

We often refer to this Second Sunday in Advent as “Bible Sunday”.  The hymnal suggests we sing songs like “Book of books, thy people’s strength” and “O Word of God incarnate”—hymns that celebrate Holy Scripture as our teacher, our chart and compass, our inspired source of strength until that day when, clouds and darkness ended, we see Jesus face to face.  Archbishop Cranmer found this theme in today’s Epistle, where we read St. Paul’s exhortation in Romans 15:4:

Whatever was written in former days was written for our instruction, that through endurance and through the encouragement of the Scriptures we might have hope.”

 

The theme of these lessons for the Second Sunday in Advent, like the other Sundays, recalls the first advent of Jesus and calls us to be prepared for his second.  But the foundation of the Protestant Reformation was the recovery of the Bible.  “Sola Scriptura”—Scripture alone—was the great rallying cry of the Reformation.  All things must be subject to God’s word.  It is our authority by which every other authority must be measured and judged.  And, as Thomas Cranmer reminds us in the Collect today, it is God’s word that teaches us our hope of Jesus and his kingdom.  We pray that we might “read, mark, learn, and earnestly digest” the Scriptures that we might always hold fast to that hope.

But how?  How do the Scriptures give us hope?  Brothers and Sisters, they give us hope by telling us a story.  The story of the God who created the cosmos and of his people.  The Bible is full of many different kinds of literature.  There’s history and hymns and parables and prophecy.  There’s story and there’s doctrine.  But it all comes together around the story of God and his people.  The major theme of Advent is the coming of Jesus and our need to be prepared.  As we read the lessons here we’re told of God’s promises to his people and his fulfilment of them and in that we learn of the faithfulness of God.  He is trustworthy and so we can trust the promises he has given to us.  This is where the two themes of the day intersect.  Cranmer was no dummy.  By shifting the focus of Advent Sunday towards the Bible, he did nothing to take away from the older lesson of the day, the one that calls us to be prepared.  This is what I want to look at today.

Let’s continue with our Epistle.  Paul wrote these words to a church that was struggling with conflict—largely a conflict between Jewish and Gentile believers.  They were, because of this conflict, unprepared to fulfil the mission Jesus has given his Church—to proclaim and to live the gospel to the world.  So Paul’s exhortation was for them to be one, to be unified in Jesus the Messiah.  But as with so many things, it’s often easier to say that sort of thing than to do it.  Again, Advent calls us to be prepared.  We each face our own struggles in being faithful to Jesus and to each other.  We often try and we often fail.  What do we do?  Well, St. Paul brings us back to the foundational truths of our faith.  This is what we need to build on.  He brings us back to the story of God and his people and, particularly, to Jesus and his place in that story.

Unfortunately, while our Epistle reminds us of the importance of the Scriptures, it leaves out the first verses of the passage.  This is where Paul identifies this problem of conflict and disunity in the Roman church and applies Scripture to it.  Specifically, he cites Psalm 69:9.  Verse 3 reads:

For Christ did not please himself, but as it is written, “The reproaches of those who reproached you fell on me.”

 

All by itself, this verse from the Psalms is a good reminder to bear with others and to put them first.  Jesus did that and we would do well to follow his example.  But Paul’s really getting at something much deeper.  Sadly, most Christians don’t make a whole lot of use of the Psalms.  We don’t know them as well as we should.  But the Jews knew them inside and out.  The Psalter was their hymnbook.  And so, in the same way a modern person might quote a single line from a popular song and in doing that bring to mind a whole verse or even the whole song to make a point, to quote a single verse from a psalm would bring to mind the whole psalm.  It also helps to know that this isn’t the first time in Romans that Paul has cited from Psalm 69.  He uses it as a lens through which to understand the times the church was facing in those days.  You see, Psalm 69 was a lament.  David had sinned and was suffering the effects, but to make matters worse, his enemies were piling on, taking advantage of his suffering, and making everything worse.  The Psalm begins:

Save me, O God!

         For the waters have come up to my neck.

I sink in deep mire,

         where there is no foothold;

I have come into deep waters,

         and the flood sweeps over me.  (Psalm 69:1-2)

David cries out to the Lord, he calls for judgement on his enemies, and it ends with praise, knowing that the Lord will vindicate his servant, even though he hasn’t done so yet.  David knew that the Lord is faithful to his promises.  But, Psalm 69 isn’t just David’s song.  It became Israel’s song.  This was Israel’s story just as much as it was David’s.  She sinned, she suffered, and then her enemies took advantage of that suffering to make things even worse, and so the nation cried out to the Lord for deliverance and in hopeful praise, knowing his promises and his faithfulness to always do what he said.  And now, knowing Jesus, who represents Israel much as David did, but in a far deeper way, Paul overlays Psalm 69 on the ministry of Jesus as Messiah.

Today’s Collect urges us to “read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest” the Scriptures so that we might in our journeys hold fast to the hope given us in Jesus.  St. Paul shows us how to do that.  It’s something we really need to hear in a day when, on the one hand we have Christians who say we should unhitch ourselves from the Old Testament and, on the other hand, Christians who go to the opposite extreme and have forgotten or misunderstood what it means to be people of the new covenant and are still trying to live under the old.  Paul knew the Old Testament Scriptures.  He knew they were the story of his people.  And he had a pretty good idea where they were headed.  And then he met the risen Jesus on the road to Damascus.  He was confronted head on by the reality that this Jesus whom he and so many others had rejected, was truly Israel’s Messiah.  As we say today, this “rocked his world”.  So much so, that he retreated for a few years into solitude to think it through and to work it all out.  He suddenly had to rethink the whole story with Jesus at its centre, its culmination.

The story Paul knew was about his people, brought by the Lord into covenant with himself, who were to bring his redemption to a fallen humanity and a fallen world.  The story had been worked out through a great deal of grief and suffering—a lot of it brought on themselves by their sin—but it would eventually come to its glorious fulfilment in the Messiah, who would represent them, and who would vindicate them somehow through his own suffering.  And now, in Jesus, it had all happened.  This was the big shock for Paul.  He and so many others had been waiting for an end to the story, but the moment he met the risen Jesus, he was forced to acknowledge that Jesus really was the Messiah—and as the Messiah, Jesus was the end, or better, the fulfilment of it all.  From Jesus he then had to read backwards and come to understand the story of the people of God through Jesus.  That’s not an easy thing to do.  Again, Paul had to go off into solitude for a good long while to sort it out for himself.  Thankfully, he’s done the heavy lifting for us.

Paul shows us how this kind of Jesus-centred approach to the story is done in the verses that follow.  Here’s what he writes:

May the God of endurance and encouragement grant you to live in such harmony with one another, in accord with Christ Jesus, that together you may with one voice glorify the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.  Therefore welcome one another as Christ has welcomed you, for the glory of God.  (Romans 15:5-7)

Paul highlights the humility of Jesus.  First, he humbled himself to be born one of us and then he humbled himself further, not only taking on himself the jeers and rejection of his people, but ultimately submitting himself to the humility of death on a cross.  In our Gospels the last two weeks we saw Jesus hailed as King.  By rights, Jesus could have taken his throne by violently overthrowing the Romans and Herodians, but to take his throne that way would not have fulfilled his messianic mission.  Jesus humbled himself in obedience to his Father’s plan of redemption.  That’s the model.  It was the model already established in Israel’s story.  Now it’s the model of Jesus’s ministry.  And that means humility will be the model of the Church’s life as well.  The Church cannot fulfil her mission by demanding our rights.  That’s not to say that there isn’t a place for “rights” in the world.  That’s not to say that the Church shouldn’t take a stand to protect the rights of others when necessary.  What it means is that to walk with Jesus, to be stewards of his royal summons and the fruit of the Spirit, means putting others before ourselves.  The Roman Christians needed to follow Jesus’ example in this in order to settle their differences—not just for their own sake, but for the sake of the calling the Lord had given them.  This is the really important part for Paul.  Getting along is great, but getting along for the sake of getting along, unity for the sake of unity isn’t the point.  Being united and loving one another, showing Christlike humility prepares us for something bigger.  This is about the Church’s stewardship of the gospel.

And here’s the thing that’s really neat here.  We see Paul applying the same principles—working back from Israel’s story—again as he writes about the mission of the church.  Here’s what he writes in verse 8:

For I tell you that Christ became a servant to the circumcised to show God’s truthfulness, in order to confirm the promises given to the patriarchs, and in order that the Gentiles might glorify God for his mercy.

 

He’s saying that there’s a connection between the promise God made to Abraham and this group of struggling Christians in Rome.  First—and he brings us back to the humility of Jesus—the Messiah humbled himself and became a servant to the circumcised.  The circumcised are the Jews, the people of the old covenant.  Jesus became a servant to them.  Paul’s talking about how Jesus died for their sins.  I know we like to quote John 3:16 and talk about how Jesus died for the whole world.  Jesus did die for the sins of everyone, but we need to be careful when we say that, that we don’t short-circuit the story here.  Jesus died for the sins of his own people.  Even the way in which he died, crucified by the Romans, was the very death that the unrepentant Jews would face a generation later.  Jesus died for his own people in order to establish a new covenant and a new covenant people—a new Israel.  He did this to show that God is faithful to his promises.  First, in Jesus, God was faithful to his promises to renew his people—to redeem them from sin and to fill them with his own Spirit and to gather them to himself from the nations where they had been scattered.  Think of that remarkable scene at Pentecost.  But then, as a result of this amazing work done through Jesus and the Spirit, the Gentiles can’t help but notice.  Israel had been unfaithful to God and because of that the Gentiles mocked her and they mocked the Lord.  “Where is your God?” they would jeer.  And yet now, even despite Israel’s faithlessness, God had fulfilled his promises and the Gentiles can’t help but take notice.  God had done something amazing with his own seemingly hopeless people and now the Gentiles are glorifying the God of Israel and wanting to know more.  As Zechariah had prophesied:

In those days ten men from the nations of every tongue shall take hold of the robe of a Jew, saying, ‘Let us go with you, for we have heard that God is with you.’”  (Zechariah 8:23)

And Paul makes this point in our Epistle, quoting more psalms that tie the mission of the Church to the Lord’s promises to Abraham and to Israel’s mission.  In verse 9 Paul quotes Psalm 18:49. This is the Psalmist celebrating the victory that God had given him—one that even the Gentiles would take note of.

“Therefore I will praise you among the Gentiles,

         and sing to your name.”

 

And next Paul quotes Moses in Deuteronomy as he calls the nations to rejoice along with Israel over the victory of God:

“Rejoice, O Gentiles, with his people.”

 

And, similarly, Psalm 117:1

“Praise the Lord, all you Gentiles,

         and let all the peoples extol him.”

 

And he ends with Isaiah 11:10:

“The root of Jesse will come,

         even he who arises to rule the Gentiles;

in him will the Gentiles hope.”

 

The root of Jesse—remember we talked about the branch Sunday before last—the Messiah will not only set Israel to rights and rule over the Gentiles, but he will do it in such a way that he will become their hope as well.  Paul is showing that all along, ever since Abraham, God’s purpose was to work through Israel, not just for the sake of Israel, but for the sake of whole world.  Jesus became a servant of the circumcised, so that the watching gentiles would glorify God and be drawn to him in faith.  Jesus has done his part.  Now the Church is called to do hers—to proclaim to Jews and Gentiles alike what the God of Israel has done through Jesus.

Paul saw an urgency in this calling and we get a sense of why in our Gospel.  Today’s Gospel is taken from Luke 21, from what’s often called Jesus’ “Olivet Discourse”—a talk Jesus had with his disciples near the end of his ministry in which he told them about the coming judgement on Jerusalem and on unrepentant Israel.  Here’s what Jesus says:

“And there will be signs in sun and moon and stars, and on the earth distress of nations in perplexity because of the roaring of the sea and the waves, people fainting with fear and with foreboding of what is coming on the world. For the powers of the heavens will be shaken.  (St. Luke 21:25-26)

In the verses just prior, Jesus gives us the setting.  Armies have surrounded Jerusalem and the city will be trampled underfoot.  In our verses here he draws on the language of the Old Testament prophets to describe the turmoil of those days.  Isaiah, for example, wrote of the judgement that was to come on Babylon, saying that the “the sun will be dark at its rising, and the moon will not shed its light” (13:10).  Ezekiel uses the same kind of language to describe the judgement that was coming on Egypt (32:7) and Joel to describe the calamity that was coming to Jerusalem in its destruction by Babylon (2:10).  This is apocalyptic language meant to give a sense of things falling apart.  The Lord holds creation together in his hands, he sustains it all, but in his judgement it’s as though he’s withdrawn his hands, creation comes apart and chaos takes over.  It makes sense.  Those who reject the Lord get a taste of what it’s like to live without him.

Continuing to draw on the language of the prophets, Jesus goes on:

And then they will see the Son of Man coming in a cloud with power and great glory.  Now when these things begin to take place, straighten up and raise your heads, because your redemption is drawing near.”  (Luke 21:27-28)

Jesus takes this language straight from Daniel 7:13.  The son of man—the one who represents Israel, the Messiah whom the people rejected and crucified, the Messiah for whom the little community of Jewish Christians has been persecuted—will come in the clouds with power and glory.  This is not an image of Jesus’ final return at the end of the age.  It can’t be, as we’ll see just a few verses on, because it’s already happened.  No, the passage Jesus draws on in Daniel describes the son of man, not coming on the clouds to the earth, but ascending on the clouds to the Ancient of Days, to receive “dominion and glory and a kingdom” (7:14).  What Jesus is describing is his own vindication as Messiah and the vindication of those who have believed in him, despite the persecution of their fellow Jews.  He goes on in verses 29-33:

And he told them a parable: “Look at the fig tree, and all the trees.  As soon as they come out in leaf, you see for yourselves and know that the summer is already near.  So also, when you see these things taking place, you know that the kingdom of God is near.  Truly, I say to you, this generation will not pass away until all has taken place.  Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away.

 

Jesus’ friends will follow in his footsteps as they face rejection and persecution.  He has tasked them with proclaiming the good news about him in Jerusalem and Judea and to the whole world.  Like the old prophets, their task is to issue the royal summons, calling scattered Israel to the King.  Many will hear the summons and believe, but they will face persecution and death at the hands of their brethren who reject the Messiah.  But both Jesus and his people will be vindicated when unbelieving Israel faces judgement.  And Jesus gives them hope and a sense of urgency.  This time of awful persecution will not last forever.  Within their generation it will come to an end.  But that also means that the clock is running on their mission to carry the gospel to their fellow Jews.  This is why St. Paul urged his readers in last Sunday’s Epistle to wake up and to put on the armour of light.  The night is far gone and the day is at hand.

Jesus’ final words in the Gospel bring us back full circle to the petition of our Collect.  Jesus assures his disciples that his words will not pass away.  Specifically, he’s assuring them that what he’s said will happen within their lifetime will indeed happen.  And, of course, from our perspective we can look back to the events leading up to Jerusalem’s destruction in a.d. 70 and see that God is, indeed, faithful and that his word is true.

But the destruction of Jerusalem and the vindication of Jesus’ people in that time isn’t the end of the story.  It took the other disciples time to see that there was more to the fulfilment of Israel’s story, but Paul had worked this part out early on as we see in our Epistle.  The Lord did not save the faithful remnant of Israel for their sake alone.  Israel’s calling was always to be a light to the Gentiles.  Israel’s calling was always to carry the Lord’s salvation to the nations.  And so in the events of a.d. 70, we see again the faithfulness of God in the vindication of Jesus the Messiah and of his people, and we see another horizon, one in which the gospel goes out from Jerusalem and Judaea to Samaria and eventually to the whole world, not only summoning the scattered sheep of Israel, but drawing in the nations as they see the faithfulness of God and come to him in faith to give him glory.  And here we have no timeline, no expiration date.  We have only the promise that one day the knowledge of the glory of the Lord will cover the earth as the waters cover the sea.  There will be ups and downs as history shows, but the kingdom of Jesus will go marching on until, empowered by the Spirit, the Church fulfils her gospel mission.  It may be a thousand years or a hundred thousand years, but we can trust that as God has been faithful in the past, he will be faithful to the very end.  Our hope is sure and certain because his word tells us so.  And in that, Brothers and Sisters, we ought to find exhortation to be faithful ourselves to live and to proclaim the gospel boldly and courageously until our Lord returns.

Let’s pray: Blessed Lord, who caused all holy Scriptures to be written for our learning: help us so to hear them, to read, mark, learn and inwardly digest them that, through patience, and the comfort of your holy word, we may embrace and for ever hold fast the hope of everlasting life, which you have given us in our Saviour Jesus Christ, who lives and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever.  Amen.

Sermon for the First Sunday in Advent

Romans 13:8-4 and St. Matthew 21:1-13

by William Klock

The Christian year has always been reckoned by the incarnation and resurrection of Jesus.  Our Eastern brothers and sisters begin the Church Year at Easter and we, in the West, have for most of our history begun it at Christmas.  Either way, our ecclesiastical New Year’s Day recognises the Jesus has changed everything.  And yet, the Church never springs Christmas or Easter on us.  Instead, a time of preparation leads us to both of these great celebrations.  These were originally times when candidates for baptism—and Epiphany and Easter were the two great times for baptism in the early Church—these were the times when those who were to be baptised prepared: learning the faith, counting the cost, and finally committing themselves entirely to Jesus.  Our traditions have changed a little down through the centuries, but the season of Advent still calls us, like the Boy Scout motto, to be prepared.  Not to be prepared in case of fire, storm, or some other disaster, but to be prepared, knowing that in his first advent Jesus inaugurated his kingdom and that in his second advent, he will finish what he started—and that we are his stewards in the in-between.  Advent reminds us that we live in an overlap of the ages.  The present evil age has been defeated, its rulers dethroned and the age to come has been born.  But in his wisdom and his grace, God has not brought the new age all at once.  Yes, this overlap of the ages allows for evil to continue and for wicked men and women to grasp at their slipping hold of the world, but it also gives space for the good news about Jesus to be carried to the world and the world to come in faith to Jesus who has come in his first advent, not to condemn, but to redeem.

Our Gospel lesson today reminds us of what Jesus has done and what he will one day finish.  St. Matthew shows us Jesus the Messiah, Jesus the King, and he shows us the nature of his rule and his kingdom.  Look at Matthew 21:1-6.

  Now when they drew near to Jerusalem and came to Bethphage, to the Mount of Olives, then Jesus sent two disciples, saying to them, “Go into the village in front of you, and immediately you will find a donkey tied, and a colt with her.  Untie them and bring them to me.  If anyone says anything to you, you shall say, ‘The Lord needs them,’ and he will send them at once.”  This took place to fulfill what was spoken by the prophet, saying,

         “Say to the daughter of Zion,

         ‘Behold, your king is coming to you,

                  humble, and mounted on a donkey,

                  on a colt, the foal of a beast of burden.’”

  The disciples went and did as Jesus had directed them.  They brought the donkey and the colt and put on them their cloaks, and he sat on them.

 

Matthew wrote his Gospel for a Jewish audience and he draws on their Scriptures and on Israel’s story to give depth to what he writes.  Specifically, here, he draws on Zechariah’s prophecies that look forward to the Messiah and to the day when the Lord would come in judgement on Israel’s enemies.  When Matthew says that Jesus came to the Mount of Olives, this isn’t just a casual geographical reference.  This is the spot, according to Zechariah, on which the Lord would stand when judgement came.  And Matthew draws on Zechariah again to explain Jesus’ strange command to the disciples to fetch a donkey.  This was not how kings made their triumphal processions.  Well, not ordinary kings.  They rode on horseback or in a chariot.  But Zechariah, hundreds of years before, had highlighted the humble nature of the coming messiah.  He was one who would ride to his coronation on the back of a humble donkey.

So Matthew, here, makes it abundantly clear who Jesus is.  He is the Messiah whom the people had hoped for.  But he also highlights the nature of Jesus’ rule.  The people expected a king would come to overthrow the Herodians and the Romans with violence.  Matthew reminds them, by calling back to Zechariah, that Jesus will take his throne by a very different sort of path.  Yes, he is the judge.  Yes, he will deliver Israel.  But it’s not going to happen the way people thought, at least not yet.

As the crowds gather to line Jesus’ way into Jerusalem, Matthew continues to draw on Israel’s story.  Look at verses 8-11:

Most of the crowd spread their cloaks on the road, and others cut branches from the trees and spread them on the road.  And the crowds that went before him and that followed him were shouting, “Hosanna to the Son of David! Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord! Hosanna in the highest!”  And when he entered Jerusalem, the whole city was stirred up, saying, “Who is this?”  And the crowds said, “This is the prophet Jesus, from Nazareth of Galilee.”

