Our Old Testament reading is Exodus chapter 25, verses 23 through 30. And this is the infallible and inerrant word of God. Exodus 25, 23 through 30. You shall make a table of acacia wood. Two cubits shall be its length, a cubit its breadth, and a cubit and a half its height. You shall overlay it with pure gold and make a molding of gold around it, and you shall make a rim around it a handbreadth wide and a molding of gold around the rim. And you shall make four rings of gold and fasten the rings to the four corners at its four legs. Close to the frame, the rings shall lie as holders for the poles to carry the table. You shall make the poles of acacia wood and overlay them with gold, and the table shall be carried with these. And you shall make its plates and its dishes for incense and its flagons and bowls with which to pour drink offerings. You shall make them of pure gold and you shall set the bread of the presence on the table before me regularly.

You can keep your place there since this is our sermon text and turn to the New Testament to Acts chapter 17 for our New Testament reading. Acts chapter 17 verses 22 through 31. This is the Apostle Paul’s address to the Areopagus in Athens, after he had seen all of the various idols that the people of that city worshiped. So Acts 17 verses 22 through 31.

So Paul, standing in the midst of the Areopagus said, men of Athens, I perceive that in every way you are very religious. For as I passed along and observed the objects of your worship, I found also an altar with this inscription, To the unknown God. What therefore you worship is unknown, this I proclaim to you. The God who made the world and everything in it, being Lord of heaven and earth, does not live in temples made by man, nor is he served by human hands as though he needed anything, since he himself gives to all mankind life and breath and everything. And he made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth, having determined allotted periods and the boundaries of their dwelling place, that they should seek God and perhaps feel their way toward him and find him. Yet he is actually not far from each one of us, for in him we live and move and have our being. As even some of your own poets have said, for we are indeed his offspring. Being then God’s offspring, we ought not to think that the divine image is like gold or silver or stone, an image formed by the art and imagination of man. The times of ignorance God overlooked, but now he commands all people everywhere to repent, because he has fixed a day on which he will judge the world in righteousness by a man whom he has appointed, and of this he has given assurance to all by raising him from the dead.

The grass withers, the flower fades, but the word of our God will stand forever.

In this section of Exodus, God is giving Moses very detailed instructions on how the tabernacle was to be built. And just to remind ourselves of the overall significance of the tabernacle, we can say that there were two things that made the tabernacle a glorious thing, a place of glory. First of all, the tabernacle was the place where Almighty God, the creator of heaven and earth, where he made his dwelling place on earth among his people. The Old Testament sometimes refers to God as the one who is enthroned upon the cherubim. The two cherubim, as we saw last week, they were made out of pure gold and they were on top of the mercy seat, which itself was on top of the Ark of the Covenant. And it was there in the tabernacle above the cherubim that God said that he would be present among his people. And that in itself is sufficient to make the tabernacle the most glorious structure ever built by human hands. It was because this is where the Lord dwelt. He was with his people. His home, you could say, his tent, was among the people of Israel in that tabernacle.

But the second thing that made the tabernacle a thing of glory was that it was full of symbolism. Many of the elements of the tabernacle pointed to spiritual realities concerning the character of God, concerning God’s work of salvation for his people. And these spiritual truths that were symbolized and represented in different ways by the tabernacle, they would find their fulfillment and their fullest expression in the person of Jesus Christ and in the work that he has done for our salvation and his incarnation, his life, his suffering, death, and resurrection. And we saw this last week when we looked at the mercy seat that was on top of the Ark of the Covenant. We saw how the death of Jesus on the cross was the fulfillment of everything that the mercy seat signified. And that is the mercy seat signified that an atonement was necessary, that there had to be a propitiation, a satisfaction for the wrath of God in order for us as sinners to be saved. Our sins have to be atoned for. And the mercy seat pointed to that. And so in that way, as the mercy seat pointed ultimately to Jesus Christ and his saving work for us, the tabernacle really preached the gospel. It was, in a symbolic way, it communicated the truth of what Christ would come to do, not only for his people among the people of Israel, but for his people throughout the world.

Now, having said that, this is where, as readers, as students of the Bible, as Christians, we need to be careful how we interpret and understand the symbolism of the tabernacle. In the history of the church, there have been very well-meaning scholars and theologians who have found all kinds of Christian truth in the tabernacle that probably was more the product of their own fertile imagination than it was the mind of God. For example, the church father Origen, he found much meaning in the precious materials that were used to construct the tabernacle. He wrote, faith is to be compared to gold, the preached word to silver, patience to bronze. Another example, Gregory the Great said the ark symbolized the church. And the four rings on the four corners of the ark represented the four gospels. And there were four rings on the four corners of the ark because the gospel was going out to the four corners of the world. Others said that the Ark actually represents the incarnation, because it was built with two materials, wood and gold. The wood stands for the humanity of Christ, the gold for his deity. And yet, just as Christ is one person with two natures, so the Ark is one Ark made out of two materials, wood and gold.

As we hear these things, of course, we say amen to the biblical truths that are being explained with these various kinds of interpretations. At the same time, we need to ask, are these kinds of allegorical, fanciful interpretations, is this where the scriptures naturally lead us? It’s hard to see how it does. A better way to study the tabernacle and everything in it is to allow the scriptures themselves to guide us in our interpretation of the symbols of the tabernacle, of what they represent. Does the Bible itself suggest or indicate a symbolic meaning to some feature of the tabernacle? And if so, how is that ultimately fulfilled in Christ? And so that is the guiding principle that should direct us as we seek to understand the true meaning of the tabernacle in light of the coming of Jesus Christ. And that’s how we will proceed as we look at the various parts of the tabernacle.

Last week, we already began to look at parts of the tabernacle. We looked at the Ark of the Covenant, the most important part of the tabernacle. Today, we will look at the table that was in the holy place of the tabernacle and the gospel truth that this table, but particularly the bread on the table, the gospel truth that is communicated to us by it is this: that through Jesus Christ, through the Son of God, we have been given the blessing of intimate and unbroken communion with God. So God is with us. And this is, as we’ll see, what the bread and the table indicate to us.

So first, let’s take a look at this table that is described for us in the passage. After the Lord told Moses how to make the ark. And remember, Moses is on top of Mount Sinai. He had entered into the cloud in the top of the mountain. He’s with the Lord 40 days and 40 nights. And throughout that time, God is giving him instructions on how to build this tabernacle. So first he tells him how to make the ark. Then he moves on to what will be in the room that is next to the room where the Ark is. And so the Ark is in the innermost part of the tabernacle. That’s called the Most Holy Place. And then the room adjacent to the Most Holy Place that’s separated by a curtain, that’s referred to as the Holy Place. And in the Holy Place, it’s a bigger room. It’s the room that the priest would enter into first before going into the Most Holy Place. But in this holy place, there were three items or three things there. There was the table for the showbread, which we will look at today. There was the golden lamp stand, and there was also the altar of incense.

So our concern this morning is the table for the bread. Like the ark, it was made out of acacia wood. Acacia wood was easy to find in that area where they were around Mount Sinai. It was overlaid with pure gold. It wasn’t a huge table. Its dimensions, as given to us in cubits, of course, but in feet, it was roughly three feet long, one and a half feet wide, and just over two feet tall. So you can picture it being about the same size of a typical coffee table that you might have in your living room. So it wasn’t huge. It’s not exactly clear what the two moldings and the rim were for or what they looked like or where they were placed on the table. The rim may have just been for a very practical purpose to be around the surface of the table so something couldn’t slip off of it. But in any case, like the Ark, the table was to be carried with two poles, two poles that were covered with gold. And these poles would be inserted into the four rings that were fastened to the table. One interesting little detail, specifically with the Ark, Moses was told that the poles were never to be separated from the Ark. They were always to be with the Ark. But here, the poles could be taken in and out of the ark. Presumably that’s because the less handling of the ark, the better, because it was the most holy object in the tabernacle.

Now, unlike with the Ark of the Covenant, I’m not aware of any movies that give us a good visual of what the table looked like. I’m not aware of any movies like Raiders of the Lost Ark that’s all about the table for the showbread. However, there is a fascinating picture of what the table may have looked like that is given to us later in history. In 82 AD, the Roman Emperor Domitian, he built what is called the Arch of Titus in Rome. And he built this arch as a monument to celebrate the great military victories of his older brother Titus, who served as emperor before Domitian. And one of the victories of Titus was the conquering and destroying of the city of Jerusalem in 70 AD. And so in order to commemorate that military conquest that Titus accomplished, this Ark of Titus has a sculpture built into it, and in this sculpture, we see Roman soldiers carrying away some of the holy articles that they found in the temple that was in Jerusalem before they destroyed it. One of those articles is the golden lamp stand, and it looks very much like a menorah, like you might picture, like you’ve seen before. But also in that sculpture, there is a sculpture of the table that we are considering today.

Now, the lampstand and the table that were found by the Romans and plundered by them in 70 AD, these most likely were not the original equipment, not the original table that was made by the Israelites in the wilderness. However, they may have been accurate reproductions. And in any case, if you look it up online, I think you’ll find it interesting to see what may have been an accurate representation of what this table looked like and what the golden lamp stand looked like after reading about it in the Book of Exodus. But along with the table, Moses was to make various kinds of dishes. So there were plates, presumably for holding the bread as it sat on the table. There were dishes for the incense, the frankincense that was to be put on top of the bread. There were different kinds of pouring vessels of different sizes. The priests would use these for their drink offerings as they offered sacrifices to the Lord. And all of these were made out of pure gold, nothing but the finest material for God’s tabernacle. So they were all made out of pure gold.

Now, the most important feature of the table is not something about the table itself, but the most important, most significant thing about the table was what was placed on top of it, and that was the bread, what is called here the bread of the presence. Verse 30 says, and you shall set the bread of the presence on the table before me regularly. It’s very, very helpful for us as we read this passage in Exodus to read another passage from Leviticus that gives us a lot more information about this bread. So I’ll read Leviticus chapter 24 verses 5 through 9. You’re welcome to read along in your Bibles if you like. This is Leviticus 24 verses 5 through 9. It says, You shall take fine flour and bake 12 loaves from it. Two tenths of an ephah shall be in each loaf. And you shall set them in two piles, six in a pile on the table of pure gold before the Lord. And you shall put pure frankincense on each pile that it may go with the bread as a memorial portion, as a food offering to the Lord. Every Sabbath day Aaron shall arrange it before the Lord regularly. It is from the people of Israel as a covenant forever. And it shall be for Aaron and his sons, and they shall eat it in a holy place, since it is for him a most holy portion out of the Lord’s food offerings, a perpetual due.

And so we learned a lot more about this bread from this passage of Leviticus. First of all, we learned that there were 12 loaves of bread. No doubt that was to represent the 12 tribes of Israel. And the text doesn’t say for sure, but most likely this was unleavened bread, particularly since the bread would be stacked on top of each other. So these were not really thick loaves of bread, but flatter loaves made out of unleavened flour. And given the specific quantities of flour involved, we can guess that each loaf was about 12 inches in diameter, about four inches thick. And so you can picture then this table made out of gold, and on top of it were two piles of bread, six loaves on each pile or in each pile. And so that can give you a kind of a visual image of what this looked like.

Now, the bread, you’ll notice if you remember from the Leviticus passage I just read to you, it’s called a food offering. It’s called a food offering. Now, it would be a mistake to think that what was meant by this is that somehow the bread was given to God by the Israelites in order to feed God. That’s not how the Israelites understood the Lord, because that’s not how the Lord revealed himself to them. But that was the reason why the pagans made food offerings to their gods. It was because they were hungry. They were thirsty and they depended on their worshippers to give them food and drink, just like a dog is dependent on his owner to feed him and water him. So the idols, the false gods of the pagans, they needed their worshippers to supply them with their daily bread, their sustenance. But nothing could be further from the truth when it came to the true God, the living God, the Lord, the God of Israel. He is the creator, he is the sovereign Lord of all. There is nothing that God needs from man. In fact, there is nothing that God needs from any of his creation, of all that he created. He does not need anything from it. His creation did not somehow complete him or make him more whole. He was perfectly, infinitely bliss as God, as the triune God before he created anything. And so he needs nothing from creation in the way we need things from creation. In Psalm 50 verse 12, the Lord says, if I were hungry, I would not tell you for the world and its fullness are mine. In other words, I do not need you to keep me alive or to feed me. I do not need anything from you. I am the Lord.

This is why I had us hear the passage from Acts chapter 17, when the apostle Paul preached the gospel to the pagans in Athens, he saw all of their idols, all of the temples there. And the Apostle Paul said this, the God who made the world and everything in it being Lord of heaven and earth, he does not live in temples made by man, nor is he served by human hands as though he needed anything since he himself gives to all mankind life and breath and everything. It is the Lord who gives us life. It is the Lord who feeds us, not the other way around. And so when the Bible calls this bread of the presence a food offering, it was not in the sense that the pagans offered food offerings to their idols. In fact, the bread in the tabernacle was a symbol of the very opposite. It was a symbol of God’s provision for man. You know, later in the history of Israel, that’s given to us in the Old Testament in first Samuel chapter 21, the show bread or the bread of the presence, it became the literal provision for David and his men. On one occasion, you remember that David and his men were fleeing from Saul. Saul was chasing David with a murderous intent to destroy him. And David and his men needed food to eat. So they went to the tabernacle, and Ahimelech was the priest in those days. He had no bread to offer David. All he had was the bread of the presence, these holy loaves of bread in the tabernacle. It was only supposed to be eaten by priests, but since David needed it to eat, the priest gave him the bread. And of course, we learn from Matthew chapter 12 in our Lord’s teaching there that Ahimelech did the right thing. It was right for him to feed David even with this bread that was only for the priests to eat because there was a higher law and that was to show mercy and compassion to those in need. But the point is, is that when the Bible calls this bread a food offering, it doesn’t mean that the Lord was fed by his people, rather the bread was a sign of God’s provision for his people.

But the bread symbolized more than that. The greater significance of the bread was not just that God is the one who gives us our daily bread, but it also represents the truth that God was in the midst of his people. He was present with them. And the Israelites, because he was with them, they could enjoy communion and fellowship with him as their God. Again, from Leviticus chapter 24, verse eight, we read this. It is from the people of Israel as a covenant forever. He’s referring to the bread there, the bread. It is from the people of Israel as a covenant forever. And so the bread had everything to do with the covenant that God made with his people. And that covenant that God entered into with His people, Israel, at the heart of that covenant, the promise of the covenant was that God said to His people, I will be your God, you will be my people, but at the very heart of that was that promise of fellowship, communion. The Israelites could know God as their God and enjoy that blessedness of communing with Him. If you remember, in our look at Exodus back in chapter 24, when the Lord confirmed his covenant with his people, he called Moses and Aaron and his sons and 70 of the elders of Israel up to the top of Mount Sinai. And this is right after he made his covenant with Israel. And Exodus 24, 11 says, they beheld God and ate and drank. And so this covenant that God entered into with his people, this covenant that brought them into a true communion with him as their God, how was this covenant confirmed? How was it sealed? It was with a meal. They shared a meal together. They ate together. The elders ate in the presence of the Lord. Of course, the Lord did not physically actually eat anything, but figuratively speaking, they shared a meal together.

And so, since this bread is in the tabernacle, which is a place where God dwelt among his people, and since the Lord uses the language of covenant to describe the bread, therefore what the bread of the presence stood for above all else was that communion and fellowship that the Israelites had with the Lord their God. The Puritan Matthew Henry puts it kind of quaintly, he says, he supped with them and they with him. But this life-giving communion that God gave to his people, that he brought his people into, this is one thing, at least one thing, that separated the true God from all the idols and the false gods of the nations around Israel, those false gods that they worshiped. God was not and is not a distant and aloof deity. He is not temperamental. He is not unpredictable or arbitrary in his dealings with man. He is not the kind of God that the Israelites had to appease with their sacrifices in the hope that he would not destroy them. That is how the pagans thought about their gods. I happen to be reading right now Homer’s epic poem, The Odyssey, and throughout that poem, the Greeks are constantly making sacrifices to the gods in the hopes that they might somehow placate them and save themselves from their capricious and impulsive anger. It seems at times the gods of the pagans were more like divine bullies that had to be appeased than they were anything like the true God.

But the worship and the service of the true God, the Lord, was nothing like that. Rather, for the Israelites to serve the Lord, to worship the Lord, to offer these sacrifices was to be a joy because he had made himself known to them. God had revealed himself to the Israelites as a God who is good, who is merciful, who is kind, who is compassionate and loving. This was the God who heard their cries for deliverance as they suffered under bondage and their slavery to Egypt. This was the Lord who answered their cries, who had mercy on them. He chose them of all the nations of the world. He loved them. He saved them. And he did so that he might bring them to himself, that they might find their eternal life, their blessedness, their joy, in having fellowship and communion with him as their God. And so God’s covenant with his people Israel, it was a covenant of communion and fellowship. You know, it’s indicated also by the name of this bread. The bread is called the bread of the presence. In Hebrew, presence, the word is literally face. So you could say the bread of the face, that is the face of God. And so the bread was always present before the face of God. And that stood for the truth that the Israelites lived their lives before the face of God. His face looked upon them. His face shone upon them for good, for blessing. And so the bread represents that fellowship that the Lord brought his people into.

And yet there were limits to that fellowship. There were boundaries that had to be set by God because he is a holy God. And so there were boundaries of how closely the Israelites could approach the Lord. The bread itself was holy. It was only to be eaten by the priests. It was kept in the holy sanctuary. It was kept in the holy place in that sanctuary. Only the holy priests could eat it. They had to eat it in a holy place. And so there were limits. But when God sent his son, Jesus Christ, into the world, he sent him into the world so that we might enjoy a fuller, a greater, a richer communion with him than the Israelites could enjoy under the old covenant as described for us here in Exodus. And with the coming of Christ, with the coming of the son of God, with God himself coming to us in the person of his son, taking on human flesh, coming to live among us, to walk among us, God no longer dwells in a separate tabernacle or a temple. He is no longer separated from us by this curtain that barred our entrance into the most holy place, to that place of most intimate fellowship with the Lord. But he has come to us in his Son, Jesus Christ. When Jesus was crucified, that curtain was torn asunder so that we could come into the presence of God through Jesus Christ. He even dwells in us. He dwells in us by His Holy Spirit.

Now, God is still as holy as He ever was. He is no less holy than He was in the days when He made Himself known to the Israelites. But now, He has given us His Son, Jesus. And being covered with the righteousness of Christ, we may approach Him without fear or dread. In fact, God calls us to draw near to Him, to come to him, to approach him with confidence, with joy, knowing that he receives us. Hebrews 10 says this, therefore, brothers, since we have confidence to enter the holy places by the blood of Jesus, by the new and living way that he opened for us through the curtain that is through his flesh, and since we have a great priest over the house of God, let us draw near with a true heart and full assurance of faith, with our hearts sprinkled clean from an evil conscience and our bodies washed with pure water. So God, through Jesus Christ, he calls us to enter into that holy place in order to enjoy that communion that we now have with him. And so just as the bread was always there on the table in the tabernacle as a reminder to them that God was with the Israelites for their good, he loved them, he was among them, so as a believer in Jesus Christ, you have the promise, the assurance, that God, he is with you. He is always with you. He loves you. He is your father in heaven.

About 10 years ago, I read a book, an autobiographical book written by a young man who grew up in what was an extremely broken home. The author actually went on to become the vice president of the United States, but the book had nothing to do with politics, really. It was just his story of the kind of circumstances he grew up in that were so broken and so devastating to him and to others. And so when he was a kid, his biological father left his home. And from that time on, his mother was either married to or romantically involved with a series of men. And it’s very sad how he tells the story. He got to like some of the men who lived in his home for a time, but he never got too close to them because he knew that someday they would be gone. And this man would be replaced by the next man who would be his mom’s boyfriend or husband. And as he writes in the book, he looks back on his childhood. He sees that what he really, really wanted was just a dad who would always be there for him, that he could count on, who would never leave.

And maybe some of you have had a similar experience. Maybe you’ve never really known what it is to be loved by a human father, one who is there always, who never leaves. The gospel is the good news that Christ has done everything for us that we might come to know the true father, the father who is always there, whose love is steadfast, who loves us with a perfect love, who has loved us from all eternity, and who will love us for all eternity. The gospel is the good news that God sent his only begotten son into the world that you and I might be adopted as his children, and to know that perfect fatherly love that only God can truly give to us. Jesus laid down his life for sinners, sinners such as you and me, that we might be forgiven, that we might be brought to God. And we come to him now in Jesus Christ, not as those who deserve condemnation. Yes, we do, but we are no longer under condemnation because Jesus has taken that for us. But we come to God as our father. He receives us as his son, as his daughter. And so one thing that the gospel means for you is that God is always there. He is always there. He has promised, I will never leave you nor forsake you. He is a perfect father. And if your hope is in Jesus Christ, this is what God is to you, your father in heaven, the one that you can come to always at any time and enjoy that perfect fellowship with him through Jesus Christ. And because He is your Father in heaven, His love for you will be your joy and your life forever and ever. Let’s pray.

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Our Old Testament reading is Exodus chapter 25, verses 10 through 22. And this is the infallible and inerrant word of God. Exodus 25, 10 through 22. They shall make an ark of acacia wood, two cubits and a half shall be its length, a cubit and a half its breadth, and a cubit and a half its height. You shall overlay it with pure gold inside and outside, shall you overlay it, and you shall make on it a molding of gold around it. You shall cast four rings of gold for it and put them on its four feet, two rings on the one side of it and two rings on the other side of it. You shall make poles of acacia wood and overlay them with gold. And you shall put the poles into the rings on the sides of the ark to carry the ark by them. The poles shall remain in the rings of the ark. They shall not be taken from it. And you shall put into the ark the testimony that I shall give you.

You shall make a mercy seat of pure gold. Two cubits and a half shall be its length and a cubit and a half its breadth. And you shall make two cherubim of gold. Of hammered work shall you make them on the two ends of the mercy seat. Make one cherub on the one end and one cherub on the other end. Of one piece with the mercy seat shall you make the cherubim on its two ends. The cherubim shall spread out their wings above, overshadowing the mercy seat with their wings, their faces one to another. Toward the mercy seat shall the faces of the cherubim be. And you shall put the mercy seat on the top of the ark, and in the ark you shall put the testimony that I shall give you. There I will meet with you, and from above the mercy seat, from between the two cherubim that are on the ark of the testimony, I will speak with you about all that I will give you in commandment for the people of Israel.

Keep your place there in Exodus and turn with me to Romans chapter three for our New Testament reading. Romans 3, 21 through 26. Romans 3, 21 through 26. But now the righteousness of God has been manifested apart from the law, although the law and the prophets bear witness to it, the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ for all who believe. For there is no distinction for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God and are justified by his grace as a gift through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom God put forward as a propitiation by his blood to be received by faith. This was to show God’s righteousness because in his divine forbearance, he had passed over former sins. It was to show his righteousness at the present time so that he might be just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus. The grass withers, the flower fades, but the word of our God will stand forever.

It’s been a couple of weeks since we were last in Exodus. And so just to review what’s happening at this point in the book, we’ll just set the context for you. The Israelites are at Mount Sinai. The Lord has just made his covenant with them. And God has called Moses by himself to come up to the top of the mountain to meet with him and to receive these instructions that he will give to him. And Moses tells us that he entered the glory cloud, that cloud that was on top of Mount Sinai in which God’s presence dwelt. He went into the presence of the Lord there. He was there for 40 days and 40 nights.

And the first thing that the Lord told Moses was that he was to take up a special offering of all the various materials that would go into making the tabernacle and all the various parts of the tabernacle. And then in verses eight and nine, the Lord tells Moses to tell the Israelites to build this tabernacle exactly after the pattern of the one that the Lord showed to Moses on the top of the mountain. And so in verses eight and nine, which we did not read this morning, but just right before our passage, verses eight and nine say, and let them make me a sanctuary that I may dwell in their midst, exactly as I show you concerning the pattern of the tabernacle and of all its furniture, so you shall make it.

And so the Lord tells Moses how to build this tabernacle. And then verse 10, chapter 25, and all the way to the end of chapter 30, almost all of that consists of the very detailed thorough instructions that the Lord gave to Moses on how to build the tabernacle, how to construct its furniture, that is the various items that were in the tabernacle, how to build the priest’s garments, how to make the altar of incense and the anointing oil and all of that. Many people have made the observation that whereas it took God only six days to create the entire universe, it took him 40 days to explain to Moses exactly how the tabernacle was to be constructed.

So clearly, this is a matter of great importance to God. And one reason for that, one reason why the Lord gave Moses such detailed, such lengthy instructions on how to build this sanctuary was because this would be the place that the Lord would dwell among his people. Only God could determine what the sanctuary or the tabernacle would be in which he would dwell with his people here on earth. And so this was not to be constructed by the imaginations of the Israelites or by their own design or thoughts, but it was God’s house and He would build it, or He would have it built according to His design.

But not only that, but the tabernacle and everything in it and everything associated with the tabernacle also served another purpose, not only to be the dwelling place of God among his people, but the tabernacle was a source of revelation. It was revelation to the people of Israel concerning the truth of God. The tabernacle not only communicated the truth concerning the character of God, what kind of God he was, what he was like as God, but it was also symbolic in many ways of the salvation that one day God would accomplish for his people through his son, Jesus Christ.

And so the tabernacle revealed to the Israelites the truth concerning the gospel, concerning Christ. In fact, one author says this, he says, every detail points to some aspect of the character and work of the person of God’s Son, Jesus Christ, and in its complete form, it is probably, he’s talking about the tabernacle here, it is probably the most comprehensive, detailed revelation of Jesus, the Son of God, and the plan of salvation in the entire Old Testament. Now, whether that is true or not, perhaps, but whatever we may think of that, the truth is that the tabernacle was indeed a revelation of Jesus Christ and of his coming, of his work, of his person, all that he would do for our salvation. And so it is very significant, very important for us to spend some time looking at the details of this tabernacle.