 

Not only do the people sing royal hymns to Jesus as he rides into the city, hailing him as “son of David”, a significant messianic title, but Matthew again draws on two events in Israel’s story that the people would have known well.  First, as he tells how the crows was spreading their cloaks on the ground, it would have been hard for his Jewish readers to miss the reference to King Jehu’s anointing.  In 2 Kings 9 we read about Jehoram.  He was King of Israel, the son of the wicked King Ahab.  The apple had not fallen far from the tree in Jehoram.  The prophet Elisha ordered that Jehu was to be anointed King in his place and announced that Jehu would bring the Lord’s judgement on the wicked house of Ahab.  As Jehu was anointed by the prophet, the men gathered cast their cloaks on the ground before him and blew a trumpet.  Matthew uses the imagery not only to make sure we know that Jesus is King, but also to hint that Jesus is also the King who will bring the Lord’s judgement on the wicked.

But the other grand image that Matthew draws on here and that leads into the next scene is that of Judas Maccabaeus.  2 Maccabees 10:7 describes the people hailing Judas as King by laying wreathes and palm branches at his feet.  Judas had not only defeated Israel’s enemies, but he had purified the temple from its defilement by the Greeks.

And the temple is precisely where Matthew takes us next.  Look at verses 12-13

And Jesus entered the temple and drove out all who sold and bought in the temple, and he overturned the tables of the money-changers and the seats of those who sold pigeons.  He said to them, “It is written, ‘My house shall be called a house of prayer,’ but you make it a den of robbers.”

 

Jesus’ purification of the temple had at least as much to do with rebuking the people for what the temple had become ideologically as it did with the buy and selling.  The selling of animals for sacrifice was a necessary part of what the temple was and, since the temple used its own currency, someone had to be there to make change.  The more serious issues was that the temple had become a symbol of the violent revolution—a revolution like the one Judas Maccabaeus had led—that had become the hope of the people.  Again, that’s not what Jesus was about.

Most importantly, Jesus’ disruption of the temple put a temporary stop to the sacrifices that day.  This was an acted-out prophecy that brought to a culmination all of his declarations of forgiveness and healing that bypassed the temple, the sacrificial system, and the priesthood.  This was Jesus’ announcement that the temple’s days were numbered.  God was about to do something not only new, but better.  Jesus points here to a coming new covenant in which he would take on the role of the temple himself, in which he would be the mediator between God and human beings, he would be the one in whom forgiveness of sins would be found, he would be the one to bring God and man, heaven and earth together.

The Gospel shows us that in his first advent, Jesus was revealed to be the King whom God had promised to his people.  It also hints at the fact that, while Jesus has inaugurated something new, even now, two thousand years later, we await its final consummation. We still wait for Jesus’ second advent.  And this leads us into our Epistle.  Let’s look at Romans 13, beginning at verse 8:

Owe no one anything, except to love each other, for the one who loves another has fulfilled the law.  For the commandments, “You shall not commit adultery, You shall not murder, You shall not steal, You shall not covet,” and any other commandment, are summed up in this word: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”  Love does no wrong to a neighbor; therefore love is the fulfilling of the law.  (Romans 13:8-10)

A shockwave went out across the world that first Easter morning when Jesus burst from his tomb.  The work of new creation was begun that day.  And yet, except for Jesus’ followers, no one seems to have noticed.  The present age rumbles along, its rulers go on ruling, and people carry on with their business.  The old gods remain, even if we aren’t so crass as to build temples with statues of them.  We may not worship Caesar or Aphrodite or Mammon, but we still worship money and sex and political power.  St. Paul knew that it’s surprisingly easy for even Jesus’ own people to forget that the kingdom is breaking in.  It’s easy for us to fall back into the ways and priorities of the present age and to give half-hearted allegiance to Jesus.  That had been Israel’s problem all along.  It should not be ours.  Jesus has filled us with his own Spirit.  The law that was once external and written on stone has now been inscribed on our hearts and our hearts have been turned to God.  Problem solved!  Or you’d think.  We need nearly constant reminders, we need to recall Jesus, his death and resurrection, we need God’s word and we need his grace.  And so Paul reminds us to live the law of love that the Spirit has inscribed in our hearts.

Paul puts in terms of the torah.  Don’t commit adultery, don’t steal, don’t covet—just don’t wrong your neighbour.  To love is to fulfil the law.  Paul uses the Greek word agape, that describes the sort of love that gives of oneself as it puts others first.  This is the love that Jesus showed us on the cross as he took on himself the sins of the very people who had rejected and despised him.  This is the love that defines the kingdom and that the Spirit has poured into our hearts.  Be in debt to no one, Paul writes, except to know that for the sake of Jesus and his kingdom, you owe everyone you meet a debt of love.  Imagine how effective the Church would be if we truly lived this way, coupled with being faithful proclaimers of the good news about Jesus.

Instead, though, we’re too often like the man who knows he’s going to be late for work, but keeps hitting “snooze” on his alarm clock, rolling over, and going back to sleep.  Paul goes on:

Besides this you know the time, that the hour has come for you to wake from sleep.  For salvation is nearer to us now than when we first believed.  The night is far gone; the day is at hand.  (Romans 13:11-12)

Paul knew that Jesus would return.  Jesus had promised that the Lord would come in judgement on an unrepentant Jerusalem within a generation.  Whether or not Paul thought that this would be the final end of the present age is debated by New Testament scholars.  I think Paul saw another horizon beyond the destruction of Jerusalem.  The Lord having judged unrepentant Israel and vindicated his faithful people, a time would follow in which the gentiles would come streaming in, having seen the faithfulness of the God of Israel.  While the other apostles were carrying the gospel to their fellow Jews, Paul had received a calling to carry it to the gentiles.  And Paul saw another horizon, one beyond the soon-to-come judgment on Jerusalem.  Paul saw that the pagan nations, particularly the Greeks and Romans, would one day face a similar judgement. The time was coming for the King’s return in judgement, first on the Jews, and eventually on the gentiles.  He would finish what he had started.  The present evil age and its false gods and false kings would be done away with and God’s new creation would be born.  Jesus’ first advent was the alarm going off.  Jesus had announced a coming judgement, but in his life, death, and resurrection had established a means of reconciliation with God.  That day the first rays of the sun had begun to peek over the mountaintops.  And now, Paul’s saying, the full day will soon be upon us.  Get out of bed and get dressed for work!

And then he shifts the metaphor.  From “Get out of bed you lazy sleepy-head” he takes a more serious tone.  It’s one thing to sleep in when you should be getting ready for work.  It’s a far worse thing to be out carousing all night and carrying on into the morning, instead of going to work.  He goes on:

The night is far gone; the day is at hand.  So then let us cast off the works of darkness and put on the armor of light.  Let us walk properly as in the daytime, not in orgies and drunkenness, not in sexual immorality and sensuality, not in quarreling and jealousy.  But put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh, to gratify its desires.  (Romans 13:12-14)

Laziness is bad and there are plenty of lazy Christians, but even worse are people who know they should be living for Jesus and the age to come, but are instead living for the present wicked age and its false gods and kings.  Paul makes a list of the wicked things people do under cover of darkness: they indulge their appetites, they get drunk, they get involved in all sorts of sexual sins.  But Paul doesn’t stop there.  Most Christians don’t do those sorts of things, so Paul goes on with the list, from orgies and drunkenness to quarrelling and jealousy.  That probably hits closer to home—especially if you spend much time on social media.  But long before social media existed, Christians were struggling with quarreling and jealousy.  Christians get angry with each other, their relationships break down, sometimes churches even split over these sorts of things.  These are the works of darkness and they’re just as bad and just as unbecoming the people of God as drunken orgies are.  Going back to the first part of the Epistle, people who love their neighbours don’t fight and don’t become jealous any more than they get involved in sexual immorality.

No, instead, as befits living in the day, we put on the “armour of light”.  Paul hints at the fact that living as people of the day when we’re surrounded by people of the darkness is going to be a struggle and, some day, even a battle.  We put on the armour of light.  What is that?  Paul goes on to put it in terms of putting on the Lord Jesus Christ.  But what does that mean?  Paul uses this put on/put off metaphor a lot in his epistles and the gist of it is that we need to remember to whom we belong.

Think of the Israelites—since we’ve been studying Exodus recently.  Pharaoh had claimed them as his slaves, but the Lord had freed them.  It wasn’t freedom for freedom’s sake.  The Lord freed Israel from Pharaoh’s cruel bondage so that the people could serve him.  They went from belonging to a cruel king to belonging to the King—a king who loves his people.  The Lord would live in the midst of his people, that was his promise.  And, for their part, the people would live as befits people who belong to and fellowship with the Lord—that was the torah and the tabernacle.

Brothers and Sisters, the same goes for us as Christians.  Through Jesus, the Lord has delivered us from our bondage to sin and death and has made us his own.  We once were in bondage to the darkness, but now have the privilege and joy of serving the light.  And as Jesus’ people, we’re not just the people who live camped around the tabernacle.  No, we are united with Jesus, who is himself the tabernacle, God with us, and who has made us, his very people, a temple when he gave us his Spirit.  It is astounding what Jesus has done for us, and yet we forget.  We hear the alarm sounding, we see the sun peeking through the curtains, and we roll over and go back to sleep.  We do that because we’ve forgotten the joy of our salvation.  We do that, because we’ve failed to steep ourselves in God’s word.  We do that, because we’ve forgotten that God has made us stewards of his good news.  We do that, because we’ve failed to think on and to meditate on the amazing and gracious love God had shown us in Jesus.

Brothers and Sisters, the Lord knew we would forget these things.  That’s why he’s given us means of grace to “stir us up” as we prayed in last week’s collect.  He’s given us each other.  Friends, the Church is a place where we stir each other up to love and good works.  He’s given us his word to prick our consciences when we go astray, to remind us of God’s faithfulness when we’re struggling to trust, and to show us the incredible depths of his love when we’re tempted to take a ho-hum approach to our faith.  He’s given us the sacraments.  In our baptism he has washed us clean and plunged us into his Spirit.  In that water he made each of us his own, just as he made Israel his own when she passed through the Red Sea.  And in the Lord’s Supper he gives us a means of participating in the very events—in the death and resurrection of Jesus—that mark our exodus from the bondage of sin and death.

Friends, be prepared.  Knowing that that King has come and that he will come again, avail yourselves this Advent of the means of grace.  Whether you’ve been carousing as if it were night, or you’ve been sleeping in, or you’ve been busy about the work of the kingdom, steep yourselves in God’s word, be reminded of the love and the grace and the faithfulness of God.  Meditate on the cross and on the empty tomb.  Remember the baptismal water through which you once passed and find assurance that you belong to Jesus.  And, finally, come to his Table.  Here is not only the manna in the wilderness for a hungry people.  Here is the bread and wine by which we participate in the death and resurrection of the King and find out identity as the people of God.

Let’s pray: Almighty God, give us grace to cast away the works of darkness, and put on the armour of light, now in the time of this mortal life in which your Son Jesus Christ came to visit us in great humility; that in the last day, when he shall come again in his glorious majesty to judge both the living and the dead, we may rise to the life immortal; through him who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever.  Amen.

Sermon for the Sunday Next Before Advent

Jeremiah 23:5-8 & St. John 6:5-14

by William Klock

We’re used to thinking of New Year’s Day falling on the 1st of January, but next Sunday marks the beginning of the Church’s year.  Today is what we call the Sunday Next Before Advent.  It’s something of a doorway.  We stand on this Sunday with one foot in the old year, looking back on all we’ve recalled about Jesus and his kingdom, and with the other foot in the new year as we anticipate recalling the story of God’s faithfulness, revealed in Jesus, once again.  We can thank the sometimes haphazard evolution of the Church’s calendar for that.  Our Epistle and Gospel today go back at least to the time of St. Jerome, who compiled one of the earliest lectionaries back in the Fourth Century.  The time of preparation for Christmas—what eventually became the season of Advent—was several weeks longer back then and today’s lessons, with their anticipation of the coming king, are a remnant of those day.

With that in mind, it’s appropriate that for our Epistle today, we read not as we usually do from one of the apostles of the new covenant, but from one of the prophets of the old.  Today we read from the twenty-third chapter of Jeremiah’s prophecy, where the Lord’s promise of a king was announced.  Our Epistle looks back.  It’s no good seeing a promise fulfilled when you have no knowledge of the promise made.

Jeremiah.  Jeremiah lived in Judah about six-hundred years before Jesus was born.  His ministry spanned the years between the reign of King Josiah and the defeat and sack of Jerusalem by the Babylonians.  Josiah was a good king.  He introduced reforms and called the nation to repentance and to faith.  He renovated the temple in Jerusalem and purged pagan worship from the nation.  He had altars to Baal torn down, pagan priests executed.  He even dug up the bones of pagan priests so that their bones could be burned on their pagan altars as an act of desecration.  He restored the regular observance of the Passover.  But Josiah’s reforms would not last.  He died fighting the Egyptians and was followed by a fairly brief series of kings who did what was evil in the sight of the Lord.  The same went largely for the people of Judah.  Josiah’s desired reform, but his people did not share his desire.  Jeremiah’s prophecy announced the Lord’s coming judgement, which would culminate in a final curse of exile from the promised land.  Jeremiah rebuked the kings and people of Judah for their idolatry, for their pride, for their failure to keep the Sabbath, but above all, he rebuked Judah’s unjust social, political, and economic structures.  Jerusalem, announced Jeremiah in 5:1-9, had become worse than Sodom.  There wasn’t a just person to be found to give the Lord a reason to spare the city from judgement.

Our lesson begins at 23:5, but we get a sense of the problem if we look at the first four verses of the chapter:

“Woe to the shepherds who destroy and scatter the sheep of my pasture!” declares the Lord.  Therefore thus says the Lord, the God of Israel, concerning the shepherds who care for my people: “You have scattered my flock and have driven them away, and you have not attended to them.  Behold, I will attend to you for your evil deeds, declares the Lord. (Jeremiah 23:1-2)

The kings of Israel should have been faithful shepherds looking after the flock of Israel.  Jeremiah calls to mind David, the shepherd-king.  The king after God’s own heart, who, despite his great failures, still sought the Lord and his will for his people.  In contrast, the leaders of Judah in Jeremiah’s day did the opposite.  They abused the sheep and led them into idolatry.  “Thus says the Lord,” prophesies the prophet ominously, “You have not attended to the sheep, so I will attend to you.”  The failure of Judah’s kings would result in the scattering, the exile of the people.  Israel was called to be the people who lived with the Lord in their midst, but as we’ve seen in our study of Exodus, to live in the Lord’s presence, meant living according to way, his law.  Israel, from the king down, had failed.  They were called to be a light to the nations, but instead, the nations mocked her saying, “Where is your God?”  Judah would be judged.  But it won’t end there.  Look at verses 3-4:

Then I will gather the remnant of my flock out of all the countries where I have driven them, and I will bring them back to their fold, and they shall be fruitful and multiply.  I will set shepherds over them who will care for them, and they shall fear no more, nor be dismayed, neither shall any be missing, declares the Lord.

 

The Lord will restore the faithful remnant of the flock and will provide faithful shepherds to care for them.  Specifically, Jeremiah goes on in today’s Epistle beginning at verse 5:

“Behold, the days are coming, declares the Lord, when I will raise up for David a righteous Branch, and he shall reign as king and deal wisely, and shall execute justice and righteousness in the land.  In his days Judah will be saved, and Israel will dwell securely. And this is the name by which he will be called: ‘The Lord is our righteousness.’  (Jeremiah 23:5-6)

The Lord will not leave his people without a just and righteous king forever.  He will “raise up for David a righteous branch”.  What does that mean?  It’s the same imagery we recall at Christmas from Isaiah’s prophecy:

There shall come forth a shoot from the stump of Jesse,

         and a branch from his roots shall bear fruit.  (Isaiah 11:1)

The line of David, the kings who had descended from him were like a tree.  It had rotted and withered and the Lord was forced to cut it down, but from the stump that, to all appearance was dead, the Lord would raise up a fresh, healthy, new shoot, a branch.  He would not only be a faithful shepherd of the Lord’s flock, but like David, he would rule with wisdom, justice, and righteousness.  In him the people of God would be saved.  And the Lord sets this king in stark contrast with Zedekiah, the last, sorry king of Judah.  The name Zedekiah means “the Lord is our righteousness”.  Zedekiah made a joke of his own name.  Zedekiah was a puppet king setup by the Babylonians.  He was an evil and faithless man.  The Lord had called his people to trust in him and never to compromise.  Zedekiah represented the utter failure of Judah and her kings to trust in the Lord.  They trusted in horses, they trusted in chariots, they trusted in espionage and forbidden alliances with foreign nations, and, yes, they prayed to the Lord, but they hedged their bets with sacrifices to pagan gods.  But this branch of David’s line whom the Lord promised to raise up, he would truly be what the kings of Israel were called to be.  He would be one who would exemplify that statement of faith, that proclamation that “the Lord is our righteousness”.  He will deliver the people of God, he will restore them to the Lord’s presence, and he will set everything to rights.  In fact, what this new king will do will be so dramatic, it will become the defining event in the life of the people of God.  Look at verses 7-8:

“Therefore, behold, the days are coming, declares the Lord, when they shall no longer say, ‘As the Lord lives who brought up the people of Israel out of the land of Egypt,’ but ‘As the Lord lives who brought up and led the offspring of the house of Israel out of the north country and out of all the countries where he had driven them.’ Then they shall dwell in their own land.”

 

The coming king will deliver the Lord’s people.  Where the old kings led them into judgement, in the coming king the faithful remnant will be vindicated and declared to be in the right.  The coming king will gather the scattered people of God from the nations and restore them to his presence.  And we see here that this is more than a homecoming.  The deliverance and restoration brought by the coming king will redefine the people of God.  Whereas the exodus from Egypt had been, for the better part of a millennium the even that defined Israel, the even in which she was formed as a nation and gained her identity, in which she was declared to be God’s beloved, firstborn son, this new exodus will come to define this restored people.  No longer will the people of God be defined by the exodus from Egypt.  In future they will be defined by this new exodus by which the great shepherd-king will establish a new people gathered from the nations.

Brothers and Sisters, our Epistle today—this “epistle” that comes to us from the prophets rather than the apostles, reminds us of Israel’s calling and Israel’s failure.  And in the midst of Israel’s faithlessness, it reminds us of the Lord’s faithfulness.  Nothing will stop his plan to set his fallen creation and fallen people to rights.  When his people fail, he will send a king to set them right.

In the Old Testament we hear the promise.  In the New we see the fulfilment.  In today’s Gospel we read the familiar story of the feeding of the five thousand.  Let’s read it again.  John 6:5-14.

Lifting up his eyes, then, and seeing that a large crowd was coming toward him, Jesus said to Philip, “Where are we to buy bread, so that these people may eat?”  He said this to test him, for he himself knew what he would do.  Philip answered him, “Two hundred denarii worth of bread would not be enough for each of them to get a little.”  One of his disciples, Andrew, Simon Peter’s brother, said to him, “There is a boy here who has five barley loaves and two fish, but what are they for so many?”  Jesus said, “Have the people sit down.” Now there was much grass in the place. So the men sat down, about five thousand in number.  Jesus then took the loaves, and when he had given thanks, he distributed them to those who were seated. So also the fish, as much as they wanted.  And when they had eaten their fill, he told his disciples, “Gather up the leftover fragments, that nothing may be lost.”  So they gathered them up and filled twelve baskets with fragments from the five barley loaves left by those who had eaten.  When the people saw the sign that he had done, they said, “This is indeed the Prophet who is to come into the world!”

 

The lectionary omits the first four verses of the chapter.  Because of that we miss two important details.  The first is the time and the second is the place.  John tells us in verse 4 that “the Passover was at hand”.  Remember what the Passover was all about.  Passover was the annual festival in which the Jews recalled the events of the Exodus—those events that Jeremiah points to as defining the very identity of Israel as the people of God.  In the Exodus the Lord had delivered them from their Egyptian slavery, he had defeated Pharaoh and the gods of Egypt, he had given them his law and the tabernacle and had taken up his dwelling in their midst, and he had led them through the wilderness.  Each new generation of Jews, as they took part in the Passover meal, became participants in the events of the Exodus.  This is one of three places in his Gospel, where John identifies events in the ministry of Jesus with the timing of the Passover.  The other two are his cleansing of the temple and his death and resurrection.  These are the events in which the Lord fulfilled his promise through Jeremiah of a new exodus and the formation of a new Israel, a new people.

The other important detail in those first verses is the place.  This took place on the far side of the Sea of Galilee.  Jesus had led the people into the wilderness and he’s taken up his seat on a mountain.  Again, John stages the story using the imagery of the Exodus.  We have a great crowd of people in the wilderness.  They’re hungry for supper, but there’s no food to be had.  The only thing missing is the grumbling, but these people were simply hungry to hear Jesus.  This time it’s Jesus who realises the people’s need, seemingly before they realise it themselves.

Jesus turns to Philip and asks what’s to be done to feed all these people.  Now, Philip—a good Jew whom I’m sure knew his people’s story—should have recalled the manna in the wilderness, but he wasn’t thinking of Jesus on that level just yet.  Andrew, on the other hand, shows a bit more faith.  He’s met a young boy who happens to have brought a sack lunch: a few fish and a little bread.  It might as well be nothing in light of the size of the crowd.  But I don’t think Andrew would have bothered telling Jesus about this boy if he hadn’t thought that Jesus could make use of it somehow.  What could Jesus possibly do with so little?  The situation seemed totally impossible, and yet the Lord had provided for his hungry people in the wilderness all those centuries before.  Why not again?  And so Andrew gives us a hopeful sign.

Brothers and Sisters, this is how the people of God are called to respond in hopeless situations, not like the faithless kings of Jeremiah’s day, who were disobedient and put their faith in horses, chariots, foreign kings, and pagan gods.  As I read of Andrew bringing that little lunch of fish and bread to Jesus, surrounded by that huge crowd and thinking of our earlier lesson from Jeremiah about the wicked kings of Judah, I’m reminded of one of Judah’s faithful kings, Hezekiah.

Hezekiah found himself in another hopeless situation.  The Assyrians had besieged Jerusalem.  The messenger of the Assyrian king called up to Hezekiah’s men on the walls of the city that he would destroy them and that it would be because Hezekiah had purged Judah of its altars and shrines to the Assyrian gods.  The Assyrian king sent a message to Hezekiah, warning him that the Lord would not be able to deliver him.  Hezekiah no doubt had advisers who saw the situation as hopeless.  Some would have advised him to surrender to the Assyrians and to bow before their gods.  Others would have urged him to form an alliance with the Egyptians, which would have involved their gods as well.  To many, it would have seemed that Hezekiah was out of options.  He knew better.  The King took the message from the Assyrian king and went to the temple.  There he prayed.  And the Lord sent Isaiah to Hezekiah with a message of reassurance:  The king of Assyria will not enter Jerusalem.  “I will defend this city to save it for my own sake and for the sake of my servant David” (Isaiah 19:34).  And that very night an angel struck down 185,000 men in the camp of the Assyrians.

Andrew now, like Hezekiah taking Sennacherib’s letter to the temple and not knowing what to do, only that the Lord would do something, Andrew now brings the boy and his lunch to Jesus.  The Lord will provide.  Somehow.  In some way.  And Jesus does just that.  He took the bread, gave thanks to God, and started breaking it into pieces and somehow there was still bread in his hands as the baskets began to fill.  And the same with the fish.  And everyone had their fill.  Just like they did in the wilderness after they’d left Egypt.  And yet there’s an element of the story here that points to this new exodus that’s taking shape being even greater than the first.  In the first exodus, there was no manna left over.  There was always enough to satisfy the needs of the people, but if you tried to gather extra and to keep it, it rotted away and produced worms.  Jesus feeds these people in the wilderness and there are twelve basketfuls left over—presumably food the people took home with them to eat and to be reminded the next day of what the Lord had done.

Now, Hezekiah’s faith came to mind as I read about Andrew, but as Jesus divided up the bread and fish, what I think would have come to the minds of the people was a different Old Testament character.  John tells the story to deliberately recall the prophet Elisha and, in particular, the events of 2 Kings 4.  There was a famine in the land and Isaiah had a band of followers to provide for.  A man brought them twenty loaves of bread and a sack of grain, but it wasn’t nearly enough to feed Elisha’s men.  That didn’t concern Elisha.  He gave the sack of bread to his servant and commanded him to give to the men so that they could eat.  His servant balked at that.  “How can I can set this before a hundred men?” he asked.  Elisha commanded him again to take it to the men and said, “Thus says the Lord, ‘They shall eat and have some left.’”  And, somehow, the men ate their fill and, just as the Lord has promised, there were leftovers remaining (2 King 4:42-44).

Now, back to our Gospel: The people on that mountain with Jesus put the pieces together: Passover, wilderness, bread from heaven, baskets of leftover bread.  And they declare that Jesus is “the prophet who is to come into the world.”  Jeremiah’s new exodus is somehow underway, with Jesus at its head.  Their acclamation is taken straight from the Lord’s promise to Moses in Deuteronomy 18: “I will raise up a prophet like you from among their brothers.  And I will put my words in his mouth, and he shall speak to them all that I commanded him” (Deuteronomy 18:18-19).  The new exodus has begun.  Jesus is the prophet who was promised, a prophet like Moses, a prophet like Elisha—and yet a prophet even greater.  Verse 15 says:

Perceiving then that they were about to come and take him by force to make him king, Jesus withdrew again to the mountain by himself.

 

“King” means “messiah”.  Now, did the people really understand who and what the messiah was to be?  No, not really  Almost no one fully understood that until after the events of Jesus’ death and resurrection.  But that doesn’t mean the people that day, filled miraculously with bread and fish, didn’t recognise the messiah in Jesus.  All the pieces were there.  Here was the good shepherd who cared for the sheep when no one else would.  Here was the prophet who would lead the people like Moses in the long-awaited exodus.  If Jesus was those two things, then he also had to be the long-awaited branch that Jeremiah had prophesied would come from the root of David.  Jesus saw the recognition dawn in their eyes and he withdrew.  The time wasn’t right.  This wasn’t how the Messiah was to come into his crown or to take his throne.  Nevertheless, as we draw the lines that connect the promises of God in Jeremiah to their fulfilment in John’s Gospel, we should be overwhelmed by the faithfulness of God.  He does what he promises.

Brothers and Sisters, the Lord invites us to his table this morning and here we again recall his faithfulness.  Here, like the Jews participating in each new generation in the events of the Exodus and finding their place in the people of God, we find our manna in the wilderness, we recall and participate in the death and resurrection of Jesus, and are reminded that we are his people and that, just as was promised so long ago, he has delivered us from our bondage to sin and death.  The sheep that were scattered, have been drawn together by the God of Israel.  You and I have heard the story of God’s faithfulness.  We have come to come to Israel’s king and submitted ourselves in faith.  And now, here at the table, we experience his faithfulness ourselves as we eat the bread and drink the wine.  Here is our manna in the wilderness.  Finally, having known the faithfulness of God, we’re summoned ourselves to walk in faith, trusting that the Lord will finish what he has begun, that he will do what he has promised.

In our Collect we asked the Lord to “stir up our wills”.  We may have come to the end of another Church Year, but the story is hardly over.  Advent is almost here and with it the reminder that Jesus is coming and that as we wait for him, he’s given his Church a mission and his own Spirit.  He has made us stewards of the good news that he is this world’s true Lord.  We have our own parts to play in this story.  And so we petition the Lord in faith, knowing that he is faithful to fulfil his promises.  Whether it takes a hundred years or a hundred thousand years for the world to answer the king’s royal summons to faithful allegiance, he will be with us and he will equip us for every good work.

Let’s pray: Stir up, O Lord, the wills of your faithful people; that we may produce abundantly the fruit of good works, and receive your abundant reward, through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever.  Amen.

Citizens of Heaven

Philippians 3:17-21

by William Klock

In our Epistle St. Paul writes: “Our citizenship is in heaven”.  Paul wrote these words to the Church in the city of Philippi and he’s warning them about certain people who were “enemies of the cross of Christ.  “Their god is their belly, and they glory in their shame, with minds set on earthly things,” he says.  But we—the people of Jesus—are called to be different.  He’s spent a good bit of this epistle explaining specifically how they’re to be different.  Back in Chapter 2 he tells them to be humble and to give themselves for the sake of others because that’s what Jesus did for us: though he was God he didn’t grasp at the prerogatives that gave him, he didn’t seek to exploit his divinity.  Instead—for our sake, for his enemies—he humbled himself, he became one of us, taking our flesh on himself, and then died the degrading and humiliating death of the cross.  Jesus gave himself for us and now we are to give ourselves for the sake of the world too.  Not in quite the same way.  By his sacrifice Jesus redeemed the world and the human race from sin and death and in his resurrection God declared him to be Lord and King of all.  We can’t accomplish what Jesus did.  He’s already done it anyway.  But we do give witness to his death and resurrection by what we preach and proclaim and by how we live.  By our lives we proclaim the good news that Jesus is Lord and in that we call the world to repent and to follow him, to find the forgiveness we have, to be released from bondage to sin as we have, and to live in faith in the joyful hope of one day being raised to the life of God as Jesus has.

This is what Paul’s getting at when he says to live our lives in the knowledge that our citizenship is in heaven.  Jesus came as King—that’s in large part what the Hebrew word “Messiah” means.  Jesus came as King and he came to inaugurate his kingdom—to set in motion the events and forces that will undo the damage our sinful rebellion has done to his Creation and finally set it to rights.  The world rejected him and crucified him.  At the cross the world rejected Jesus’ kingship.  But when God raised him from the grave, he vindicated Jesus and declared that he really and truly is the King.  His kingdom is breaking in.  And that means we have a choice.  Either we choose to follow this new king or we choose to follow the false rulers of the world.  In Paul’s day the pagans worshipped Caesar or Aphrodite or Mammom.  Our world is no different.  People still worship power and sex and money and a host of other things.  This is why Jesus didn’t come the way the Jews expected the Messiah to come.  They expected him to come vanquish his enemies and establish his kingdom all at once.  But that’s not how God works.  He loves us.  He doesn’t want us left dead in our sins.  He doesn’t delight in destroying sinners.  Instead, he seeks to redeem them.  That’s why he sent Jesus, not to condemn, but to redeem.  That’s why Jesus established his Church and equipped us with the Holy Spirit, that we might build his kingdom here as we call sinners to turn away from the world’s false gods and instead to come to Jesus, the true King.  Yes, as we affirm in the Creed, Jesus will come back as King when this work is finished.  He will judge us all on that day and those who have continued to reject him will be destroyed.  But in the meantime, we are to proclaim the Good News that he is the King.  We are to proclaim the goodness of his rule and of his kingdom.  We are to call men and women to repentance and to turn to Jesus so that when judgement finally does come, they can have a part in Jesus’ kingdom rather than be destroyed.  And our lives need to match our proclamation.  We need to live as people who are citizens of heaven.

But what does it mean to be citizens of heaven?  This should be simple, but pop-theology has made a real mess of our theology of heaven and the Christian hope.  This is one of the reasons a narrative-historical approach to how we read the Bible and do theology is so important.  We need to grasp the big story or the big picture.  Only when we’ve done that, can we fit the smaller pieces of the story into it.

When we look at the big picture we see that God created the world good.  He populated it with men and women who were to serve him by having “dominion”—that means to be his regents or his stewards and spread his good rule.  This vocation is what it means for us to bear God’s image.  But we rebelled against God’s rule and in doing so we not only cut ourselves off from his presence and from the life he gave to us, but we dragged his Creation down with us.  The rest of the Big Story, then, is God working to set both us and his Creation to rights—to redeem us from sin’s bondage, to restore us to his presence and his life, all so that we can once again fulfil the vocation he originally gave us.  This is what we see at the end of the story in Revelation—not redeemed men and women going to heaven, leaving earth behind, to live in some kind of disembodied spiritual state, but God resurrecting the faithful who then join King Jesus as he returns to establish his kingdom and to reunite earth and heaven that we might dwell in his presence and he in ours.

There are a host of things that contributed to Christians getting the story wrong over the years.  In part it was the influence of Greek philosophy which saw the body and the material world as bad and the spirit as good.  Many Greeks looked to death as a good that freed the spirit from the dead weight of the body and the material world.  In part it was the doctrine of purgatory that put so much attention on getting through purgatory to heaven that people forgot that the real hope of Christians is for resurrection.  The good theology has always been there.  It’s in the Creeds we recite every Sunday.  It’s in many of the best hymns.  But the bad theology is there too in just as many hymns.  It’s in the popular books.  The last few years has produced a plethora of books and movies on what some more curmudgeonly types have dubbed “heaven tourism”.

But even after getting the Big Picture more or less right, we read Paul’s statement that we are citizens of heaven and some still ask: “When do we get there?  How do we get there?”  And, Brothers and Sisters, that would have left both Paul and the Philippian Christians scratching their heads and looking at us sideways.  Let’s look again at what Paul writes in our Epistle.  This is Philippians 3:17-21.

Brothers, join in imitating me, and keep your eyes on those who walk according to the example you have in us.  For many, of whom I have often told you and now tell you even with tears, walk as enemies of the cross of Christ.  Their end is destruction, their god is their belly, and they glory in their shame, with minds set on earthly things.  But our citizenship is in heaven, and from it we await a Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ, who will transform our lowly body to be like his glorious body, by the power that enables him even to subject all things to himself.

 

As you hear me often say, we have to read Scripture in context.  Whatever sense we give to it had to first make sense to the people who originally heard it.  The modern pop-theology of the “heaven tourism” books wouldn’t have made any sense to Paul or the Philippians.  Well, that’s not entirely true.  It would have made sense, but they would have seen these books as teaching something closer to what the pagan Platonist philosophers taught, not what the Old Testament taught or what the Jews believed or what Jesus taught.

Here’s the context we have to keep in mind when we read Philippians: Philippi was a Roman colony and as Paul writes his letter to the Christians there he draws on this.  Julius Caesar had been killed about a century before Paul wrote these words.  When Caesar died it plunged the Roman Empire into a civil war.  That war was fought mostly in the Eastern part of the empire and when it was over and Octavian had defeated Antony, he ended up with a large army in Greece.  The soldiers were done fighting.  They couldn’t go to Italy or to Rome.  The Romans feared having large armies on their home soil.  In fact, armies weren’t allowed in Rome at all.  And when you just disband an army and give the soldiers nothing productive to do, they tend to make trouble.  So Octavian’s solution was to settle the soldiers around the Greek city of Philippi, giving them land so that they could farm in peace, and he made the city a Roman colony.

Philippi had close ties to Rome.  It was on the road that led across Greece to the narrowest part of the Adriatic Sea, where it was easy to sail back to Italy and to Rome.  The Philippians were proud to be Roman colonists and they did their best to live as Romans despite being surrounded by Greek culture and language.  The newest bit of Roman culture was the imperial cult.  Caesar was to be worshipped as divine, as the saviour and lord of the world.  And the Philippians were happy to do just that to show their loyalty to Rome.

Think about Victoria.  It’s much closer than Philippi, but when it was built something similar was done.  The Colonial Office wanted Victoria to be a bastion of British culture and government on the Pacific.  They pressured the Hudson’s Bay Company to welcome British settlers and to discourage Americans.  A lot of people today think the strong British flavour of the city is just a modern gimmick to attract tourists, but it’s not.  It was deliberate and it goes all the way back to the mid-19th Century when the city was a colony on the far edge of the British Empire meant to shine the light of Britannia in the wilderness.

This is what Paul’s getting at in Philippians when we writes that we are citizens of heaven.  A lot of people read this and think, “Yes, and so living as citizens of heaven is what we do while we wait for Jesus to come back take us to heaven where we belong.”  But that’s not it at all.  Again, we’ve got to think like the Philippians to whom Paul was writing.  Being a Roman citizen didn’t mean that someday Caesar would come and take you home to Rome with him.  Not at all.  In fact, that’s just the opposite of what it meant to be a colonist.  Rome didn’t need any more people.  It was already overcrowded and had high unemployment. That was why Octavian had settled these colonists in Philippi to begin with.  No, to be a Roman citizen in a colony like Philippi was to bring the light of Roman civilisation and culture to the far reaches of the world.  It was to speak Latin when everyone around spoke Greek.  It was to be a practical, sensible, down-to-earth Roman in the midst of decadent Greeks.  It was to show the Greeks that Caesar was their lord and that his rule and his empire would bring them peace and prosperity.

And what if the colony was threatened?  Philippi wasn’t very far from the raiding bands of barbarians in the north.  What if they attacked?  Or what if the Greeks raised a rebellion?  What if the Roman colonists couldn’t deal with it themselves?  Then they looked forward to Caesar coming to their rescue.  He was their “saviour”, after all.  He would come from Rome with his army, squash the barbarians or put down the rebellion, and after it was all over the colony would be as firmly established as Rome itself.  Caesar was the ruler of the known world.  He had the power and he had the authority to make it happen.

This is the idea and the mindset that Paul’s drawing on here when he writes to the Philippians about being citizens of heaven.  The Church is a colony of heaven, established by Jesus, settled by his people and our purpose is just what we pray in the Lord’s Prayer.  We pray, “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.”  Our duty as citizens of heaven is to bring the life of God and the rule of Jesus to bear on the people and on the world around us.

As we all know, this isn’t always easy to do.  It’s easy to forget who we are when we’re surrounded by people who worship Caesar and Aphrodite and Mammon.  It’s not always easy to stand up to the pressures around us.  It’s not always easy to proclaim that Jesus is Lord when doing so is unpopular and might get us into trouble.  But remember, Brothers and Sisters, that we live in hope.  The Roman colonists trusted that if they got into trouble Caesar would come to their rescue—and they trusted that he would win the fight.  But Jesus has not only given us his promise, he’s told us the end of the story already.  He will return—no ifs, ands, or buts.  What he began when he rose from the grave, what he started when he equipped his Church with the Spirit and sent us out to do as heavenly colonists, he will one day complete.  We don’t know when.  It could be a hundred years or a hundred thousand, but he will complete it through his Church, working in the power of the Spirit.  John gives us a vision of the heavenly city descending to the earth, earth and heaven joined together, and a loud voice crying out: “Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man. He will dwell with them, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them as their God. He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more”.  We look forward to the day promised by the prophets and apostles when God’s creation has been set to rights and the earth will be filled with the glory of the Lord as the waters cover the sea.

Paul writes in verse 21 that Jesus will, on that day, transform our bodies to be like his glorious body.  Think about that.  After his resurrection Jesus’ body was as at home in heaven as it was on earth.  On the one hand his friends could touch and feel him.  Jesus sat and ate with them.  And yet he could also ascend on the clouds to take his throne in heaven.  Jesus will raise us in the same way, making us, too, as at home in heaven as we are on earth—filling us with the very life of God himself so that we can live in the world as God created it—heaven and earth not separate and apart, but joined together and overlapping—God dwelling with men and women.  John’s last vision is of Creation restored, this time not a garden, but a great city, but at the centre of it we see the same thing: the tree of life and a river flowing from the throne of God to give life to the world.  Jesus died and rose again in order to lead us back to the place we started, to restore us to the life and vocation for which God created us.  We are citizens of that kingdom and our duty and vocation today is to live in hope as the people of that kingdom and to proclaim it’s coming and to proclaim its King.

That is why Paul writes in the next verse:

Therefore, my brothers…stand firm thus in the Lord (Philippians 4:1)

Paul was calling the Philippians and urging them to stand firm in their allegiance to the Lord Jesus.  Everyone around them paid allegiance to Caesar, but regardless of how strong the pressure was, they were to proclaim that Jesus is Lord and they were to live in faith, showing by their choices and their values and their allegiance that Jesus is the one, true Lord of Creation.  Paul tells them to imitate him in this.  His situation was a little different.  He writes earlier in the letter about the ways in which he had given up—even thrown aside—his Jewish privilege in order to give his allegiance to Jesus.  That had got him into trouble more times than he liked to count—beaten, stoned, imprisoned.  Not being Jewish, the specifics of the Philippians’ situation were different, but Paul is urging them to do the same thing.  This is what it meant when he told them in Chapter 2 to work out their salvation with fear and trembling.  They needed to keep Jesus before them, thinking on his death and resurrection and on his Kingship and then they needed to work out for themselves what it was going to take to follow him and to proclaim him—what things needed to change in their lives, where they needed to change their priorities.  And so for us, Brothers and Sisters.  We need to live with Jesus at the forefront of our minds.  Jesus died and rose for our sake.  He is the world’s true King.  Jesus changes everything, but how does this truth work itself out in each of our lives and in each of our situations?  How does it impact the things we say and do?  How does it impact our priorities and values?  How do we use our money or engage in politics in light of Jesus and his kingdom?  How do we respond to our own troubles or to the trials of others with Jesus in mind?  What does it look like for us when our allegiance to the Lord Jesus runs into the priorities and allegiances and desires of the world and people around us?

Abraham Kuyper once wrote, “There is not a square inch in the whole domain of our human existence over which Christ, who is Sovereign over all, does not cry, Mine!”  It’s worth noting that Kuyper wasn’t just a theologian.  He was also a statesman and the prime minister of the Netherlands.  He understood the importance of bringing the kingdom of Jesus to bear not just on his own life and personal piety, but on the world around him.  How can we do the same?  You don’t have to be a great theologian or a great political leader.  We’ve each been called and equipped to live the life of Jesus where we are, to live life faithfully and in accordance with our hope that Jesus is setting everything in this world right, knowing that one day the Lord’s glory will fill the earth.  What can you do with your unique gifts and personality and resources and situation to give the world around you a glimpse of Jesus’ kingdom?

Let us pray: Gracious Father, you sent your Son into the world, not to condemn, but to redeem.  Through his death and resurrection you’ve forgiven our sins and brought us into the life of your kingdom.  Teach each of us now, how we can bring your redeeming grace to bear on the people and situations around us.  Teach us to live as colonists of your kingdom, speaking your language, showing your character, and living according to your values in the midst of the world so that others will be drawn into your kingdom and know Jesus as we do. We ask this in his name.