Now, just by itself, as a structure, just taking it for what it is, the tabernacle wasn’t particularly awe-inspiring. It wasn’t a particularly imposing or impressive building. Our family, one time, was able to visit a life-sized recreation of the tabernacle. It was in Amish country, in Pennsylvania, and someone had built, as best as he could, a replication of what the tabernacle might have looked like, according to the dimensions and everything that are given to us in scripture. And it was very interesting. It was very beneficial to see it and to walk into it and see what that might have been like in those days.

But the building itself didn’t leave the kind of impression on us that you might have after you see some magnificent structure like the Cathedral of Notre Dame or the Taj Mahal or the Burj Khalifa. That’s the world’s tallest building in Dubai. And so the tabernacle itself was rather modest in size. It wasn’t awe-inspiring just by virtue of its appearance. But what makes it truly awe-inspiring, what makes the tabernacle truly the most glorious structure that has ever been built by human hands is this, that it was both the dwelling place of God on earth among his people, and it was a revelation of the Son of God, Jesus Christ, before his coming. And so that’s why we will take some time to study the tabernacle because of what it reveals to us about God and about the Lord Jesus Christ.

And we’ll start with what is the most important part of the tabernacle, the place where the Lord started in giving his instructions to Moses, and that is the Ark of the Testimony or the Ark of God, the Ark of the Covenant. And so first of all, let’s just get a picture in our minds of what this ark looked like, because it’s described for us here. And so let’s try to get a mental image of what this ark would have looked like to us. In verse 10, the Lord says to Moses, they shall make an ark of acacia wood, two cubits and a half shall be its length, a cubit and a half its breadth, and a cubit and a half its height.

And so the ark was basically a chest or a box. It was made from the wood of acacia trees and getting wood from acacia trees would have been very easy for the Israelites where they happen to be in the wilderness at this time. The dimensions of it are given in cubits. A cubit is about 18 inches. It’s the length from the elbow of a man’s arm all the way up to the tip of his finger. About 18 inches, give or take, or so. And so the ark, if you can imagine, it would have been just under four feet long and just over two feet wide and two feet tall.

It was covered with pure gold. It rested on four feet, and on each of these feet was a ring so that poles could be inserted into the ring so that the ark could be carried without being touched. And the reason for that, as we’ll see, is the ark was holy and no human was to touch it. God designed the ark to contain the two tablets on which he had written with his very own finger the law, the 10 commandments that he gave to the people of Israel. That’s why it is called the ark of the testimony. Look at verse 16, or that’s why it’s referred to as containing the testimony. Verse 16 says, and you shall put into the ark the testimony that I shall give you. And so the testimony—those are the two tablets with the Ten Commandments.

And it’s also why the Ark is called the Ark of the Covenant, because the Ten Commandments were the substance of the covenant that God made with his people Israel at Mount Sinai. And because the Ark contained the Ten Commandments, it is called the Ark of the Covenant. We know from other scripture, from the book of Hebrews, that the Ark also contained the jar of manna that the Lord instructed the Israelites to set aside, and it also contained the staff of Aaron that budded.

On the top of the ark is a lid—was what was called the Mercy Seat and we’ll talk more about the Mercy Seat in a few minutes. But this lid or covering was made of pure gold and on top of the Mercy Seat were two cherubim which were also made of pure gold and they were all made of one piece with the lid or the cover, the Mercy Seat. Well what do we know about these cherubim? Well they’re not the cute chubby little creatures that may come to your mind when you hear the word cherubim. These were angelic creatures. They were very often in the presence of the Lord. So they were there with the Lord in the presence of his holiness and they kind of served as guardians of holy places.

The first time that we meet the cherubim is in Genesis chapter 3, after the Lord cast Adam and Eve out of the Garden of Eden. If you remember, to the east of the garden at the entrance, he placed cherubim there to guard the entrance. He also placed a flaming sword that turned this way and that in order to guard the way to the Tree of Life. And so the cherubim were God’s angels, they were God’s attendants, and they guarded that which was holy. And in this case, they guarded the Ark of the Covenant. The most outstanding feature of these two cherubim is that they are looking down. They are not looking up, but they are looking down, and that’s because God was above them. They are bowing their heads in reverence and awe before the Lord. So these two cherubim are looking down as they guard the Ark of the Covenant.

Since we are considering the Ark of the Covenant this morning, I just can’t help but mention that when I was a kid, my very favorite movie of all time was Raiders of the Lost Ark. I wouldn’t rely on that movie for a lot of factual information about the Ark of God. No, the Ark wasn’t almost captured by the Nazis. And no, the Ark isn’t being stored in some government warehouse in the deserts of Nevada. As cool as that may be, that is not true. But if you can remember from the movie what the Ark looked like, you get a pretty good sense of what it probably looked like in real life. It seems that the producers of the movie tried to make it as close to the biblical description as possible. And so if you can picture for that—picture in your mind what the Ark looked like in that movie, you get a sense of what it looked like at this time as well.

But far more important than what the Ark looked like was what the Ark represented, what it stood for, for the people of God. And there are two truths, two spiritual truths that the Ark symbolized that we will consider this morning. And the first truth is this. The Ark signified, it represented to the people of Israel God’s presence among them. In fact, God was with them right there above the Ark of the Covenant. So God’s presence with his people. Look at verse 22. The Lord says, there, I will meet with you. And from above the mercy seat, from between the two cherubim that are on the ark of the testimony, I will speak with you about all that I will give you in commandment for the people of Israel.

And so the Lord would make his presence, he would be, he would cause his presence to be right on top of the ark, above the cherubim. That’s why the Old Testament refers to the Lord at times as being enthroned on the cherubim. Psalm 99.1, he sits enthroned upon the cherubim. Let the earth quake. And that was the whole point of the entire tabernacle was to tell the Israelites that the Lord was with them. It was where the Lord was actually with his people, in the tabernacle. And the specific place where the Lord dwelt was in that most holy place in the tabernacle, the Holy of Holies. And in that Holy of Holies, the place where his presence was, was on top of the Ark of the Covenant.

And if there was anything that set apart the people of Israel from all the nations of the world, it was just that, that among them, God was with them, that Almighty God, the God who is infinite and eternal, the one who created the heavens and the earth, the one who is Lord over all that he has made, the one who is high and lifted up, the one who is enthroned in heaven, the one who inhabits in eternity, that this God, he graciously chose to live, to dwell among his people, that his presence would be with them on earth, among the people of Israel. And that is one of the spiritual realities that defines us as the people of God today, that as Christians, as those who have been redeemed by God through His Son, Jesus Christ, we have the blessing, the privilege of being a people among whom the Lord dwells.

God is with us. He is with us as our God, and we are His people. We saw a couple of weeks ago from the Gospel of John that John says about Jesus, the word became flesh and dwelt among us. And if you remember that word that is translated dwelt among us in the Greek, in the original Greek, it literally means he tabernacled among us. He made his tabernacle among us. And so God is with us even in a far greater way than he was with his people Israel. Now he was with his people Israel in the Old Testament. He truly did dwell among them. They saw his glory. He was present with them in the tabernacle, but in a far greater way, God has come to make his dwelling among us.

When he took on human nature, when he became one of us, he became man and lived among us. And although Jesus has since been exalted to the right hand of God in glory, although he is now at God’s right hand, reigning over heaven and earth with all the dominion and authority and rule that the Lord has given to his son, Jesus, nevertheless, Jesus is still truly and really as present with us as he was with his disciples when he walked among them in the world. He is with us by his Holy Spirit. 1 Corinthians 3:16 says, do you not know that you are God’s temple and that God’s spirit dwells in you?

And this is the truth that is a tremendous comfort to us when we experience suffering in this life, in times of adversity, in times of confusion, when all seems dark, when we are grieving, when we are suffering, God is always with you in all of that. He promises that as a believer in Jesus Christ, he will never leave you nor forsake you, that he is as truly with you as Jesus was with his people when he was here on earth. And so as a Christian, you are never God forsaken. It may feel that way at times, it may seem that way at times, but Christ is always present with you.

Robin and I went to a funeral yesterday morning, a funeral for a young Christian woman. She was 22 years old. She died after a five month long battle with cancer. And her dad asked her before she died if she was afraid to die. And her answer to her dad was, I’m not scared to die because I know that I’m going to be with the Lord. And that was her hope as a believer in Jesus Christ, that at her death, which at the time was coming very soon for her, that she would be brought into the glorious presence of her savior, Jesus.

And so it was a funeral that was very sad, but it was also very hopeful. But what she said was true even before she died. She was yet to be in the glorious presence of Jesus, but as a believer in Jesus Christ, the Lord was with her even in this life, even in her suffering. He was present with her through all that she endured up to the day that she died. And if your faith is in the Lord Jesus Christ, that is the promise that he gives to you as well. The son of God who loved you, the son of God who came from heaven and earth to save you, to redeem you, the son of God who gave his life for you, who offered himself on the cross in your place for your salvation. He is with you. He has not left you. He has not abandoned you, but he is with you throughout your days in this world. John 14:23, our Lord says in that verse, if anyone loves me, he will keep my word and my father will love him and we will come to him and make our home with him. Jesus, the Son of God, the Father, they come and they make their home in you as a believer in Jesus Christ. And so God is with us just as he was with the people of Israel then.

And there’s one particular aspect of this truth that God is with us that is represented by the Ark of the Covenant, and that is this, that the Lord is with us as his people in order to give us victory over our enemies. The book of Numbers tells us that whenever the people of Israel moved from one location to another in their wilderness wanderings, that Moses would proclaim these words as the Ark of the Covenant set out to go with the people of Israel. This is what Moses would say. He said, arise, O Lord, and let your enemies be scattered, and let those who hate you flee before you.

Later when the Israelites crossed the Jordan River in order to go into the land of promise to begin driving out the Canaanites who lived there in order to take that land that God had promised to give them, it was the Ark of the Covenant that led the way as a general leading his armies into battle. And when the Israelites captured the city of Jericho, as they marched around the walls of that city, before they blew the trumpets which caused the walls to fall down so that they took over the city of Jericho, the ark of the covenant was in their midst.

And so the ark stood for the people of Israel, not just as the presence of God, their savior with them, but as the presence of their conquering king, the one who would fight their battles for them, the one who would give them victory over their enemies. And so the truth that the Lord was with his people to fight for his people, to be their champion, that was also signified by the Ark of the Covenant.

However, it was not as though the Ark itself was a kind of magic charm that forced the Lord to do the will of the Israelites. That was a mistake on the part of the Israelites to view the Ark in that way. And they found that out the hard way. You remember from the book of 1 Samuel, how one time the Israelites were fighting the Philistines, and the elders of Israel, apart from any direction from the Lord, they took it upon themselves to take the Ark of the Covenant and to bring it into the camp of the Israelite armies, thinking that that would be a certain destruction for their enemies.

And the Philistines thought the same thing. Everybody thought that the Philistines would certainly be destroyed because the Ark of God was with the people, the armies of Israel. But you know what happens? Instead of certain victory, Israel suffered a resounding defeat from their enemies. They were routed. Worst of all, the Ark of God was captured by the enemies of Israel.

I mentioned the movie, The Raiders of the Lost Ark, and the whole premise of that movie was that if the Nazis could only get their hands on the lost Ark of the Covenant, they could then rule the world because none of the armies of the world could stand before this Ark that they had found. And that’s exactly how the Israelites thought. If we can have the Ark, there is no military force that can stop us. But they misunderstood. The ark was only a means of showing forth the power and presence of God when he was pleased to dwell with his people and to bless his people when he was pleased to do so. And if the people of God were unfaithful, if they were unbelieving, if they were like the Philistines, an ungodly and unbelieving people, the Lord would not be with them with his ark for their victory.

And there is a parallel in our own lives today and that is this, that we cannot presume on the presence of God to be with us for blessing simply because we profess to be Christians or simply because we say we believe in Christ or because we wear a cross or because we have some superficial association with the church. God will not be used as a magic charm in order to fulfill our desires or to accomplish our will.

But the good news is, is that if you truly belong to Christ by faith, if by the grace of God you have repented of your sin, if you have turned to Jesus, if you have entrusted yourself to Him as the only one who can save you from sin and guilt, if you are resting in Him as your Savior, then the promise is for you that Jesus is with you. He will always be with you. And He is with you in Jesus Christ as your conquering King. Just as the ark signified for the Lord or for the people of Israel that the Lord fought for them, so Jesus Christ, he is your victor over your enemies. Christ has conquered for you sin and death forever. He has conquered for you the powers of Satan and hell forever. And so he is with you, he is for you, for your blessedness and joy forever and ever.

So that’s the first spiritual reality that was signified by the Ark of the Covenant, that the Lord was with his people. Secondly, the Ark of the Covenant signified that God provided atonement for his people. So God was present with the Israelites, but he was present with them as he truly is, that is, as God. He was present with them in the fullness of his divine holiness and righteousness. And that was a problem for the Israelites, because by nature, they were not righteous, they were not holy. Just like us, they were sinners.

That explains the reason that the poles were put into the rings on the side of the Ark, never to be removed, because the Ark was never to be touched. No human hand could touch the Ark of God, because it was a place where the Lord dwelt. It was holy. It shared in the holiness of God himself. In fact, the holiness of the Ark is shown by the fact that it was never even seen by ordinary Israelites. It was only seen by one Israelite and that only once a year when the high priest would go into the Holy of Holies to offer sacrifices there.

Most of you are familiar with the story of Uzzah in the Old Testament. When King David was bringing the Ark up to Jerusalem, Uzzah was one of the men who was driving the carts that the Ark was placed on as it was being transported to Jerusalem. And that in itself was a mistake. The cart was not, or the Ark was not supposed to be carried on a cart, but it was supposed to be carried with its poles. But the second mistake was much worse. When the oxen stumbled, the cart tipped, and to make sure that the ark didn’t fall off the cart, Uzzah, instinctively, he reached out his hand to touch the ark to steady it, and as soon as he touched it, the Lord struck him down dead. And the Israelites learned their lesson. The next time they carried the ark, they were using the poles to carry it, just like the Lord had told them to do.

But the ark was holy because God is holy. This was the Ark of the Covenant. As long as the Lord dwelt among his people in the tabernacle, this was the location, the presence of a holy God on earth. So how could a holy God dwell among a sinful people? Well, the answer was in the Ark itself, or better yet, the answer was on the Ark itself. The answer was that covering or lid that was on top of the Ark, what is called the mercy seat. The phrase mercy seat, that is a translation of a Hebrew word. The root of that Hebrew word and its verbal forms means something like to cover over sin or to pacify or to make propitiation.

And so the word that’s translated mercy seat denotes something that satisfies the wrath of God, something that propitiates or deals with the wrath of God in order to put away sin, so that there can be true atonement, true reconciliation, true restoration between a holy God and a sinful people. That’s why in the New International Version, if you read that version, it’s not called the mercy seat, it’s called an atonement cover, which is a very good translation, because it was the place where atonement was made between God and his people.

And we know that that is the case with the mercy seat or the atonement cover because of the yearly sacrifice and cleansing that the Lord commanded the Israelites to do on the Day of Atonement. On the Day of Atonement, among other sacrifices, the high priest would take the blood of a bull that he had slain as a sin offering for himself, and he would take that blood of the bull that was slaughtered, he would take it into the most holy place of the tabernacle, and there he would sprinkle the mercy seat seven times with the blood of the bull. And then the high priest would take the blood of a goat and he would sacrifice that or he would sacrifice the goat as a sin offering for the whole people of Israel. And he would take the blood of that goat. And again, he would go into the most holy place and he would sprinkle the mercy seat with that blood in the very same way.

Leviticus 16:16 says, thus he shall make atonement for the holy place because of the uncleanness of the people of Israel and because of their transgressions, all their sins. And so he shall do for the tent of meeting, which dwells with them in the midst of their uncleannesses. In other words, because of the blood that was shed and then was sprinkled on the mercy seat, the sins of the people of Israel were atoned for. They were forgiven so that a holy God could dwell in the presence of an unholy sinful people.

And when you consider that it was the Ark of the Covenant where this mercy seat was placed, and at the same time, it was within the Ark of the Covenant that the 10 commandments were placed, you have this most wonderful combination of symbols. In the Ark, you have the 10 commandments, which represent the righteousness of God, the holiness of God, and at the same time, a reminder to the Israelites that they have broken God’s law, that they are not holy.

But on top of that was the mercy seat. The mercy seat that was sprinkled and covered with the blood of sacrifices, that turned aside, that propitiated the righteous wrath of God against an unholy people. One author put it this way, when God came down to dwell with his people, he would not see the law that they had broken, first of all, but he would see the saving blood of an atoning sacrifice. And so here’s a wonderful picture in the ark itself of God’s grace towards his people. We have broken the law that was in the ark and yet the blood shed on the mercy seat makes atonement for us.

And of course, this was only a—this was only a picture of a greater spiritual reality. That is the promise that one day God would provide the blood of a greater sacrifice, blood that would not need to be shed year after year after year, but blood that would be shed once for all. The blood not of a bull or a goat, but the blood of a man, a holy man, a divine man, a God man, the blood of Jesus Christ that was shed upon the cross when he suffered and died there, that is the blood that makes true atonement, that truly brings the forgiveness of sins, that propitiates, that satisfies the wrath of God against us for our sin.

Earlier, I read to you from Romans chapter three. In Romans chapter three, the Apostle Paul speaks of the death of Christ for our redemption. And in verse 25, he says this, speaking of Jesus, whom God put forward as a propitiation by his blood to be received by faith. Propitiation—it’s a big word. It is something that satisfies the wrath of God. And here it is the blood of Jesus or Jesus who satisfies the wrath of God because of our sin.

And here’s the wonderful thing. The Greek word that Paul uses to name what Jesus has done, the word propitiation, that word in Greek is the very same Greek word that is used to translate the Hebrew word for mercy seat. In other words, what this verse in Romans, Romans 3, verse 25 is saying is that the true mercy seat, the true atonement cover was not the lid on the ark, but it was the one to whom it testified. It was Jesus Christ. He is the true mercy seat, the one who takes away our sin, the one who atones for our sin.

And so the Ark of the Covenant then, it was a declaration of the gospel to the people of Israel. It was proclaiming the good news that one day there would be bloodshed that would take away their sin forever. And Paul says that God put forward Christ to be that atoning sacrifice. God put him forward. Another way to say that would be that God publicly set him forth. God publicly declared he has set forth Jesus his son as the means of redemption for sinners. No more is the mercy seat hidden away in a tabernacle behind a veil. No more is it hidden so that no one could see it except the high priest. But God has publicly put forth his son Jesus for all to see, so that all who come to him, everyone who believes in him, might have eternal life.

And that is true for you, for you who hear my words today. If you belong to Christ by faith, if you have come to him as your savior, your sins are forgiven. The blood that Jesus shed atones for your sins. God’s wrath has been propitiated. He’s been satisfied. He no longer looks upon you as you are in your sin, but he looks upon you as you are in Jesus Christ, forgiven, cleansed, and restored to him.

And all of this shows us one of the most important truths of scripture when it comes to our salvation, and that is this, it is God who saves us. When we consider what God had done for the Israelites in showing them the work of salvation that he would accomplish one day through his son, when we consider what Jesus Christ has done for us, all we can say is, to God alone be the praise, to God alone be the credit for our salvation. It is God who designed the ark. This was not the product of Moses or the Israelites. It was God who provided the sacrificial blood. It was God who sent his son, Jesus Christ, into the world. The incarnation, the life, the obedience, the suffering, the death, the resurrection of Jesus Christ for man’s salvation from beginning to end, it is all the work of God. It is not the work of man.

And so your part in all of this is simply to come to Jesus, to entrust yourself to him, to believe that he is the one who alone can save you from your sin. And having come to him, you have the promise that he dwells with you, that his spirit abides in you. And so Jesus, he is our mercy seat. Go to him and find mercy and grace with God. Let’s pray.

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The Old Testament reading is Exodus chapter 25, verses one through nine. Exodus 25, one through nine. This is the infallible and inerrant word of God.

The Lord said to Moses, speak to the people of Israel that they take for me a contribution from every man whose heart moves him, you shall receive the contribution for me. And this is the contribution that you shall receive from them. Gold, silver and bronze, blue and purple and scarlet yarns and fine twine linen, goat’s hair, tanned ram’s skins, goat skins, acacia wood, oil for the lamps, spices for the anointing oil and for the fragrant incense, onyx stones and stones for setting, for the ephod and for the breast piece. And let them make me a sanctuary that I may dwell in their midst, exactly as I show you concerning the pattern of the tabernacle and all of its furniture, so you shall make it.

Let’s turn now to 2 Corinthians chapter nine for the New Testament reading. 2 Corinthians nine verses six through nine. I decided to shorten the New Testament reading from what’s printed there in the bulletin, Second Corinthians chapter 9 verses 6 through 9.

The point is this, whoever sows sparingly will also reap sparingly and whoever sows bountifully will also reap bountifully. Each one must give as he has decided in his heart, not reluctantly or under compulsion, for God loves a cheerful giver. And God is able to make all grace abound to you, so that having all sufficiency in all things at all times, you may abound in every good work. As it is written, he has distributed freely, he has given to the poor, his righteousness endures forever.

The grass withers, the flower fades, but the word of our God endures forever. So you can turn back to Exodus chapter 25 for our sermon text this morning.

Last week for Easter Sunday, we took a break from the book of Exodus so that we could focus our thoughts on the resurrection of Christ and the hope that we have for our own resurrection when the Lord Jesus returns from heaven. And so today we are returning to our study of the book of Exodus. And we are considering a subject this morning from our passage, and it may feel like something of a letdown after having just celebrated the glorious truth of the resurrection of Christ.

And that’s because our subject today is our giving to the church. It is though we’re going from the sublime to the mundane, from the hope of the resurrection, the glorious reality of the resurrection, to the Christian’s responsibility to give to the church.

And I had that thought in my mind this past week, and I noticed that there was actually good biblical precedence for the seemingly abrupt transition from the resurrection glory to the much more prosaic subject of giving. In first Corinthians, the apostle Paul, he spends all the chapter 15 unpacking the wonders, the glories of the resurrection of Jesus and declaring that because of his resurrection, we have this promise, this hope of victory over death.

And so he extols the wonders of the resurrection of Jesus. And then immediately at the beginning of chapter 16, he starts to give instructions to the Corinthians about their giving to the church. And so in one moment, Paul takes us up to heaven, so to speak, and then the next moment, he brings us back down to earth, as if he were saying, and speaking of the resurrection of Christ, by the way, set aside some money every Sunday so that when I come, I’m ready to pick it up to take it to Jerusalem.

But the fact that Paul doesn’t hesitate to deal with the subject of giving in virtually the same breath in which he deals with the subject of the resurrection shows us that in God’s eyes, our giving to the church has everything to do with the grace and the salvation that God has given to us. In other words, the Bible doesn’t treat the topic of giving as something that is less spiritual or less spiritually significant or important than any other truth that is connected with our salvation and our worship of God. And so our giving to the church has very much to do with our redemption, with our knowing God, serving him, worshiping him as our God.

You see this truth also in the context of our passage this morning. A few weeks ago, for a few weeks, we were in chapter 24 of Exodus. And if you remember, that chapter describes for us a very, very important event in the history of Israel. That was this worship service in which God made his covenant with his people Israel at Mount Sinai. And as part of that covenant making worship service, the Lord called the leaders of Israel up to Mount Sinai and he revealed his glory to them. He gave them a vision of himself, of his heavenly majesty to the elders of Israel.

And after that, God called Moses back up to Mount Sinai. And Moses describes that the appearance of the Lord was like a devouring fire on the top of the mountain. And then out of the cloud, God calls Moses to come into his very presence. And as we’ll see in the weeks to come, as the Lord speaks to Moses face to face, he tells him about all of the details of this tabernacle that the Israelites are to construct so that God can dwell among them.

But the very first thing that the Lord says to Moses after he calls him into his presence, the very first thing that God says after he has revealed his covenant or made his covenant with Israel, after he has revealed his glory to the elders of Israel, the very first thing Moses or that God says to Moses is this, Moses, I need you to take up a special offering.

So giving is something that is very important to God. God has a great concern that his people should give of their resources to him and to the work that he is doing in the world, his work of salvation. And God has a great concern for the way in which we are to give our wealth to him. Giving to the church, giving to the Lord is not supposed to be a burden, a grim duty, a joyless sacrifice. Rather, there are many blessings that come to us as we willingly, joyfully, generously give to God some of the wealth that he has first given to us. And as we look at this passage this morning, we’ll consider several of the blessings, of the benefits that come to us as we give to the Lord.

First of all, when you give to the church, you bear witness to your faith in Christ. One way in which you bear witness or testify to your faith in Christ as you give to the church is that in giving to the church, you are saying, you are testifying that you belong to God, that you belong to Christ, that Jesus is your Lord and Savior. Notice in this passage in verse 2 that twice the Lord says that these contributions are for him. He says in verse 2, speak to the people of Israel that they take for me a contribution. From every man whose heart moves him, you shall receive the contribution for me.

This was a special offering that God commanded the Israelites to give. And they were to give these offerings, these contributions to the Lord himself, to him. I’m always a little nervous when it comes to preaching on the subject of giving to the church, especially if we happen to have visitors coming to the church, and that’s because in the minds of many people, what the church really wants, or even worse, what the pastor really wants is other people’s money. And when you consider how many corrupt ministers or preachers or televangelists there have been who have enriched themselves from what the people have given to their churches or organizations, it’s understandable that a lot of people think that way. A lot of people have this idea that the church is mostly interested in their money.

But when you give to the church and the church is faithful with those offerings, you are really giving to God. You are not giving to man, but you are giving to God. The Lord commanded the Israelites to give their contributions to him. And that’s because they belong to the Lord. The Israelites did not belong to Moses. They did not belong to the elders, but they belonged to God. He was their Lord. He was their savior. He was the God who created them. He was the God who saved them from their bondage in Egypt. He was the God who entered into covenant with them. He was the God who promised to be their God and to make them his people forever and ever.

And so by giving their contributions to the Lord in response to this call, the Israelites were confessing that truth that the Lord is my God. All that I am is due to Him. All that I have, I have received from Him. He is God. He is my God. And in the same way, when you give to the church, you are confirming and expressing this truth that God is your God and your Savior. You are acknowledging as you give to the church that you belong to the Son of God, the Lord Jesus Christ, that you have been purchased by His blood shed on the cross, that you are His by virtue of His saving work, that you have been adopted by God as His son or daughter. And you bear witness to all of those truths when you give to God through giving to the church.