The Glory of the Lord Filled the Tabernacle

Exodus 35:1-40:38

by William Klock

 

When we were last in Exodus before All Saints, we saw the Lord renew his covenant with Israel.  They had broken it.  Their lives were spared, but for a while there, everything was off.  The Lord would fulfil his promise to give them Canaan, but he wouldn’t go with them himself.  He’d send an angel.  No torah.  And no tabernacle.  He would not be dwelling in midst of this adulterous and siff-necked people.  But Moses stepped in as mediator and pleaded on their behalf.  The Lord forgave and we saw the covenant renews.  As we come to Chapter 35 this morning, it the text picks up right where it left off before the golden calf incident:

Moses assembled all the congregation of the people of Israel and said to them, “These are the things that the Lord has commanded you to do.  Six days work shall be done, but on the seventh day you shall have a Sabbath of solemn rest, holy to the Lord. Whoever does any work on it shall be put to death.  You shall kindle no fire in all your dwelling places on the Sabbath day.”

 

The very structure of the narrative highlights God’s forgiveness.  The last instructions he gave before the raucous idolatrous worship of the Israelites reached them on the mountain were for the Sabbath.  And now, the covenant renewed, the Lord picks at the same place: the Sabbath.  The Sabbath was the sacred time of the people of God.  The tabernacle was their sacred space and that’s what fills the next six chapters of Exodus.  I want to skip through those six chapters this morning.  Six chapters is lot, but if you’ve been paying attention, you’ll remember that we’ve already covered most of it.  As we covered the instructions for the tabernacle in earlier chapters, remember that I repeatedly pointed out that we see those instructions carried out.  And the text stresses that they were carried out faithfully, exactly as given, by repeating the details of the instructions word for word in most cases.  So there’s not as much to cover here as you might think at first glance.

So the instructions have been given and in 35:4 Moses we read:

Moses said to all the congregation of the people of Israel, “This is the thing that the Lord has commanded.  Take from among you a contribution to the Lord.  Whoever is of a generous heart, let him bring the Lord’s contribution… (Exodus 35:34-35)

 

It’s time for the people to bring their gold and silver, their linen and the leather, their gemstones and their incense.  And, too, the work of the people is needed.  Verse 10:

 

“Let every skillful craftsman among you come and make all that the Lord has commanded…

 

The conventional wisdom these days in churches is that ten per cent of the people contribute ninety per cent of the money and do ninety per cent of the work.  That wasn’t the case in Israel—at least not at this point.  I expect they were feeling a lot of gratitude at the moment.  They’d not only been spared a death sentence, but just when they thought they had lost the Lord, he’d forgiven them and reestablished the covenant.  They’re enthusiasm for the Lord was at its peak.  If John Newton had been writing hymns in those days, they’d have been singing “Amazing Grace”.  Brothers and Sisters, this is why we Christians need to spend time contemplating the cross of Christ, remembering out sinfulness, remembering that the wages of sin is separation from God and the death that ensues, and then glorying in the gracious and merciful love he has poured in giving himself for the sake of our sins.  If we are not motivated to give and to serve and to do so with enthusiasm and joy, we have not grasped the depths of God’s grace towards us.  Look at verse 20:

 

Then all the congregation of the people of Israel departed from the presence of Moses.  And they came, everyone whose heart stirred him, and everyone whose spirit moved him, and brought the Lord’s contribution to be used for the tent of meeting, and for all its service, and for the holy garments.  So they came, both men and women. All who were of a willing heart brought brooches and earrings and signet rings and armlets, all sorts of gold objects, every man dedicating an offering of gold to the Lord.  And every one who possessed blue or purple or scarlet yarns or fine linen or goats’ hair or tanned rams’ skins or goatskins brought them.  Everyone who could make a contribution of silver or bronze brought it as the Lord’s contribution. And every one who possessed acacia wood of any use in the work brought it.  And every skillful woman spun with her hands, and they all brought what they had spun in blue and purple and scarlet yarns and fine twined linen.  All the women whose hearts stirred them to use their skill spun the goats’ hair.  And the leaders brought onyx stones and stones to be set, for the ephod and for the breastpiece, and spices and oil for the light, and for the anointing oil, and for the fragrant incense.  All the men and women, the people of Israel, whose heart moved them to bring anything for the work that the Lord had commanded by Moses to be done brought it as a freewill offering to the Lord. (Exodus 35:20-29)

The Lord had commanded Moses to gather these things from the people, but in the end, they brought them not out of obligation, but because their hearts moved them.  They brought them as a freewill offering to the Lord.  They brought them in gratitude.  And I think we get here as well a sense of just how important the tabernacle is going to be for Israel.  The tabernacle was the means by which the Lord dwelt in their midst—and the presence of the Lord was what the people do desperately wanted.  They wanted it so badly, that when they Moses had died, they made the golden calf as a sort of throne for the Lord, to summon him down into their midst.  And now, couple with their desire for the Lord, they’ve also got a very definite understanding that both to honour him and to protect themselves from his holy presence, the Lord will only dwell in their midst on his terms.  With that in mind, they throw themselves into this project.

I’m going to skip over Chapters 36 and 37 and most of 38 and 39.  This is where we see everything build just as the Lord had entrusted from the tent itself, to the ark and mercy seat, the altar, the vessels, and the garments of the priest.  Everything just as the Lord said.  But I want to pause at the end of Chapter 38.  Starting in 38:21 we’re told that the Levites were commanded to record the materials that were given by the people, and here we get a sense of their generosity.  In verses 24 and 25 we’re told they gave 29 talents, 730 shekels of gold (that’s almost a thousand kilograms) and 100 talents and 1775 talents of silver (that’s over 3400 kilos), and 70 talents and 2400 shekels of bronze (that’s 2400 kilos).  That’s a lot.  Because we’re not certain how to read the numbers in Exodus that tell us how many Israelites there were, it’s also hard to say how much this amounted to per person, but I think the generosity is obvious.

Now, let’s jump to Chapter 39:32.  This is what we read after all the detailed descriptions of each part of the tabernacle being made:

Thus all the work of the tabernacle of the tent of meeting was finished, and the people of Israel did according to all that the Lord had commanded Moses; so they did.

The people made everything exactly as the Lord had told them and they brought it to Moses.  Verses 33 to 41 list all the individual parts from the tent to the ark to the garments and everything else.  Then, in verse 42, it’s stressed yet again that in all this they were doing just as the Lord had said:

According to all that the Lord had commanded Moses, so the people of Israel had done all the work.  And Moses saw all the work, and behold, they had done it; as the Lord had commanded, so had they done it. Then Moses blessed them.

 

The really important part here is there in verse 43.  Moses saw all the work they had done and Moses blessed them.  I hope that sounds kind of familiar.  It should.  This passage is full of allusions to Genesis.  First, same word is used in verse 32 of the people “completing” all these things as is used of the Lord in Genesis 2:2.  And here, Moses see all they have made, using language drawn from Genesis, where Lord saw all he had made and called it good.  And Moses blessing of the people draws on Genesis 1 and 2 and God’s blessing of his new creation.  This was important to the author of Exodus.  He wanted to stress that the building of the tabernacle wasn’t just an act of building.  It was an act of creation that was connected with the Lord himself and that links the tabernacle with creation itself—specifically, we saw in the instructions the Lord gave, the details that made the tabernacle analogous to the garden in Genesis.  The garden was the place where human beings lived in the presence of the Lord.  Because of our rebellion, we were cast out.  But here the tabernacle, hearkening back to the very beginning, becomes the place where the Lord will once again dwell in the midst of his people.  It’s a theme of new creation we see developed all the way through the scriptures, right into the gospels—think of St. John writing about the Word becoming flesh and dwelling, literally he writes “tabernacling” amongst us.  And from the gospels this them of new creation centred on the tabernacle or temple carries right to the end of the story, except at that point—remember—in the new creation there was no temple.  Creation had itself, once again, become the temple, heaven and earth joined back to together, and human beings living in forever in the presence of the Lord.  That theme begins here in Exodus.

Now, in Chapter 40, the final chapter in Exodus, we see it all come together:

The Lord spoke to Moses, saying, “On the first day of the first month you shall erect the tabernacle of the tent of meeting.  And you shall put in it the ark of the testimony, and you shall screen the ark with the veil.  And you shall bring in the table and arrange it, and you shall bring in the lampstand and set up its lamps.  And you shall put the golden altar for incense before the ark of the testimony, and set up the screen for the door of the tabernacle.  You shall set the altar of burnt offering before the door of the tabernacle of the tent of meeting, and place the basin between the tent of meeting and the altar, and put water in it.  And you shall set up the court all around, and hang up the screen for the gate of the court.  (Exodus 40:1-8)

So the Lord now gives specific instructions for how it’s all to be put together.  He also gives Moses instructions for how everything is to be anointed with that special anointing oil we read about a while back.  Aaron and his sons are to washed and dressed and anointed as well.  And we’re told in verse 19 that Moses did everything that the Lord had commanded.  Verses 16 and 17:

This Moses did; according to all that the Lord commanded him, so he did. In the first month in the second year, on the first day of the month, the tabernacle was erected.

 

What follows from verse 18 to verse 33 are the specifics: the setting up of the tent with its frames and sockets, the placing of the ark and the veil, all the furnishings, the altar, and the outer court.  I won’t read all that, but it ends with the words—and they should sound familiar:

So Moses finished the work.

 

Again, this is the language of creation.  The vocabulary is taken straight from Genesis 2:2: So God, on the seventh day, finish his work.  Too, we see that the setting up of the tabernacle on the first day of the first month.  Israel’s deliverance from Egypt marked a new beginning for the people of God.  Israel was a “new creation.  I think another thing that comes out—and maybe not so well when we don’t read all those verses giving the detailed instructions first and then the detailed descriptions of how they’re followed out, but there’s a creational element there too.  In the details, the tabernacle mirrors the order that the Lord built into his creation.  It’s according to his plan.  It’s perfectly ordered.  There’s no room, no place for disorder or chaos.  Everything must be—and everything turn out to be—exactly as God instructed.

All this is why the tabernacle was so central to Israel’s life.  There’s a tendency for Christians to think of all of this as tedious and ineffective.  People talk about the tabernacle and it’s rituals in a negative light, as if the tabernacle were an attempt by Israel to put God in a box and that what the Israelites did there was just a bunch of dead ritual.  But I hope you can see after all of this that this couldn’t be further from the truth.  When the prophets, and when later Jesus criticized the priesthood and the temple, it was the priesthood and the temple that they were criticizing; it was what they had become and the way that Israel had come to abuse them.

Brothers and Sisters, the tabernacle was the means and the place of the Lord’s presence with his people.  The sacrificial system was a vital means of cleansing and forgiveness that made it possible for the people to live with the Lord in their midst.  I think if we read backward from the New Testament it helps to give us a sense of what was going on.  As I said earlier, St. John describes the incarnation of Jesus as God dwelling—he uses the Greek word that’s also used of the tabernacle—Jesus is God tabernacling in our midst.  Jesus took the place of the temple, but that means that before Jesus, the tabernacle and then the temple were the means by which the people knew the presence of the Lord.  Just because Jesus has become the tabernacle for us doesn’t mean that the tabernacle was faulty or ineffective.  It was God’s means to be with his people and to prepare them for a day when he would be with them more fully, not only taking on their human nature, but also making them the tabernacle themselves as he filled them with his own Spirit.

But that’s not the end.  Exodus 40 has four more chapters.  I was going to preach on them next week, but realised that it made more sense to look at them now.  What happened once Moses has finished setting up the tabernacle and anointing the priests?  Look at verses 34-38.  This is the glorious end of Exodus and it’s a shame that all the movies seem to end long before any of this.

Then the cloud covered the tent of meeting, and the glory of the Lord filled the tabernacle.  And Moses was not able to enter the tent of meeting because the cloud settled on it, and the glory of the Lord filled the tabernacle.  Throughout all their journeys, whenever the cloud was taken up from over the tabernacle, the people of Israel would set out.  But if the cloud was not taken up, then they did not set out till the day that it was taken up.  For the cloud of the Lord was on the tabernacle by day, and fire was in it by night, in the sight of all the house of Israel throughout all their journeys.

 

The God who had led Israel from Egypt and through the sea, the God who has been up on the mountain, now descends and his presence fills the tabernacle.  Specifically, the cloud covered the tent and the Lord’s glory filled it.  I can’t tell you exactly what that means or what that looked like.  We can only point to Moses’ experience on the mountain when he wanted to know the Lord and his ways, he wanted to understand, and the Lord placed him in a crevice in the rocks and his glory passed by Moses. In that act the Lord made himself known to Moses.  It was awesome and holy.  It was something no human could bear to see.  Moses was given the smallest of glimpses.  And yet it left his face radiant.  And now, that manifestation of glory fills the tabernacle as the Israelites watch—and I’m sure as they fell to their knees and hid their faces in fear, but sang with joy.  The dwelling of God was now with men and his presence in the tabernacle will, through the long centuries, prepare his people for a greater and deeper and more personal dwelling amongst his people and a new creation that reaches beyond Israel to the nations and eventually encompasses all of creation itself.  What happens here is amazing, awesome, and faith-inspiring, but we’re a long way from the New Covenant.  The glory of the Lord is so great that even Moses is unable to enter the tabernacle.  And through the long centuries, even though they are the people who live with the Lord in their midst, the Israelites themselves—apart from the priests—will never get any closer to that presence than the outer court of the tabernacle.  The Lord will be with his people, but still distant from them.  Not until the Incarnation will this change.

And yet, in the cloud that guides the Israelites, we’re reminded that even with that degree of separation, he really is with them and he will guide them at every step through the wilderness and into the promised land.  And I think in this we’re reminded of why God redeems his people.  I’ve seen a surge of Liberation Theology amongst Evangelicals these last few years as our culture has become increasingly concerned with and sometimes unhealthily obsessed with issues of race.  Liberation Theology, like so many of the popular movies telling this story, stops at the sea or at the mountain.  God has set his people free from their Egyptian slavery.  But, Brothers and Sisters, God has never redeemed people, he has never set them free to go their own way.  He liberates his people from one bondage to another.  He liberated Israel from bondage and Egypt that they might serve him instead, and just so in Jesus, he frees his people from our bondage to sin and death that we might serve a new king in a new country and know the glorious life in the presence of God for which we were originally created.

It might seem that Exodus ends on an odd note to us.  It’s a preparatory note.  This is not the end of the story.  It’s the end of this story, but it’s the beginning of another that picks up in the book of Numbers as the Israelites begin their march to the promised land.  The way through the wilderness will be long and grueling and the entrance into Canaan will be against great odds, but the events of Exodus assured the people that the Lord was with them and would guide them each step of the way.  Exodus establishes the foundation of Israel’s faith: “I will be your God and you will be my people.”

That story will, eventually lead to the greatest story ever told, that began on that night two thousand years ago when the word became flesh and tabernacle amongst us.  The gospel story concludes with the Incarnate Word ascending to his throne, but also with his glory descending at Pentecost, giving his own Spirit to indwell his people.  He, the cornerstone, has built a new tabernacle, a new dwelling for the Lord, built brick by brick of his own people, redeemed, forgiven, and made holy.  And yet even Pentecost is not the end of the story.  It’s only the beginning.

I was reminded this week of the ending of C. S. Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia.  At the end of The Last Battle, the great lion Aslan, the Christ figure of Narnia, leads the children in his new creation and Lewis writes:

“And as He spoke, He no longer looked to them like a lion; but the things that began to happen after that were so great and beautiful that I cannot write them.  And for us this is the end of all the stories, and we can most truly say that they all lived happily ever after.  But for them it was only the beginning of the real story.  All their life in this world and all their adventures in Narnia had only been the cover and the title page: now at last they were beginning Chapter One of the Great Story which no one on earth has read: which goes on for ever: in which every chapter is better than the one before.”[1]

That, Brothers and Sisters, is I think the key message of Exodus, just as it is for the gospel itself.

On that note, I think our collect offers an appropriate closing prayer. Let’s pray. Lord, we beseech thee to keep thy household the Church in continual godliness; that through thy protection it may be free from all adversities, and devoutly given to serve thee in good works, to the glory of thy Name; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

[1] The Chronicles of Narnia (New York: Barnes and Noble, 2010), 767.

Blessed are…

St. Matthew 5:1-12 & Revelation 7:2-17

by William Klock 

The Feast of All Saints is one of oldest feasts on the Church’s calendar.  We have evidence of sermons preached on this occasion as far back as the Third Century.  In those early centuries it was sometimes celebrated during Eastertide.  The Eastern Church celebrates this feast on the Sunday after Pentecost.  The Western Church has celebrated it on November 1 since the Eighth Century—apparently an ancient Irish tradition that gradually made its way from Ireland, to England, to Gaul, and eventually to Rome.

The purpose of All Saints’ Day has evolved since those earliest days.  The first Christians to observe it did so with the intent to commemorate the many martyrs of those early centuries—brothers and sisters who gave up their lives, rather than deny their faith in Jesus.  As the empire eventually converted and martyrdom became less common, the feast gradually came to encompass all the saints, all our brothers and sisters who have gone before us, not just those who were martyred.  But the theme of martyrdom—and of the Christian hope held so tightly by those martyrs—lies at the heart of our lessons today.  The faithful are often ground up in the gears of this evil age.  The world shouts, “Good riddance.”  In the words of our Old Testament lesson from the Wisdom of Solomon, “In the eyes of the foolish they seem to have died” and “in the sight of men they were punished”, but the reality is that their hope was not in vain, “The souls of the righteous are in the hand of God, and no torment will touch them…They will govern nations and rule over peoples, and the Lord will reign over them forever.”  Apocryphal that text may be, but it highlights the truth of God’s kingdom and its conflict with the world.  The kingdom of God seems upside-down—but only because the values of fallen humanity were upside-down already.

This is what lies behind our Gospel lesson, the Beatitudes, the first part of Jesus’ “Sermon on the Mount”.  Jesus begins his famous sermon with a list of people who are “blessed”.  That’s language straight from the Lord’s covenant with Abraham.  Remember, the Lord called him and promised not only that he would bless Abraham, but that through him he would bless the nations.  To be

“blessed” isn’t so much about being happy or prosperous, but about being the people God had called his people to be, about being the people who live with God in their midst—it’s about being kingdom people.  Israel had mostly failed at this, but there was always a faithful few who really did have a sense of what God had called them to do.  We see them in people like John’s father, Zechariah, in Mary and in Joseph, in Simeon and in Anna.  But the thing was that none of these people were the sort most people expected to be exemplifying the kingdom of God.  Sure, they were faithful in their simple ways, but they weren’t important, they weren’t rich, they weren’t powerful—they were nobodies.  They were the people being ground up in the gears turned by the bigshots, whether that was the Romans or the Herodians or the corrupt Sadducees who controlled the temple and the priesthood.  And yet it says something that it’s with these people that the Good News begins.  And it’s with these people—and the people like them to whom Jesus had been ministering in Galilee—that he begins his most important sermon on the kingdom.  Jesus says:

“Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” (Matthew 5:3)

I think we have a tendency to read this and think that what Jesus is saying is that if we behave a certain way—in this case, if we’re poor in spirit—then we will somehow earn or be worthy of God’s blessing.  But that’s not it.  Again, think of Abraham.  In Genesis 12 God calls Abraham and he says to him, “I will make of you a great nation and I will bless you and make your name great.”  The Lord reiterated and renewed this promise to the generations that came after Abraham.  This was his promise to Israel, “I will bless you” and this was at the core of Jewish identity.  To be blessed was to be part of the covenant people of God.  When Jesus talks about people who are blessed, he’s answering the question of who belongs to the people of God.  But here’s where he turns things upside-down—at least that’s how it seemed to so many of the people who heard him.  Most people just assumed that because they were descendants of Abraham, were circumcised, ate the right food, observed the Sabbath, and stayed away from Gentiles that they were “blessed” because they were God’s people.  But here’s the thing: the Lord’s blessing wasn’t blessing for the sake of blessing.  There was more to the promise.  He said to Abraham, “I will bless you…so that you will be a blessing.”  A blessing to whom?  The Lord says to all the families of the earth.  Israel was to be like salt, preserving the earth.  Israel was to be a light, shining in the darkness and leading the nations back to the knowledge of God.  In fact, after these Beatitudes, that’s the next thing Jesus goes on to preach about: salt and light.  If you’re not being salt and light, you’re not blessing and are not blessed—you’re not part of the kingdom.

This is what blessing is about.  The people Jesus describes here are the people through whom God makes his kingdom known.  They’re the people who already understand and are already living the life of the kingdom.  He starts with the poor in spirit.  I can’t help but think of Mary.  When she finds out that she’s going to be pregnant with the Lord’s Messiah she doesn’t get full of herself.  There were plenty of people who would have.  No, she bursts out into a song of praise and the first things she sings is, “My soul doth magnify the Lord…for he hath regarded the lowliness of his handmaiden.”

Most people expected God to usher in his kingdom by coming to the important people, the wealthy people, the powerful and politically connected people.  Most people expected the Messiah to ride into Jerusalem like King David in a chariot with a sword and with an army.  Instead he came to a poor young girl.  And it was people like Mary, people who were poor in spirit who came flocking to Jesus and in and through them the kingdom of God burst into the world.  The humble came to Jesus in faith and he opened their blind eyes, he healed their paralysed legs, he healed their diseases, he cast out their demons, he even raised their children from death.  Meanwhile the powerful people, like the Sadducees, fumed that Jesus was offering forgiveness of sins without sending these people to the temple to offer sacrifices.  Meanwhile the Pharisees, people who thought of themselves as righteous, were fuming because Jesus was welcoming the unclean and the sinful.  But Jesus says that the kingdom won’t be found with the powerful or the self-righteous, but with those humble enough to follow the king born in a stable.

The rest of the Beatitudes go the same way.  Jesus says:

“Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.

“Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.

“Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied.

“Blessed are the merciful, for they shall receive mercy.

“Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.

“Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God.” (Matthew 5:4-9)

Israel was in a sort of exile and the people longed for consolation, but most wanted that consolation to come in the form of a Messiah who would put their enemies to the sword.  Jesus says that, no, those who will be comforted, those who will show the kingdom, are those who mourn the sins of Israel and who are ready to repent and turn back to God.  Israel wanted to inherit the earth, but Jesus reminds them that their inheritance will come not through those who are full of pride, not through those who think they’re better than everyone else because of their descent from Abraham or their circumcision or their diet, but it will instead come through those who are meek.  Israel longed for justice—which is probably a better translation than “righteousness” in this case, but the justice Israel wanted had more to do with vengeance on her enemies and Jesus is saying, again: No.  Your hunger for justice will only be satisfied when you are willing to set aside your rights in favour of humility and gentleness.  Israel longed for mercy.  She longed for deliverance.  But Jesus warns that mercy is only for the merciful, not the vengeful.  Israel longed to see God, but Jesus warns: You will never see God so long as your outward acts of piety are a cover for oppressing the poor, the widow, and the orphan.  The kingdom is manifest by those who aren’t just outwardly pure, but who are pure of heart.  And, of course, Israel saw herself as God’s son.  The people longed for God to vindicate them by establishing them once again as a nation over their enemies, but Jesus warns: If you want to be God’s sons you need to show the peacemaking character of your Father.  You’re out for vengeance, you’re calling for the blood of your enemies, if you had the chance you’d kill them in their beds and then tell the world that you were acting out the justice of God on the enemies of his people.  But people like that will never be sons of the God who seeks not vengeance on his enemies, but offers them mercy and forgiveness and reconciliation.  The violent will never be sons of the God who seeks to make peace, even offering his own as an atonement for their treason.

Everything Jesus describes here was aimed at Israel’s failure to be God’s people, to be salt and light, as he says in the verses that follow.  God had blessed Israel to be a blessing, but they wanted to keep his blessing to themselves, which is why he’d taken it away and sent them into exile.  And most still hadn’t learned.  But there was this remnant: again, people like Mary and Zechariah and Simeon who were already showing the world what the kingdom was like, people who were already living out the character of God.  People whom the world saw as nobodies, but who were in reality already sharing the Lord’s blessing to the world.  This is what John the Baptist had been about: calling the people of Israel to repentance, calling them to turn aside from their sin, their folly, from their false views of the kingdom so that they would be prepared for the Messiah.

But, Jesus warns, if you are faithful in being the sorts of people who carry God’s blessing to the word, be prepared for trouble.  In verses 10-12 he goes on:

“Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

“Blessed are you when others revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for so they persecuted the prophets who were before you.”

 

I expect Jesus was anticipating where his own ministry was headed when he preached these words.  He’d already experienced the anger of his own people.  When he preached in his hometown of Nazareth the people tried to throw him off a cliff.  He knew that most people were not going to receive what he’s saying here and he knew that he was going to be rejected and that he would suffer and be killed.  And he knew, too, that the people who chose to follow him would be persecuted and many would die.  At the Cross the present evil age was dealt a death blow.  In rising from the grave Jesus inaugurated the age to come.  The present age is passing away and the age to come is breaking in, but Jesus knew that his people would live in the overlap.  God brought salvation and renewal this way for a reason.  The people of Jesus’ day wanted it to come all at once, but God chose to bring it slowly.  People today have the same sort of expectation.  They ask how a good God can allow so much evil in the world.  But in asking that question, in asking why God doesn’t come and deal with evil we’re showing the same sort of self-righteous mindset that dominated Israel.  We’re forgetting that for God to come and deal with evil means that God will not only have to deal with our enemies and the people who cause us grief, but that he’ll also have to deal with us.  We’re all sinners.  We’re all responsible for the mess this world is in—some more, some less—but we’ve all contributed to it.  And so God sent Jesus to deal with that sin and to inaugurate his kingdom, but he also delays, and in that he gives sinners a chance to repent and turn to him.  It also means that those who, in this in-between time, insist on revealing the kingdom, those who insist on confronting the sinful systems of the old age through their poverty of spirit, through their meekness, through their mercy, through their peacemaking will face the same backlash that Jesus faced.  As God’s people show the world set to rights, those invested in the way things are will fight back.  When God’s people declare that Jesus is the world’s true Lord, the Caesars of this age and their supporters will lash out to silence the challenge.

The martyrs are a testimony to Jesus’ promise.  And when you see your brothers and sisters being carted off to die—whether by the Jewish authorities, or the Roman, or radical atheists, Islamists, Hindus, or Buddhist in our age, it’s easy to fear.  Are we really blessed when we are persecuted for the sake of righteousness?  This was the purpose behind St. John’s “revelation”.  The church was on the verge of being plunged into violent persecution—a time of trial or tribulation.  Would their faith hold?  And what about those who died for the sake of faith in Jesus?  And so God gave John a vision.  Just as Jesus had promised, judgement was coming, first on unbelieving Israel and then on the pagan word of the Greeks and Romans.  The scroll of judgement is brought forth—this in the fifth and sixth chapters of Revelation—sealed with seven seals, which only the lamb—now come as the lion of Judah—can open.  As the judgement is unleashed on Jerusalem, the saints are reminded that God is in control.  The judgement plays out here just as had said it would.  And, too, the Lord marks out his own.  That’s where our lesson today from Revelation picks up.  The winds of judgement are poised to bring destruction to Jerusalem.  This is the great day of the wrath of God and of the lamb.  But what of the faithful?  The opening of the scroll is stopped for their sake.  Look at Revelation 7:2-3.

Then I saw another angel ascending from the rising of the sun, with the seal of the living God, and he called with a loud voice to the four angels who had been given power to harm earth and sea, saying, “Do not harm the earth or the sea or the trees, until we have sealed the servants of our God on their foreheads.”

 

The imagery here is drawn from Ezekiel.  The prophet was shown a vision of Israel’s idolatry and then a vision of a “man clothed in linen” who was directed by the Lord to “put a mark on the foreheads of the men who sigh and groan over all the abominations that are committed in it” (Ezekiel 9:3-4).  Immediately after, the Lord sent six other men through Jerusalem, beginning at the temple, to slay men and women, young and old, but they were to “touch no one on whom is the mark” (9:2, 5-6).  What the Lord did in Ezekiel’s day is about to happen again, but the Lord will spare the faithful.  Those who are sealed by the angel are announced in verse 4:

And I heard the number of the sealed, 144,000, sealed from every tribe of the sons of Israel.

The text goes on to list specifically twelve thousand from each of the twelve tribes.  This is the remnant of faithful Israel, much like those marked out in Ezekiel’s vision centuries before.  This is the Jewish church of Jerusalem and Judea, those Jews who heard the good news and trusted in Jesus.  Those Jews who were appalled by Israel’s abominations.  Those who were about to face violent persecution at the hands of their fellow Jews.  The Lord will not abandon them, even though they die.  He places his mark on them and seals them as his own.  And their faithfulness to Jesus the Messiah, is the means by which the nations are brought to the cross.  They are persecuted for righteousness’ sake, and they know blessing as a result, because it is through their faithfulness to Jesus that they fulfil the Abrahamic covenant’s call to be a blessing to the nations.

John hears the announcement of the sealing of the Jewish church, and then he sees a vision of a multitude that could not be numbered, drawn from the nations:

After this I looked, and behold, a great multitude that no one could number, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, clothed in white robes, with palm branches in their hands, and crying out with a loud voice, “Salvation belongs to our God who sits on the throne, and to the Lamb!” (Revelation 7:9-10)

And jumping down to verse 13:

Then one of the elders addressed me, saying, “Who are these, clothed in white robes, and from where have they come?”… And he said to me, “These are the ones coming out of the great tribulation. They have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb.  (Revelation 7:13-14)

John’s vision now draws on the imagery of the prophet Daniel, who wrote of another time of great distress through which the Lord saw a faithful remnant of his people.  The wise amongst them were refined through persecution that they might “shine like the brightness of the sky above” (12:3) so that they would “turn many to righteousness”.  Faithful Israel, through her unwavering allegiance to Jesus in this time of trial would serve as the witnesses that will bring the nations to faith in the Lord.  The faithfulness of the 144,000, of the Jewish martyrs, their robes soaked in their own blood, brings that multi-ethnic multitude to Jesus that he might wash their robes in his blood and make them part of his people.  As Zechariah had prophesied, ten men from the nations, of every tongue, will take hold of the robe of a Jew and say, “Let us go with you, for we have heard that God is with you!” (8:23)

Jeremiah says something very similar.  Jeremiah 31:7 cries out for the Lord to save the remnant of Israel and in response, the Lord will bring a great multitude from the farthest parts of the earth.  John’s vision here draws on Jeremiah’s imagery.  There the Lord will keep Israel “as a shepherd keeps his flock.  They shall “come and sing on the height of Zion”.  They “shall hunger no more” and God will “turn their mourning into joy”.  He will “comfort them, and give them gladness for sorrow”.  And here John sees this new, multi-ethnic Israel, gathered from the nations, “before the throne of God” where they “serve him day and night in his temple.”  He will “shelter them with his presence.  They shall hunger no more, neither third anymore.  For the Lamb in the midst of the throne will be their shepherd, and he will guide them to springs of living water, and God will wipe away every tear from their eyes” (Revelation 7:15-17).

Brothers and Sisters, as they remind us of the witness of those Christians who have gone before us, today’s lessons call us to faith and to hope.  We’re reminded today of the way in which the faithfulness of the people of God, their faithfulness to Jesus as Lord, their faithfulness to his kingdom, even in the midst of persecution, was the means by which God brought the nations to Jesus.  It’s also a witness to the faithfulness of God, who gathers his people to himself.  He gives his own Spirit to his people that they—that even we—might face persecution in faith.  Today we see him embracing his people and wiping away their tears.  Revelation tells us the story of our brothers and sisters who lived in the First Century—of those Jewish believers who faced persecution and martyrdom at the hands of unbelieving Israel and of that multitude drawn because of their witness from the pagan Greco-Roman world.  They, too would face persecution at the hands of an empire that would, because of their witness, eventually be brought in submission to the lordship of Jesus.  And yet there’s obviously more to the story of Jesus’ people.  What we see in John’s vision is intermediate and temporary.  The martyrs held close by God as saints on earth and in heaven await the consummation of history, that day when the faithful will follow Jesus in his resurrection, when all things are made new, when heaven and earth are rejoined, and when men and women once again dwell in the presence of the Lord.

Brothers and Sisters, we don’t know what will happen between now and then.  We may face our own time of great tribulation one day, but even if we don’t, we continue in the ordinary fight of Christians in every generation against the world, the flesh, and the devil.  We face the ordinary troubles of life in an imperfect world and the difficulties of being faithful witnesses of Jesus in a culture that worships its own version of Caesar and Mammon, Mars and Aphrodite.  Let us, like the saints who have gone before, stand firm in faith as stewards of the good news of Jesus and his kingdom, knowing that our God is faithful to his promises.  Let us be the people blessed to be a blessing, living out the life and values of Jesus’ kingdom, even though it may mean opposition and persecution.  Jesus has promised hold us close, even in death, until that day when he makes all things—including us—new.

Let’s pray:  Almighty God, you have knit together your elect in one communion and fellowship in the mystical body of your Son Christ our Lord: Give us grace so to follow your blessed saints in all virtuous and godly living, that we may come to those inexpressible joys that you have prepared for those who truly love you; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who with you and the Holy Spirit lives and reigns, one God, in glory everlasting.  Amen.

The Face of Moses

Exodus 34:1-35

by William Klock

This morning we’ll be looking at Exodus 34.  This is the third chapter covering the golden calf incident.  In Chapter 32 we read about the Israelites, who fearing Moses was dead, made a golden calf—basically a throne for the Lord—in an attempt to bring him down the mountain and into their midst.  The Lord announced he was going to destroy the people.  This was their covenantal honeymoon and they were already breaking their end of the covenant.  But Moses stepped in—taking up his role as mediator—and pleaded on behalf of the people.  Remember, Moses appealed to the Lord on the basis of his covenant—his promises—to Abraham.  The Lord relented.  He would not destroy the people, but the covenant with Israel was off.  The people had broken it.  He would fulfil his promise to give them the promised land, but he would not go with them.  He would send an angel to guide them.  Instead, he would start over with Moses alone and would fulfil his promises to Abraham through him.

Moses went down the mountain to deal with the people.  The Levites struck down three thousand—presumably the ringleaders who instigated the idolatry.  And Moses pitched a tent, away from the camp, and there he met with the Lord and continued to plead Israel’s case.  More than anything, Moses wanted to understand the ways of the Lord, and so as we ended our look at Exodus 33 last week, we read that the Lord told Moses that he would give him a glimpse of his glory.  To glimpse the Lord’s glory, the God who will show mercy to whom he will show mercy and will be gracious to whom he will be gracious—somehow to see his glory is to understand—or at least to begin to understand—his ways.  This is an answer to Moses’ request, but what does it mean for Israel.  This is where we pick up in Chapter 34.

The Lord said to Moses, “Cut for yourself two tablets of stone like the first, and I will write on the tablets the words that were on the first tablets, which you broke.  Be ready by the morning, and come up in the morning to Mount Sinai, and present yourself there to me on the top of the mountain.  No one shall come up with you, and let no one be seen throughout all the mountain. Let no flocks or herds graze opposite that mountain.”  So Moses cut two tablets of stone like the first. And he rose early in the morning and went up on Mount Sinai, as the Lord had commanded him, and took in his hand two tablets of stone.  The Lord descended in the cloud and stood with him there, and proclaimed the name of the Lord.  The Lord passed before him and proclaimed, “The Lord, the Lord, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, keeping steadfast love for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, but who will by no means clear the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children and the children’s children, to the third and the fourth generation.”  And Moses quickly bowed his head toward the earth and worshiped.  And he said, “If now I have found favor in your sight, O Lord, please let the Lord go in the midst of us, for it is a stiff-necked people, and pardon our iniquity and our sin, and take us for your inheritance.”

 

Does all this sound familiar?  It should, because all of this—apart from the instructions for Moses to cut two stone tablets—all this repeats what the Lord had said to Moses back in Chapters 19 and 20 before he called him up the mountain the first time.  Moses is to climb the mountain in the morning.  The people are stay back—even the livestock—while Moses ascends and the clouds descend.  There’s a reason the Lord repeats everything from the first time Moses went up: he’s chosen to renew the covenant with Israel.  And so the Lord, as he did in the beginning, declares his name.  Moses had asked to know the ways of the Lord and here the Lord answers that request.  He passes in front of Moses, he declares his name and his character.  The Lord is full of mercy and compassion, he is slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness.  He will punish the guilty, but he will forgive the sins of those who are repentant, as Israel has shown herself to be.  The Lord reveals his glory.  The Lord is prepared to start afresh with his repentant people.  I think it’s worth noting that Jewish tradition refers to these verses at the “Thirteen Attributes of God” and they’re recalled in the synagogue liturgy on holy days when the Torah scrolls are brought before the people to read.  The rabbis saw here the birth of the people of God and understood God’s own character to be foundational to the covenant.  Recalling his attributes not only reminded the people of who the Lord is, but also sets the pattern for the way they pray and petition him.[1]

Moses, it seems though, has his doubts.  The Lord declares his mercy and forgiveness, but Moses responds by pleading again on behalf of the people.  I say it seems he has his doubts, because Moses addresses the Lord not as the Lord—not using the name Yahweh, that the Lord just used of himself—but by addressing him as ’adonay, using the common Hebrew word for “Lord”.  Moses uses this word ’adonay four times in this way in Exodus and each time it’s when Moses is expressing his doubts to the Lord.  But the Lord doesn’t reprimand Moses.  He is patient and full of grace and mercy.  No, the Lord goes on to explicitly renew the covenant with Israel.  We read the covenantal preamble in verse 10.  Notice how the Lord is promising to do again what he did when he led the people out of Egypt.

And he said, “Behold, I am making a covenant.  Before all your people I will do marvels, such as have not been created in all the earth or in any nation.  And all the people among whom you are shall see the work of the Lord, for it is an awesome thing that I will do with you.

 

The Lord will start over with Israel.  Again, this people will be birthed through marvels so that the surrounding nations will see that Israel is the work of the Lord—his people, brought forth by him, given the land by him, and in whose midst he dwells.  Think back to his promises—the covenant—with Abraham.  The story that immediately precedes Abraham’s introduction in Genesis is the story of the tower of Babel.  The key point to that story is to highlight that humanity had lost all knowledge of our Creator.  And then the Lord calls Abraham out of the pagan morass, makes himself known, and announces that through Abraham and his family he will make himself known to the world.  Through Abraham’s family, the Lord will begin his project to set the world to rights.  Israel is that family and Lord again promises that he will be present with this people and work amongst and through them in ways that the nations will have no choice but to take notice.

But, remember, there are two ends to every covenant.  The promise, “I will be your God and you will be my people” commits the Lord to Israel and Israel to the Lord.  And so the Lord reiterates again the terms of the covenant in the verses that follow.  These are Israel’s obligations and he starts in verse 11 with the words, “Observe what I command you this day.”  And the Lord promises, “I will drive out before you the Amorites, the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites.”  In other words, the Lord will set apart this land of Canaan for the holy use of a holy people and he will do that by driving out its current inhabitants.  For Israel’s part, she must ensure the purity of the land.  He goes on, and I’ll summarise, that they are not to make any covenants with these people—because a covenant was serious business and would put Israel in conflict with her covenant to the Lord.  As he says in verse 12, “lest it become a snare in your midst”.

The Lord puts emphasis on the need for Israel to remove the pagan altars and idols from the land.  He will remove the people, but they must remove every last remnant of the worship of their pagan gods.  After the incident with the golden calf, Israel needed to hear this.  The Lord warns that if paganism is not purged from the land, the Israelites will be tempted, as he puts it using the covenantal imagery of marriage, to “whore after other gods”.  He also stresses here that they are not to intermarry with the people of the land for the same reason.  If you marry your son to one of their daughters, she will cause him to whore after those pagan gods.  And, sad to say, this is precisely what will happen.  But in verse 17, the Lord sort of sums all this up and stresses: “You shall not make for yourself gods of cast metal.”

In verses 18 through 20 the Lord commands them again to keep the Passover—the Feast of Unleavened bread.  This was the sacramental meal of the Old Testament in which the Lord’s people, in each generation, recalled and participated themselves in the redeeming events of the Exodus, those events through which he’d made Israel his people.  And as the Lord reminds them of their redemption from slavery, he also reminds them of what became known as the law of the firstborn.  Every firstborn son—whether of human beings or of the livestock—belonged to the Lord and was to redeemed.  It was a reminder of that night when the Lord’s angel passed through the land of Egypt, taking the lives of all the firstborn, but sparing the sons of the Israelites who had painted the blood of a sacrificial lamb on their doorposts.  Israel belonged to the Lord.  I will be your God and you will be my people.

In verses 21 through 24 the Lord commands again that they observe the Sabbath and three great seasonal feasts.  Why?  Because, he says, “I will cast out nations before you and enlarge your borders”.  The Lord stresses all of this again, because the Israelites, when they made the golden calf, had declared a new “feast of the Lord” that the Lord had never commanded.  Again, it can’t be stressed enough, that the Lord’s people can only come to him on his terms—never on their (or our) own.

To us it may seem repetitive and tedious to read all of this again, but it’s all here to emphasise that what the Lord is doing is renewing the covenant.  Israel has sinned—and there’s a bit of the Lord rubbing Israel’s nose in the specifics of that sin here—but he is longsuffering, gracious, and merciful.  In light of Moses’ intercession on behalf of a repentant people, the Lord will take them back.  He will be their god after all.