And also when you give to Christ in that way, as a demonstration of your trust in Him, as a confession that He is your Lord and Savior, as a acknowledgment that all that you have, you have first received from Him, this pleases the Lord. This pleases God when you give to Him in this way.

And so that’s one way in which you bear witness to your faith in Christ when you give to the church. Another way is that by giving to the church, you demonstrate, you show that you trust in His promises to provide for you, that you believe, you have confidence in what He has said in His word, that He will give you in this life all that you need.

Let’s look at what the Lord called the Israelites to give to Him. So I’m gonna read verses three through seven. And this is the contribution that you shall receive from them. Gold, silver and bronze, blue and purple and scarlet yarns and fine twine linen, goat’s hairs, tan ram skins, goat skins, acacia wood, oil for the lambs, spices for the anointing oil and for the fragrant incense, onyx stones and stones for setting for the ephod and for the breast piece.

So these are all the materials that would be needed in the construction of the tabernacle. And as we’ll see in the chapters to come, the tabernacle had various kinds of furniture in it. There was the Ark of the Covenant. There was the golden lamp stand. There was the table for the showbread. There were curtains in the tabernacle. There were frames and bars that supported it. There were different kinds of coverings that went over the top of it. There was the whole courtyard with the curtains that went around the courtyard. In all of that, there was also the garments that would be made for the priests. And all of that was to be made from these various materials.

And you’ll notice that almost everything that is listed here was truly valuable. Of course there is gold, silver, and bronze. There is, we may not think much of it, blue and purple and scarlet yarns, but in fact these things were also extremely valuable at that time. And that raises the question, well, how in the world did these Israelites who just weeks ago were slaves in Egypt, how is it that they have become so wealthy with all of these nice and expensive items?

Well, it’s because the night that they left Egypt, at the Lord’s command, they asked the Egyptians to give them their valuables, their treasures, and the Lord gave them favor in the sight of the Egyptians, so they let them have what they asked for. It was probably the case that after the 10 plagues, the Egyptians were so happy to see the Israelites go that they were more than willing to give them their gold and silver and all of this stuff. It wasn’t so much of a goodbye gift as it was a good riddance gift. Please don’t come back.

But these were basically all the wealth that the Israelites had in the world. These things that they received from the Egyptians. They wouldn’t have had very much else because they were impoverished slaves. But now the Lord is saying through Moses to his people, give me your gold, your silver, your bronze, your blue and purple and scarlet yarns, your fine twine linen, all of these expensive, valuable things that you have received from the Egyptians. Now I want you to give them back to me.

And the typical Israelite probably would have thought at that time, but wait a minute, this is all the wealth that I have in the world. This was my savings for getting my family’s feet on the ground once we got into the promised land. And so the Lord was calling his people to give sacrificially. This was not an easy thing for the Israelites to give up these expensive items that they had received from the Egyptians. But as they did so, they were showing that their trust was in God. They gave sacrificially of what they had received, trusting, believing that God would provide for them, that they would not go hungry, that they would not go unclothed, that they would not go without shelter. And so as the people gave up their wealth in response to this call, they were showing forth their belief, their trust that God would provide for them.

In the teaching of our Savior Jesus, he said that one of the true distinguishing marks between one of his disciples, a Christian, one thing that would separate a believer in Christ from a pagan, from a Gentile, would be that the Christian would trust in the care of his heavenly Father for the things that he needed for this life. And so Jesus taught this in Matthew 6, therefore do not be anxious, saying, what shall we eat or what shall we drink or what shall we wear? For the Gentiles seek after all these things, and your heavenly Father knows that you need them all, but seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be added to you. Therefore do not be anxious about tomorrow, for tomorrow will be anxious for itself. Sufficient for the day is its own trouble. Jesus says, God will provide for you. Do not be anxious.

Do not be anxious about tomorrow. How many of you have mastered that one? Not to be anxious, not to worry, not to be concerned how you’ll make ends meet, how you’ll provide for yourself and so on. I certainly haven’t mastered that, but Jesus gives us every reason why we can give to the church with perfect confidence, perfect trust that he will give to us, he will provide for us everything that we need in this life. And because our giving is an exercise of our trust in Christ, our faith in his promises, one indication of our spiritual health is how faithful we are to give to the church.

A healthy Christian is a giving Christian. He gives as he is able. He gives cheerfully, sacrificially, generously. On the other hand, a Christian who holds everything back, who gives nothing to the church except maybe a small pittance, a nominal amount, that is an indication of a real spiritual problem. His heart or her heart is not in the right place.

At least in this point in the history of Israel, the Israelites, their heart was in the right place. Later in Exodus, we read that the people responded so generously, so positively to this call for this special offering, that the workmen who were building the tabernacle, they told Moses that they were receiving too many materials, that the people were giving too much. And so Moses had to announce to everyone, stop giving, nobody give anything anymore. We have everything we need for building the sanctuary, we can’t handle anymore.

Have you ever been in a church, or have you ever heard a pastor say that? Stop giving, you’re overwhelming us with your generosity. I haven’t heard that before. Unlike with Israel, the church today usually doesn’t struggle with an overabundance of offerings. In fact, if you look online, the different kinds of studies and surveys show that typically the average Christian or churchgoer gives somewhere between two, to 4% of his income to the church. That’s not a huge amount, to put it mildly, at least for most people, that would be far below what they could really give if they were giving as generously as they should.

But how is your spiritual health in this area? How are you doing in this way? If someone was able to see all of your resources, your finances, how you handle your money, and not just your money, but your possessions, your time, your energy, all your resources, would they say of you, here is someone who truly believes what he says, that he believes in the Lord, he trusts in God to provide for him. Look how he gives himself, herself, look how he gives his resources to the church. Or would they say, well, he says he belongs to Jesus, but he spends all of his money on himself. He spends all of his time on his own interests and hobbies and pursuits. And that seems strange to me. How important really is his faith to him if he’s wholly devoted to serving and pleasing himself with what he has? And so giving to the church is a way for you to bear witness to your faith and trust in Christ.

Secondly, when you give to the church, you give expression to your joy in Christ. You’ll notice in this passage that strictly speaking, the Lord did not command anybody to give him anything. Rather, Moses was to tell them this. Verse two, from every man whose heart moves him, you shall receive the contribution for me. And throughout Exodus, we see this idea that the people were to give from a willing heart as their heart moved them. Moses says in chapter 35 verse five, whoever is of a generous heart, let him bring the Lord’s contribution. In chapter 35 verse 21, and they came, everyone whose heart stirred him and everyone whose spirit moved him and brought the Lord’s contribution. And so this was a truly, this was a free will offering.

But compare that with the other Old Testament teaching about giving, which is the tithe. The tithe was the rule that the Israelites were to give a 10th or 10% of their produce to the Lord. When it came to the tithe, that was something that was strictly commanded. That was the law. There was no language like every man whose heart moves him shall bring the tithe. Now, of course, the Israelites were to bring the tithe with glad hearts, with generous hearts as well, but the tithe was a law that they were to obey. It was not something like, if you feel like it, if your heart moves you, if you are stirred to give, then give.

And when the New Testament addresses this issue of a Christian’s giving to the church, the Old Testament model that the New Testament looks to is not the giving of the tithe, the 10% law, a rule that 10% is the standard for giving for Christians, but the New Testament looks to this other principle that we see here in Exodus, that people are to give, God’s people are to give to God freely, generously, joyfully, as their heart moves them. And so Paul had this passage in mind. He had other passages from the Old Testament in mind when he says in 2 Corinthians 9, 7, each one must give as he has decided in his heart, not reluctantly or under compulsion, for God loves a cheerful giver. And so it’s not 10%, but it’s give cheerfully, give generously.

When I lived in the state of Montana in the mid 1990s, for a few years, there was no numerical speed limit. On the highways, at least during the daytime, the speed limit was literally reasonable and prudent. And so when you saw a highway sign, there was no number on it. It just said, daytime speed limit, reasonable and prudent. Now, unfortunately, or fortunately, depending on your point of view, that didn’t last too long because, surprise, surprise, people who like to drive really fast and the police had different interpretations of what reasonable and prudent actually meant.

But when it comes to our giving to the church, as Christians living in the new covenant age, in the same way, God has not given us a numerical standard as the rule for our giving. Now, 10%, the tithe, that is a good rule of thumb to be sure, but many people could give more than 10%, and there may be some people who cannot give as much as 10%. But the standard that God gives us is not a number. It’s not reasonable and prudent, but it’s something like joyful and sacrificial. That’s the rule for God’s giving for his people, joyful and sacrificial.

Well, what does that mean for you in particular? How much should you give? Well, to answer that question, the first thing you do is by the grace of God, you fill your heart with the truth of what God has given to you. You fill your heart with the truths of God’s saving grace to you, how he has loved you, how he has redeemed you, that he has given you his son. You rejoice in the forgiveness of your sins, the new life that he has given you, the hope of glory.

And then having your heart filled with thanksgiving and gratitude to God for what he’s given to you, you give to God what you want, what you want. But you will give joyfully and sacrificially from that frame of mind, from that heart, and if you are giving out of a genuine spirit of joy and gratitude, the amount that you give will take care of itself. But if you are really giving out of a joy or out of joy and thankfulness, it’s not going to be a token amount. It’s not going to be a pittance, a small amount, because how can that be when you consider all that God has given to you, all that Jesus has given to you as your savior? And so giving to the church is a way for you to express your joy in Christ.

Thirdly, when you give to the church, you are investing yourself in the work of Christ in the world. To me, one of the really remarkable things about this passage is that God involved the Israelites in building the tabernacle in the first place. Think about that. God is God. He is able to do all things, he could have easily constructed a tabernacle or spoke a tabernacle into being in heaven, a prefab tabernacle, if you will, and simply plopped it down in the midst of the Israelites, and they would have a perfectly constructed, God-constructed tabernacle in their midst.

But that’s not how God chose to do it. Instead, He calls his people to give of their resources, give of their wealth, take up a collection of all of this different material. And then as we’ll see, he gives Moses detailed instructions on how this tabernacle is to be built. And so God used his people to build this tabernacle for him. And God works in the same way today.

As he is establishing his kingdom, the kingdom of Jesus Christ, the kingdom of God’s redeemed people, as he is building this new tabernacle of the saved people of God, God continues to use human means to accomplish his purposes. He uses preachers of the gospel, very human preachers. He uses very human people to serve and minister in his church. And he continues to use the giving of his people to support the ongoing work of the ministry of preaching and proclaiming Jesus Christ.

Again, God does not have to work this way. God is God. He could miraculously fill the bank accounts of all the missionaries and churches and pastors in the world. But instead, he doesn’t do that, he calls his people, he calls us, you and me, to support the work that he is doing through his church in bringing his people to salvation.

Jesus said in Matthew 6, 21, for where your treasure is, there your heart will be also. If you give nothing to the kingdom of God, if you give too little or nothing to the work that Christ is doing through his church, if you give no time on your parts, no efforts on your part, no energy on your parts, it’s no wonder if your heart then will be far from where God’s heart is. Your heart will be far from the kingdom of God. But that is not God’s will for you as a Christian.

God’s will for you as a Christian is that you would delight in the very things that God delights in, that your heart would be filled with love for the very things that God delights in and that he loves. And the way to do that, the way to cultivate a heart like that is to invest in the work of the kingdom of God, to invest yourself in the work that Christ is doing through his church, to give not just of your money, your wealth, but your talents, your time, your resources, in order to see the work of the church to advance. And so giving to the church is a way for you to invest yourself in the work of Christ in the world.

Fourthly and finally, when you give to the church, you confirm the truth of the gospel. As we go on in our study of Exodus, we’ll be looking at the tabernacle and we’ll be considering all of, perhaps not all of the details, but many of the details of the construction of the tabernacle, how it was to be made, what all of those details signify. But the primary significance, the primary meaning of the tabernacle is actually given to us here in this passage, and that’s in verse eight.

In verse 8, the Lord says to Moses, let them make me a sanctuary that I may dwell in their midst. That I may dwell in their midst. So it was God’s will to dwell among his people, that his presence would be there among the Israelites. Now, of course, it’s not as though the sanctuary would somehow enclose God or contain him as though he were there but nowhere else. We know that can’t be true. God cannot be limited to one place or one point in his creation. He is infinite in his being. Even the entire creation itself cannot contain God.

King Solomon acknowledged this truth in his prayer of dedication for the temple that would be built some 450 years after this. King Solomon said, but will God indeed dwell on the earth? Behold, heaven and the highest heaven cannot contain him. How much less this house that I have built. And the same is true with the tabernacle. This little tabernacle certainly could not contain God. However, in a very real way, this is where God would make his presence known. This is where he would dwell. He would be present in the tabernacle in a way that he was not present anywhere else on earth. So he truly would be with his people. This would be his tent.

And it’s significant that his sanctuary was in the form of a tent, and that’s because the Israelites themselves were living in tents in the wilderness. So the holy tabernacle was God’s tent. And wherever he led them in the wilderness for them to set up their own tents, well, God himself, the Levites would set up his tent, his tabernacle, and he would dwell among them. In fact, you could say God tabernacled among his people.

In fact, that’s exactly what the Apostle John says about Jesus. In John 1 14, he says, and the word became flesh and dwelt among us and we have seen his glory. Glory as of the only son from the father, full of grace and truth. The Greek word there that is translated dwell is literally the word to set up a tent. And so what John is saying is that Jesus, he tabernacled among his people when the word became flesh and dwelt among them.

It was the same Lord who dwelt in the tabernacle among the Israelites, that Jesus set up his tabernacle, his body, in the midst of his people. And for the Son of God to do this, the Son of God who himself is very God, the Son of God who shares with the Father in all of the divine attributes that makes him God, for him to set aside his outward divine glory, for him to give up for a time his divine prerogatives in order to take on our human nature, to dwell among us, to be with us in the person of Jesus Christ. This was an act of profound, profound condescension of self-abasements.

Our minds cannot really grasp in its entirety what it meant that God himself came to us in the man Jesus. And though Jesus was always God, he was never anything less than completely divine. Nevertheless, in his incarnation, in the life that he lived, a life of humility, of service, especially in his suffering, especially in his suffering, the curse of death of the cross and becoming sin for us. Jesus lowered himself, the son of God. He made himself nothing. And he did so for our sake, for our salvation.

And when you, as a believer in Jesus Christ, in the name of Christ, when you give to the work of the church, when you give to the Lord in a way that is sacrificial, you are showing forth that truth, that your Lord, your Savior, He sacrificed everything for you in coming down to us and in bringing us salvation, in dying for us.

Paul speaks to this in 2 Corinthians chapter eight. He says, for you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich yet for your sake, he became poor so that you by his poverty might become rich. And so when you make yourself a little poorer, when you impoverish yourself a little bit and giving to the work of the church so that others may be enriched, you are reflecting in a small way the sacrifice of our Lord Jesus Christ. He gave up his life for you that you might live and you show forth that life giving death by your own willing and sacrificial giving, including your giving to the church.

And what greater privilege can there be as a Christian? What greater privilege can be yours as one who belongs to Christ that you can show forth in this way, that you can reflect a little bit of the wonderful thing that your Savior did for you and sacrificing everything, even his very life and making himself poor in order that you might become rich in him. J.C. Ryle said this, he said, a giving Savior should have giving disciples.

And so giving to the church is a way for you to confirm the truth of the gospel. And so giving is not a burden. It is not a grim sacrifice, a joyless duty. You shouldn’t feel pain when you’re writing out your check to the church, but it is a blessing. And when you give from the heart, when you give out of faith, when you give with joy, you will find that in giving, you are really receiving. You are receiving blessing from God.

And that was the lesson that the Lord was teaching the Israelites here in this passage, as he called them to give of their wealth, to build this tabernacle. And this is the same lesson that Paul would teach the Corinthians. This is the lesson that the Holy Spirit teaches us through his word. The point is this, whoever sows sparingly will also reap sparingly, and whoever sows bountifully will also reap bountifully. So God causes his grace to abound to those who give joyfully, who give sacrificially to him as they give to his church. Let’s pray.

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Our Old Testament reading and our sermon text this morning is Job chapter 19, verses 21 through 27. And this is God’s inspired, inerrant, infallible word. Let’s hear the word of God. Have mercy on me, have mercy on me, O you my friends, for the hand of God has touched me. Why do you, like God, pursue me? Why are you not satisfied with my flesh? Oh, that my words were written. Oh, that they were inscribed in a book. Oh, that with an iron pen and lead they were engraved in the rock forever. For I know that my Redeemer lives, and at the last he will stand upon the earth. And after my skin has been thus destroyed, yet in my flesh, I shall see God, whom I shall see for myself, and my eyes shall behold, and not another. My heart faints within me.

You can keep your place there and turn to 1 Corinthians chapter 15 for our New Testament reading. 1 Corinthians 15 verses 12 through 22. So 1 Corinthians 15, 12 through 22. Now, if Christ is proclaimed as raised from the dead, how can some of you say that there is no resurrection from the dead? But if there is no resurrection of the dead, then not even Christ has been raised. And if Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain and your faith is in vain. We are even found to be misrepresenting God because we testified about God that he raised Christ, whom he did not raise, if it is true that the dead are not raised. For if the dead are not raised, not even Christ has been raised. And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins. Then those also who have fallen asleep in Christ have perished. If in Christ we have hope in this life only, we are of all people most to be pitied.

But in fact, Christ has been raised from the dead, the first fruits of those who have fallen asleep. For as by a man came death, by a man has come also the resurrection of the dead. For as in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive. The grass withers, the flower fades, but the word of our God endures forever.

When I was a kid, I loved Easter. Of course, for me at that time, Easter had absolutely nothing to do with Jesus or the resurrection, but I loved Easter baskets full of candy and chocolate bunnies and Easter egg hunts and all of that. But when I came to faith in Christ as a young adult, I came to love Easter for much better reasons. I loved hearing about the empty tomb, the resurrection of Christ, singing the great Easter hymns, greeting others with “He is risen.” I do love our Easter breakfast too before the congregation, before our worship. So that’s another reason to love Easter.

There are countless reasons why as Christians we should rejoice and celebrate that glorious day when our Lord Jesus emerged from the tomb. One reason we should love Easter is because the resurrection of Christ is the guarantee that our faith and hope as Christians are not in vain, that all that we do as believers in Christ, all that we live for as Christians is not in vain. The empty tomb is the guarantee that what we believe is true, that we are truly serving the living Lord Jesus.

As we heard in our New Testament reading from 1 Corinthians, the Apostle Paul says, if the dead are not raised, not even Christ has been raised. And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still on your sins. But praise the Lord, that is not the case. The tomb that contained Jesus for those three days, it was empty on that Easter morning, it is still empty today. Paul says, in fact, in fact, Christ has been raised from the dead, the first fruits of those who have fallen asleep. The tomb is empty, and one day the whole world will know what we now know by faith, and that is Jesus Christ. He is the true, the living Lord of lords, King of kings. He is the savior of all who come to him in faith. So praise God for the resurrection of Jesus.

Another reason why we should love Easter is because the empty tomb reminds us that in the face of the suffering and death, the suffering and death that we must all endure in this world, the greatest hope that God gives to us is this, the promise of our own resurrection, our own resurrection from death to life on that great day when the Lord Jesus will come again into our world. In fact, this resurrection hope has always been the hope of God’s people. Even in the Old Testament, before the coming of Christ, there were hints, prophecies, promises that God’s ultimate purpose for his people was to raise up their dead bodies from their graves to new bodily life forever and ever.

To give just one example of how the Old Testament saints also hoped in the resurrection, listen to the words from Isaiah the prophet. He declared to the people of Israel, your dead shall live, their bodies shall rise, you who dwell in the dust awake and sing for joy, for your dew is a dew of light and the earth will give birth to the dead. In fact, we find this resurrection hope in one of the most unlikeliest places in all of the Old Testament, and that is in the book of Job.

So much of the book of Job is taken up with Job’s lament of the incredible suffering that he endured. The grief and the pain so overwhelmed Job because of his suffering that he even longed to die. And so often when we read Job, we are struck with Job’s, what seems to be his complete despair, his hopelessness in the face of his suffering. And so many of the passages in Job are very dark and grim, but like a single shaft of brilliant sunshine piercing through the dark clouds of a storm, Job in the midst of his suffering and despair, he declares a hope that we now recognize as the hope of his own bodily resurrection to new life in the presence of God forever. Job’s hope was an Easter hope. And that will be our subject this morning as we look at this passage from Job. First, we’ll consider the suffering of Job. Then we’ll consider the hope of Job. And thirdly, we’ll consider what I’ll call the greater Job.

So first, the suffering of Job. If you’re at all familiar with the book of Job, you know how he was afflicted with tragedy upon tragedy. He was filled with pain, with misery, with anguish. We won’t get into the background of Job’s suffering, but the author of Job tells us that God, for his own holy, wise, inscrutable purposes, he allowed the evil one to afflict Job. He allowed Satan to, afflicted Job with wave after wave of calamities.

First of all, a band of Sabeans stole all of Job’s oxen and donkeys and slaughtered some of his servants. And then fire came down from heaven and incinerated all of Job’s sheep and killed more of his servants. And after that, a raiding band of Chaldeans stole all of Job’s camels and killed yet more of Job’s servants. And even as the news of these disasters was still ringing in the ears of Job, the most devastating news of all came to him. And that is a great wind destroyed the house of his eldest son. All 10 of his children were in the house and all 10 of his children were dead.

And then the evil one was allowed to destroy Job’s health. He was afflicted from head to toe with loathsome sores, sores for which all he could do was sit in a pile of ashes and scrape himself with a shard of pottery. And on top of all of that, Job’s wife encouraged Job, I should put that in quotation marks, encouraged Job with this inspiring counsel, “Do you still hold fast your integrity? Curse God and die.” Thank you, Mrs. Job, for those uplifting words. I’m sure Job was very happy to hear those.

And if all of that wasn’t enough to overwhelm Job with grief and misery, his three good friends traveled all the way from foreign lands to take turns lecturing Job on what a terrible and unrepentant sinner he was. And in the midst of all of that, the night that may have plunged deepest into the heart of Job was the utter silence of God. Job longed for his innocence, his integrity, his righteousness to be vindicated by God. But up until the very end of Job, there was nothing but silence from heaven. No wonder Job cursed the day of his birth. In chapter three, he says, let that day perish on which I was born and the night that said a man is conceived. Let that day be darkness. May God above not seek it, nor light shine upon it. Job would rather not have lived at all than to have lived and suffered all that he suffered.

Now, none of us here will ever suffer the way that Job did, but by the same token, none of us will escape suffering in this life. To live in this fallen world is to experience pain, heartache, sorrow, loss, and misery. It may be the death of a loved one. It may be a disease or the loss of property. It may be the hurt and the pain that is caused by others, or the betrayal of a friend, or the shattering of your dreams and hopes in this world in one way or another, we all suffer trouble and affliction in this life. And what’s more, even when we enjoy good times, even when we bask in the sunshine of God’s smiling providence and enjoy pleasant and enjoyable times in this world, even so the storm clouds of our own mortality are always gathering on the horizon. And each one of our lives, whether they are long or short, each one ends in that greatest trial of all that confronts us, and that is our own death.

And so Job is kind of like a mirror for us. His suffering is extreme, but we see in his suffering the unpleasant but inescapable reality that to some degree we must all suffer in this world that is cursed by sin and death. By the time we get to chapter 19 in Job, Job seems defeated, resigned, without hope. As one person said, there was a feeling of sadness that pervades everything that Job says in this chapter, at least the first part of the chapter. He speaks of how his three friends have only tormented him. God seems to be his enemy. His other friends and family have failed him and forgotten him. Even young children despise Job and slander him. His body is still ravaged with these loathsome sores. He is a man in despair. He is a man who has lost hope. In fact, he says in verse 10, speaking about God, “my hope has he pulled up like a tree.” God has taken all hope away from me, Job says.

In verse 21, Job no longer tries to argue with his friends. Instead, he just begs them for mercy. He says, have mercy on me. Have mercy on me, O you, my friends, for the hand of God has touched me. And in verse 22, his anguished cry to his friends is, why are you still teaming up with God and persecuting me? Have you not yet had your fill of my flesh? Haven’t you already eaten me up enough?

And that leads Job to express his deepest longing in all the midst of his suffering. The thing that he wanted most of all was that he would be vindicated, that his innocence, his righteousness would be shown to be true, that the whole world would know that it was not his own sin as his friends accused him. It was not his own sin that brought all of this suffering upon him. And so in verse 23, he wishes, he longs that the truth of all that he has said concerning his own integrity, that those words would be written in a book so that even if his generation didn’t acknowledge it, at least future generations would acknowledge that Job was a righteous man. But that leads him to say in verse 24, better yet, don’t write in a book, a book will perish with time, but inscribe my words on something that will last. Engrave them in a rock with an iron pin and lead so that they will testify to my integrity forever.

Little did Job know that he would get something much better. His words would be included in the Holy Scriptures, which are far more enduring, eternally enduring, but far more permanent than even words inscribed in a rock. And then we come to verses 25 and 26. And these are the greatest words in all the book of Job. Because here, by some miracle of faith, when all seems hopeless, Job takes hold of the promise of God that not only will God himself vindicate him, but he will vindicate him and restore him in the most wonderful way possible. And that is Job will be raised from the dust of death to resurrection glory.

And that was the hope of Job. He says in verse 25, “for I know, I know that my Redeemer lives.” This is Job’s profession of faith. He knows that he has a Redeemer. He knows that he has a savior and he knows that he lives because his Redeemer is none other than God himself. And Job goes on to say in verse 25, “and at the last he will stand upon the earth.” His Redeemer will stand, which probably means here in this context that God will stand as though He were taking a stand in a court of law, as though He were bearing witness and testifying to all of creation that Job is righteous, that Job is and forever will be a true man of God.

Depending on your version of the Bible, you’ll notice that there is a footnote after the word earth. The Hebrew word there literally means dust. And as it often means in the book of Job, dust most likely here refers not to the ground or the earth, but it means the dust of the grave. It refers to the dust to which all bodies, including Job’s, must return to after death. And so Job sees that somehow his vindication from God, his redeemer, will take place at his grave.

And then Job’s hope reaches even higher. He says in verses 26 and 27, “and after my skin has been thus destroyed, yet in my flesh I shall see God, whom I shall see for myself and my eye shall behold and not another.” Now the Hebrew here, the original language of this passage, the Hebrew, it is notoriously difficult to translate. By the way, if you feel like in your life you don’t have enough suffering, study Hebrew and your misery index will go up a few notches, I promise. And so the Hebrew here is a little unclear, but in our English versions, our English versions faithfully capture the sense of what these verses are saying.

In some way after death, Job will behold with his very eyes, his redeemer, who was God himself. But because the Hebrew is difficult to read in different ways, it can be read in different ways. Some people have suggested that Job’s hope here is that he will see God in some kind of disembodied state. In other words, that it will be Job’s spirit that beholds God. Again, you may have in your Bible a footnote that says that “in my flesh” can be translated “without my flesh.” Literally, it’s “from my flesh.” However, Job does say, “my eyes shall behold his divine Redeemer.” That certainly implies that Job will have a body with eyes.

But more importantly than that, when we read the words of Job here, when we read his hope in the context of the Old Testament, in the context of the Old Testament hope of resurrection, and especially when we read Job’s words here in the context of the New Testament promises of resurrection, then we can confidently say that Job’s hope here was not that his body would remain in the dust forever, but his hope was that when his Redeemer stood by his grave, he would also raise up Job in a new body, so that truly in his flesh, in his renewed flesh, in his raised flesh, with his very eyes, Job would behold his Redeemer, the Lord God.

And this has been the understanding of the church from the earliest days, that Job’s hope was an Easter hope. He grasped by faith, for a moment at least, and however indistinctly it may have been, Job did grasp the glorious truth that on that last day, God would raise him up from the grave in a body that is imperishable, incorruptible, immortal. In other words, Job proclaims a hope here that can only find its fullest meaning in his resurrection from the dead.

And there is a remarkable detail at the very end of the book of Job that I believe confirms Job’s hope in the resurrection. In the very last paragraph of all the book of Job, we read that the Lord restored to Job everything that he had lost. In Job 42:12, we read this: “And the Lord blessed the latter days of Job more than his beginning. And he had 14,000 sheep, 6,000 camels, 1,000 yoke of oxen, and 1,000 female donkeys.” Verse 13 says, “he had also seven sons and three daughters.” And what’s very interesting about those two verses is that Job gave twice as many sheep, camels, oxen, and donkeys than he had before all of his suffering began. However, God gave him the same number of children that he had earlier before they died, that is 10 children, seven sons and three daughters.

When I was in the process of becoming a pastor, I had to take all kinds of exams with my presbytery, Hebrew and Greek, church history, apologetics, theology, and so on. And one of the exams that I had to take was an English Bible exam. Just because you go to seminary doesn’t mean that you necessarily know the English Bible all that well. And the last question on the English Bible exam was something like this: Why did God not give Job twice as many children at the end of the book when he gave him twice as many livestock? I had no idea what the answer to that question was supposed to be, so I left it blank. I did pass the test, but when the minister graded the test, he sent it back to me and he wrote out the answer for me. He said, the reason was because Job would receive his first 10 children back in the resurrection. And so in that way, his children would be doubled. And I believe that was Job’s hope.

You may know that when the composer, George Friedrich Handel, when he wrote his magnum opus, The Messiah, he actually meant that to be a piece or a work to be performed for Easter, not for Christmas. Of course, traditionally we hear and sing The Messiah at Christmas. What I didn’t know about The Messiah is that Handel did not write the lyrics to it. He had someone else put the words to the music. That person’s name was Charles Jennings. And Jennings was absolutely correct, both biblically and theologically, when in one of the songs in the Messiah, he joins the words of Job with the words from 1 Corinthians 15. So I’ll just read what that song says: “I know that my Redeemer liveth, and that he shall stand at the latter day upon the earth.” And so that’s from Job. “And though worms destroy this body, yet in my flesh shall I see God.” That’s from Job. And then from 1 Corinthians: “For now is Christ risen from the dead, the first fruits of them that sleep. Since by man came death, by man came also the resurrection of the dead. For as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive.”

As a believer in Jesus Christ, the hope of Job, Job’s Easter hope, this is your hope as well. This is your hope in the face of the suffering and the death that confronts all of us, that we all must experience in this fallen world. God does not promise you that he will heal you from your sickness. He does not promise you that he will take away disease from you. God does not promise you that he will give you better circumstances or a better life, that he will take away whatever afflicts you. God does not promise you that he will deliver you from all the different ways that you suffer in this world. But God does make this promise to you, that when the Lord Jesus Christ returns, he will raise you up in a new body. He will raise you from death to life in a new body that is free from suffering and pain forever. He will give you everlasting life in a new world, a new world in which there will be no more pain and suffering and death forever and ever. This is your hope as a believer. This is your hope in the resurrection, the same hope that Job had. And the certainty, the infallibility of that hope is grounded in the very thing that we are celebrating today, the resurrection of Jesus Christ.

In his own way, Job gives us a picture of the Christ who is still yet to come. Job was a righteous man, just like Jesus. He suffered the attacks of Satan, like Jesus. He was mocked and mistreated like Jesus. He prayed for his enemies like Jesus. And in that way, he became a mediator between God and sinners like Jesus. And in the end, Job was vindicated by God like Jesus.

But unlike with Jesus, in the final words of the book of Job, we read nothing about his resurrection from the dead, but we read only of his death. The very last verse of the book of Job says this, “and Job died, an old man and full of days.” It doesn’t say, “and Job lived happily ever after,” but it says, “and Job died.” There’s an ancient hymn in the church from the fourth century that says something like this, “Christ conquered death where Job could not.”

Job was a man of faith. By the grace of God, he proved himself to be patient and faithful to the Lord in all that he suffered, but even with his faith, he could not overcome death. It would take the greater Job. It would take the suffering of the greater Job to overcome death for us. And in the most wonderful and unexpected and mysterious way, the Lord Jesus Christ defeated death by willingly succumbing himself to death. The death that Jesus died on the cross was the death of death itself. And so by the suffering of the greater Job, he did what Job could not do by his suffering. He has brought death to death. He has overcome the grave forever.

And Jesus did so, not for himself, but he did so for you and me, for guilty and sinful people like you and me. And if your faith and trust are in Jesus Christ, He died the death that you deserved. He suffered the wrath, the judgment of God that you deserved. And if your hope is in Jesus Christ, you are free from that death. Your sins are forgiven because Jesus died for you on the cross. And in his death, he conquered sin and death and hell and Satan for you, for your salvation. And when Jesus rose from the dead, when he emerged from that tomb alive, he emerged as the victor, the conqueror over Satan, sin, death and hell forever and ever for you. He is the triumphant Lord who has brought you eternal life and has conquered the grave for you.

And so the hope of Job is your hope. The resurrection of your body on the last day. And this is guaranteed. This is certain. Not only because God promises it in his word, but it is certain because the tomb of Jesus is empty. Because Jesus Christ has been raised from the dead to new life. And one day, because of that one day, your grave, wherever your body ends up, after you die, your grave, one day, will be as empty as the tomb of Jesus is today.

So what is Easter to you? What do you love about Easter? Is it all about your Easter traditions at home or the coming of spring, getting dressed up for church? Not that any of those things are wrong, but does Easter mean more to you than that? Is Easter the source of your hope as a sinful, suffering mortal who must one day succumb to death? Do you look to the resurrection of Christ or the empty tomb as the source of your hope?

Put your trust and hope in the Lord Jesus Christ. Put your trust in the one who was crucified for you, who was resurrected for you, who is the savior from sin and death so that you can say with Job, “I know that my redeemer lives and at the last he will stand upon the earth. And after my skin has been thus destroyed, yet in my flesh I shall see God, whom I shall see for myself, and my eye shall behold, and not another.” Let’s pray.

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The Old Testament reading is Exodus chapter 24, verses 9 through 18. And this is God’s holy, inerrant, and inspired word. Exodus 24, nine through 18. Then Moses and Aaron, Nadab and Abihu, and 70 of the elders of Israel went up, and they saw the God of Israel. There was under his feet, as it were, a pavement of sapphire stone, like the very heaven for clearness, and he did not lay his hand on the chief men of the people of Israel. They beheld God and ate and drank.

The Lord said to Moses, come up to me on the mountain and wait there that I may give you the tablets of stone with the law and the commandment which I have written for their instruction. So Moses rose with his assistant Joshua, and Moses went up into the mountain of God. And he said to the elders, wait here for us until we return to you. And behold, Aaron and Hur are with you. Whoever has a dispute, let him go to them.

Then Moses went up on the mountain, and the cloud covered the mountain. The glory of the Lord dwelt on Mount Sinai, and the cloud covered it six days. And on the seventh day, he called to Moses out of the midst of the cloud. Now the appearance of the glory of the Lord was like a devouring fire on the top of the mountain in the sight of the people of Israel. Moses entered the cloud and went up on the mountain, and Moses was on the mountain 40 days and 40 nights.

Our New Testament reading is 2 Corinthians 3, verses 12 through 18. I made a mistake in the bulletin. I put chapter four, but it’s 2 Corinthians 3, verses 12 through 18. 2 Corinthians 3, 12 through 18.

Since we have such a hope, we are very bold, not like Moses who would put a veil over his face so that the Israelites might not gaze at the outcome of what was being brought to an end. But their minds were hardened. For to this day, when they read the old covenant, the same veil remains unlifted because only through Christ is it taken away. Yes, to this day, whenever Moses has read, a veil lies over their hearts. But when one turns to the Lord, the veil is removed.

Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom. And we all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another. For this comes from the Lord, who is the Spirit. The grass withers, the flower fades, but the word of our God will stand forever.

You can turn back to Exodus chapter 24 for our sermon text. There are some places in the world that you just have to see with your own eyes to appreciate how stunning, how beautiful they really are. Videos and pictures, no matter how lifelike they may be, they just can’t convey the majesty, the grandeur of a place like the Grand Canyon or Niagara Falls or Mount McKinley. You have to see those places in person to get the full effect, to really understand just how wonderful they are.

And if you’ve been able to visit one of those places in person, you know what a powerful impression it makes on you to stand on the rim of the Grand Canyon and to look over that amazing part of God’s creation. It’s not just to see a pretty scene or pleasant scenery, but it’s to see something that is truly full of glory, full of wonder. And if there is such amazing beauty and glory in these natural wonders, how much more glorious is the God who created them?

And if beholding with our eyes something in creation can fill us with such a sense of awe and wonder, then what must it be like to behold the one who created those things, the creator? What must it be like to see him in all of his glory? Because God is infinite and unlike this creation and even the most stunning thing that we may behold in this creation, God, He is infinite in glory. He is infinite in beauty and in majesty. And for that reason, for you and me to somehow see God with our eyes, there would be no experience like it. There could be no greater experience than for us to behold the creator, the Lord, the one who made all things.

In fact, one of the ways that the Bible describes for us the hope that we have as Christians, one way that it explains to us what heaven will be like is to say that one day as the redeemed people of God, we shall behold God with our eyes. We shall see him. Jesus gave the promise, blessed are the pure in heart for they shall see God. This is what theologians have called the beatific vision. That day when we shall no longer behold or apprehend God by faith, but that day when we shall see the Lord in all of his glory and splendor and beauty.

1 Corinthians 13:12 says, for now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. And this is our hope as Christians for the world to come, for the life to come. Seeing God now in this world is not our experience. However, there are a few instances in the scriptures when God did allow his people to catch a glimpse, as it were, of God himself, to see with their eyes, the Lord, at least to see in parts, as he revealed himself to them.

And one such instance in which God made Himself known visibly to His people is described for us this morning in our passage. This is when the Lord called to Himself Moses and Aaron, Nadab and Abihu, and 70 of the elders of Israel. He called them to come up to Mount Sinai and to worship Him there. And verse 10 says that they saw the God of Israel.

Now last week we read about the events leading up to this, Moses and the leaders of Israel. When they saw the vision of God, this was after these events took place that we saw last week. Before they went up on the mountain, Moses led the people in a worship service in which God’s covenant with his people Israel was formally inaugurated. You remember that Moses read the law and the commandments to the people of Israel. The people responded by saying that they will do everything that’s written in God’s word. They pledged their obedience to God.

And then oxen were sacrificed to God. Moses sprinkled what he called the blood of the covenant, the blood of those oxen that were slaughtered. He sprinkled that on the people. And that meant that they were to keep the covenant with their God upon pain of death. And so by this covenant making worship, by this covenant making ceremony with the blood of the oxen sprinkled on the people and all of that, God was confirming to the Israelites that he was their God and they were his people. That is the heart of that covenant relationship between God and us. He is our God, we are his people.

And so our passage this morning picks up with what took place after that. And we’ll focus this morning particularly on verses 9 through 11. And this is the vision of the Lord that was given to Moses and the others who were with him. But we’ll go over the rest of the passage briefly before we zero in on verses 9 through 11. And so let’s look at verses 12 through 18 just briefly.

Beginning at verse 12, we can assume that after Moses and the elders of Israel saw the Lord, after they ate and drank before him, that they went back down the mountain. And then in verse 12, the Lord calls Moses to go back up the mountain. Only this time, he takes just one person with him, and that is his assistant, Joshua. And Moses leaves the people of Israel behind. He leaves them in the charge of his brother Aaron and Hur.

We’ll find out later in Exodus that if Moses thought that the people of Israel would be in safe hands with Aaron in charge, he was badly mistaken. That’s when the golden calf disaster took place, when they worshiped the golden calf. But when Moses and Joshua go up the mountain, they see the glory of the Lord in the form of a cloud covering on the top of the mountain. And after six days, the Lord calls Moses to come alone into the cloud. And so Moses by himself, he enters into the presence of God.

And at some point, then the Lord gives him two tablets of stone on which God himself with his very own finger wrote the 10 commandments. And by the way, these Ten Commandments, they are given on two tablets of stone, not because one tablet of stone contained the first half of the Ten Commandments and the second tablet of stone contained the second half of the Ten Commandments, but it was customary in the ancient Near East when a covenant was made between two peoples that each party to the covenant would have their own copy.

And so that’s what’s taking place here. God gave Moses two tablets of stone. One was the copy for the people of Israel. The other was the copy that belonged to the Lord. In this case, the Lord gave to Moses both copies. And so this is when God gives the 10 commandments on these two tablets to Moses. And then verse 18 tells us that Moses was on the mountain for a total of 40 days and 40 nights.

Now, again, what I want to focus on with you this morning is this vision that God gave of himself to Moses and Aaron and to the other leaders of Israel. And the first truth to take from this vision of God is this, that is to see God is to know him. To behold God is to know him and to be known by him. We need to keep in mind that God gave these Israelites this vision on the mountain. He gave them a glimpse of his glory as part of the worship service in which he made his covenant with them.

And again, the purpose of God’s covenant was to bring His people into a relationship with Him so that the people of God would know God, they would know the Lord, they would delight in Him as their God, and God, on His part, would know His people Israel, and He would delight in them as His people. Again, that’s the heart of the covenant relationship that God makes with His people. And one way that this communion or fellowship between the Lord and his people was expressed was in this meal that the leaders of Israel ate before the Lord. And so in verse 11 it says, they beheld God and ate and drank.

Now, the fact that the people of Israel here, that they ate and drank in the presence of the Lord, this is not just an interesting detail in the passage, as though Moses is telling us that he and the people who were with them, they’d been up on the mountain ever since morning time. Now it was getting late in the day. They were hungry. They took out their brown lunch bags and they had a bite to eat. That’s not what’s happening here.

Rather, in that ancient culture, to share a meal together was very significant. It was very meaningful. It was something that bound people together. It was an expression of communion or fellowship between people when they shared a meal together. And we can relate to that because to a certain extent we know from experience that that is still true today.

I remember one year when I was in high school, I absolutely dreaded lunchtime because none of my friends had the same lunch period that I had. And the last thing that I wanted to do was to eat lunch all by myself. That’s very lonely. But I also wasn’t confident enough just to sit down at a table full of kids that I didn’t know and have lunch with them. And so that was quite a dilemma for me because we naturally want to be with friends when we eat. And that’s because sharing a meal together is an exercise in fellowship or communion with one another.

And that was especially true in biblical times. And so in the scriptures, we see sometimes when people make a covenant with one another, that there is a meal included as part of that covenant ceremony. And so, for example, in Genesis chapter 26, when Isaac and Abimelech, the king of the Philistines, when they make a covenant with each other not to attack each other, the Bible says that Abimelech, and this is Genesis 26:30, made them a feast and they ate and drank.

And something like that is also taking place here on Mount Sinai, only this is a covenant, not between two peoples, but a covenant between God and His people. And so the fellowship or the communion that takes place here is these elders of Israel, and Moses, as they eat this meal together, it is a communion and a fellowship, not only with one another, but with the Lord. They are sharing a meal, if we can put it this way, with God Himself. They are expressing their fellowship with Him.

And we do the same thing today as the people of God. When we worship God, we also have a sacred meal, a covenant meal, in which we commune with the Lord, and that is the Lord’s Supper. When we take part in the Lord’s Supper, we are experiencing not only communion with one another as fellow members of the body of Christ, but more primarily, we are enjoying and engaging in that communion and that fellowship that we have with Christ himself as he is present with us in that sacrament.

Now, I say all of that because it is in the context of this sacred meal, in the context of this covenant meal that the leaders of Israel saw the Lord. Verse 11 says, they beheld God and ate and drank. And so what this means is, is that their seeing God was part of that communion that they had with him as their covenant Lord, as their God and savior. And the same is true for the promise that God gives to you and me in Jesus Christ, that one day we shall see him face to face.

That promise that one day we shall see God, that is not a promise that we will behold God in all of his glory and majesty as a tourist might behold the Grand Canyon or Niagara Falls, admiring it from afar. No, God will give us a glorious vision of himself as he envelops us and blesses us with his gracious and loving presence. And for us to see God in his glory will be to bask in the eternal, the infinite love that God has for us in his son, Jesus Christ.

And so this promise of seeing God is all about being in the presence of the one who loves us, who is our God, who will love us forever. Think of it this way. What is it that lights up a baby’s face more than anything else? It’s the sight of seeing her father looking down and smiling at her. And that is what it will be like for us only a million times greater to see the face of our father smiling at us as we gaze into his loving countenance.

And in fact, that is what makes the promise of God a beatific vision. The word beatific is an adjective that describes something that imparts blessedness or happiness. The great theologian, Jonathan Edwards, he called the beatific vision the hapifying vision. I suppose he made that word up, the hapifying vision. And he called it that or it’s called the beatific vision because there will be no greater joy, no greater happiness for you and me as the children of God than one day to see with our very own eyes what we only see now by faith and that is the beaming face of our heavenly father as He brings us into His glorious presence forever and ever.

And so to see God is not just to behold Him in His glory and greatness, but it is to be brought into His loving presence, to be embraced by Him as our Father. And one day we shall experience that fully and perfectly in the world that is to come. And so to see God is to know Him and to be known by Him.

The second truth about beholding God is this, to see God is to be made like Christ in His righteousness. In order for any of us who are sinful by nature, and of course that means all of us, in order for any of us who are sinners, in order for us to see God in his majesty and glory, we must be made holy. Jesus said, blessed are the pure, blessed are the pure at heart, for they shall see God.

You’ll notice in this passage that there isn’t a whole lot of description about what Moses and the others with him, what they actually saw when they beheld God. In fact, the only thing that is described for us in this passage is the floor, the platform upon which God was standing or sitting. In verse 10 it says, there was under his feet as it were a pavement of sapphire stone, like the very heaven for clearness. The word sapphire is referring to a deep blue mineral or stone called lapis lazuli. Only here the stone is clear; verse 10, it’s like the very heaven for clearness. So God was standing or sitting upon some sort of bluish crystal floor or platform.

But you’ll notice there’s no description of what God himself looked like. It would be like if you were invited to meet the president at the White House and when you got back, somebody asked you, well, what was he like? And you said, well, let me tell you about the carpet in the Oval Office. It was spectacular. But you had no words, I suppose, to describe what it was like to meet the president. It’s as though the vision of God was so overwhelmingly glorious that Moses could only find the words to describe the floor at the feet of the Lord.

Matthew Henry makes this very apropos comment. He says, our conceptions of God are all below him and fall infinitely short of being adequate. In other words, what Moses describes for us here, the floor upon which God was sitting. In the same way, we can only begin to describe what God is like. We can only reach up so much in our descriptions of who God is, his essence, his character, and so on.

Well, later in verse 17, when the people of Israel saw the Lord from afar, Moses describes it this way. Now the appearance of the glory of the Lord was like a devouring fire on the top of the mountain in the sight of the people of Israel. But this is not what Moses and the others with him saw when they were up on the mountain. It was something different. Verse 10, again, they saw the God of Israel. Verse 11, they beheld God. God did not just appear to them as fire or a cloud on top of the mountain, but in some visible form, in some way, God appeared to Moses in a way that they could behold him, that they could see him. It’s just not described for us.

But however God did appear to them, we can say this for sure, that they did not see God in all the fullness of his divine glory and majesty. They did not see God in the fullness and perfection of who he is as God, because if they had, if they had seen God in the fullness of who he is, they would have been struck down dead immediately. Because when it comes to seeing God, one of the consistent teachings we find in the scriptures is that in this life, no one can see God. No one can see God in the fullness of his glory and live. The book of Exodus teaches us that.

Later in chapter 33, when Moses says to the Lord, please show me your glory, the Lord says that he will show him not his face, but his back. And why was that? Because the Lord says, you cannot see my face for man shall not see me and live. The New Testament teaches the very same thing. 1 Timothy 6:16, speaking of God, who alone has immortality, who dwells in unapproachable light, whom no one has ever seen or can see.

And why can we not behold God with our eyes in the completeness or fullness of his majesty and glory? The reason is this, it’s because of our sin, because of the corruption of our hearts. Almighty God, he is infinite in his holiness and righteousness. Habakkuk 1:13 says that God is of purer eyes than to behold evil. He cannot look at wrong. And in our sin, we are unholy. We are unrighteous. And so for you and me to have an unfiltered vision of God means that we would be destroyed in an instant by his holiness.

I remember several years ago being at my cousin’s house for a family get-together. And my cousin, he collected all of his scrap lumber and several logs, and he made this huge bonfire. And as the night went on and more wood was added to the fire, the coals at the bottom of the fire just got hotter and hotter and hotter. Eventually, by the end of the night, you could toss a soda can into the fire, into the coals, and within seconds it just melted and evaporated, just was vaporized by the heat of the fire.

And that’s kind of a picture of what would happen to us. The searing intensity of the holiness of God would be so overwhelming that it would annihilate any person who came into his presence. And this is why so often in the scriptures for those who did see God, at least they saw him in a partial way, they were often left with a sense of dread and fear. For example, when the angel of the Lord appeared to Manoah and his wife, those are the future parents of Samson, Manoah says in Judges 13:22, we shall surely die for we have seen God.

And the most famous example of this, of course, is when the prophet Isaiah, in Isaiah chapter six, when he sees the Lord in his glory in the temple, Isaiah cries out, woe is me, for I’m lost, for I’m a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips, for my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts. It’s remarkable sometimes when you hear or read about somebody claiming to have seen God or to have seen Christ, and the way they describe it is almost as if they had seen a celebrity walking down the street, very casual, very informal.

Well, what happens in the scriptures when someone sees the Lord? When God appears to someone in the Bible, that person says, woe is me, I am undone. It is something that overwhelms us with dread and fear because of who God is. But here in this passage, not only did the Israelites not perish when they came into the presence of God and saw him, but in fact, they went on to eat a covenant meal in the presence of the Lord.

You can almost hear the surprise in the text itself that the people were not destroyed. In verse 11, it says, and he did not lay his hand on the chief men of the people of Israel. They beheld God and ate and drank. Almost as if Moses is saying, how could this be? How could they behold God and go on to eat and drink in his presence?

Well, part of the answer was that this was not a full revelation that God gave to Moses and the others with him, just like later in chapter 33, the Lord will hold back from fully revealing himself to Moses. He will only show him his back and not his face. So here too, he did not reveal himself in all of his glory to these Israelites. But another reason why Moses and those with him, why they were able to see the Lord with their eyes and live, why they were not overcome with the holiness and righteousness of God because of their sin, another reason why they could see God and live was because they were literally covered with the blood of the sacrifices that they had slain earlier.

Remember, before this vision of God, Moses took the blood of the sacrifices, he sprinkled that blood on the people, and that blood signified, among other things, that blood signified for them the fact that they were cleansed from their sin. The Lord had atoned for their sin. And so with that blood, covered with the blood of the sacrifices, the people could go before the Lord and come into his presence and even see him.

And the reason why you as a believer in Jesus Christ, the reason why you can have the hope that one day you will see God, you will see Him in all of His glory and majesty, and the reason why this will be for you a true beatific vision, a blessed vision and not a death sentence, is because of the blood of Jesus Christ that was shed for you upon the cross. If your hope and your trust are in the Lord Jesus as your savior, not only does his death on the cross take away from you the guilt of your sin so that you can come into the presence of God without fear of condemnation, but also Jesus Christ has given you the gift of his Holy Spirit and the Holy Spirit is at work in you to purify you from the sin that remains in you.

And the Spirit does his work of sanctifying and purifying you as a Christian as he directs your gaze towards Christ. And so it’s not only true that in order for us to see God, we must be holy, but it’s also true that when you and I, by faith, behold the Lord Jesus Christ, we are made more holy. By faith, even now, you can see God. Again, not with your eyes, but with the eyes of faith, you can behold God as he makes himself known to you in his son, Jesus Christ, as Jesus is made known to us in his word.

And so to fix our gaze upon the Christ that is given to us in the scriptures, to look to Him, to set our eyes upon Him, this is to be transformed more and more into His image. We become what we look at. We become what we gaze at. And when we look at the Lord Jesus Christ, we become more like Him. That’s what the New Testament reading tells us in 2 Corinthians 3:18. And we all with unveiled face beholding the glory of the Lord are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another for this comes from the Lord who is the Spirit.