I think we also get a sense of the nature of the Lord’s forgiveness in the way the surrounding narrative is structured.  The last half of Chapter 31 is the Lord’s command for Israel to keep the Sabbath.  He then gives Moses the tablets with the law written on them.  Chapter 35 picks right up from there with Moses himself instructing the people how to keep the Sabbath.  If Chapters 32-34 were missing, we’d have no hint that nothing had gone wrong.  The Psalmist’s commentary in Psalm 103 on the Lord’s revelation to Moses of his mercy and grace, which I noted last week, continues:

He does not deal with us according to our sins,

         nor repay us according to our iniquities…

as far as the east is from the west,

         so far does he remove our transgressions from us.  (Psalm 103:10, 12)

And so the Lord commands Moses to record all of this, to write it down that the people not forget either the covenantal commitment they have made to the Lord or the gracious and merciful commitment he has made to them despite their sin.  Verses 27-28:

And the Lord said to Moses, “Write these words, for in accordance with these words I have made a covenant with you and with Israel.”  So he was there with the Lord forty days and forty nights.  He neither ate bread nor drank water.  And he wrote on the tablets the words of the covenant, the Ten Commandments.

 

Moses stays on the mountain for forty days and nights.  He doesn’t eat or drink.  The narrator highlights the way in which, on the mountain and in the presence of the Lord, Moses has been taken into an experience beyond the ordinary.  It foreshadows and explains what comes next.  And the Lord inscribes the law, once again, on stone for the sake of his people.

Now look at verse 29 and following:

When Moses came down from Mount Sinai, with the two tablets of the testimony in his hand as he came down from the mountain, Moses did not know that the skin of his face shone because he had been talking with God.  Aaron and all the people of Israel saw Moses, and behold, the skin of his face shone, and they were afraid to come near him.  But Moses called to them, and Aaron and all the leaders of the congregation returned to him, and Moses talked with them.  Afterward all the people of Israel came near, and he commanded them all that the Lord had spoken with him in Mount Sinai.  And when Moses had finished speaking with them, he put a veil over his face.

  Whenever Moses went in before the Lord to speak with him, he would remove the veil, until he came out. And when he came out and told the people of Israel what he was commanded, the people of Israel would see the face of Moses, that the skin of Moses’ face was shining. And Moses would put the veil over his face again, until he went in to speak with him.  (Exodus 34:29-35)

Moses returns to the camp and is surprised to find the people afraid to come near.  It would be interesting to know how that scene went in detail.  I assume Moses must have asked what was wrong and a cowering Aaron, perhaps, explained that they couldn’t bear to look at his shining face.  Whatever the case, Moses carries with him not only the Lord’s law, but his glory, shining as a sort of afterglow of having been in his presence.  This, too, is a reminder to the Israelites of the danger there is in being in the presence of the Lord.  In making the calf, they tried to summon the Lord into their midst and they can’t even bear to look at the divine afterglow of Moses’ face.  It was a mercy that the Lord did not come to them as they wanted.  We also see that all those rules and regulations they’ve been given to follow not only to come before him at the tabernacle, but even to be the people in whose midst he lives, all of that is a mercy, too—given not to burden, but to protect them.

If we look at a passage like Habakkuk 3:4, the sense of this word indicating that Moses’ face shone is “rays of light”.  It’s also used there in parallel with a word meaning “brilliant light”.  So there’s this radiance shining from Moses face.  It marks out Moses as both the Lord’s prophet and as the Lord’s mediator for the people.  Think back to how this incident began with the people despising Moses, because they assumed he had somehow failed in his role as mediator.  This time he comes down the mountain marked out by the Lord.  Instead of being mocked, the people fear him.

There’s also a play on words going on.  The word for this radiance shining from Moses face is related to and sounds like the Hebrew word for horn.  The Latin Vulgate Bible, in fact, translated the word as “horns”, which is why you sometimes see Moses portrayed in medieval art with horns projecting from his forehead.  But this wordplay ties in with the gold calf.  The people had tried to make a mediator for themselves, but in imparting this radiance to Moses, the Lord has marked him out as the real and legitimate mediator.  And, even though the Lord’s cloud of glory will descend into the tabernacle after it’s built and will dwell in the midst of the people, Moses right here becomes a sign of the return of the Lord’s presence to Israel.  God is with them through the presence and prophetic and mediatorial office of Moses.  In a sense, Moses has become the embodiment of the tabernacle, even as he veils his face to protect the people from the radiance of the Lord’s glory.

Now, let’s talk about that.  In the first week of our look at this part of Exodus we looked at the covenantal nature of Israel’s relationship with the Lord. Then last week we asked that important question, “Does God change his mind?”  And I said that this week we’d look at Moses’ role as a mediator—something we’ve seen through all three of these chapter.

But first, we need to understand the problem in these chapters.  It’s easy for us to see the problem as the Lord.  What a lot of people latch onto here is the Lord’s anger and his announcement that he will destroy the people.  We read the story selectively and start thinking of God as if he’s arbitrary or petty or loses his temper.  We forget or ignore the context.  Brothers and Sisters, Exodus is a story of recreation.  The calling of Moses and Israel are told so that they mirror the creation story itself.  Israel is even brought into being as a people through the parting of the sea.  Everything highlights their uniqueness, their specialness as a people.  If the first thirty-one chapters of Exodus connect Israel’s deliverance with creation, their sin here represents the “fall” of God’s people—it mirrors the sin of Adam and Even in the garden.

I think this helps us understand the Lord’s angry response.  Yes, he is holy and they have sinned, but more specifically, the Lord has poured himself into these people.  He has manifested his power to Pharaoh and to them.  He’s literally brought heaven to earth in the giving of the tabernacle and the law.  And in response they have rejected him.  So what we have to explain isn’t the Lord’s anger; it’s why the Lord turns from his anger at Moses’ intercession for the people.

We were told in 32:30 that Moses approached the Lord to make atonement for the people.  This was to be the purpose of the tabernacle—the place where sacrifices were made for atonement—but even before it’s been built, Moses steps in as both high priest and as tabernacle to make atonement for the sins of the people.  Do you remember how he did that?  He pleaded with the Lord: “Blot me out of your book”.  Kill me instead.  Right here we see where the sacrificial system and the whole of the old covenant is leading as Moses offers to take the Lord’s anger himself that that the people be spared.  One death can bring life to the many.

Just as the Lord is preparing to establish a system of sacrifices for sin involving animals, in this selfless act of Moses, we get the first hint of what’s truly needed for atonement for sin—not the sacrifice of animals, but of a person.  As one commentator puts it very well, “At the very inception of the sacrificial system, it is a glimpse into the heart of the heavenly reality to which the earthly sacrificial system points.”[2]  In the New Testament we see Jesus fulfil that system, but here the people of God are prepared for that, more than a thousand years before it happened.  Moses shows us that the specific manner in which the old covenant sacrifices would be fulfilled will be through a personal sacrifice.

And yet the Lord rejects Moses offer.  Why?  Well, he says to Moses that only the guilty can be punished.  Moses isn’t the one who sinned.  Guilt can’t simply be transferred from one person to another.  And we read that and think, “But…but…that’s just what Jesus did.  He took on himself the guilt of his people.”  But, you see, this underlines the difference between Moses and Jesus—a difference that the animals sacrifices also pointed to.  Moses was not a suitable sacrifice.  To be a substitute for sins, one has to be—like the animals offered on the altar in the tabernacle—without blemish.  Moses was the mediator between the Lord and his people, but he was not perfect.  He could not bear the guilt of another.  You see, Jesus was worthy to bear his people’s sin, precisely because he was himself sinless—and we find this truth all the way back here in Exodus.

Brothers and Sisters, it’s increasingly common for Christians to write off the Old Testament as irrelevant.  We talk as if it was God’s “Plan A” and he gave it up and went with Jesus instead.  That’s simply not true and we see it right here.  The Lord rejected Moses as a substitute for the sins of the people.  He couldn’t meet the criteria.  This is the mystery of the cross.  Jesus was guilty.  The sins of his people were removed and taken up by him.  How?  Because he was worthy to bear those sins and to offer himself as a sacrifice, because he was himself without guilt.  Friends, there is no grasping this, no understanding this, no making sense of this without the Old Testament.  The story of the Lord and Israel is not only what leads us to the cross, but is also what makes sense of the cross.  It is also in light of Moses’ bearing a fading glory of God that, I think, we gain a true appreciation for Jesus when we read, for example, in Hebrew 1:3 that Jesus himself “is the radiance of the glory of God”.  Jesus embodies perfectly that which faded from the face of Moses.   “In him,” as St. John writes, “all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell.”  Why?  That he might “reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of his cross.”

Let’s pray: Father, in our collect today we acknowledge your bountiful goodness, which we’ve seen again as we read about your renewal of the covenant with Israel, but which you also revealed to Moses—your goodness passed by as he hid in a cleft of the rock—leaving his face radiant with your glory.  Considering that Jesus is the fullness of your radiant glory and that we are united with him, cause us to radiate your glory into this dark world as we bear the fruit of your Spirit, as we proclaim the good news about Jesus, as we lift the veil lift the veil on your new creation.  Through him we pray.  Amen.

[1] Rosh Hashanah 17b

[2] Peter Enns, The NIV Application Commentary: Exodus (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2000), page 590.

I Will Show Mercy on Whom I Will Show Mercy

Exodus 33:1-18

by William Klock 

Last Sunday, as we came to the end of Exodus 32, we left Israel and Moses in a very discouraging spot.  Yes, on one hand, Israel had been spared destruction, but in exchange, the Lord has all but said that he’s ditching the people.  He won’t even refer to them as his people anymore.  No, now they’re the Moses’ people, the people that Moses led out of Egypt.

The Lord had just established a covenant with the people.  “I will be your God and you will by my people,” he had said.  He’d given them his law—their end of the covenant—and they’d loudly proclaimed, “All of this we will do!”  But all it took was thinking that Moses had been lost on the mountain and they’ve fallen into idolatry.  Remember from last week, it wasn’t that they had abandoned the Lord and gone after a different God.  It was that they abandoned Moses.  Moses was their mediator with the Lord.  And now, so they thought, he was gone.  So they made the golden calf as a mount—basically a throne—for the Lord.  It was their way to summon him back down the mountain.  Instead of Moses as mediator, it was no going to be some combination of Aaron and the golden calf.  And in that, the calf becomes a parody of the tabernacle, the place where the Lord intended to dwell with and meet with his people—on his terms, not theirs.  It’s an awful scene.  Here are the people, basically on their honeymoon with the Lord and they’re caught in adultery.

First the Lord was furious.  He told Moses to get out of the way so that he could destroy the people, but that’s when Moses stepped fully into his role as mediator and pleaded with the Lord.  And, notice, he didn’t plead with the Lord that the Israelites really weren’t so bad.  You know, sure, they’re having an orgy around a golden idol, but otherwise they’re pretty good people—they tithe, they go to church most of the time, they pack a shoebox every year at Christmas and give their change to poor people.  No, Moses doesn’t plead anything like that.  He knows the people deserve destruction.  They’re a grumbling, unfaithful, adulterous lot.  No, Moses pleads the only thing he can: the faithfulness of God.  He pleads for mercy based on the Lord’s covenant with Abraham.  Brothers and Sisters, that’s the nature of grace.  You can’t earn it.  It’s totally undeserved.  That’s what makes it grace.  And so we read in 32:14 that “the Lord relented from the disaster he had spoken of bringing on his people”.  “The Lord relented.”  Think about that phrase as we move into Chapter 33.  The Lord relented.  The Lord chose not to destroy the people, but that doesn’t mean everything’s fine.  The Lord also announced to Moses that the people would be going on to the promised land without him.  The covenant was broken—visibly represented by the smashed stone tablets.  He’d make good on his promise and send an angel to lead the people there, but he would not be going himself.  Israel would no longer be the people in whose midst he would dwell.  That’s where Exodus 33 picks up.  Look at verses 1-3:

The Lord said to Moses, “Depart; go up from here, you and the people whom you have brought up out of the land of Egypt, to the land of which I swore to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, saying, ‘To your offspring I will give it.’  I will send an angel before you, and I will drive out the Canaanites, the Amorites, the Hittites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites.  Go up to a land flowing with milk and honey; but I will not go up among you, lest I consume you on the way, for you are a stiff-necked people.”

 

Again, notice that the ground for the Lord’s mercy isn’t that Israel isn’t as bad as they look or that they’ve done something else that merits overturning the death sentence.  The ground for the Lord’s mercy is his covenant with Abraham and his own faithfulness.  The Lord will do what he has promised and he promised Abraham that his descendants would inherit the promised land.  But he will not be going with them.  The covenant with Abraham stands, but Israel has broken their covenant of this new covenant with him.  An angel will, instead, lead the way and the Lord commands them to leave.  They can no longer camp at the base of his mountain.

Notice, though, that even as harsh as this sounds, it’s really a mercy.  It can’t be said often enough that the unholy cannot live in the presence of the holy.  This isn’t the first time Israel has sinned against the Lord—it’s the worst—but it isn’t the first time and it won’t be the last and without the covenant, which, critically, provided a means of atonement for the sins of the people—without that they would be in danger in the Lord’s presence.  So this isn’t the Lord being temperamental.  It’s the Lord being merciful and sparing Israel a just punishment.  But that doesn’t mean the people aren’t disappointed.  Look at verses 4-6:

When the people heard this disastrous word, they mourned, and no one put on his ornaments.  For the Lord had said to Moses, “Say to the people of Israel, ‘You are a stiff-necked people; if for a single moment I should go up among you, I would consume you. So now take off your ornaments, that I may know what to do with you.’”  Therefore the people of Israel stripped themselves of their ornaments, from Mount Horeb onward.

 

The positive thing here is that Israel obviously takes the Lord’s rebuke to heart.  They longed for the Lord’s presence.  Again, remember that the whole point of the golden calf was to summon the Lord into their presence when they thought that Moses was gone.  Moses had been their mediator and they made the calf to fill that role.  They want the Lord. The problem was that they tried to approach him on their terms instead of his—always a dangerous thing to do.  So they mourn the news that they will be going on without the Lord.

But Moses isn’t done in his role as mediator.  He’s not done wrestling with the Lord, so to speak.  Look at verses 7-11:

Now Moses used to take the tent and pitch it outside the camp, far off from the camp, and he called it the tent of meeting. And everyone who sought the Lord would go out to the tent of meeting, which was outside the camp.  Whenever Moses went out to the tent, all the people would rise up, and each would stand at his tent door, and watch Moses until he had gone into the tent.  When Moses entered the tent, the pillar of cloud would descend and stand at the entrance of the tent, and the Lord would speak with Moses.  And when all the people saw the pillar of cloud standing at the entrance of the tent, all the people would rise up and worship, each at his tent door.  Thus the Lord used to speak to Moses face to face, as a man speaks to his friend. When Moses turned again into the camp, his assistant Joshua the son of Nun, a young man, would not depart from the tent.

 

Moses moves off some good distance from the main camp and pitches a tent, which we’re told, will be the place where he will meet with the Lord.  It’s far off.  Think again of the adultery imagery of the prophets.  Israel has committed adultery and the Lord will no longer enter her presence, but he’s willing to continue to meet Moses at some distance from the camp.  This “tent of meeting” is basically a substitute for the tabernacle.  The tabernacle was supposed to be the place where the Lord would meet with his people, but since that’s not going to be built—at least for now—Moses pitches a tent where at least he can meet with the Lord.  The writer stresses the nature of Moses relationship with the Lord.  They meet together face to face.  In a similar way, Numbers 12:6-8 says they spoke with each other “mouth to mouth”.  The point is to highlight the uniqueness of Moses as a prophet.  God speaks to him directly.  There’s nothing cryptic or questionable about it.  It’s not a dream or a vision.  Moses never woke up in the morning and had to wonder if the weird dream he’d had was the Lord or too much pizza the night before.  His experience with the Lord was personal and direct.

So the Lord descends to the tent in a pillar of cloud as the people anxiously watch from a distance.  And Israel, like the bride trying to get a glimpse of her estranged husband, watches from a distance, no doubt anxious, but I think, still with a measure of hope.  Moses the mediator is back, he’s meeting with the Lord, maybe he can do something to bring restoration between the Lord and his people.  And that’s just what Moses does.  Moses speaks to the Lord:

Moses said to the Lord, “See, you say to me, ‘Bring up this people,’ but you have not let me know whom you will send with me.  Yet you have said, ‘I know you by name, and you have also found favor in my sight.’  Now therefore, if I have found favor in your sight, please show me now your ways, that I may know you in order to find favor in your sight. Consider too that this nation is your people.”  And he said, “My presence will go with you, and I will give you rest.”  And he said to him, “If your presence will not go with me, do not bring us up from here.  For how shall it be known that I have found favor in your sight, I and your people? Is it not in your going with us, so that we are distinct, I and your people, from every other people on the face of the earth?” (Exodus 33:12-16)

“If you’re not going to go with us, Lord, who will you send?”  The Lord had said he would send an angel to guide the people, but Moses wants to know who this angel will be, how’s it going to work.  He appeals to the Lord.  Back when the Lord first met him and called him, he’d said that he knew Moses by name and that he was favoured in his sight.  It’s worth noting that the only other person in the Old Testament of whom the same is said is Noah.  It highlights the uniquely close relationship Moses had with the Lord and on this basis Moses asks the Lord, “Show me your ways.”

Things have gone horribly wrong.  It’s not the Lord’s fault.  It’s Israel’s fault.  But, still, Moses wants to understand.  I think there are probably two main things Moses wants to grasp better.  First, he wants to understand what the Lord is about.  Why did he choose this fickle and stiff-necked people Israel?  Moses understands why the Lord is angry, but he wants to better understand it all.  But, second, Moses wants to understand—or maybe we should say to know—the Lord: his ways, his attributes, what guides his actions and dealings with human beings.  Moses knows that the Lord is sovereign, but how does he govern?  Abraham asked the same sort of question back in Genesis when the Lord announced he was going to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah.  Abraham asked, “Shall not the judge of all the earth do what is just?” (Genesis 18:25)  Both men knew that the Lord is not like the gods of the pagans.  He’s not capricious or temperamental.  Just the opposite, they knew that the Lord acts justly and that, if we can only know him, we might be able to understand—not fully, of course, but at least in part.  Psalm 103:7-8 is our oldest commentary on this scene between Moses and the Lord.  The Psalmist writes:

He made known his ways to Moses,

         his acts to the people of Israel.

The Lord is merciful and gracious,

         slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love.

 

It’s telling in its simplicity.  Brothers and Sisters, do you want to understand the ways of the Lord?  Know that he is merciful and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love.  The Lord is holy and he is just.  He punishes sin and he cannot tolerate the unholy in his presence, but he is at the same time profoundly merciful and gracious with sinners.  He loves his people, he will set us and the rest of creation to rights.  We sometimes get angry and frustrated with God when we see evil in the world or when we’re dealing with our own pain and misery.  Why doesn’t he end all the evil in the world?  Why doesn’t he punish the bad people.  And we forget that we’re part of the problem ourselves.  The Lord has a better plan than ours.  In his mercy and love he’s sent his Son to forgive and to begin the work of new creation and in his patience he has spared us and continues to spare us that the good news about Jesus, the royal summons to the world’s true Lord, will go out to the nations—so that sinners will know mercy rather than destruction.

This is the kind of thing Moses wants to understand, but—specifically—he wants to know what will happen to Israel.  He stresses that they are the Lord’s people.  That’s what makes Israel different from the other nations.  If the Lord has disowned them, if he will not go up with them to the promised land, what is to happen to them.  Their fate is bound up with being the Lord’s people.  This mixed multitude that went up from Egypt, what is to bind them together, what is to define them if not the Lord?

And the Lord responds in verse 18:

And the Lord said to Moses, “This very thing that you have spoken I will do, for you have found favor in my sight, and I know you by name.”

 

The Lord responds to Moses, he assents to his request, based on his appeal.  The Lord is nothing if not faithful.  If he said that Moses had found favour in his sight, Moses has, indeed, found favour in his sight.

Moses said, “Please show me your glory.”  And he said, “I will make all my goodness pass before you and will proclaim before you my name ‘The Lord.’ And I will be gracious to whom I will be gracious, and will show mercy on whom I will show mercy.  But,” he said, “you cannot see my face, for man shall not see me and live.”  And the Lord said, “Behold, there is a place by me where you shall stand on the rock, and while my glory passes by I will put you in a cleft of the rock, and I will cover you with my hand until I have passed by.  Then I will take away my hand, and you shall see my back, but my face shall not be seen.”

It’s fascinating to me that Moses has asked the Lord to show him his ways—Moses wants to understand him—and the Lord has agreed, and what does Moses now ask?  “Please show me your glory.”  He doesn’t ask for theology.  He doesn’t ask for philosophy.  He doesn’t ask for ethics.  He asks to see the Lord’s glory.  You see, Moses understood that the Lord’s ways are bound up with his glory.  The Lord does what he does because he is glorious and what the Lord does always bring him glory.  He shows grace to whom he chooses to show grace and he shows mercy to whom he chooses to show mercy and if you want to understand the who and the why of it, you’ve got to understand the glory of the Lord.  I don’t think there’s any easy exposition of this.  Like the cross of Jesus, this is something to meditate on, something to let sink in, and something that we’ll never truly plumb the depths of until, like Moses, we’ve seen the glory of the Lord for ourselves.