And this is where you are much better off than those Israelites on the mountain. Now to be sure, to have been one of those 70 elders, to have been there with Moses and to have seen the glory of God as he revealed himself there, that would have been a life-changing experience, a true mountaintop experience. And so, however God revealed himself to the Israelites, it would have been an incredible thing to experience beyond words.

However, as amazing as that was for them, God has given you, as a believer in Jesus Christ, something even more wonderful, even more amazing, and that is that he has revealed himself to you in the person of his son, Jesus Christ. And so, no, you have not yet seen Jesus with your eyes, but with the eyes of faith, as you look to Christ, what you see as you look to Christ is a fuller, a greater, a more glorious, a more perfect, a more wonderful, more beautiful revelation of God than God ever gave to any of the saints in the Old Testament, including here when he revealed himself to Moses and the elders on Mount Sinai.

As wonderful as that was, Moses and those others with him, they would have loved to see what you see by faith. God revealed in his son, Jesus. When Philip, the disciple, said to Jesus in John 14:8, Lord, show us the father and it is enough for us. Jesus replied, have I been with you so long? And you still do not know me, Philip. Whoever has seen me has seen the father. Whoever has seen me has seen the father.

And then John earlier in his gospel, he says, and the word became flesh and dwelt among us and we have seen his glory. Glory as of the only son from the father, full of grace and truth. And so if you believe in Christ, you have seen the father. You have seen God as he has revealed in his son, Jesus. You have seen in the life, in the ministry of Jesus, the grace and compassion of the father towards sinners.

And the more you put Jesus in your sights, the more you set your gaze upon Christ, the more you will understand the character and the love of the father, the more and more you will grasp the depths of the love that God has for you in his son. But this is all by faith. This is by faith. The world says, those who do not believe in Christ, the world says, seeing is believing. And so the unbeliever says, if God will just show himself to me, if he will appear to me, of course I would then believe in him, but he is invisible. I don’t see him. I don’t know if he exists. If he would just make himself known, if I could see him, then I would believe.

But God says, no, it’s the other way around. Believing is seeing. Believing is seeing. God says to us and to the world, if you would see my glory, if you would see me for who I am, if you would see my truth, then believe. Believe in my son, Jesus Christ. And you will see. Because God has revealed himself to us. He has made himself known to us. And it is only a sinful, willful blindness that keeps someone from beholding the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.

Jesus said to Thomas, have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed. And if this faith is yours, then God promises you that one day what you perceive by faith, you will then see by sight. And that is that beatific vision, that haplifying vision, that one day what you know is true by faith, what you behold only with your eyes of faith, God will show you in fullness, his glory, his greatness, as he has made himself known to you. And you will see his glory as it shines out through the face of Jesus Christ. That is our hope as believers. But even now, we can see God as we behold him by faith in his son, Jesus. Let’s pray.

The post For They Shall See God appeared first on Mt. Rose OPC.

The Old Testament reading this morning is Exodus chapter 24, verses one through eight. And this is God’s holy, his infallible, his inspired word. Exodus chapter 24, verses one through eight.

Then he said to Moses, come up to the Lord, you and Aaron, Nadab and Abihu, and 70 of the elders of Israel, and worship from afar. Moses alone shall come near to the Lord, but the others shall not come near, and the people shall not come up with him. Moses came and told the people all the words of the Lord and all the rules. And all the people answered with one voice and said, all the words that the Lord has spoken, we will do. And Moses wrote down all the words of the Lord. He rose early in the morning and built an altar at the foot of the mountain and 12 pillars, according to the 12 tribes of Israel. And he sent young men of the people of Israel who offered burnt offerings and sacrificed peace offerings of oxen to the Lord. And Moses took half of the blood and put it in basins, and half of the blood he threw against the altar. Then he took the book of the covenant and read it in the hearing of the people. And they said, all that the Lord has spoken, we will do and we will be obedient. And Moses took the blood and threw it on the people and said, behold, the blood of the covenant that the Lord has made with you in accordance with all these words.

And now turn to Hebrews chapter nine, verses 11 through 22. This is God’s inspired commentary on the passage that we just read, at least part of this is. Hebrews 9, 11 through 22. But when Christ appeared as a high priest of the good things that have come, then through the greater and more perfect tent, not made with hands, that is not of this creation, He entered once for all into the holy places, not by means of the blood of goats and calves, but by means of his own blood, thus securing an eternal redemption. For if the blood of goats and bulls and the sprinkling of defiled persons with the ashes of a heifer sanctify for the purification of the flesh, how much more will the blood of Christ, who through the eternal spirit offered himself without blemish to God, purify our conscience from dead works to serve the living God.

Therefore, he is the mediator of a new covenant so that those who are called may receive the promised eternal inheritance since a death has occurred that redeems them from the transgressions committed under the first covenant. For where a will is involved, the death of the one who made it must be established. For a will takes effect only at death, since it is not enforced as long as the one who made it is alive. Therefore, not even the first covenant was inaugurated without blood. For when every commandment of the law had been declared by Moses to all the people, he took the blood of calves and goats, with water and scarlet wool and hyssop, and sprinkled both the book itself and all the people, saying, this is the blood of the covenant that God commanded for you. And in the same way, he sprinkled with the blood both the tent and all the vessels used in worship. Indeed, under the law, almost everything is purified with blood. And without the shedding of blood, there is no forgiveness of sins. The grass withers, the flower fades, but the word of our God will stand forever.

Last Lord’s Day, as we looked at the passage before this in Exodus, we considered how the destination that the Lord had set for the people of Israel was the promised land, the land of Canaan. That was why the Lord delivered his people out of Egypt. It was in order to give to them, to bring them into this land that he had promised their forefathers, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. And so the destination was one reason why the Lord brought his people out of Egypt.

But there was even a more basic, more fundamental reason why the Lord brought his people out of Egypt. And that more basic reason was that so his people would worship him, so that they would worship the Lord. When Moses told Pharaoh that he must let the people go, he said to Pharaoh, it was so that they might offer sacrifices to the Lord. That is to worship him.

And the same is true for you and me as Christians. We have a destination, we have a heavenly destination, that eternal glory that God is preparing for us, that is where the Lord is ultimately leading us to. But even heaven serves a greater goal than for us simply to be there. And that is that we are there, we will be there in order to worship the Lord, to praise Him, to magnify His name. This is why God created you. You were created to worship him. That is your purpose. That is why God has redeemed you through his son, Jesus Christ, so that you would be a true worshiper of God. And this is the reason that he is preparing for you an eternal home in heaven, your destination. This is why he is bringing you there, so that there you might worship him forever and ever.

And that raises a question for us. How do you think about your Christian faith as a believer in Christ? Do you think mainly of all of the wonderful benefits and blessings that God gives to you, not only in this life, but far much more in the life to come? Is that how you primarily think about your faith, what you have received from the Lord? Or as a believer in Christ, do you think about your faith as a Christian in terms of what pleases God? What honors God? What may I do in order to bring the most praise, glory, and magnification to my God and my Savior?

We should all rejoice in the good gifts, the blessings of salvation that God has given to us. However, we want a faith that is fundamentally God-centered, not self-centered. We want a faith that is oriented to God, that heart that seeks what brings glory to God. We want His name to be magnified in us and through us. And there is one thing, there is one thing more than anything else that will center our thoughts, our lives, our hearts on God, and that one thing is worship, it is worship.

And what’s described here in our passage is a worship service. Really, it’s the first worship service described for us in the Bible. And although there are many ways in which this worship service is very different from what we do when we come here on Sundays to worship God, nevertheless, much of it is the same, especially the very elements or essentially what they are doing in this worship service, it is very much the same. And that’s because the God that we know and serve and worship, the God that has made himself known to us in his son Jesus Christ, this is the very same God, the very same Lord who delivered his people out of Egypt so that they too would know and serve and worship him as their God. He is the same God, he is their God, he is our God.

And so this morning, for that reason, we can look at this worship service and we can draw some lessons from it about our own worship. And so we’ll look at each part of this worship service and we’ll see what each part means for us as Christians, as we too are called to engage ourselves in this most important activity in worshiping God.

So first of all, in this worship service, there is a call to worship. Look at verses one and two, I will read those verses to you. Then he said to Moses, come up to the Lord, you and Aaron, Nadab and Abihu, and 70 of the elders of Israel, and worship from afar. Moses alone shall come near to the Lord, but the others shall not come near, and the people shall not come up with him.

Now we’ll look a little bit closer at these verses later, but for now, just notice this one thing, and that is, it is God who calls his people to worship him. It is the Lord who summons His people to Him to praise Him, to worship Him. And this is at the heart of true worship. True worship never originates in the heart of man. Idolatry, the worship of false gods, this comes from the heart of man, but not true worship. True worship is initiated, it is created by God and His call when He calls us into His presence to praise Him. And so God summons his people to approach him, to approach him with reverence, with awe, in order to give him praise, thanksgiving, and honor. That is his due for who he is.

And we are reminded of this every Sunday when we begin the worship service here at Mount Rose. We hear the voice of God summoning us through the scripture, through his call to worship. And so he calls us into his presence to worship him. So that’s the first part of this worship service.

The second part is the word of God. Verse three says this, Moses came and told the people all the words of the Lord and all the rules. And then in verse four, we read this, and Moses wrote down all the words of the Lord. And then later in verse seven, it says this, then he took the book of the covenant and read it in the hearing of the people. And so Moses first, he declared verbally, from what he remembered, the words of God to his people, but then he wrote it down in a book. And from that book, he then read the words of God to his people.

And this book that Moses wrote, this was essentially the first Bible. It was a lot smaller than our Bibles today. It would have been no problem to read through it in a year. You could probably have read through it in 20 minutes. But it was kind of the first Bible. It contained four chapters of the Bible, what we have now. Chapter 20 was the Ten Commandments. And then chapters 21 through 23 are the various civil laws, judicial laws that we’ve been looking at. And so these four chapters were the rules of the Lord, the words of God that Moses wrote down in what he called the Book of the Covenant.

Now, the fact that God had Moses write down his words, this is extremely important. It’s even a bit surprising because God could have revealed himself as he has been doing, he could have revealed himself directly to his people. He could have continued to speak directly to his people, or at least through the mouthpiece of Moses and Aaron. But instead, he chose to give his word to his people in written form, in a book, on pages. And from this point on, God’s people have always been a people of the written word, of the Scriptures, of the book. Now, of course, from this point on, God would continue to speak directly to Israel, but the permanent means, the enduring way in which God has chosen to speak to his people beginning from here is through the scriptures, the written words of God.

And so for this reason, in any worship that is biblical, that is faithful to God’s will, that worship will be centered upon the Word of God, the written Word of God, the scriptures, our Bible. And so this is why here, we try to make the Bible front and center in our worship. We hear the reading of God’s word. We hear the preaching of God’s word from the scriptures. We hear God’s law declared to us from the Bible. We hear the assurance of his forgiveness to us from the scriptures. Often as we did this morning, we will read responsibly from a psalm, from the word of God.

And so biblical worship will be saturated with the word of God. And that’s because this is how we know the will of God, the mind of God. This is how God reveals himself to us. It is through the scriptures. This is how we know what his will for us is, what his truth is, what his promises are for us, his Grace to us, this is where we learn of his love and mercy to us in Jesus Christ. It is through the scriptures, through what God has spoken and continues to speak through the written word.

One of the glaring weaknesses, I believe, of the contemporary evangelical church is how little Christians read their Bibles, how little Christians know their Bibles. And there can be no question that part of the reason for that is because in the worship of so many churches, there is so little scripture. The Bible is not front and center. When I visited evangelical churches in the past, I’m often struck by how little the Bible is used in the worship service.

But as Christians, we should be devoted to the scriptures. We should not only hear much of God’s word on Sundays when we worship, but throughout the week, we should be reading the Bible. We should be storing the word of God up in our hearts because this is how God speaks to us. Again, this is how we come to know Christ better and better.

But one major challenge for us to be a scripture-centered people, one major challenge for us to be word-oriented, to be filled with the scripture is this, that we are living in an age in which images have replaced the written word as the primary means of communication. One symptom of this major cultural shift is the fact that people don’t read books anymore. People just don’t do much reading, let alone reading books, let alone reading the scriptures. And if we are conformed to this world, the more that we are conformed to the spirit of this age and this aspect, the more and more difficult it will be for us to be true Bible people, to be people who are truly filled with the word of God, who are devoted to reading and learning and understanding the scriptures. We will find it harder and harder to give serious attention to the written word of God, the more that we are carried away with this cultural shift to a very image-based culture.

And this is why worship is so crucial. This is why how we worship is so extremely crucial. Because how the church worships God together in our weekly services will have a tremendous influence in the formation of the character of the day-to-day life of the believer. And so if Christians do not hear scripture in worship, why should we expect them to read scripture throughout the week? If Christians are not reminded on Sundays in worship, as we worship the Lord, that God speaks to us through his written word, if Christians are not reinforced in that conviction week after week, why should we expect them to seek to hear God’s voice in the scriptures in their day-to-day lives? And so how we worship God is so important. It’s not only that we might glorify Him in our worship, but it also has a tremendous influence in the way that we will live out our Christian lives from week to week. And so we need a Bible-centered worship service so that we will be Bible-centered Christians in our lives.

The third part of this worship service is the people’s response. And so the people respond to the words of the Lord. In verse three, this is what Moses says: And all the people answered with one voice and said, all the words that the Lord has spoken, we will do. And then later in verse seven, it says this, then he took the book of the covenant and read it in the hearing of the people. And they said, all that the Lord has spoken, we will do and we will be obedient.

You can say one thing for the Israelites at this time, they were an optimistic bunch. They were quite confident that they would keep all the words of the Lord. Matthew Henry, the Puritan commentator, he says it quite quaintly, bravely resolved. Bravo for the people of Israel. We know that, of course, the people of Israel would do the very opposite. They definitely did not do all that the Lord commanded. They were disobedient to his commands as becomes abundantly clear as you read on in the Old Testament. But what else could they say? This was, of course, the right response. The people knew that they were bound to keep the word of God and any other declaration on their part would of course been not what the Lord desired. And so they declared that they would keep God’s word.

But notice the obedience that God commanded. Notice the obedience that the people promised. It was complete, entire, perfect obedience. Look at verse three, Moses came and told the people all the words of the Lord and all the rules and all the people answered with one voice and said, all the words that the Lord has spoken, we will do. The bad news for you and me, from one perspective, the bad news is that God still requires the same standard for us as Christians today. What he requires of us regarding his law is nothing less than perfect conformity to all that he has commanded us. To obey his law perfectly, to be conformed perfectly to his righteousness.

It’s safe to say that that’s not the same standard that we set for ourselves. We hear the law of God and we, no matter what we might say, we aim to keep it more or less. We aim for above average obedience. And when we meet that goal, we are pretty satisfied that we have pleased God. But not according to the law of God. We are commanded to love our neighbor as ourselves, but I haven’t really truly obeyed that commandment if all I have done is to avoid doing harm to my neighbor. I’ve not kept that commandment unless I have devoted myself to seeking his good in every way that I possibly can. I have not really kept the first great commandment to love God with all my heart, soul, strength, and mind if I have only gone through the motions of the Christian life and Christian worship without my heart engaged in that.

A big part of our growth as Christians, a big part of our maturity as we grow in our faith and understanding of the word of God and God’s will for us, a big part of that is seeing more and more clearly just how far short we fall of truly obeying what God requires of us, keeping his commandments. We fail. We fail to keep the first and the second great commandments. We fail to keep all of God’s law. And yet this is his standard for us. He has not compromised his standard.

But the good news is that God is gracious and merciful. He is gracious and merciful towards sinners such as us. He is gracious and merciful towards you and me, people who are flawed, who are imperfect, who keep God’s law so imperfectly, who often transgress God’s commandments. And this is embedded here in this worship service because as we will see, not only was God’s law read, but sacrifices were commanded. And those sacrifices were given to the people of Israel in order to teach them that because of the blood of those sacrifices, that there is forgiveness, there is mercy from God towards his people because we have failed to keep his commandments.

So God is merciful. And the same is true today. He is a gracious and merciful heavenly father. He forgives the sins of his children. First John 1:9 says, if we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. He not only forgives us when we come to Him in faith, when we seek that forgiveness, He not only forgives us for breaking His commandments, but also He forgives us for failing to keep His commandments as perfectly as we are called to do. And because of the work of Jesus Christ, God accepts even our imperfect obedience. He sanctifies it so that in Christ, even our imperfect obedience is pleasing to Him. And yet the standard he sets for us is never anything less than full, perfect conformity to his law.

But there is more good news for you and me in Jesus Christ, and that is this, when we compare ourselves to the Israelites here back in Exodus. Unlike the Israelites here, you and I live after the day of Pentecost. We live after the day in which the exalted Lord Jesus Christ, at the right hand of God the Father, he has poured out his Holy Spirit upon the church, upon us, and by the power of the Holy Spirit, who indwells in you as a believer in Jesus Christ, you can begin to keep the commandments of God. Not perfectly, not perfectly, but truly, truly.

And so we should have a similar kind of response as well when we hear the commandments of God. This is how we should respond. We should say, I will endeavor with all that is in me by the grace of God to do the will of God to follow my Savior Jesus, not because I can earn God’s favor and love, not because I’m trying to establish my own righteousness before God, but because I know that God has loved me. God has saved me. He has been merciful to me. He has forgiven me. The love that I have for him because of the way that he first loved me. I want to keep his word. I want to please him. I want to glorify him in my life by obedience. I want to grow to be more and more like my faithful savior, Jesus Christ. And we have the promise. This is what we can tell ourselves. We have the promise that by his spirit, we will grow to be more and more like him. So that is our response to hearing the word of God as believers in Jesus Christ.

The fourth part of this worship service are the sacrifices. After Moses wrote down the words of the Lord, we read how he built an altar and 12 pillars and the 12 pillars represents the 12 tribes of Israel. And then verse five says this, and he sent young men of the people of Israel who offered burnt offerings and sacrificed peace offerings of oxen to the Lord. We won’t get into the details of what is a burnt offering, what is a peace offering. As you read, go on and read in the Old Testament, Moses will explain the differences between those offerings. But what’s most important to notice here is that what these offerings have in common is that blood was shed. Blood was shed, animals were slaughtered, and blood was shed.

Verse six: and Moses took half of the blood and put it in basins, and half of the blood he threw against the altar. Verse eight: and Moses took the blood and threw it on the people and said, behold, the blood of the covenant that the Lord has made with you in accordance with all these words. So what does all this? What does all this mean with the blood that is thrown against the altar, the blood that is thrown on the people of Israel, all this blood being shed, these bloody sacrifices?

Well, first of all, notice that Moses calls the blood, the blood of the covenant, not the blood of the ox and the blood of the goats, but the blood of the covenant. A covenant was a sacred bond between God and his people. And when God made a covenant with his people, this was the heart of a covenant, he says, I will be your God and you will be my people. But God also gives the terms to his people for remaining in that covenant, for keeping the covenant. And that is this, that if God’s people obey him, if they walk according to his word, they would enjoy the blessings of the covenant. But if they disobeyed the Lord, if they became covenant breakers, the penalty for breaking the covenant was death. And that death was symbolized by the blood of the animals that was shed in this ceremony, in this worship. And so the blood would teach the Israelites that the penalty for breaking God’s commandment was death, the death that they deserve, just as the blood was sprinkled on their bodies. So they knew that their blood would be upon them if they rejected God’s covenant and broke his commandments.

However, at the same time, the blood here also represents cleansing from sin. And we know that because of what the author of Hebrews teaches us about this first worship service. We read from Hebrews chapter nine. And in that chapter, the author of Hebrews says that for a covenant or what he calls a will, for a will slash covenant to go into effect, there must be a death. And then he says in chapter nine, verse 17, for a will takes effect only at death since it is not enforced as long as the one who made it is alive. And then he says that that was also true for the first covenant. And when he talks about the first covenant, he’s talking about this worship service involving the inauguration of the covenant that we’ve read here. And so this is the covenant that the Lord made with the Israelites through Moses on Mount Sinai. And the author of Hebrews says in verse 18, therefore not even the first covenant was inaugurated without blood.

And so he’s referring to the blood that was shed and sprinkled on the people. The author of Hebrews goes on to describe the worship service that takes place in this Exodus passage. Moses read the law to the people, and then he took the blood of the sacrificial animals. And according to Hebrews, Moses sprinkled both the people and the book of the covenant with the blood. The author of Hebrews says later that when the tabernacle and all the vessels that were made with the tabernacle, that they also, when they were made, they were also sprinkled with blood. And then he says this in verse 22, in chapter nine, he says, indeed, under the law, almost everything is purified with blood, and without the shedding of blood, there is no forgiveness of sins.

So here’s another reason for all of this blood in this worship service, this beginning of the covenant with God: without the shedding of blood, there is no forgiveness of sins. And so the blood that Moses sprinkled here on the people, it not only inaugurated the covenant, but it signified that the sins of the people were atoned for. They were covered. They were forgiven so that they could truly come into the presence of the Lord and worship Him. In all of the blood that was shed, in all of the sacrifices, in the entire sacrificial system that’s expanded upon in Leviticus, they were all for the same purpose, to show them that if the Israelites were to come before God, if they were to approach Him to worship Him, if they were to come into His presence, they could not come without blood. And they needed the blood to cover their sins, to atone for them. Leviticus 17:11: for the life of the flesh is in the blood. And I have given it for you on the altar to make atonement for your souls, for it is the blood that makes atonement by the life.

And so this is another reason why there was so much blood here. It was to teach the Israelites that they needed their sins to be dealt with. They needed atonement in order to come into the presence of God. The whole book of Hebrews, the point of it is to show us how the ministry of Jesus Christ, both as priest and sacrifice, is superior to the priesthood and the sacrifices under Moses. So Hebrews teaches us that all of the animal sacrifices that we read in the Old Testament, including those that we read here in Exodus 24, that they were only copies, they were only shadows of the one true sacrifice that Christ would offer. That is the sacrifice of himself. That is the one sacrifice, the shedding of blood that would truly take away sin.

As Hebrews puts it, Hebrews 10:4, it is impossible for the blood of bulls and goats to take away sin. And so when Moses sprinkled that blood, the blood of oxen, the blood of animals, when he sprinkled that on the people of Israel, that wasn’t truly atoning for their sins. Not truly, because it was the blood of animals. What was needed to deal with our sin, what was needed in order to bring us to God, in order for us to be forgiven, what we needed was the blood of a man, the blood of a human being, one just like us, a perfect man, a divine man, a sinless man, one who could offer himself a sacrifice that we might be forgiven. And this is the blood that Jesus has offered in our behalf, his very own blood shed on the cross for us.

And so we needed a perfect representative, one without sin to bear our sins before God, that we might be made forever clean and holy and able to come into the presence of almighty God, to worship him and to enjoy his presence, his blessing, his grace. And this is what Jesus has done for us at the cross. Hebrews 10:14: for by a single offering, one offering, a single offering, he has perfected for all time those who are being sanctified.

When Jesus ate that last meal with his disciples, that Passover meal on the eve of his crucifixion, he handed them the cup and he said, this is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins. He also called it the new covenant in my blood. And so Jesus came to make a new covenant with us. Not like this covenant, a covenant sealed not with the blood of animals that could not take away sin, but sealed with his own blood.

And if your faith is in Jesus Christ, this is why you are forgiven. If your faith and hope are in Christ, your sins are atoned for. You are forgiven because Jesus has shed his blood for you. He died the death that you and I deserve to die. Remember, another aspect of this blood that was shed in this worship service in Exodus 24, the blood was telling the Israelites that if they broke the covenant, what they deserved was death. And they were in fact covenant breakers. They did not keep the law. And in our sin, we too were covenant breakers. We also did not keep God’s law. And so a death has taken place. Because we were covenant breakers, a death has taken place, but not our death, but it was the death of Jesus. And so his blood shed for you and me is that new covenant. It is eternal life. And because of Jesus Christ, you have overcome sin, You have overcome death because of what he has done for you.

And so the worship service involved blood. Our worship service is based on the greater blood of Jesus. You’ll notice that in this worship service, not everybody was called to come near to the Lord. The people stayed below at the foot of the mountain. Aaron and his sons and the elders, they were able to go with Moses part of the way, but they had to stay back. They couldn’t go all the way into the presence of God. Only Moses could draw near to God himself.

Thankfully, our worship service is not like that. Imagine if it was. All the congregants here, you would have to be standing out in the parking lot. Thankfully, it’s a nice day, so it wouldn’t be too bad out there. The elders, you could come into the church building, but only into the foyer, but only the minister, only the pastor could come into the sanctuary to be near God. Even though Moses sprinkled the people with the blood of those animals, there was still a distance. There was still a gap, a distance between them and the Lord.

And this distance makes perfect sense in the context of Exodus. If you remember the description that Moses gives to us when the people saw God, as he came down upon Mount Sinai, it was terrifying. There was thunder, there was lightning, a trumpet blast, the people trembled. Mount Sinai was covered with smoke. The Lord descended on it in fire. And most terrifying of all, what left them in abject fear was hearing the voice of God thundering from the mountain. He spoke to the people with a voice that was so dreadful, the people begged Moses that they would not hear the voice of God anymore.

And so the people were given a glimpse of the searing holiness, the awful majesty of Almighty God, and it left them in dread. And so here in chapter 24, the people who worship the Lord, they have to stay back. They can’t come near. The elders of Israel, they can’t come too near. Only Moses, the mediator could go near to God because of his holiness, his majesty that would consume them.

But praise God, this does not describe the way things are today when we worship the Lord through faith in Jesus Christ. No, God is still the same. He is still holy. He is as majestic as he ever was. But because you are covered with the blood of a better sacrifice, because the blood that has been sprinkled on you is not the blood of oxen and goats, but the blood of Jesus, you can draw near because you have a better mediator than Moses. You have Jesus. You can draw near. You can come as near to the Lord as Moses himself approached God on top of Mount Sinai.

Again, Hebrews tells us of this wonderful access that has been opened up for us to come to God by faith in Christ. Hebrews 10:21 and 22 says, since we have a great high priest over the house of God, let us draw near with a true heart in full assurance of faith with our hearts sprinkled clean from an evil conscience and our bodies washed with pure water. Let us draw near. Let us draw near. Hebrews also says in 4:16, let us then with confidence draw near to the throne of grace, that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need.

These are wonderful promises that you and I, we can come near to God without fear. It doesn’t matter what your past is. It doesn’t matter how sinful a life you have lived. It doesn’t matter how evil and wicked the sins that you have committed. By faith in Jesus Christ, you are covered with the blood that takes away all of your sins so you can come near to God. And it doesn’t matter, Christian, how you have stumbled recently and your struggle with sin. It doesn’t matter how you have failed because you are covered with the blood of Jesus Christ. And so you can draw near to Him, to your Father. You can come to Him with your desires, your fears, your prayers, and know that He will hear you. For the sake of Christ, God, your Father, He will give you mercy and grace to help in time of need. Let’s pray.

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The Old Testament reading is Exodus chapter 23, verses 20 to 32. And this is God’s inerrant, his infallible, his inspired word. Behold, I send an angel before you to guard you on the way and to bring you to the place that I have prepared. Pay careful attention to him and obey his voice. Do not rebel against him for he will not pardon your transgression for my name is in him. But if you carefully obey his voice and do all that I say, then I will be an enemy to your enemies and an adversary to your adversaries.

When my angel goes before you and brings you to the Amorites and the Hittites and the Perizzites and the Canaanites, the Hivites and the Jebusites, and I blot them out, you shall not bow down to their gods nor serve them, nor do as they do, but you shall utterly overthrow them and break their pillars in pieces. You shall serve the Lord your God, and He will bless your bread and your water, and I will take sickness away from among you. None shall miscarry or be barren in your land. I will fulfill the number of your days. I will send my terror before you and will throw into confusion all the people against whom you shall come, and I will make all your enemies turn their backs to you. And I will send hornets before you, which shall drive out the Hivites, the Canaanites and the Hittites from before you.

I will not drive them out from before you in one year, lest the land become desolate and the wild beasts multiply against you. Little by little, I will drive them out from before you until you have increased and possess the land. And I will set your border from the Red Sea to the Sea of the Philistines, and from the wilderness to the Euphrates. For I will give the inhabitants of the land into your hand, and you shall drive them out from before you. You shall make no covenant with them and their gods. They shall not dwell in your land, lest they make you sin against me. For if you serve their gods, it will surely be a snare to you.

And our New Testament reading is John chapter 14, verses one through seven. Let not your hearts be troubled. Believe in God, believe also in me. In my Father’s house are many rooms. If it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you? And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to myself and where I am, you may be also. And you know the way to where I am going. Thomas said to him, Lord, we do not know where you are going. How can we know the way? Jesus said to him, I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the father except through me. If you had known me, you would have known my father also. From now on, you do know him and have seen him. The grass withers, the flower fades, but the word of our God will stand forever.

You have all heard the saying, it’s not the destination that matters, but the journey. And sometimes that is true. But that was probably not what the Israelites wanted to hear as they set out on their wilderness journey to the promised land. For the Israelites, it was all about the destination and not about the journey. It was about the destination that God had promised to bring them to. That is, the promised land. He would bring them through the wilderness into a land flowing with milk and honey.

This was the promise that God made to Abraham, that his descendants would inherit this land. This was the promise that God made to Moses when the Lord appeared to him from the burning bush and told him that he would be the one who would lead his people out of Egypt and into the land of promise. And in this passage, the Lord makes this promise again as he speaks to Moses, who will relay these words to the people of Israel. And so for the Israelites, what made their journey meaningful, what made it a journey worth making was the destination. It was the promised land. That was their hope. That was the promise, the gift that the Lord had given to them.

And as a Christian, your hope as well is in the destination that God has prepared for you at the end of your earthly journey. And that is the true promised land, the heavenly promised land, the new heavens, the new earth, that eternal glory that God has in store for you as one whom he has redeemed through his son, Jesus. In our passage in verse 20, the Lord speaks of the place that I have prepared. And we heard from our New Testament reading that when Jesus spoke to his disciples, he also spoke to them of a place that he would prepare.

Jesus says in John 14, in my father’s house are many rooms. If it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you? And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to myself that where I am, you may be also. So Jesus also promised his disciples that there was a place he was preparing for them. Just as the Lord here prepared the promised land for the Israelites, so Jesus, in his resurrection from the dead, he was, after his resurrection, he was taken up into glory to the right hand of the Father in heaven. And there he is preparing an eternal home for his followers.

Since God’s promise to the Israelites that we read in this passage from Exodus is a type of that greater promise that Christ has made to us of our heavenly home, we can read this passage in Exodus and take some lessons from it about the promise that Christ has made to us of heaven.

And the first lesson is this, that God gives his promise of heaven to a people that he has already saved. So let’s remember, remind ourselves of when and where the Lord spoke these words to Moses. So the Lord is speaking to Moses. Moses is on Mount Sinai. They’re in the wilderness. This is after God has brought his people out from their bondage to Pharaoh, out of the miserable existence that they were living in Egypt.

But even before the Lord had brought them out of Egypt, the Lord had made the Israelites his people, his special people. He entered into a covenant with them. He promised the people of Israel and no other people on earth, but he promised the people of Israel that he would be their God, they would be his people. And so at this point, God has already chosen his people. He’s already made them his own. He’s already saved them from their plight in Egypt. And so now God is making these promises to a redeemed people, to a people that he has already saved and to whom, or whom he has already called to himself.

Of all the nations in the world, only Israel was bound for the promised land. And that was entirely because of the grace of God, that God loved them. And God loved them not because of how great and mighty a nation they were. God did not love his people Israel because of how righteous and godly they were, but God loved them simply because it was his good pleasure to set his love upon them. It sounds redundant, but God loved his people simply because he loved them.

And the point for us here is this, that God gives the hope and the promise of heaven, the promise of resurrection life and a new creation only to those whom he has delivered from their bondage to sin and death. When we read the book of Exodus, we must always keep in mind that the salvation that the Lord accomplished for the Israelites from Egypt is a picture or a type of the greater salvation that God has accomplished for us in his son, Jesus Christ.

And how did God accomplish that salvation for us in his son, Jesus? It was through the incarnation, the eternal son of God, who was very God, who is very God. He himself took on a human nature. He became man in his incarnation. He lived a life as man, a life of perfect obedience to the will of his father. He died the cursed death of the cross as man, as a substitute for you and me as sinners. He was raised to new life from the grave so that all who come to Jesus Christ by faith are delivered from their bondage, not bondage to the physical slavery like the Israelites were under in Egypt, but bondage to the slavery of sin.

And for those who repent of their sin by God’s grace, for those who put their faith in the Lord Jesus Christ, God promises to bring them into his glorious and gracious presence forever and ever in the life that is to come. This is the promise of heaven. But this promise of heaven belongs to Christians, to those who have been redeemed through the blood of Jesus Christ, by the grace of God. It’s been said that not everybody who’s talking about heaven is going to go to heaven. And we could also say that not everybody who would like to go to heaven is necessarily going to end up in heaven. But only those who have come to Jesus Christ by faith, only those who have submitted to him as their Lord, who have repented of their sin, have this promise and hope of heaven.

Well, how about you? Have you trusted in the Lord Jesus Christ? Have you repented of your sin? Have you come to Jesus as the only one who can save you? If so, then know that by God’s grace, this promise is for you. This promise of eternal life, life in a new heavens, a new earth, life with Christ forever and ever, that this is yours. This promise is for you. You have a promised land. It’s not the land of Canaan, but one that is infinitely greater. You have the promise of a resurrection body, a resurrection body that will be raised from the grave, immortal, imperishable, free from sickness and the ravages of disease, free from death, decay forever. But this promise of everlasting glory, this promise of eternal life, it is only for those whom God has redeemed through his son, Jesus Christ, whom he has brought to himself.

And so God makes his promise of heaven then to a people that he has already saved. And this brings us to the second lesson, which I’ve already given it away. But the second lesson is this, that God will fulfill his promise through his son. God will fulfill his promise through his son. So in verse 20, the Lord says to Moses, behold, I send an angel before you to guard you on the way and bring you to the place that I have prepared. And so this is a true guardian angel, the angel who would watch over the Israelites, who would protect them, guard them on their way to the promised land, who would drive out the inhabitants before the people of Israel.

This isn’t the first time that we’ve seen the book of Exodus, the angel of the Lord. He also appeared to Moses at the burning bush back in Exodus chapter three, we read this, and the angel of the Lord appeared to him, that is Moses, in a flame of fire out of the midst of a bush. He looked and behold, the bush was burning, yet it was not consumed. And so we’ve already seen this angel of the Lord. And just like when the angel of the Lord appeared to Moses at the burning bush, so here too, this angel is identified with the Lord himself.

The Lord says in verse 21 in this passage, our passage in chapter 23, the Lord says, my name is in him. My name is in him. The name of God represents the character of God, the person of God, his power and so on. And so for the Lord to say that my name is in the angel means that he has fully invested the angel with his own divine power and glory. And so what the angel says, the Lord says. What the angel does, the Lord does.

And whereas in verse 20, God speaks of the angel bringing the Israelites into the promised land and fighting for his people, later in the passage in verses 27 and 28, the Lord speaks of himself as driving out the inhabitants of Canaan, leading his people into the promised land. Look at verses 27 and 28. No longer does he speak of the angel, but he says, I, I will send my terror before you, and will throw into confusion all the people against whom you shall come, and I will make all your enemies turn their backs to you. Verse 28, and I will send hornets before you, which will drive out the Hivites, the Canaanites, and the Hittites from before you.

Now hold that thought for a minute. You might be thinking, what are these hornets that are spoken of in verse 28? I’m wondering the same thing myself, to be honest. Nobody knows exactly what these hornets are. It could be a literal thing. The Lord perhaps sent actual hornets into the desert armies of the Canaanites to cause them to panic and to flee. They could represent perhaps some kind of even a human army, maybe even an angelic army. We just don’t know. It was some kind of assault against the inhabitants of Canaan.

But whatever the hornets were, the larger point is this, that the angel of the Lord is at the same time equated with the Lord himself, and he is somehow distinct from the Lord. And so the Lord speaks of the angel as if he is a different person, but he also so closely identifies himself with the angel that he speaks of what he is doing in the first person. And when we read this in the light of all that the New Testament has revealed to us about God, we are on very safe grounds to say that the angel of the Lord is none other than the Lord himself. It is the second person of the Trinity, the son of God. We have here a revelation of the pre-incarnate Christ and the angel of the Lord.

Jesus, he is God in the flesh. God’s name is in Jesus just as it was in the angel, and just as it was the son of God who led the Israelites into the promised land, so it is Jesus, it is Christ who leads us into the greater promised land. And one thing that this means for you as a believer in Christ is that your eternal destiny, this promise that God has given to you of glory in the life to come, this depends upon or is in the hands of a sovereign and faithful savior. Just as no human enemy or any kind of enemy could have overcome the Lord in driving out the inhabitants of Canaan, no enemy could have stopped the Lord from bringing his people into the promised land because the angel of the Lord fought for his people.

There is no enemy that will hinder Christ from bringing you into that eternal glory that the Father has prepared for you. And so you can be assured that just as Jesus has led you out of bondage to sin, out of darkness and death, and just as he has already brought you in Christ into the kingdom, so he will most certainly bring you into that final and consummate glory that awaits you. You have that assurance that there is no enemy who can separate you from God’s will for you, from the love of Christ that he has for you, or for God’s love for you in Christ. Philippians 1:6 says, and I am sure of this, that he who began a good work in you will bring it to completion at the day of Jesus Christ.

And so as a believer, your eternal destiny is assured, it is secure because of the one who fights for you, because of the one who is for you, that is Jesus Christ. And we need to remember this when we go through trials and struggles in this life. We get so easily discouraged, downcast, anxious over the trials and afflictions and the frustrations of this life. And this is not to diminish at all the very real suffering and pain that we experience in this world. But what are the things that afflict us in this life? What are they from the perspective of eternity? Well, they are nothing. They are nothing because they cannot keep us from that inheritance that is ours in the Lord Jesus Christ.

Just as for the Israelites, whatever trials and struggles that they would experience in the wilderness, they were nothing compared to the blessedness that God had promised them that awaits them in the promised land. In the same way, the apostle Paul says of us as believers, for this light momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison. Because we have a savior who has promised to bring us into our heavenly home, we can bear up under whatever afflictions, whatever suffering that we have in this life, knowing that this is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory. That what we experience now is not to be compared with that glory that will be ours in heaven one day. And God will fulfill all of this through his son, Jesus Christ.

The third lesson is this, with his promise, God gives us a command for obedience. So right after the Lord in this passage, after he promises that he will bring them into the promised land, He gives them this command. He says in verses 21 and 22, he says, pay careful attention to him and obey his voice. Do not rebel against him for he will not pardon your transgressions for my name is in him. But if you carefully obey his voice and do all that I say, then I will be an enemy to your enemies and an adversary to your adversaries.

And so the Lord commands His people that they must obey. And as they obey, He will fulfill His promises to them to bring them into the promised land. Later, He is more specific about what that obedience entails. In verse 24, He tells them that they are not to commit idolatry. Specifically, they are not to bow down or worship the gods of the Canaanites. In fact, they were to destroy all the objects of the Canaanite worship. In verse 32, likewise, he says that the Israelites were not to make a covenant with the people or with their gods. Why is that? Because friendship with the people of Canaan would inevitably lead to friendship with their gods and worship with their gods. Instead, they were to destroy both the people and their gods.

And the reason, and this is one of the difficult teachings of scripture, that the Lord commanded his people to destroy the Canaanites. Here he speaks of driving them out, but we know from other scripture that what that meant was destroying the people of Canaan. But the reason why God commanded his people to destroy the Canaanites was not because God is somehow some kind of intolerant, murderous dictator. Rather, the people of Canaan were to be destroyed because of the fact that God is holy. He is just. He is righteous. And the people of Canaan were under the righteous condemnation, the righteous judgment of God for their own sin, their own iniquity.

Back in Genesis chapter 15, when God told Abraham that he and his offspring would possess the land of Canaan, he said that they would not inherit the land until the iniquity of the Amorites was complete. In other words, it was the sin of the Canaanites. It was the sin of the Perizzites, the sin of the Hittites, the sin of all the other “ites” who lived in Canaan that brought upon them the destruction at the hands of the Israelites. And so the conquest of the promised land, this was not some instance of genocide or mass murder, but it was God carrying out his just and righteous judgment against a people that brought that upon themselves because of their own sin and iniquity.

So the Israelites were to obey the Lord in all these ways. They were to drive out the people. They were to destroy all their gods. And as they did, as they obeyed the Lord, as they kept his commandments, they would come to possess the entirety of the land of promise. And so we could put it this way. The land was a gift of God’s grace. Yes, the land was a gift purely of grace. However, the way for the Israelites to come into full possession of the land was the way of obedience, of faithfulness, of keeping his word. Now, we can also say that insofar as the Israelites were obedient and faithful to keep the word of God, that too was the result of God’s grace at work in them. But this is the way that the Lord led his people into their inheritance, only as they were faithful to keep his commandments.

And the same is true for you as a Christian as well. Salvation for you and me as believers in Christ is all of grace. From beginning to end, salvation belongs to the Lord. When we come into heaven, the only thing that we’re going to be able to say then is, I don’t belong here, this is all by the grace of God. This is all by the grace of God. There is nothing I contributed, no work that I did, nothing that I merited, that I deserve to be in this glorious place forever and ever. It is all by God’s grace and we’ll have all eternity to thank and praise God for that grace.

But the way in which God graciously leads us to that promised heaven is the way of obedience, the way of righteousness, the way of keeping God’s commandments. Hebrews 12:14 says, strive for peace with everyone and for the holiness without which no one will see the Lord. Ephesians 5:5, for you may be sure of this, that everyone who is sexually immoral or impure or who is covetous, that is an idolater, has no inheritance in the kingdom of Christ and of God.

This truth of the nature of the Christian life is that salvation is a gift of God and yet we inherit that salvation as God graciously brings us along the path of obedience. This is so wonderfully illustrated for us in John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress. You remember that Christian is saved. Christian is the hero of Pilgrim’s Progress. He is saved from the city of destruction. He is on a journey throughout the book to his destination, the celestial city. But there is a long and arduous journey between those two places. A journey in which Christian must persevere through all kinds of challenges and difficulties. He must remain faithful to the one who was called in the book, the Lord of the place, that is the God of the celestial city.

And so Christian, you’ll remember, he goes through all of these trials and tribulations. He goes through the Slough of Despond, the Hill Difficulty, the Valley of Humiliation, his hand-to-hand combat with Apollyon. He goes through the Valley of the Shadow of Death. He goes through Vanity Fair, Doubting Castle, and so on. And along the way, Christian’s faith, his obedience was tested. And sometimes by faith he was successful, but other times he stumbled and he failed and he temporarily lost his way. But he never completely fell away from the path as others did in the book. God in his grace kept him in the way, but that way was the way of obedience, of keeping God’s commandments.

And notice that the obedience that God demands here, that he demands of the people of Israel, that this is not 75% obedience, it’s not 95% obedience, but God demands 100% obedience. Look at verse 24. He says, you shall not bow down to their gods nor serve them, nor do as they do, but you shall utterly overthrow them and break their pillars in pieces. And then he says, look at verses 32 and 33, you shall make no covenant with them and their gods. They shall not dwell in your land, lest they make you sin against me. For if you serve their gods, it will surely be a snare to you.

And so the Lord does not give the Israelites some wiggle room where they can mainly obey the Lord, but also have a little space for dallying with the worship of these Canaanite gods. No, they were to utterly destroy their gods. There was no place for compromise. They had to be destroyed completely. And what this means for you as a believer in Christ is this, that you must put sin to death. You must destroy it. You must not let it live. You must not make room for it in your life.

If the Israelites, think about it, if the Israelites had merely taken all these Canaanite gods and put them into a storage unit for safekeeping, at some point, you know that they inevitably would have taken those gods out and they would have started worshiping them. They would have been a snare to them. That’s why they had to destroy them, to put them to death. And in the same way, if you make room in your heart to secretly cherish any hidden sin, rather than putting that sin to death where it begins, in your heart—if you do not put it to death, that sin will grow and grow. It will eventually break out from your heart. It will emerge in your life. If it is unchecked, if it is not put to death, it will eventually overcome you and destroy you.

When it comes to sin, it is the law of the jungle. Kill or be killed. The Puritan John Owen put it this way, be killing sin or sin will be killing you. For the Israelites, the only hope that they had to remain faithful to the Lord was to completely demolish the idols of the land. And the only way for you to remain faithful to Jesus Christ is to destroy sin, to put sin to death, to not let it live. As soon as you identify and see it in your life, put it to death by the Holy Spirit, by the grace of God. Otherwise it continues to grow until it kills you. Romans 8:13 says, for if you live according to the flesh, you will die. But if by the spirit you put to death the deeds of the body, you will live.

And according to what the Lord says here, the Israelites would be blessed or cursed according to their obedience. If the Israelites went on to be as faithful to the Lord as they should have been to keep his commandments in the promised land, the life in Israel would have been the closest thing that the world has ever seen to heaven on earth. Because God promises here that he would bless them beyond measure in that place if they were faithful. They would not have known hunger or thirst. God would have kept them from sickness. Their women would not have miscarried or been barren. Everyone would have enjoyed a long and healthy life.

Now, when we hear these promises as Christians today, we cannot directly apply them to us, to the church. God does not give us the promise that if we are faithful to Christ, that he will bless us with good health, a long and prosperous life, with freedom from disease or barrenness and all of that. These were promises specifically for the Israelites at this time, but they do point to a greater truth, and that is this, that there is blessing in obedience. When we genuinely seek the Lord from the heart, we will find blessing in this.

Of course, to seek the Lord is the work of God’s grace, but when by grace we seek Him, there is blessing in this, but the blessings are spiritual. They are blessings enjoyed in the hearts. They are the blessings that include, among other things, the assurance of the love of God, the peace that surpasses understanding, a true joy, true contentment in the Holy Spirit. These are the kind of blessings that God gives us as we seek Him by faith; He blesses that obedience. In Psalm 19, in speaking of God’s commandments, David says, in keeping them, there is great reward.

The other side of the coin is that the Lord also warned the Israelites here that if they failed to keep God’s commandments, if they were disobedient to his word, that they would experience not blessing, but cursing. And in other places of the Old Testament, the Lord spells out in much, much more detail exactly what those curses would look like if the Israelites were not faithful in the promised land. But here he alludes to them. He says in verse 21, do not rebel against him for he will not pardon your transgression. Verse 33, for if you serve their gods, it will surely be a snare to you.

But notice here that the greatest threat facing the Israelites at this time, when it came to the Canaanites, the people that inhabited the land, the greatest threat was not their military might, was not their power. God would take care of that. But the greatest threat that the Israelites faced was the spiritual influence that the Canaanites would have upon them if they did not destroy them and their idols. And in the same way, the greatest dangers that we face, they’re not usually the things that we fear the most.

What do we fear the most in this life? We fear a personal tragedy or a tragedy in the family. We fear a disease. We fear sudden financial hardship, poverty. We fear being the victim of a crime. We fear all these things, but these are not the greatest threats to our well-being. These are not the greatest threats to our soul. But the greatest threats that face us are sin, temptation, hardness of heart, unbelief. These are the things that we should fear and be on guard against and protect ourselves from. Just like the Israelites, their greatest threat was the spiritual influence that the Canaanites might have against them.

Now, as we hear what God said to the people of Israel on the cusp—well, actually, we haven’t read it yet, but it’s going to be 40 years of wilderness wanderings before they can go into the promised land. But here, they seem to be on the cusp of entering the promised land. But as Paul Harvey would say—if you don’t know who Paul Harvey is, ask somebody in their 50s and they’ll fill you in—but Paul Harvey would say, and now for the rest of the story.

God did bring his people into the land of Israel or the land of Canaan, as he promised. However, the people of Israel were not faithful. They were not obedient. They did exactly what they were not supposed to do. They did not destroy all the gods of the Canaanites. Instead, they started to worship the gods of the Canaanites. And that worship was wicked, it was evil, not only because in itself it was idolatrous, but also because it involved other evils, such as child sacrifice.

In Psalm 106, the psalmist describes the rest of the story. What happened when Israel came into the promised land. It is not a pretty picture. Let me read Psalm 106. They did not destroy the peoples as the Lord commanded them, but they mixed with the nations and learned to do as they did. They served their idols, which became a snare to them. They sacrificed their sons and their daughters to the demons. They poured out innocent blood, the blood of their sons and daughters whom they sacrificed to the idols of Canaan. And the land was polluted with blood. Thus they became unclean by their acts and played the whore in their deeds.

And so the Lord ultimately would cast his people out of the land of Canaan because of their disobedience, their faithlessness. But the good news for you and me as Christians is this, that when God brings you and me into that heavenly glory that he has promised us, when he brings us into the promised land that he is preparing for us, that is heaven, he will at the same time so transform and change you and me that there will no longer be any possibility for us to sin against God.

In the case of the Israelites, they sinned their way out of the promised land, but you and I will never sin our way out of heaven. And the reason for that is because in our resurrection, God will so transform us. He will so constitute us that every thought of our hearts, every inclination of our minds, every word, every action, all that we do will only be righteousness and holiness and obedience and worship. Just as before you came to know Christ, just as then in your sin, you could not do anything righteous and good and holy because you were in a state of sin, so in the state of glory, the opposite will be the case. You will not be able to do anything that is unrighteous or unholy or sinful against God. You will not be capable of it.

But until then, God calls you and me to pursue with all our hearts a life of righteousness, obedience, and Christ-likeness. And as you do so by his grace, he is preparing you for the heaven that he has in store for you.

And that brings us to our fourth lesson, our final lesson. God fulfills his promise little by little. One thing that stands out in this passage, one thing that strikes us when we read it, is that the Lord promises the people of Israel that the conquest would not be all of a sudden, but it would be gradual, little by little. And so in verses 29 and 30, we read, I will not drive them out from before you in one year, lest the land become desolate and the wild beasts multiply against you. Little by little, I will drive them out from before you until you have increased and possessed the land.

Now here, comparison—when we use the Israelites as a type of our entering into the promised land of heaven—here the comparison breaks down a little bit because when God brings us into the fullness of that glory of the life to come that he has promised us, it will not be gradual at all. We will be brought into glory and the fullness of that glory forever and ever. However, in this life now, insofar as God is at work in you, insofar as He is making you fit for that glory, the process of sanctification, that is little by little. It is gradual. It is not all at once.

And sometimes that’s hard for us to accept. We want to be made perfect now. We want to be brought into glory now. Have you ever wanted to be just like Enoch or Elijah and just have God come down and swoop you up and take you directly to heaven? Kind of like in Star Trek, how Scotty would beam up his friends back to the starship. Salvation is not a “beam me up Scotty” affair. Rather, it is the gradual work of God’s spirit as He makes you more and more fit, more and more ready for that place that God is preparing for you, a place of righteousness, holiness, purity, a place where Christ is enthroned and worshiped continually, that place where there are saints—the saints are made perfect in love and holiness.

God is preparing you for that in this life, and He prepares you for that little by little. Before he brings you into heaven, God, by his spirit and grace, little by little, gradually, he’s putting a little bit more of heaven into you. And this is where the journey does matter. This is where our lives are meaningful and significant because God is at work in us, preparing us for that greater life that is to come. But even still, it’s only important because the destination is so grand and glorious.

When you read in the Pilgrim’s Progress, that’s wonderful, the last few pages, when Christian is crossing with his friend the river that symbolizes his own death, and on the other side of the river is the celestial city, and he comes to the shores on the other side, and he’s welcomed by angels, and he sees the glories of that celestial city, and you read that, and you think, he made it, and it was all worth it. You think back to all that he endured, and you say, it’s all worth it. He’s made it to his destination.