Brothers and Sisters, the glory of the Lord, we see here, is something none of us can bear.  I think we see here just why the Lord had to give all those rules to the Israelites.  The Lord isn’t out to get Moses here, he wants to show Moses his glory, but even Moses could never bear to see it head-on.  Even Moses has to hide in the cleft of a rock with his face covered by his hands.  The glory of the Lord is a fearful and dreadful thing to behold—and at the same time something that somehow reveals his profound mercy and love.

Now, that’s the end of Chapter 33.  As I said last week, we’d ideally look at Chapters 32-34 all at once, but it’s too long to do that, so we’re looking at one chapter a week.  And I also said that I want to focus on three themes here.  Last week I focused on the nature of the Lord’s covenant with Israel.  Next week we’ll look at Moses’ role as mediator between the Lord and his people.  We’ve already seen him taking up that role in these last two chapters and we’ll see more of it next week.  But today I want to look at this question that arises out of Chapters 32 and 33: Does God change his mind?  Again, we read last week that the Lord said he was going to destroy the people.  Moses interceded on their behalf and, the text says, “the Lord relented”.  And, looking forward to what’s going to happen, we see that despite his announcement that he will not be dwelling in Israel’s midst, the Lord will do just that.  Next week we’ll read about the renewal of the covenant.

So what’s going on here?  Did the Lord change his mind?  When Moses appeals to him, reminding him of the covenant with Abraham, was Lord like, “Oh, yeah.  I forgot about that.”  Or, “Oh, you’re right Moses, I should always count to ten before striking down my people.”  Did Moses show the Lord a better way?  It raises the question: Is the Lord truly sovereign or not?

Our first problem is that the phrase used in Hebrew isn’t easy to translate.  “to relent” or “to repent”, as some translations put it, don’t carry the full meaning.  The Hebrew word also carries the meaning of consolation.  Some have said that the best way to translate it is to say that the Lord had compassion.  That’s not exactly right either, but I think it’s closer.  But if we look at all the instances of this phrase in the Bible (2 Samuel 24, 1 Chronicles 21, Psalm 106, Jeremiah 18, Jeremiah 26, Jonah 3 and 4, Amos 7, Numbers 23, 1 Samuel 15, Malachi 3, Romans 11, Hebrews 6, James 1), they all describe a situation in which the Lord has announced a certain course of action and has announced he is reversing it.  But this doesn’t mean that God doesn’t know what he’s doing or that he’s not sovereign.  First, these instances highlight the importance of prayer and repentance.  Prayer and, most of all, repentance matter.  The issue in each case isn’t that God changed.  It’s that the people involved changed.  They repented and came to the Lord in faith to express that repentance.

The Lord punishes sin and rebellion; he blesses repentance and belief.  Now, as we saw in our look at Job, it’s more complicated than that, but this is the general trend.  But as the Lord said to Moses, he is slow to anger and steadfast in his love.  He delights to show mercy and, when he does this, it brings him glory.  Israel sinned greatly, but Israel also repented of her sin and the Lord had compassion in response.  This is what he said to the people through the prophet Jeremiah:

If at any time I declare concerning a nation or a kingdom, that I will pluck up and break down and destroy it, and if that nation, concerning which I have spoken, turns from its evil, I will relent of the disaster that I intended to do to it.  And if at any time I declare concerning a nation or a kingdom that I will build and plant it, and if it does evil in my sight, not listening to my voice, then I will relent of the good that I had intended to do to it.  (Jeremiah 18:7-10)

This is God’s character, to destroy evil and to bless repentance.  You see, the Lord must announce his wrath and judgement or a people will never know that they need to change course, that they need to repent and turn to the Lord.  So, no, the Lord isn’t changing his mind.  He’s doing what he does and what brings him glory.  He’s showing mercy to those who repent and believe.

We see this character, this pattern come to full fruit in Jesus.  The Lord will set his creation to rights.  The Lord will, one day, wipe every last bit of evil, wickedness, rebellion, and corruption from his creation.  But he so delights to show grace and mercy, his steadfast love is so deep, that he humbled himself to be born as one of us and ultimately to die for the sake of his enemies, in order to provide a means of deliverance from that coming destruction.  Think of Jesus and his ministry.  Jesus’ message was both an announcement of God’s coming judgement, but also a call to repentance and faith.  In Jesus we see the living embodiment of God’s delight in showing mercy.  And in that we see the constancy and faithfulness of God, who never changes, of God who keeps his promises, of God who is faithful to the covenant he has established with his people—and in our case, through the perfect work of Jesus his son.  Think on that as you come to the Table this morning.  Reflect on the way in which the cross of Jesus reminds us of the absolute faithfulness of God to his promises and to his unchanging character.  And, Brothers and Sisters, consider that here as we share the bread and wine, as we share in the death and resurrection of Jesus, we, like Moses, are given a glimpse of the glory of God.

Let’s pray: Heavenly Father, we give you thanks for revealing to us both your wrath and your compassion.  Without knowing the first, we’d never fully grasp the depth of the second.  You hate sin.  You hate that we have corrupted your cosmos.  You have every right to wipe every last one of us from the face of the earth.  But you also delight, you glory, in showing mercy.  Teach us to reflect on your love, your mercy, and your grace in light of our sinfulness and the punishment we deserve, a punishment for which only your own Son could pay the price, that we might grasp in some greater way each day the depths of your love for us.  Through our Lord Jesus we pray.  Amen.

The Covenant BrokenExodus 32:1-35by William Klock As we come to Exodus 32 this morning we shift from a long section of legal material and detailed instructions for the tabernacle and back to narrative—a narrative that runs from Chapter 32 to Chapter 34.  This the incident of the golden calf—a story most of you probably know pretty well.  Ideally, we’d look at the whole thing all at once, but it’s too long for that, so my plan is to look at it in three segments, a chapter at a time and to focus each week on one of three major themes that comes out of this incident.  This morning I want to look at what this has to do with God’s covenant with Israel, with his people.  Next Sunday I want to look at what this tells us about God’s faithfulness.  And, Lord willing, the Sunday after that I want to look at Moses as the mediator between God and this rebellious people and how that prepares us for Jesus.  What we’ll explore in the next two weeks, though, will depend on and grow out of what he learn here about the nature of the Lord’s covenant with Israel.We’ve talked a lot about this idea of “covenant” already.  First, when the Lord delivered Israel from Egypt, he told them that he was doing so because of his covenant promises to Abraham.  He’d promised to make Abraham into a great nation and that through this nation, he would make himself known to the rest of the world.  He would bless Abraham’s family and through that blessing, bless the nations.  And now, in Exodus, we’ve seen the Lord establish another covenant with the people of Israel.  “I will be your God and you will be my people,” he’s said.  Israel will be the people in whose midst the Lord dwells.  And so in establishing this covenant with Israel, he has given a law—a means by which Israel will be a holy people suitable to host the Lord’s presence—and instructions for a tabernacle—a house where his visible presence, the cloud of glory, will dwell in their midst, a house where they will bring their offerings and where they will offer sacrifices in atonement for their sins.  At the heart of the tabernacle sits the ark of the covenant and the mercy seat, this golden chest guarded by golden angels that serves as something of a throne.  David calls it the Lord’s footstool.  Because human beings are sinful and he is holy, the Lord has gone to great pains these last several chapters to graciously and mercifully give his people a means to live in his presence, but it must be on his terms.  The Lord, who is holy, sets the terms, not miserable offenders, as our Prayer Book describes us human beings.  Keep this in mind as Moses, his audience with the Lord up on Mt. Sinai now ended, makes his way back down to the people carrying the covenant carved on the stone tablets.The scene shifts from the mountain top, down to the plain where the people have been waiting for Moses.  Look at verses 1-6:When the people saw that Moses delayed to come down from the mountain, the people gathered themselves together to Aaron and said to him, “Up, make us gods who shall go before us.  As for this Moses, the man who brought us up out of the land of Egypt, we do not know what has become of him.”  So Aaron said to them, “Take off the rings of gold that are in the ears of your wives, your sons, and your daughters, and bring them to me.”  So all the people took off the rings of gold that were in their ears and brought them to Aaron.  And he received the gold from their hand and fashioned it with a graving tool and made a golden calf.  And they said, “These are your gods, O Israel, who brought you up out of the land of Egypt!”  When Aaron saw this, he built an altar before it.  And Aaron made a proclamation and said, “Tomorrow shall be a feast to the Lord.”  And they rose up early the next day and offered burnt offerings and brought peace offerings. And the people sat down to eat and drink and rose up to play. Moses has been up on the mountain in the midst of the storm for forty day and nights.  Basically, the people have assumed he’s a gonner.  They’re thinking that there’s no way Moses has survived.  He went up to the mountain and, for reasons unknown to them, God smote him down or something.  Moses was their mediator with the Lord and he’s obviously gone.  He couldn’t cut it.  The way they refer to him as “this man Moses” shows disdain.So the people go to Aaron, Moses’ brother.  The sense of the Hebrew is that they accost him or at least, they come to him in a menacing way.  Moses is gone.  Aaron has to do something.  The people need a new spokesman to act on their behalf with the Lord.  This is what’s going on here.  Our English translations—most of them anyway—are a little misleading when they have the people asking Aaron to make gods (plural) for them.  You’re probably familiar with the word they use in Hebrew: ‘elohim.  This is a generic Hebrew word of “god”.  It’s plural—and the verbs that go with it are often plural—but whether it’s plural or singular comes mostly from the context and here the context demands we read it as singular.  They want Aaron to “make a god for us”.  Now, what does that mean?  It’s not that the people have given up on the Lord.  They haven’t.  They’ve given up on Moses and they need a new mediator.  They’re putting Aaron in that role, but specifically, they want some means to bring the Lord down to them.  They want to know what to do now that Moses is gone.This is the human predicament.  We long for God.  Augustine wrote of God, saying, “Thou has made us for thyself and our hearts are restless until they rest in thee.”  C. S. Lewis made the same point when he wrote that each of us has a God-shaped hole that nothing else can fill.  We long for God.  But lacking his revelation of himself, we try either to fill that longing with false gods or we attempt to approach God on our own terms rather than his.  The Israelites are doing the latter here.  They want the Lord, but having rejected Moses, his chosen mediator, they’re only going to get into trouble.So Aaron takes their gold earrings.  The earrings aren’t just innocent pieces of gold.  Genesis 35 and Judges 8 connect earrings of this sort with pagan religious practises.  So this project of Aaron’s is tainted already.  Aaron takes their gold earrings, melts them down, and makes a golden calf—a young ox or bull.  This is significant, too, and it gives a good idea of what the people are trying to do.  So, first, we know that they weren’t abandoning the Lord for some other god or gods.  They just wanted a way to interact with the Lord now that Moses is gone.  The calf was an idol of sorts, but not actually meant to represent the Lord himself.  When we look at Israel’s pagan neighbours, they made representations like this, too—often even oxen or bulls.  The idea was that this golden animal that represented strength, virility, and fertility was meant to be a mount—basically a throne—for the deity.  What they’re doing is making a throne for Lord, to summon him into their presence so that they can know his presence again and receive his guidance.Now, it’s important that this is happening down at the base of the mountain just as Moses is receiving instructions for the tabernacle.  At the heart of the tabernacle is the ark and the mercy seat—the Lord’s footstool or throne.  So the golden calf is essentially a paganise parody of the mercy seat.  And everything about it is wrong.  The only thing they got right was the gold.  They knew it had to be gold if was going to be the Lord’s throne.  But everything else is wrong.  The mercy seat was to be built according to the Lord’s design, not a human design borrowed from pagans.  The mercy seat was veiled and guarded by angels so that no human might approach the holy and die.  The Lord designed the tabernacle to protect the worshipers—they approach on his terms, purified and holy.  With the calf, the people approach the Lord on their terms, foolishly coming with nothing to protect them from the presence of the holy.  The Lord comes to the tabernacle on his own initiative, but the calf is meant to summon him on the initiative of the people.  I think you get the idea.  As a means of connecting with the Lord, the calf is wrong in every way.In verse 7 we return to the mountain top:And the Lord said to Moses, “Go down, for your people, whom you brought up out of the land of Egypt, have corrupted themselves.  They have turned aside quickly out of the way that I commanded them.  They have made for themselves a golden calf and have worshiped it and sacrificed to it and said, ‘These are your gods, O Israel, who brought you up out of the land of Egypt!’”  And the Lord said to Moses, “I have seen this people, and behold, it is a stiff-necked people.  Now therefore let me alone, that my wrath may burn hot against them and I may consume them, in order that I may make a great nation of you.”  (Exodus 32:7-10)The Lord disowns Israel.  No longer are the Israelites his people whom he brought out of Egypt.  No, now they’re Moses people, whom Moses brought out of Egypt.  His anger burns against them.  It’s only been forty days since they joyfully shouted out “All these thing we will do!” in response to the Lord’s covenant, and they’ve already fallen into idolatry.  They may even be having some kind of orgy in the presence of the calf—which is what the Hebrew behind those words “rose up to play” sometimes means.  No, the Lord is through with Israel.  Their behaviour is shameful and shocking when you stop to consider all that the Lord has done for them.  He announces that he’s going to consume them in his wrath and then start over with Moses as he did with Abraham.But Moses interposes himself between the Lord and the people.  Moses has changed.  Remember that in the beginning, when the Lord sent Moses back to Egypt to be his mediator to the Israelites and Moses wanted nothing to do with the job and made excuse after excuse?  Moses has finally grown into his role as mediator.  Look at verses 11-14:But Moses implored the Lord his God and said, “O Lord, why does your wrath burn hot against your people, whom you have brought out of the land of Egypt with great power and with a mighty hand?  Why should the Egyptians say, ‘With evil intent did he bring them out, to kill them in the mountains and to consume them from the face of the earth’?  Turn from your burning anger and relent from this disaster against your people.  Remember Abraham, Isaac, and Israel, your servants, to whom you swore by your own self, and said to them, ‘I will multiply your offspring as the stars of heaven, and all this land that I have promised I will give to your offspring, and they shall inherit it forever.’”  And the Lord relented from the disaster that he had spoken of bringing on his people. Is this a case of the Lord changing his mind?  He was going to destroy the people, but Moses convinces him otherwise?  That’s the topic I plan to address next week as we look at Chapter 33.  I’ll just say today that the answer is, in a way, both “yes” and “no”.  What I want to bring to your attention to today is the covenantal aspect of this.  First, we know that whatever the Lord is threatening to do to Israel here, he hasn’t forgotten the covenant with Abraham.  He might wipe out these miserable, fickle, unfaithful sinners below the mountain worshipping around a gold calf, but he will continue his mission and fulfil his promises through Moses.  Second, Moses appeals to the Lord on the basis of that same covenant: “Remember the promises you made to Abraham, Isaac, and Israel.”  That seals it and the Lord relents.  The covenant with Israel may be broken, but the covenant with Abraham still stands and the Lord is always faithful to his promises.  But someone still has to go down and deal with Israel.In verses 15-20 Moses heads down the mountain carrying the stone tablets written by the Lord.  On the way down he meets up with Joshua.  Remember that Joshua had gone part way up the mountain with Moses.  Joshua has heard the revelry below and thinks that war has broken out, but as they draw near the camp they see what’s really going on.  They see the calf and the dancing—whatever the “dancing” entailed.  We’re told:Moses’ anger burned hot, and he threw the tablets out of his hands and broke them at the foot of the mountain.  He took the calf that they had made and burned it with fire and ground it to powder and scattered it on the water and made the people of Israel drink it.  (Exodus 32:19b-20)Moses has turned away the Lord’s wrath from the people, but now that he’s seen their idolatry for himself his own wrath burns against them.  Moses is beside himself with fury and smashes the stone tablets.  Now, this isn’t just Moses throwing a tantrum.  As with everything else here, the smashing of the tablets is symbolic.  Presumably the people saw Moses do it.  The Lord has agreed not to smite the people for their idolatry, but Moses himself now declares the covenant broken.  To use the imagery picked up by the prophets later on in Israel’s history, the Lord was the groom and Israel the bride and here, on their honeymoon, Israel the bride has been caught in adultery.  The groom has chosen to let the bride live, but the marriage is off.  That’s what the shattered stone tablets represent.But what’s with Moses pulverising the golden calf and making the people drink it?  This was a mystery to me until I started looking at the Talmud and there, the rabbis made a connection between this and the test for adultery prescribed in Numbers 5:12-31.[1]  There a woman suspected of adultery, in a situation where there are no witnesses, was to be brought before the priest with an offering to the Lord.  He would mix dust from the sanctuary floor with water and she was to drink it.  If she was innocent, nothing would happen.  If she was guilty something would happen to her reproductive organs—the Hebrew is pretty obscure at this point—but it suggests that she would be rendered barren.  The rabbis drew a connection between this practise and Moses making the people drink the gold dust from the calf.  It was a means for the Lord to indicate to Moses who the guilty parties were.  Presumably something happened to some of the people and not to others and the instigators of this idolatry—maybe those who had accosted Aaron or those who had donated their earrings to the cause.  Whatever happened, the guilty became known and this sets up the following scene.First, in verse 21, Moses corners Aaron.  He asks him how he could have done this awful thing that brought such a great sin on the people.  And Aaron responds:“Let not the anger of my lord burn hot. You know the people, that they are set on evil.  For they said to me, ‘Make us gods who shall go before us. As for this Moses, the man who brought us up out of the land of Egypt, we do not know what has become of him.’  So I said to them, ‘Let any who have gold take it off.’  So they gave it to me, and I threw it into the fire, and out came this calf.” “Don’t blame me, Moses!  These wicked people made me do it.  I threw their gold into the fire and out popped the calf.”  We get a sense of just how pathetic Aaron’s defense is, because Moses doesn’t even dignify it with a response.  Instead, Moses turns to the people.  In verse 25 he sees that Aaron has let them get completely out of control and so he goes to the gate of the camp and addresses the people.  Look at verse 26:“Who is on the Lord’s side? Come to me.” And all the sons of Levi gathered around him.  And he said to them, “Thus says the Lord God of Israel, ‘Put your sword on your side each of you, and go to and fro from gate to gate throughout the camp, and each of you kill his brother and his companion and his neighbor.’”  And the sons of Levi did according to the word of Moses.  And that day about three thousand men of the people fell.  And Moses said, “Today you have been ordained for the service of the Lord, each one at the cost of his son and of his brother, so that he might bestow a blessing upon you this day.”  (Exodus 323:26b-29)The guilty parties—some three thousand of them—have been singled out by drinking the pulverised golden calf.  Moses then summons the faithful to him. And here we see that all is not lost.  At the very least, the Lord’s own house in order, because we’re told that all the Levites—the priestly tribe—rally to Moses.  There’s no reason to think that there weren’t others from the other tribes, but the emphasis is put on the faithfulness of the tribe specifically set apart for service to the Lord.  At Moses’ command, they go through the camp, putting the guilty to the sword.  If that seems severe, remember that the Lord has instituted the death penalty for a host of offenses that would either undermine the holiness of his worship or that undermine the covenant itself.  To enter the sanctuary unprepared meant death.  Even to use the incense or anointing oil of the sanctuary for personal use meant death.  It was set apart and holy for the Lord.  And remember that to break the sabbath, which was a wilful rejection of the covenant, meant death, too.  These folks, have turned the entire worship of the Lord upside-down.  In their idolatry, they’ve violated the covenant at its most basic level.  And the Levites purge the camp of this wickedness.  This sort of sin was a cancer that had to be dealt with.  While it wasn’t what had been planned, Moses declares that this show of faithfulness to the Lord and to the covenant has become their ordination—they’ve proved themselves fit to serve the Lord.So the guilty have been dealt with.  The camp has been purged.  But the people in some way still bear a burden of collective guilt.  The biggest problem is that the covenant has been broken and the shattered stone tablets lie there at the base of the mountain as evidence.  Moses has to do something more.  Look at verses 30-32:The next day Moses said to the people, “You have sinned a great sin. And now I will go up to the Lord; perhaps I can make atonement for your sin.”  So Moses returned to the Lord and said, “Alas, this people has sinned a great sin.  They have made for themselves gods of gold.  But now, if you will forgive their sin—but if not, please blot me out of your book that you have written.” As the high priest would enter the tabernacle and the presence of the ark to make atonement for the people, Moses now ascends back up the mountain, into the presence of the Lord in an attempt to atone for what Israel has done—to find some way to renew the broken covenant.What Moses ends up doing is offering himself as an atonement for the sins of his people—blot me out of your book and forgive their sin.  Does that sound familiar?  I hope it does.  Moses willingly takes up the role of mediator and sacrifice for the people.  He’s come a long way from Chapter 3, where he made excuse after excuse!  But the Lord refuses Moses’ offer.  Moses is an effective mediator between the people and the Lord, but he is not an acceptable sacrifice for their sins.  That, however, doesn’t mean the Lord won’t show mercy.  Look finally at verses 33-35:The Lord said to Moses, “Whoever has sinned against me, I will blot out of my book.  But now go, lead the people to the place about which I have spoken to you; behold, my angel shall go before you. Nevertheless, in the day when I visit, I will visit their sin upon them.”  Then the Lord sent a plague on the people, because they made the calf, the one that Aaron made. The Lord and Moses come to something of a compromise.  The Lord suspends Israel’s sentence.  Their disobedience will come back on them at some point and we read that in verse 35.  It’s not clear how much time passed between this pronouncement and the plague, how many—or even if anyone—died.  The sin does not go unpunished.  But in the meantime the people are on probation.  The Lord had made a promise to the people to take them to the promised land and he will see that they get there.  Moses is commanded to take the people and to be on their way.  They can no longer camp at the base of the Lord’s mountain.  Sinners cannot live in the presence of the holy.  This also means that the tabernacle is off.  The Lord will not dwell in the midst of an unholy, disobedient, and rebellious people.  He had led Israel himself so far, as the cloud in the day and pillar of fire at night, but from this point on, he will send an angel to lead the people.  He will not lead them himself, just as he will not dwell in their midst.  Again, the covenant has been broken.  Of course, we know that there’s more to come, but at the end of Chapter 32 it would appear that because of Israel’s sin, because Israel has broken the covenant while the ink is still fresh—or the ringing of the chisel on stone has hardly died—the Lord has chosen to part ways with this people.In the great story of redemption, Israel’s deliverance from Egypt and the ratifying of the covenant at Sinai were a hopeful sign of new birth, of new creation.  Beginning with this people, the Lord is advancing his project to reveal himself to the nations and to set his fallen and broken creation to rights.  But before it’s even begun, his covenant partners fail, his bride commits adultery, and it looks like the Lord’s redemptive plans are as dashed as the stone tablets lying in pieces at the base of the mountain.  Praise be to God that his plans do not rely on the faithfulness of mortals!Brothers and Sisters, I think this ought to highlight for us the seriousness of the human predicament.  Even the people who saw first-hand the signs and wonders that the Lord did in delivering them from Egypt, the very people who passed through the parted waters of the Red Sea, the very people who were fed by the Lord’s own hand in the wilderness and saw the thunder and lightning on the mountain, even they could not keep their end of the covenant.  They needed something beyond, outside of themselves.  They need something more than a law carved on stone tablets.  They need the Spirit of God himself to write his law of love on their hearts.  They need a mediator with the Lord, but one greater than even Moses could be.  They need a mediator who can also be a sacrifice for their sins.  They need a new covenant, not dependent on their fickle and unfaithful performance, but a covenant established on one who can keep it.  Friends, Israel reminds us that we cannot redeem ourselves, we cannot return to the Lord’s presence on our own terms.  We need another.  These stories of Israel’s failures point us to Jesus.  In Jesus, the Lord himself came, took on our flesh, and became not only our mediator, but the sacrifice for our sins.  As you come to the Table this morning, as you eat the bread and drink the wine, as you recall and participate anew in the death and resurrection of Jesus for us, let Israel’s story, let the events we’ve read from Exodus this morning give you greater appreciation for what Jesus has done.  Israel reminds us that on our own we are lost.  We need a perfect mediator.  We need a perfect sacrifice for sin.  Brothers and Sisters, Jesus has, for our sake, become both and in him we know the faithfulness and love of God.Let us pray: Father, we asked in the collect for the grace to withstand the temptations of the world, the flesh, and the devil.  We ask now that you would keep us always mindful of our need for grace.  We are, without your intervention, but miserable sinners.  But, too, in reminding us of our need for grace, fill our hearts with gratitude for the undeserved favour you have shown us.  You have given your Son to die for the sake of those who rejected you.  Teach us to think on these things and to mediate on them that we might better grasp your love for us and better love you in return.  Through Jesus we pray.  Amen.[1] Avodah Zarah 44a