And in the same way, when you and I are brought into the eternal rest and glory that Christ is preparing for us, we will think it was all worth it. It was more than worth it. All that we endured was worth it because of this glorious place where God has brought us. The struggle against sin, the suffering, the sorrow, the sacrifice and tears, all that you have endured, your toil for the sake of Christ, it will all be worth it and more.

Now, as we read ahead in the Old Testament, we’ll see that—or you see as you read on past Exodus—that God brought to fulfillment what he promised the Israelites. Of course, this promise of no disease and no barrenness and all of that, the Israelites, they weren’t faithful. They didn’t receive that promise, but God brought them into the promised land. It was 400 years later that the boundaries of the promised land looked something like they’re described here under the reigns of David and Solomon, that God was faithful to his people.

So many times his people sinned against him. So many times they failed him. So many times they committed idolatry and were disobedient. Nevertheless, God was faithful. He fulfilled his promises. And he will fulfill the promise that he has made to you and his son, Jesus Christ. He will fulfill that promise ultimately on the basis of the obedience of Jesus himself, which is counted as your own. And on that day, on that day of salvation, you and I will know in fullness what we only experience in part here in this life. You and I will know that unspeakable blessedness of joy and peace of being with Jesus Christ and his new creation forever. That is the hope that God has given us in his word. Let’s pray.

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Our Old Testament reading is Exodus chapter 23, verses 10 through 19. Exodus 23, 10 through 19, and this is the holy word of our Lord.

For six years you shall sow your land and gather in its yield, but the seventh year you shall let it rest and lie fallow, that the poor of your people may eat, and what they leave the beasts of the field may eat. You shall do likewise with your vineyard and with your olive orchard. Six days you shall do your work, but on the seventh day you shall rest, that your ox and your donkey may have rest, and the son of your servant woman and the alien may be refreshed. Pay attention to all that I’ve said to you and make no mention of the names of other gods, nor let it be heard on your lips.

Three times in the year you shall keep a feast to me. You shall keep the feast of unleavened bread. As I commanded you, you shall eat unleavened bread for seven days at the appointed time in the month of Abib. For in it you came out of Egypt. None shall appear before me empty-handed. You shall keep the feast of harvest, or the firstfruits, or of the firstfruits of your labor, of what you sow in the field. You shall keep the feast of ingathering at the end of the year, when you gather in from the field the fruit of your labor. Three times in the year shall all your males appear before the Lord God.

You shall not offer the blood of my sacrifice with anything leaven or let the fat of my feast remain until the morning. The best of the first fruits of your ground you shall bring into the house of the Lord your God. You shall not boil a young goat in its mother’s milk.

Let’s turn now to Romans chapter 12 for our New Testament reading. Romans 12 verses one and two. Romans 12, one and two.

I appeal to you therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship. Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect.

The grass withers, the flower fades, but the word of our God will stand forever.

If you watched any of the Winter Olympics that were on a few weeks ago, I’m sure that you couldn’t help but being impressed by the talents and the skills of the athletes that were competing in their various events. Those athletes, they are truly the best of the best. But maybe the most impressive thing about those athletes is what we don’t see, what isn’t broadcast, and that is the hours and hours and hours of training each day that they put in for years and years on end.

If you’re going to be an Olympic athlete, if you’re going to be an athlete at that elite level, you must be extremely devoted to the training, the preparation that it takes to reach that level of success in any given sport. And that kind of devotion on the part of athletes to their sport is a picture in some ways of the sort of devotion that God calls you as a Christian to give or to devote yourself to God.

You are to devote yourself to Him in service, in worship, in obedience, not just a few hours each day, not just a few days each week, but every day, all the time, you are to give yourself, to consecrate yourself to serving the Lord, to worshiping Him, seeking Him, loving Him. And so Christ calls you not just to devote part of your life to Him, but you are to consecrate the entirety of your life to your Savior and Lord.

This has always been the standard that God has set for his people. He has always demanded their wholehearted obedience, devotion, worship, their complete and unreserved consecration to Him. God wants all of us, not just part of us.

In these verses that we read from Exodus chapter 23, they give us a picture of the way in which the Lord called His Old Testament people, the people of Israel, to commit their lives to Him as their God and Savior. Again, as we are going through this section of Exodus, we are dealing with all kinds of various laws that the Lord gave to his people after he gave them the Ten Commandments. So we have seen various civil laws, judicial laws. These laws here mainly have to do with ceremonial duties on the part of the Israelites.

And as we look at these laws, one theme at least that we can use to tie these laws together—one common denominator that they have in common in our passage—is that they all, in one way or the other, they all call for the consecration of the people of God to the Lord. They call for their complete devotion to God. And so as we look at this passage this morning, we’ll see how the Lord called his people to be devoted to him in these different ways. And then we’ll see how Christ still speaks to us as Christians today through these laws and calling us to be completely devoted to him as our Lord and savior.

And so let’s just go through these laws and we’ll consider them somewhat briefly. In verses 10 and 11, the Lord commanded his people to give their land a rest every seventh year. And so they were to farm their lands for six years, but on the seventh year, they were to let their fields lie fallow. And they were to do the same with their vineyards and their olive orchards. And so this was a Sabbath for the land. This was a Sabbath rest for the land.

Just as the people of Israel were to rest one day each week, so the land also was to have a rest one year every seven years. And there could be, and no doubt there is, good agricultural reasons for doing this. If the fields lie fallow once every seven years, it gives them time to regain their fertility. But notice that in this passage, that’s not the reason why the Lord gave the Israelites that they were to give their land rest every seven years. But it was so that through this lack of cultivating the land once every seven years that the poor may have something to eat. And not only the poor, but that even the beasts of the field may have something to eat.

And so this is one way in which God would provide for his people, particularly the poor among his people. And so if the Israelites, if they trusted in God’s provision, if they trusted that the Lord would provide, even though they wouldn’t go out and work their fields that year, they would give their land a Sabbath rest, and they would see how the Lord would provide for them, especially for the poor among them.

And in the same way, the Lord called on his people to trust him for his provision when he commanded them to rest one day of the week, one day in seven. And so in verse 12, we have what is essentially a restatement of the fourth commandment, which we considered several weeks ago. The people were not to work on the Sabbath day, and that was so not only they could rest from their labors, but also that their servants could rest from their work, their animals could rest from their labors as well, that they could be refreshed and strengthened.

As the Israelites were faithful to keep this Sabbath commandment, they also in this way testified to their faith, their trust that the Lord would provide for them, that he would give them all that they need. They did not need to devote themselves entirely all seven days of the week to secure what they needed to survive, but they trusted that God would provide for them even by taking a day off one day in seven during the week. And so the Lord called on his people in these ways to dedicate themselves to him. They were to dedicate their land to him. He commanded them to devote their time to him. And as they did so, the Israelites would bear witness to the truth that God was faithful to provide. He was their great provider.

The Lord also called for the devotion of his people in observing the annual feasts that he had appointed for them. And that’s what we read about in verses 14 through 17. Every year, the people of Israel were to travel to Jerusalem three times in the year and to celebrate these annual feasts that are described for us.

And the first feast was the feast of unleavened bread. For seven days after the day of Passover, the Israelites were to eat unleavened bread. And this was a celebration, a commemoration of that great salvation that the Lord worked for his people in bringing them out of Egypt, bringing them out from under their bondage to Pharaoh. Verse 15 says, you shall keep the feast of unleavened bread. As I commanded you, you shall eat unleavened bread for seven days at the appointed time in the month of Abib, for in it you came out of Egypt. And they ate only unleavened bread in order to commemorate the fact that when the Lord brought them out of Egypt, they left in such a hurry that their bread did not have time to rise. And so they would eat unleavened bread to remember how the Lord rescued them from Egypt. And so it was an annual reminder for them, this feast of the salvation that the Lord gave them.

And this was another reason why the Israelites were to devote themselves to the Lord. He was not only their provider, but he was their savior. And therefore, he deserved the worship of the people of Israel, of all the people of Israel. He says in verse 15, none shall appear before me empty handed.

The second feast was the Feast of Harvest. Elsewhere in the New Testament or the Old Testament rather, the Feast of Harvest is called the Feast of Weeks. It took place about two months after the Feast of Unleavened Bread. And the occasion of the Feast of Harvest was to celebrate the beginning at least of the harvest of grain that they were beginning to reap from their fields. And so this was a celebration again of God’s provision. They brought the first fruits of their crops to the Lord as a way of offering.

Finally, the third feast was the Feast of Ingathering. This also has different names in the Old Testament. It’s called the Feast of Tabernacles or the Feast of Booths. And this took place several months after the Feast of Harvest. This took place in the fall. And the occasion for the Feast of Ingathering was to celebrate the ingathering of all the different crops in Israel before the onset of winter. And so grain, olives and grapes, they had all been brought in from the fields. And so as they celebrated this feast at the end of all the harvests, they were giving praise to God for his provision again.

But this was also a feast to remember their salvation from Egypt. In Leviticus, we read that the Israelites during the feast of ingathering, that they were to live in tents or in booths for seven days. And this was to remind them of their salvation from Egypt because when they were delivered from the land of Egypt and in the wilderness, they lived in tabernacles or in booths.

And so the Lord commanded then his people to observe these three yearly times of feasting and worshiping. When you look at verse 17, it seems to suggest that only the male Israelites would participate in these festivals. But when we compare other verses from the Old Testament that we won’t look at, it’s apparent that it was normal, perhaps even expected, that whole families would join in as well in celebrating these festivals. And so these festivals were for the people of Israel in general; for them as a nation, as a people, they were to observe these times of feasting and worshiping. And in this way, they would dedicate themselves to their God, to the Lord, who was both the one who provided for them, who cared for them, but he was also their redeemer, their savior.

When we look at the rest of these laws in this passage, again, the common theme running through them is the Israelites’ devotion to the Lord. And it goes on to speak of their worship. In verse 18, we read that the Israelites were not to mix the blood of their sacrifice with anything leavened, and they were not to let the fat of the Lord’s feast remain until the morning. The fat was the best part of the meat, and it was considered the best part of the meat in those days. I don’t know if that’s what you think the best part of the meat is, but it was to be given to the Lord. All the fat was to be burned up on the altar. So if the Israelites waited until the morning to burn up the fat on the altar, they were sinfully withholding from the Lord what belonged to Him. And so it was not to be put off until the morning.

Verse 19 says that the best of the first fruits of your ground, you shall bring it to the house of the Lord, your God. And so whenever the Israelites were to bring the first fruits of their crops to the Lord, they were to bring the very best of their crops, the very best of their first fruits, because it was God whom they were worshiping and he was deserving of their best.

When you go to the grocery store to buy fruits or vegetables, you look over what they have, and you pick over what’s there, and you choose the best looking oranges or apples, and then you let the rest of the customers take whatever rejects that you left behind. Well, the Israelites, they were supposed to do something like that, only they were to pick out the very best of their produce, not for themselves, but for God. And so in that way, they were to devote what they had to the Lord.

Finally, there is in the second half of verse 19, a rather strange verse. You shall not boil a young goat in its mother’s milk. This is one of those verses sometimes you read in the Old Testament, especially in these law sections that seem to come out of nowhere. There’s no explanation attached to it. Just be sure you don’t let your pastor see you boiling a goat in its mother’s milk. There will be trouble.

But most likely, this verse is an expression of God’s concern, even for animals. Again, people don’t really know why this law is here. There’s some guesses, and this is as good as a guess as any, but it would be a very cruel thing, a very perverse thing to take the milk of a mother, the mother of a young goat, the milk that is supposed to nourish and sustain the life of her offspring, to use that very milk to boil the flesh of her young. And so evidently this was a practice that needed to be forbidden, prohibited. And so the Lord prohibited the Israelites from doing this.

In the middle of all these laws in verse 13, which comes in the middle of these laws, is kind of a summary of what the Lord is communicating to his people. And that is this: they were to be wholly consecrated to the Lord. They were not to pay attention to any other God or idol. Verse 13 says, pay attention to all that I have said to you. So the Israelites were commanded to obey everything that God had spoken to them. Make no mention of the names of other gods, nor let it be heard on your lips.

And so when you consider these laws, especially when you consider them in addition to all of the other laws that we’ve already considered in the last few weeks, it’s obvious that the law that God gave to his people, these various commandments, that they would impact every aspect of their lives. And so it was a reminder to them that they were not their own. They belong to the Lord.

And so their land—their land didn’t belong to them to be used however they saw fit. It wasn’t simply for them to make a profit, but they had to manage it according to the law of God. The Israelites were not free to schedule their time any way they wished, but they had to attend these annual feasts. They had to keep the Sabbath day, one day a week, holy for rest and worship. They certainly were not free in religious matters. They had to give themselves and worship in service to the Lord and only to the Lord. They could not mix the worship of the Lord with other gods, other idols, but they were to worship him according to his word as he commanded.

And so everything in the life of the Israelite—his time, his land, his wealth—it was all to be wholly consecrated to God. And they were to be wholly devoted to the Lord because of who he was, because he was the God who loved them, who cared for them, who provided for them, and who rescued them, who saved them from Egypt and from their bondage to Egypt and Pharaoh.

In fact, when we read these laws in the light of the New Testament, we see it’s evidence that the Lord was revealing to his people, the Israelites, that he was their savior, not just from their bondage to Pharaoh and Egypt. He was the one who provided for them, not just with what they needed for life in this world, but he revealed to them through these laws that the Lord was their savior from their bondage to a far greater enemy, that is their bondage to sin. And he was the one who had provided for them, not just what they needed for temporal life in this world, but the Lord was the one who provided what they needed for eternal life, for spiritual life.

And so the greatest blessings that God gave to his people in the old covenant, as well as the new, were not earthly blessings, temporal blessings, but they were spiritual, eternal. And so the land that the Lord would give the Israelites, that they were to farm a certain way, the land of Canaan, the land of promise, this land was just a shadow of the greater heavenly country that the Lord was preparing for his faithful people.

The Sabbath day, of course, it pointed back to their salvation from Egypt, but at the same time, it pointed ahead to the eternal Sabbath rest that God was preparing for his people. And insofar as these three annual feasts reminded the Israelites of their redemption from their bondage to Pharaoh, they also pointed the Israelites ahead to that greater salvation that the Lord was preparing for them, that he would accomplish for them through the Messiah, through the Christ, that is freedom from slavery to sin.

Insofar as these feasts were times to praise God for the provision of their daily bread, they would also be reminders to Israel that it was the Lord who not only provided their daily bread, their grain and wine and so on, but he also provided them spiritual bread. He provided them the spiritual sustenance of his word and promises. And so in Deuteronomy 8:3, the Lord declared to Israel that it was his will that they would know that man does not live by bread alone, but man lives by every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord.

And we can go on. The blood of the sacrifices of the Israelites, that they were not to mix with leaven. This was the blood that pointed them to the blood of that one perfect sacrifice that was to come that would take away their sin forever. And it is as we stand where we are after the coming of Christ, we can look back and we can see it was Jesus Christ. It was the Messiah who fulfilled all of these promises that were implied in these laws and in these feasts.

He is the true spiritual bread. Jesus said, I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me shall not hunger. Whoever believes in me shall never thirst. And just as the Passover lamb pointed to Christ, who is the lamb of God, who takes away the guilt of sin, so the leaven of the feast of unleavened bread pointed to the presence of sin in us, that we are to purge that sin, that we are to purge by the grace of God as the redeemed people of God. Paul says in 1 Corinthians, cleanse out the old leaven that you may be a new lump as you really are unleavened. For Christ, our Passover lamb has been sacrificed. Let us therefore celebrate the festival, not with the old leaven, the leaven of malice and evil, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth.

And again, we can go on and see how Christ fulfilled these laws and the promises implied in them. The Feast of Harvest was a day or the day that the New Testament calls Pentecost. And it was the day of Pentecost that the exalted Lord Jesus, that he poured out his spirit upon the church. And it was a celebration there, not just of the harvest from the fields, but it was the beginning of a far greater harvest, the harvest of redeemed people, redeemed by Christ, converted by the Spirit, brought into the kingdom—a great harvest of souls began on that day.

Also, just as the firstfruits of the Feast of Harvest were a sign of a greater harvest to come, so the Lord Jesus in His resurrection is called in 1 Corinthians the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep. And so Jesus, as the first fruits of those who have fallen asleep, that points again ahead to a great spiritual harvest, the harvest of countless resurrected souls, resurrected saints who will come to new life at the return of Christ.

Verse 18 speaks of the blood of my sacrifice. All the blood of the sacrifices that the Israelites offered to the Lord pointed to the shed blood of Christ that cleanses us from sin and frees us from all guilt and condemnation. And so in one way or another, these laws and these feasts, they reveal to the Israelites the greater salvation that was to come with the coming of Christ, the greater provision of spiritual blessings, eternal blessings that God had in store for his people.

And the salvation from bondage to sin and death, the gift of eternal life—these realities that these laws and these commandments pointed to and these festivals pointed to—these are now yours in fullness by faith in Jesus Christ, the Son of God. As you come to Him by faith, as you hold fast to the Lord Jesus Christ by faith, these promises are yours; your sins are forgiven. You have been freed from the bondage of sin. You have been freed from the bondage to sin and guilt and death forever. You have Jesus, the bread of life, who gives you eternal life, who sustains you in that life.

And so Jesus Christ is your great savior. He is your great provider. And for that reason, just as the Lord called the Israelites then to devote themselves, to give themselves in obedience and service and worship to the Lord who was their savior, so you are called to that same kind of complete, unreserved, wholehearted devotion and consecration to Jesus Christ because of the work of salvation that he has accomplished for you.

And that’s what we read in the New Testament reading in Romans chapter 12. If you remember when we went through the book of Romans, the first 11 chapters of Romans, in Romans, Paul unpacks the gospel and all of its different aspects of that grace that God has given to us in Jesus Christ. And then beginning with chapter 12, verse one, Paul says this: he says, I appeal to you brothers by the mercies of God to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship.

As Christians, we are called to consecrate ourselves, our bodies, to the Lord in worship as a sacrifice. And your bodies here means all that you are. Body and soul, you are to offer to God as a sacrifice. And so unlike the Israelites, you don’t bring to the Lord sacrifices of grain or of animals, but you bring to the Lord your body, your heart, your mind, your will, all that you have, all that you are, you bring to the Lord as a living sacrifice. That is the worship, the life to which God calls you as one whom he has redeemed from sin and death.

At our men’s fellowship meetings, we are working through a book by John Calvin, and John Calvin had a motto, and his motto was this—his personal motto: “My heart I offer to you, Lord, promptly and sincerely.” And this should be the motto of every believer. My heart I offer to you, Lord, promptly and sincerely.

If someone saw your life, if someone examines the course of your life and was even able to examine your thoughts and your hearts, if he saw the priorities that you make, if he saw how you spend your time, how you use your money, if he saw how you relate to others, how you think of others, if he saw the things that you think about, the things that you delight in and treasure—if he saw your life, would he be able to say, here’s a life, here is the life of a person who is devoted to Christ, his savior. Here is the life of a person who has consecrated herself to her Lord, Jesus Christ.

The truth is none of us are as devoted to Jesus as wholly, as unreservedly as we should be. But we have the promise of God that by his spirit at work in us, by the word that he has given us, he will work in us to conform us more and more to the image of Jesus. He will make us more like that one man who gave himself, the one and only man who ever gave himself in complete, total, unreserved devotion to his God.

But the Spirit of God, as a believer, you have the Spirit of God abiding in you, living in you, working in you, to grow you to be more like Christ. None of us are there yet. But as God gives you the grace to trust in Him, as God gives you the grace to walk by faith, to serve and worship Him, He will make you more and more an instrument set apart and devoted to Him.

You may be familiar with the story of the famous Japanese dog named Hachiko. Hachiko was a dog in Japan, an Akita, if you’re familiar with that breed. He lived in the 20s and 30s, the 1920s and 30s. His owner was a professor at the University of Tokyo. And every afternoon when Hachiko’s owner got off at the train station on his way home from work, his dog Hachiko would be there waiting for him on the train platform. One day his owner didn’t get off the train and that’s because his owner died at work. He had a heart attack and died. And so Hachiko that day went home alone.

He showed up again the next day at the train station at the time that his master should have been getting off the train. But his master was not there to meet him. And so he went home again. And then he showed up the next day at the right time waiting for his master and he showed up for the next nine and a half years, every single day, waiting for his beloved master to get off the train. And he did that until the day he died.

It’s a wonderful story of loyalty and devotion to a master. And it’s an illustration in part of the kind of loyalty and devotion and steadfastness that Christ calls you and me to give to him. We are to wait day by day for him. We are to look to him as our master and savior, even though we do not yet see him.

The good news is that unlike Hachiko’s master, your master, the Lord Jesus Christ, he is coming back one day. He is not dead; he lives, and he has promised that he will return. And so you serve, you wait upon, you look to a living Savior and Lord who has promised that He is coming again to take you home to be with Him forever.

Until He comes, He sees your faithfulness to Him, and He promises that your labor for His sake is never in vain. And when He does return, He will say to those who have been faithful to wait for Him, to serve Him in His absence, He will say, “Well done, good and faithful servant, You have been faithful over a little. I will set you over much. Enter into the joy of your master.”

Let’s pray.

The post A Living Sacrifice appeared first on Mt. Rose OPC.

The Old Testament reading is Exodus chapter 22, verse 16, through chapter 23, verse nine. So let’s give our attention to God’s word. This is God’s inerrant, infallible, and holy word.

If a man seduces a virgin who is not betrothed and lies with her, he shall give the bride price for her and make her his wife. If her father utterly refuses to give her to him, he shall pay money equal to the bride price for virgins. You shall not permit a sorceress to live. Whoever lies with an animal shall be put to death. Whoever sacrifices to any God other than the Lord alone shall be devoted to destruction.

You shall not wrong a sojourner or oppress him for you are sojourners in the land of Egypt. You shall not mistreat any widow or fatherless child. If you do mistreat them and they cry out to me, I will surely hear their cry and my wrath will burn and I will kill you with the sword and your wives shall become widows and your children fatherless.

If you lend money to any of my people with you who is poor, you shall not be like a money lender to him and you shall not exact interest from him. If ever you take your neighbor’s cloak and pledge, you shall return it to him before the sun goes down, for that is his only covering, and it is his cloak for his body, and what else shall he sleep? And if he cries to me, I will hear, for I am compassionate.

You shall not revile God nor curse a ruler of your people. You shall not delay to offer from the fullness of your harvest and from the outflow of your presses. The firstborn of your sons you shall give to me. You shall do the same with your oxen and with your sheep. Seven days it shall be with its mother. On the eighth day, you shall give it to me. You shall be consecrated to me. Therefore, you shall not eat any flesh that is torn by beasts in the field. You shall throw it to the dogs.

You shall not spread a false report. You shall not join hands with a wicked man to be a malicious witness. You shall not fall in with the many to do evil, nor shall you bear witness in a lawsuit siding with the many so as to pervert justice, nor shall you be partial to a poor man in his lawsuit. If you meet your enemy’s ox or his donkey going astray, you shall bring it back to him. If you see the donkey of one who hates you lying down under its burden, you shall refrain from leaving him with it. You shall rescue it with him.

You shall not pervert the justice due to your poor in his lawsuit. Keep far from a false charge and do not kill the innocent and righteous, for I will not acquit the wicked. And you shall take no bribe, for a bribe blinds the clear-sighted and subverts the cause of those who are in the right. You shall not oppress a sojourner. You know the heart of a sojourner, for you were sojourners in the land of Egypt.

Our New Testament reading is 1 Peter, Chapter 1, 13 through 16, 1 Peter 1, 13 through 16. Therefore, preparing your minds for action, be sober-minded, set your hope fully on the grace that will be brought to you at the revelation of Jesus Christ. As obedient children, do not be conformed to the passions of your former ignorance, but as he who called you is holy, you also be holy in all your conduct. Since it is written, you shall be holy for I am holy. The grass withers, the flower fades, but the word of our God will stand forever.

There is no kind of pressure like peer pressure. We all experience it and we’ve all succumbed to it. There’s something within us that really wants to be like everybody else, something within us that wants to do what everybody else is doing. We don’t want to stand out as odd or different or not with it. And when it comes to spiritual and moral concerns, this desire that we have within us to conform, to be like everyone else, to be like the world around us, this can lead us into all kinds of trouble.

The Lord knew that the people of Israel were going to struggle with this temptation to want to conform to the world. He knew that after he brought his people into the promised land, after they settled there, that they would naturally see the nations around them and that they would want to be like those nations around them. And so one of the purposes of the many laws that God gave to Israel was to teach them that because they belonged to the Lord, they were not to be like the nations around them. They were not to be conformed to the world, but they were to be holy. They were to be a people who were distinct from the rest of the world in their life and in their worship.

And this call that the Lord gave to his people to be a holy people, a people belonging to a holy God, this is, really the unifying theme in all of these laws that we just read. We’ve been going through the various civil laws that the Lord gave to the people of Israel from Mount Sinai. He gave them to Moses. Moses gave them to the people. Our passage this morning reads kind of like a laundry list, like miscellaneous laws. There are various statutes and rules here that cover a large variety of subjects, but one thing that we can say that they all have in common is this, that in these laws, the Lord was calling his people to be a holy people, a people different from the world, a people set apart from the world to belong to God and to reflect that holiness, separateness in the way in which they lived and worshiped. They were not to be like the pagans, the unbelievers that would surround them.

And so we’ll look at these laws today with that in mind. And as we look at these laws, we’ll proceed in the same way. Hopefully it’s become familiar to us by now. First, we’ll consider how these laws, what their significance was for the people of Israel when Moses gave them to them. And then we’ll consider what lesson can we learn from these laws for us as believers in Christ today.

So first, what these laws meant for Israel. So we’ll just go through these laws and draw some lessons from them and consider what they meant for the people of Israel. Also, we’ll draw some lessons, what they mean for us today as well.

Verses 16 and 17 are laws that gave, or the Lord gave to the people of Israel to preserve the sanctity of marriage by forbidding men and women to have sexual relations with one another outside the bonds of marriage. And we won’t get into all the nitty-gritty details, but the gist of these laws is that there would be serious consequences for an unmarried man if he seduced an unmarried woman and slept with her. The man in that case, he would be guilty of stealing her virginity. And thus, not only would he bring dishonor upon her and her family, but in that social context, he would have rendered her virtually unmarriageable. And so he’d have to compensate the family. He would have to pay the family what is called a bride price or an engagement present.