A Sign ForeverExodus 31:1-18, 35:1-3, 30-36:7by William KlockWhen I was in high school I worked as a draftsman for a residential architect.  I was just a kid.  I wasn’t a designer.  I just drew what they told me to draw.  But every once in a while the boss asked me to sit in on meetings with clients—usually the really important clients—because he wanted to let me see into that part of the business.  One of those meetings was with a couple who were getting ready to build a big house overlooking the Columbia River Gorge.  It was an amazing setting and everyone agreed that setting needed an amazing house.  The plans were basically done, but my boss and the clients were going round in circles about who was going to build it.  They had already started working with a builder, but the architect refused to let that builder construct it.  He knew all the local builders and this guy wasn’t going to get it right.  He knew what was going to be involved and he knew just the guy to get it right.  After listening to the back and forth I gradually figured out what the real issue was.  This house was going to have my bosses name on it and he wasn’t going to just let it go once the plans were drawn.  He wasn’t normally like that, but this was a special case.  He wanted to be able to give input to the builder during construction and he knew the guy the client had picked wasn’t going to let that happen.I was thinking about that meeting the last couple of weeks as I was looking at Exodus 31.  Moses is up on Mt. Sinai.  He has been since Chapter 24.  The Lord has given him detailed instructions for the tabernacle and everything associated with it.  But the Lord isn’t going to send Moses down the mountain to find any old builder he likes.  And, if you happened to be paying really close attention, you might already suspect that the Lord’s not quite done.  I mentioned last week that the instructions for the tabernacle are structured around the phrase, “The Lord spoke to Moses”.  Seven times the Lord speaks to Moses.  The Lord’s word is creative.  There’s a reason for this.  As we’ve seen, the tabernacle is designed to be a sort of cosmos in miniature.  The most holy place with its fierce cherubim standing guard is reminiscent of the garden, the place where human beings lived in the presence of the Lord.  And so even the instructions for this little model microcosm of the cosmos are structured in a way that points us back to the creation of the cosmos itself.  Seven times the Lord speaks—as if he’s calling the tabernacle into being just as he did Creation.Brothers and Sisters, this is why the Lord isn’t going to send Moses down the mountain to just round up a team of builders on his own initiative.  The people of Israel may do the work, but the Lord himself—not too unlike my old architect boss—will choose the craftsmen, will empower them to bring his vision into being, and will superintend the project himself.  Look at Exodus 31:1-11.The Lord said to Moses, “See, I have called by name Bezalel the son of Uri, son of Hur, of the tribe of Judah, and I have filled him with the Spirit of God, with ability and intelligence, with knowledge and all craftsmanship, to devise artistic designs, to work in gold, silver, and bronze, in cutting stones for setting, and in carving wood, to work in every craft.  And behold, I have appointed with him Oholiab, the son of Ahisamach, of the tribe of Dan. And I have given to all able men ability, that they may make all that I have commanded you: the tent of meeting, and the ark of the testimony, and the mercy seat that is on it, and all the furnishings of the tent, the table and its utensils, and the pure lampstand with all its utensils, and the altar of incense, and the altar of burnt offering with all its utensils, and the basin and its stand, and the finely worked garments, the holy garments for Aaron the priest and the garments of his sons, for their service as priests, and the anointing oil and the fragrant incense for the Holy Place. According to all that I have commanded you, they shall do.” The Lord has called and appointed two men by name.  It’s not clear if that means Moses is going to have to track them down and give them the news when he descends from the mountain or if the Lord has summoned them himself and that they’ll already be waiting for Moses.  Whatever the case, providence seems to be at work.  “Bezalel” means something like “in the shadow or protection of God” and “Oholiab” means “the father is my tent”, “tent” referring to “protection”.  Down to their names, these two craftsmen are suited to the task of building the tabernacle.  The Lord says that there are other able-bodied men as well, but the key thing here is that he says that he has filled these men with his Spirit.We’re used to thinking about the Spirit causing us to bear fruit.  Paul writes about the various ways in which the Spirit equips Christians for ministry—giving people gifts for teaching, pastoring, showing mercy, things like that.  But here the Spirit equips these men to build and to craft.  He gives them “ability and intelligence, with knowledge and all craftsmanship, to devise artistic designs, to work in gold, silver, and bronze, in cutting stones for setting, and in carving wood, to work in every craft”.  How often do you think of the Holy Spirit equipping in that sort of way?  I remember watching an interview with a sculptor who was working on the Sagrada Familia basilica in Barcelona.  They showed some of the amazing and beautiful work he was doing and in the interview he said that this passage here about the Lord equipping Bezalel and Oholiab was his favourite in the Bible.  He picked up a chisel and a mallet and he said something like, “This is how God has equipped me to serve the Church.  This is the gift the Spirit has given me.”  There’s great encouragement here for those people called to do this kind of hands-on work in the body of Christ.But, again, it’s important to think of this work of the Spirit in the context of Creation.  Remember: the tabernacle represents the cosmos in miniature, the garden, the presence of God, at its centre.  We’ve got the speech acts of God: “The Lord said to Moses”.  God’s word has the power to create.  He commands, he calls forth, and things come into being.  But his Spirit is at work along with his word.  Go back to the beginning and there was the Spirit hovering over the waters of chaos awaiting his word to bring order.  And now, again, God gives his word to command and to instruct, but it’s the Spirit who brings the tabernacle into being as he equips and inspires the craftsmen.  Creation is a work of God’s word and God’s spirit.  It always has been and it always will be.  What we see here prepares God’s people for what will happen in the new covenant.  Think of what we read of the birth of the Church in Acts 2.  Jesus, the word of God incarnate, has fulfilled his mission and Peter preaches the good news of Jesus’ death, resurrection, and Lordship from God’s word and what happens?  People believe.  The Spirit fills them.  The new Israel, the new people of God is born.  As St. Paul sums up this story, this narrative in Ephesians 2, saying that building on the foundation of the prophets and apostles, Jesus being the cornerstone, this new people is being built up as the new temple and that we have access to the Spirit.  God brings forth new creation through his word and his Spirit.Of course, this also highlights a key difference between the old covenant and the new and one of the ways in which the new fulfils the promises of the old.  In the old covenant, to be filled with the Spirit was a unique experience.  The craftsmen who built the tabernacle were filled with the Spirit of God for this unique task.  Joshua, we’re told was filled with the Spirit.  And we’re told that at his anointing as King, the Spirit rush upon David.  But even in these unique situations, it’s not clear that the Spirit accomplished in these men what he accomplishes in the New Testament.  The Spirit equipped for a special task, but what was really needed for the people of God—the whole people, not just leaders or kings—was a heart renewed by the Spirit.  The prophets knew Israel’s heart problem and through them the Lord promised a day when his Spirit would make hearts of stone in to hearts of flesh.  We don’t see that until the birth of the Church.  And, of course, being filled with the Spirit, having that renewed heart, bearing fruit, being equipped for ministry—all the work of the Spirit—is the essential mark of every Christian.  Along with faith in Jesus, the indwelling of God’s Spirit is what defines us and sets us apart.  Our baptism is not only symbolic of our being washed clean from sin by Jesus, but of the Spirit being poured into us to do his transformative work.Now, we’ve spent all this time looking at the work of building the tabernacle.  If you were counting, we’ve read those words “The Lord said to Moses” six times.  Six creative speech acts.  The Creation theme means one more speech from the Lord and it follows naturally that the subject will be the sabbath.  Look at verses 12-17:And the Lord said to Moses, “You are to speak to the people of Israel and say, ‘Above all you shall keep my Sabbaths, for this is a sign between me and you throughout your generations, that you may know that I, the Lord, sanctify you.  You shall keep the Sabbath, because it is holy for you.  Everyone who profanes it shall be put to death.  Whoever does any work on it, that soul shall be cut off from among his people.  Six days shall work be done, but the seventh day is a Sabbath of solemn rest, holy to the Lord.  Whoever does any work on the Sabbath day shall be put to death.  Therefore the people of Israel shall keep the Sabbath, observing the Sabbath throughout their generations, as a covenant forever.  It is a sign forever between me and the people of Israel that in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, and on the seventh day he rested and was refreshed.’” The tabernacle is sacred space.  The sabbath is sacred time.  The Lord brings them together.  The tabernacle is the place of his presence, but it’s tied to his covenant with Israel.  The ark of the covenant is his footstool.  But interestingly, the Sabbath isn’t just a mandatory day of rest.  The Lord says here that the Sabbath—this sacred time—is a sign of the Israel’s covenant with the Lord.This not only ties in with the theme of Creation as it follows the building of the tabernacle, but more importantly, it ties into the theme of Creation in the sense that in the Exodus, God is creating a new people for himself in the Israelites.  Everything in Exodus has been working towards this point.  It’s easy for us to miss it.  When we think of the book of Exodus, we usually think about all the exciting stuff that happened in the first half: Moses fleeing and meeting the Lord in the burning bush, Pharaoh and the plagues, the parting of the Red Sea and the drowning of the Egyptians.  For most of us, I think, the story sort of peters out after that.  Moses goes up onto Mt. Sinai and then comes all this boring technical stuff about laws and the tabernacle.  Preachers often reinforce it.  I’ve looked around the Internet to see how others have preached through Exodus and it’s surprising to me how many preachers cover the first half of Exodus and then stop after the Ten Commandments.  That’s where the movies all stop, I guess.  But the Red Sea, even Moses on Mt. Sinai, those aren’t the climax of the book.  The birth of the people of God is the climax, the fulfilment of the covenant: I will be your God and you will be my people.  And we see that as the tabernacle is completed and the Lord’s presence descends upon it in a cloud of glory: God dwelling in the midst of his newly created people.  (It happens again in Acts with the descent of the Spirit onto the Church.)So the Lord has done this work of new creation.  He’s called, rescued, and come to dwell in the midst of this people through whom he will begin his work of setting this fallen creation to rights, and at its completion—symbolised by the building of his dwelling place amongst them—they are to rest as he rested from his work of creation in the beginning.  So the Sabbath isn’t just a reminder of God’s original creation of the cosmos, but a reminder to his people of this work of re-creation that he will bring about through them and that is symbolised in the tabernacle.If there is an argument for the sabbath carrying over from the old to the new covenant and being observed as the Lord’s Day, being observed on Sunday with a day of rest and worship, I think it lies here.  We have no direct command to Christians, like this one given to the Israelites, but the idea is basically the same.  A day of rest, one out of seven, can remind us that we are the Lord’s new creation and the observance of that day—along with worship—on the first day of the week points to the resurrection of Jesus as the source of new creation.  Recalling the covenant is the key.Notice that the Lord tells Moses that the purpose of the Sabbath is that “you may know that I, the Lord, sanctify you”—that I, the Lord, have set you apart, made you my own, and given you a holy purpose.  By tying Israel’s identity into this idea of creation and new creation, the Sabbath became a reminder to Israel not only of who the Lord is, but his purposes for her, for rescuing her from bondage and making her his people.  It’s not just an issue of people needing rest.  That’s a perk.  But at its core, the Sabbath was a reminder to Israel of who she was.  This might give us a better sense of what Jesus was getting at when he said that the Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath in Mark 2:27.Although it’s not the direct focus of this passage, tying Israel’s observance of the Sabbath to Creation and the covenant, also makes it a sign of faith, of trust in the Lord.  Living in the modern age of the forty-hour work week, it can be difficult for us to grasp this aspect of the Sabbath.  Ancient people didn’t have weekends.  Life was hard.  Unless you were wealthy, you worked from sunup to sundown, usually seven days a week in order to survive.  Like the tithe, which asked people to give back to the Lord ten per cent of their income off the top, before they knew if they’d have anything left over, the Sabbath asked people to take one day in seven off from work, acknowledging that everything they had came from the Lord in the first place, acknowledging that he was sovereign over Creation, and trusting him to be good to his promises and to provide—to trust that six days of work and ninety per cent would be enough because God is faithful.Understanding all of this also helps us to understand why the penalty for breaking the Sabbath was so severe.  “Everyone who profanes it shall be put to death.  Whoever does any work on it, that soul shall be cut off from among his people.”  The point of the Sabbath was to know “that I am the Lord”.  The point of the Sabbath was for Israel to gain a deeper understanding of her covenant relationship with the Lord and his purposes for her.  To profane the Sabbath was to reject this covenant, it was to say, “I’m not really interested in the Lord.  I’m not satisfied with what he’s given.  I trust in my own hands to provide, not the Lord.”  To break the Sabbath was, essentially, to reject the covenant and the penalty for that was death.  And if you ever wondered why the Jews invested so much in what seem like nit-picking laws and regulations about what constituted work on the sabbath, this is why.  In many respects they may have missed the spirit of the law for all their focus on the letter, but the reason behind it was that they took this covenant and the penalty for breaking it seriously.So the tabernacle is sacred space.  The Sabbath is sacred time.  In entering the tabernacle, Israel entered into the dwelling place of the Lord.  In keeping the Sabbath, Israel entered into the Lord’s rest.Now, finally, this whole section is wrapped up in verse 18: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. Before sending him down the mountain and back to the people, the Lord gives Moses two tablets of stone inscribed with everything he’s told him.  This isn’t just the ten commandments, it’s everything we’ve read since Moses went up the mountain.  Moses was to go down and deliver the Lord’s covenantal instructions to the people and the Lord ensures that no one will question who has spoken.  It’s inscribed on stone.  How this happened we can only speculate.  The Lord doesn’t have literal fingers.  But the point here is that the Lord has given this law to Moses, he is the source, and it carries his authority.  That it’s written on stone gives it gravity, gives it weight, give it permanence.Most of you probably know what’s about to come next.  Moses descends the mountain to find that the people have made and are worshipping a gold calf.  The scene stands in stark contrast to the need for men and women to come to God on his terms.  God has spent these last chapters giving specific instructions for what worship is to look like and how the people are to approach him.  Everything reminds them of their sinfulness, his holiness, and that they come to him by grace.  And lest anyone think all of these details aren’t really a big deal, the Lord inscribes them on stone.  And we think, is that really necessary?  And then we descend the mountain with Moses and we see that, yes indeed, it is.  Left to ourselves, left without reminders of the covenant, left without God’s word, we fall so easily into idolatry.  God’s people did, indeed, need his word carved on stone to keep them in line.And, Brothers and Sisters, we continue to need God’s word.  The seriousness and the permanence of the Lord’s instructions for Israel’s life and worship were underscored by their being written on stone by God’s own hand.  And yet, even the law inscribed on stone tablets wasn’t enough.  An external law wasn’t enough.  The law looked forward to a day when God, through his Spirit, would indwell his people—to a day when the people themselves would be the tabernacle, the temple in which God dwelt.  And so we see just how great the ministry of the Spirit is in that it is he who finally supersedes that law written on stone tablets.  It is the Spirit of God, poured into us by Jesus in our baptism, who finally sets our hearts and minds on God and who fills us with love, both for him and for each other.  It is finally the Spirit who fulfils the law and inscribes it once again, not this time on stone, but on our hearts.  And yet, Brothers and Sisters, the Spirit and his work does not and can never stand apart from God’s word.  The Spirit has, in many ways, lightened the load for us.  And because of that it can be easy to think that all we need is the Spirit and all we need is love.  We downplay God’s word and we get into all sorts of trouble.  We forget that the Scriptures were inspired by the same Spirit who now dwells within us and we forget that the love with which the Spirit has filled us is defined by that same word he caused to be written.  We see two great errors in the Church in our day.  On one hand there is a strong tendency to think that because we have the Spirit, we can approach the Lord however or as casually as we want.  Brothers and Sisters, no, we can’t.  The other great error is defining love apart from God’s word.  Christians increasingly are saying things like, “God loves everybody.  This or that isn’t really sin.  God is fine with you however you are.  Love means doing what makes you happy.”  All this in blatant disregard for God’s word.  We do this in the name of the Spirit and in doing that we grieve him.  Friends, the death of Jesus on the cross reminds us that even with the Spirit, we can approach God only on his terms.  We must come to him by way of the cross, by way of repentance, and by way of submission to the Lordship of Jesus.  And in that, Jesus reminds us too, that love is defined not by what makes us feel good, but by sacrifice and by submission to God’s word.  Too, the gift of the Spirit is a reminder that as Israel was freed from bondage to the Egyptians, Jesus as freed us from our bondage to sin and death, we have been chosen to be God’s people, his new creation, not only to take his royal summons to the world, but to live in such a way—a way of holiness, sacrifice, and hope—that we lift the veil and give the world a glimpse of God’s age to come.Let’s pray: Lord, as we asked earlier in the collect, may we walk in your grace that we may be given always to the good works you have given us to do.  Remind us that walking in grace isn’t some passive and nebulous thing we do, but that to walk in grace means that we daily avail ourselves of the means of grace that you have given, that we immerse ourselves in your word, that we be always in prayer, that we participate in your Supper to be reminded whose people we are so that we can swim in our baptism.  Remind us always that you are our God and that we are your people.  Keep before us not only the cross, but the risen and ascended Jesus that we might be the agents of your new creation for the sake of the world.  Through Jesus we pray.  Amen.