And if her father consented to the marriage, he would have to marry this young woman whom he slept with. If her father did not consent to the marriage, he would still have to pay that same amount as a bride price as a way of compensating her and her family for the harm that he had done to them by seducing this young woman. And so this law, along with the seventh commandment that forbids adultery, and along with all of the other laws that we read in the Old Testament that condemn various kinds of sexual immorality, these laws together, they taught the Israelites that one thing that holiness means is sexual purity. As we saw when we consider the seventh commandments, any kind of sexual activity outside the covenant bond of marriage that was sinful, that was forbidden by the Lord for his people.

And from what we know of the pagan nations that would surround the people of Israel, the Israelites, if in fact they did live according to these laws, if in fact they were sexually pure, they would have been very, very different from the nations that surrounded them. The pagan nations, the pagan peoples in those days were very much engaged in all kinds of sexually immoral practices. Now today, this exact law doesn’t apply to the Church. We don’t transfer this law and apply it word for word to the Church today. However, it is still very much the will of God today for His people, for us, that sexual relations take place only within marriage, only within a biblical marriage, one man and one woman. Anything other than that is sin.

And just like the Israelites would be very different from the people around them if they kept these commandments, so we too, as the people of God, insofar as we are faithful to honor God in keeping the seventh commandment, keeping the marriage bed undefiled, protecting the marriage bond as the one place in which sexual activity takes place, insofar as we are faithful to do this, we are going to be very, very different from the world around us as well. And this is one way, by the grace of God, that we will demonstrate that we are a holy people, that we belong to a holy God.

Verses 18 through 20 list three separate offenses for which the guilty party was subject to capital punishment. He would have to be killed. Sorcery, bestiality, and idolatry. And all three of these practices were characteristic of the nations that existed at this time that would surround the people of Israel. And so this would be one area in which the Israelites would feel that peer pressure. Everyone else is doing it. We should as well. But these were sins against God that were so heinous. They were practices so dangerous that the spiritual or they were so dangerous to the spiritual health of the people of God as a whole that the penalty for them was death. The death penalty for those who committed these sins.

Now today, of course, God does not will the church to put anybody to death for anything. Israel, as the church then was a political entity, a nation, a geographical, a national kingdom, but the Church of Jesus Christ is a spiritual kingdom. Therefore, we do not put anybody to death. However, when a person in the church is guilty of a serious sin and that person refuses to repent of their sin, then the church, after pursuing formal church discipline, must declare that that person is no longer a member of the church. They are no longer able to take part in the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper. And this action on the part of the church today, this is called excommunication. They are no longer able to commune with the people of God in the Lord’s Supper because the church declares them to be no longer part of God’s people.

And this is the spiritual equivalent of what was then the death penalty. However, thankfully today, with excommunication, unlike with the death penalty, there was always the hope of restoration, that the offender, although he or she is guilty of grievous sins and has been excommunicated, nevertheless, that God will bring them back to repentance and faith. And so we pray, of course, that the Lord would bring back one who has been excommunicated back into full communion with the Lord Jesus, back into full communion with the church. But the concern both for the people of Israel then, the concern for the church today behind these laws and behind this penalty of excommunication, the concern is the holiness, the purity of the people of God. Those who have been redeemed by the Lord Jesus Christ, those who have been called out of darkness to belong to Him, we cannot, we must not engage in the sinful, the evil practices of the unbelieving world. There must be a distinction. And therefore the church at times must carry out this kind of discipline to declare this person excommunicated from the church until they repent and come back to faith.

And so holiness is involved in all of that, but there is more to holiness than just avoiding these kind of flagrant, blatant sins, like sorcery and idolatry, but holiness is also a matter of showing love and compassion to those who are weak and vulnerable. And that is the concern of the laws in verses 21 through 24, and in chapter 23, verse 9. The Israelites were not to oppress or to exploit or take advantage of the sojourner, the widow, and the fatherless. These were all classes of people in the ancient world who were liable to be trampled upon by others. They were weak. They were defenseless. The Israelites knew themselves all too well from their recent history what it meant, what it was like to be oppressed, to be taken advantage of, to be trampled upon. They suffered at the hands of Pharaoh, the taskmasters. They were sojourners in Egypt, but they were to be different when they were the ones who were in a position of more power or authority. They were the people belonging to the Lord and the God who saved them was a God who had special concern for the weak and the vulnerable. Therefore, the Israelites were not to mistreat the strangers and the widows and the orphans in their midst.

Now, we need to take a little bit of time, a minute or two, to look at verse 21 especially, in our current political situation. I think it’s important for us to hear what this verse is saying and what it’s not saying. So I’ll read verse 21. You shall not wrong a sojourner or oppress him, for you were sojourners in the land of Egypt. Now, in the immigration debates that are kind of raging right now in our current context, this verse is often appealed to. However, this verse does not say a thing about how the United States government should go about pursuing an immigration policy that is just and wise, a policy that is in the best interest of the nation as a whole. This verse does not prescribe any specific kind of immigration laws or immigration policies for any nation today. So it’s not saying that.

However, what it is saying is that Christians, the people of God, we must treat those from other nations, those who are in our midst, who have come here from other places, we must treat them with fairness, with justice, and even compassion. So often immigrants, no matter how they came here, they are vulnerable. They are vulnerable to mistreatment, to oppression, because they are strangers living in a foreign land. But having said that, as Christians, we can certainly support immigration laws, we can support immigration restrictions, we can support the enforcement of those laws. We can do so without wrongdoing, without wronging or oppressing the foreigners who live in our country, or even those who want to live in our country. And so verse 21 does not mandate what our nation’s immigration policy is supposed to look like, but it does tell us as Christians what our basic attitude should be toward the stranger who is in our midst.

Our basic attitude should be to carry out what Jesus taught us, what we call the golden rule, that we are to do unto others as we would have them do unto us. And we can apply that same rule to all sorts of people in our society, not only those who are from other nations living in our midst, but also those who are more vulnerable to oppression or exploitation. Think of the forgotten, the lonely elderly among us. Think of children who have no families, have no homes. Think of the unborn children who are at risk of abortion. If we were in their shoes, how would we want to be treated by others? That is how we should think of and how we should treat those who are in positions of weakness.

And God is the same God today who gave these laws to the Israelites back then. God still has a special concern for those who are weak and vulnerable in society. And he declared just how strong his concern was when he told the Israelites that if they did wrong and mistreat the vulnerable in their midst, that he would carry out a very severe judgment against them. Look at verses 23 and 24. The Lord says, if you do mistreat them and they cry out to me, I will surely hear their cry and my wrath will burn and I will kill you with the sword and your wives shall become widows and your children fatherless. And so we as the people of God, we too should have the same concern, the same care, the same mindset of compassion to those in our midst who are weak and vulnerable and know that God has that concern for them and that he watches over them in a special way.

Moving on in our laws here, verses 25 through 27 are also concerned with the fair treatment of the weak. But this time the concern is with the poor. The Israelites were not to act like loan sharks towards their brothers when they needed a loan, they needed money. They were to lend their money to the poor and not charge interest to them. And they were not to take away some vital piece of property of theirs as collateral. For example, the cloak that they used to sleep at night, they were not to withhold that from them. What else were they going to sleep in at night, the Lord says. So they were to show mercy towards their poor brothers in loaning money to them.

And then in verses 28 to 31, the subject of the law changes to the proper respect and worship that is due to God. The Israelites were not to revile God. They were not to revile any God-given ruler that was set over them. And they were to faithfully bring to the Lord their offerings from their wealth. And they were to consecrate to the Lord their firstborn sons, both human and animal. For their firstborn sons, and for certain kinds of animals, they would consecrate to the Lord by redeeming them with money. But for other kinds of animals, they were to be sacrificed to the Lord. The Israelites were not to eat the flesh of animals killed by other animals. We might call this the roadkill law. They were not to eat any dead animal that they saw on the side of the road that may have been killed by another animal. And insofar as the Israelites obeyed these laws, they demonstrated that they were set apart to the Lord as a holy people, a special people.

In chapter 23, verses one through three and six through eight, the concern there is with upholding justice, upholding justice both in their general dealings with one another and also in a court of law. There are so many ways that we can pervert justice. We can spread lies about other people. We can bear false witness in a courtroom. We can go along with popular opinion just because it’s popular and we don’t want to swim against the tide. We can show favoritism towards the poor just because they are poor. We can show favoritism towards the rich just because they are rich. And all of these ways of injustice are either explicitly or implicitly forbidden in these laws to the Israelites. If the judges of Israel accepted a false charge or condemned the innocent to death or accepted a bribe, they would be perverting justice.

And so part of the holiness of Israel was that in all of their dealings with one another, whether it was just in the general life situations that emerge or whether it was in a more formal court of law, the Israelites were to be very concerned that they dealt with one another in terms of justice, fairness, equity, what was right, what was true, and to the degree that the Israelites upheld justice, they, again, would have been distinct from their pagan neighbors. In that way, they would have reflected the holiness of God. We know all too well, just from our own observations of the world, that the default condition of societies in this fallen world is that the justice systems in our nations are very far from perfect. They are very flawed. There is no perfect justice in this world. And yet the Israelites were to be different. They were to uphold what is true, what is just, what is fair in all of their dealings with one another.

And then finally, in verses four and five of chapter 23, the Lord commanded the holiness of his people in the most demanding way, and that is his people were to show concern even to those who were their enemies. If an Israelite saw his enemy’s ox or donkey wandering away from his home, he was to lead that animal back to the home of his enemy. Or if he saw his enemy’s donkey collapse under the weight of his load, and his enemy was trying to help his donkey up, but he wasn’t able to get him back up on his feet, the Israelite was to go out and to help his neighbor, even if he was at odds with him.

Now, obviously, this is the exact opposite of what anybody would naturally do in that situation. It’s not hard to imagine an Israelite looking out of his window one day and smiling with perverse pleasure as he sees that neighbor whom he can’t stand trying to get his donkey up back on his feet. And he’s just watching, enjoying the spectacle, but that’s not what he was supposed to do. He was supposed to go out and to help his enemy get his donkey back up again. And of course, Jesus taught the same teaching. He says, you have heard that it was said, you shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy, but I say to you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you. And insofar as the Israelites kept that commandment, to do good to their enemies, to love those even that they were at odds with, that they showed themselves to be holy, that they were people who belong to the Lord.

So the general theme of all these laws is this: I am the Lord who is holy, you are my people, therefore you are to be holy. You are not to be like everyone else in the world, but you are set apart, you belong to me, and this is what that holiness will look like in your day-to-day life as my people.

So let’s consider now what the significance of these laws are for us as believers today. I’ve said this before, I’ll say it again, it’s worth repeating. We do not take these laws from the Old Testament that were given to the people of God under the old covenants. We don’t take these and apply them word for word for the church today. We don’t take them and say, these are the laws that the nations of the world today should have as their laws. Again, Israel as a nation was a political kingdom. It needed these laws, but the church today is a spiritual kingdom. We have laws to be sure. Christ is our lawgiver, but it is not these specific laws. So they do not apply to us in the same way that they did to them.

However, having said that, insofar as these various civil laws are faithful applications of the 10 commandments of the moral law, then they do show us how we are to conduct ourselves as the people of God. And these laws will help us, even as Christians today, to see that God’s will for us today is that we are a people who are holy, a holy people.

So listen again to what God says to us in 1 Peter. This is the passage that I read from 1 Peter earlier. As obedient children, do not be conformed to the passions of your former ignorance, but as he who called you as holy, you also shall be holy in all your conduct. Since it is written, you shall be holy for I am holy. So Peter was writing to Christians who were Gentiles. And before they came to faith in Christ, they were the pagans who were living lives that were far from holy. They lived according to the passions of their former ignorance. They were unbelievers. They lived according to their sinful desires and passions. And they weren’t all that different than the pagans who surrounded the people of Israel under the old covenant. But once they came to know Christ, they were called to live holy lives. And as they were faithful to do so, these Christians in the first century that Peter was writing to, they would have also set themselves apart as a holy people. They would have been distinct from their neighbors, from the world in which they lived.

And what was true for the Israelites in the Old Testament, what was true for the Christians in the New Testament, the early Christians, is also just as much true for us today. We are living, we live in a world that by and large does not acknowledge God, does not worship God, is not seeking truth and holiness and righteousness. We are living in a society whose values and beliefs and practices are far more pagan than they are Christian. And so we find ourselves in the very similar situation as the people of God have always found themselves in. There are so many ways in which our culture denies fundamental biblical truths. The truth that God is the creator. We are the creature. The truth that God rules over this creation by his sovereign power and wisdom and goodness. The truth that there is an absolute right and wrong that is given to us by a transcendent Lord. The truth of the reality of sin. The truth of the reality of the coming judgment of heaven, of hell, of salvation in Jesus Christ.

These are all truths that our society, that our culture denies or suppresses. They seem like quaint religious ideas from a distant past. And as a result of that, we find ourselves living in a world in which we are enshrouded in great spiritual darkness, in which we are immersed in great moral confusion. But you, as the people of God, as those who belong to Jesus Christ, are called to holiness. You are called to worship the true and the living God and to live according to his word. And if there is any silver lining to the sad reality that we are living in a society that is increasingly pagan in nature, it is this, that to the degree that we as Christians, by the grace of God, reflect the holiness of God in our lives and worship, to that degree, the truth of Christ will shine all the more brightly in that moral and spiritual darkness that surrounds us.

We can put it this way: that God causes the light of his own holy character to shine in the world through his people whose lives he is making to conform more and more to his own image, to reflect his holiness. And so God’s own light, his own holiness is reflected in his people as we are faithful by the grace of God to serve and to worship him. And so Jesus said to his disciples, you are the light of the world. A city set on a hill cannot be hidden. We are the light of the world because we belong to God and we reflect his holiness. And insofar as we do that, we are reflecting nothing other than the truth of God’s character, which is light, which is holiness and righteousness.

And one thing that that means is that these laws that God gave to Israel back then, the laws that he gives us today, the Ten Commandments, the moral law, that these are really an expression of his own holiness and righteousness. You know, we read these laws and sometimes we get the impression, or sometimes we ask, why in the world did God give this law to his people? Sometimes we might even think this seems like such an arbitrary law. What’s the purpose? What’s the point of it? But these are not arbitrary laws. God did not give these laws to his people just because he could, because he is God. But these laws made up a pattern of holiness and righteousness that would be an expression of the righteousness, the character of God himself.

And so because God is pure, because God is a God who is infinite in purity, in righteousness, in goodness, we are to be pure in sexual matters. Because God is the one true and living God, because there is no God beside him, his people then reflect that insofar as we give worship and service and obedience to God alone. Because God has a special concern for the weak and the vulnerable, we manifest the character of God as we show special concern and compassion towards the weak and the vulnerable. And because God is perfect in justice, we are to be just in all our dealings. And because God loves his enemies, because God so loved us when we were his enemies, he so loved us that he gave us his son, Jesus Christ, to die for our sins, so we too are to love our enemy. We are even to go out of our way to help our enemy when he is in need.

And so one thing that these laws mean for you as a Christian is this: they reveal to you the holy character of God, that you might better reflect in this world his holiness, that God might be glorified through you in this world, in this world of darkness and confusion. As you continue to serve and to worship God, you show forth the truth, the light, the righteousness of God, who He is.

But the issue is really deeper than that. God wants us to be holy, not just so that His truth may shine more brightly through us, which is true, but it’s also true, and this is even perhaps an even deeper truth, and that is, it is only in holiness that you can enjoy true communion with God. Only as you are pursuing the holiness of God can you enjoy that communion, that fellowship with God that he created you to enjoy forever. This is why Jesus Christ came into the world. He came into the world to make us holy so that we might have communion with God.

And Jesus Christ makes us holy in two ways. First of all, he makes us holy by giving us his perfect righteousness. We are sinners by nature. We have broken God’s commandments. In us, in our hearts, there is no inherent holiness, righteousness, purity, but the opposite, there is corruption, immorality, there is sin. But God came into the world in the person of his son, Jesus Christ, in order to live a perfectly righteous life for us, in order to bear our sin and guilt for us upon the cross, so that by coming to faith in the Lord Jesus Christ, you receive as a gift His perfect righteousness, His holiness, and that is yours now and forevermore. As a believer in Jesus Christ, you are already holy, you are already sanctified, you are already righteous because God looks at the righteousness of Christ and He counts it as your very own. And so Jesus makes us holy in that way.

But the second way that Jesus came to make us holy is to give us His Holy Spirit so that He might work within us, that we might grow in personal righteousness, personal holiness, so that we might become more and more what we already are in the sight of God. And this is your sanctification. This is growing in holiness, growing in righteousness, and only to the degree that you grow in this holiness by God’s grace, only to that degree will you enjoy the fullness of joy and peace in spiritual life.

We could put it this way: happiness follows holiness. Happiness follows holiness. And that is why if you are a Christian, and I trust we are all believers here, that is why as a Christian, you will not find joy in Christ as long as you are engaged in sexually immoral conduct. You will not have joy in Christ if you devote yourself to any other person or thing as an idol. You will not find joy in Christ if you only live for yourself, if you show no concern for helping others or serving others in need. You will not find joy in Christ if you are not living for him a life of self-sacrifice, self-giving. You will not find joy in Christ if you are not dealing with others justly and fairly. You will not find joy in Christ if you do not love your enemy, forgive your enemy. If you harbor bitterness and resentment in your heart, you will not enjoy the fullness of that life and peace that Christ came to give us.

And so God calls you to holiness in all of these ways expressed in these laws so that you might enjoy that fullness of life, that fellowship, that communion with the Lord. That is why God created us. That is why God saved us, that we might know Him and know life, eternal life, and be filled with that joy and peace in knowing Him. But we only enjoy that to the fullest as we are pursuing the holiness to which He calls us. And so holiness, at the end of the day, doesn’t mean being holier than thou, but it means growing in Christlikeness so that the life of Christ may abound in you.

And I’ll end with these words from our Lord Jesus. He says, if you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love just as I’ve kept my father’s commandments and abide in his love. These things I’ve spoken to you that my joy may be in you and that your joy may be full. Let’s pray.

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The Old Testament reading is Exodus chapter 22, verses one through 15. Exodus 22, one through 15. This is God’s word, his inspired, his infallible, his inerrant word. So let’s give our attention to the reading of the word of God.

Exodus 22, one through 15. If a man steals an ox or a sheep and kills it or sells it, he shall repay five oxen for an ox and four sheep for a sheep. If a thief is found breaking in and is struck so that he dies, there shall be no blood guilt for him. But if the sun has risen on him, there shall be blood guilt for him. He shall surely pay. If he has nothing, then he shall be sold for his theft. If the stolen beast is found alive in his possession, whether it is an ox or a donkey or a sheep, he shall pay double.

If a man causes a field or vineyard to be grazed over or lets his beast loose and it feeds in another man’s field, he shall make restitution from the best in his own field and in his own vineyard. If fire breaks out and catches in thorns so that the stacked grain or the standing grain or the field is consumed, he who started the fire shall make full restitution.

If a man gives to his neighbor money or goods to keep safe, and it is stolen from the man’s house, then if the thief is found, he shall pay double. If the thief is not found, the owner of the house shall come near to God to show whether or not he has put his hand to his neighbor’s property. For every breach of trust, whether it is for an ox, for a donkey, for a sheep, for a cloak, or for any kind of lost thing of which one says, this is it, the case of both parties shall come before God. The one whom God condemns shall pay double to his neighbor.

If a man gives to his neighbor a donkey or an ox or a sheep or any beast to keep safe and it dies or is injured or is driven away without anyone seeing it, an oath by the Lord shall be between them both to see whether or not he has put his hand to his neighbor’s property. The owner shall accept the oath and he shall not make restitution. But if it is stolen from him, he shall make restitution to its owner. If it is torn by beasts, let him bring it as evidence. He shall not make restitution for what has been torn.

If a man borrows anything of his neighbor and it is injured or dies, the owner not being with it, he shall make full restitution. If the owner was with it, he shall not make restitution. If it was hired, it came for its hiring fee.

That is our passage this morning, but we will also hear from the New Testament. So you can keep your place there in Exodus and turn to Luke chapter 19, a very familiar passage from the Gospels of Zacchaeus, the wee little man who came to faith in Jesus. Luke 19, verses 1 through 10. Luke 19, verses 1 through 10.

He entered Jericho and was passing through. And behold, there was a man named Zacchaeus. He was a chief tax collector and was rich. And he was seeking to see who Jesus was. But on account of the crowd, he could not because he was small in stature. So he ran on ahead and climbed up into a sycamore tree to see him, for he was about to pass that way. And when Jesus came to the place, he looked up and said to him, Zacchaeus, hurry and come down, for I must stay at your house today.

So he hurried and came down and received him joyfully. And when they saw it, they all grumbled. He has gone in to be the guest of a man who was a sinner. And Zacchaeus stood and said to the Lord, behold, Lord, the half of my goods I give to the poor. And if I have defrauded anyone of anything, I restore it fourfold. And Jesus said to him, today salvation has come to this house since he also is a son of Abraham. For the son of man came to seek and to save the lost. The grass withers, the flower fades, but the word of our God will stand forever.

We all have things in our past that we are not too proud of. And as I was thinking of our passage that we’re looking at today, one thing from my past came to mind that I’m not too proud of, but I share it with you today because it illustrates, at least indirectly, it illustrates the wisdom and the goodness of these laws that the Lord gave to his people Israel.

When I was in college, my fraternity decided to build this huge tree house in front of our fraternity house. We were planning to have a party and we wanted to have a tree house for our party. And of course, to build a big treehouse, you need wood. You need a lot of wood. And since I had a pickup truck, I was asked, along with a couple of other friends, to acquire the wood that we would need for the treehouse.

And our idea for obtaining the wood was not to go to the lumberyard or Lowe’s and actually purchase a bunch of lumber. Rather, we decided we’d visit a home construction site late at night and help ourselves to the piles of lumber that were stacked up in front of the homes that were being built. And so my two friends and I drove out to this neighborhood where houses were under construction and in the darkness of night, the cover of darkness, we loaded up the back of the truck with as much lumber as we possibly could.

And then we started our drive back to campus. And when we were just a few blocks away from campus, I saw the red and blue lights in my rear view mirror. I was not really excited to see that. So we got pulled over by a police officer. Somehow the sight of three young guys driving in the middle of the night with a truck full of lumber looked suspicious to him. Rightfully so.

And so he pulled us over and before he came to my car window, my friends and I concocted a story that we would tell him to explain what we were doing. I told the policeman that we were students at the college, which was true enough. And then I told him that we were just getting back from Nashville, which was a few hours away, and we had bought the lumber there and we were driving all day and we were just coming home, which was definitely not true.

The policeman looked at my license, and he looked at the three of us and he was not at all happy. And he said in words that I will not repeat now that my story was not believable at all. But for some reason he gave me my license back and he let us go on our way. And the result of all that was that my two friends and I were the heroes of our fraternity. We had stolen the lumber for our tree house. The party was a great success. We lied to a policeman. And I got to tell the story over and over to my admiring friends.

I wasn’t a Christian at that time, just so you know. And I look back at that now, and I’m very ashamed of what I did. It was a terrible thing to do. But I learned all the wrong lessons from it. I got away with stealing and lying. And in the process, strangely enough, I gained the respect of my friends. And so, in a small way, at least for me at that one time, crime did pay.

But as I think about it, particularly in the light of God’s word in this passage, how much better for me it would have been if I and my friends had been arrested by the policemen, and if we had been forced not only to return all the lumber that we had stolen from the construction company, but also if we had been forced to pay back double to the company of what we had taken in order to compensate for the time and trouble that no doubt we had caused them. In that case, I would have learned all the right lessons from that whole episode.

I would have learned that stealing is wrong, that it’s disgraceful, that it hurts other people, and the penalty of paying double for what we had stolen would have not only driven those lessons home in a painful but good way, but it also would have compensated the company from whom we stole that lumber for the trouble that we had put them through. And in that case, if that had been the outcome of that, in that case there would have been a true restitution for our crime. That is, the wrongs that we did to our victims would have been righted. What they lost, the trouble that they suffered, would have been compensated by us who caused all the trouble for them.

And that is God’s concern behind the various laws that we have heard this morning from this passage in Exodus. God’s justice demands that there be restitution for the victim, a restitution that must be paid by the one who is guilty of the crime. And as we’ve done in the last couple of weeks, as we’ve been looking at this section in Exodus with these various civil laws, we’ll first consider what the laws meant for the people of Israel at that time. And then next we’ll consider the significance of these laws in the light of the gospel of Jesus Christ. What do these laws mean for us or what can we learn from them as Christians today?

But before we look at the laws in more detail, I want to make a couple of comments concerning these laws that all have to do with property, or the theft of property, or the destruction of property. One thing to note about these laws is that they were to be applied to all people in the same way. There is no special conditions carved out here for the rich, the powerful, the influential. This was not the case in other law codes of the ancient Near East. Often people of high social standing had a privileged status in the eyes of the law. But people of a high social standing do not have a privileged status in the eyes of God. God is no respecter of persons. And that truth is enshrined in the laws that he gave to the people of Israel. All people were to be treated equally in the sight of the law.

And of course that ought to apply to our laws today. Any just and fair legal system today will not show favor to the rich, the powerful, the influential, but a just law with just penalties will apply equally to all people, just as God’s moral commandments, just as his moral law applies equally to all people, regardless of social standing or power in the society.

A second thing to note is that the punishments are proportionate to the crime. Other ancient law codes that existed around this time often had penalties that were draconian and totally disproportionate to the offense. For example, the Hammurabi Code made theft a capital punishment. And so if you stole something, you were put to death. In some parts of the world today, if you are guilty of theft, especially in Islamic, at least some Islamic places, if you are guilty of theft, you get your hand chopped off.

But here in God’s laws, you see the principle of equity. That is the principle that we looked at last Sunday. Eye for eye, tooth for tooth, the penalty must be proportionate to the crime, not more extreme than the crime, not less in severity than the crime. And so this law then, these laws that we have seen show God’s concern that the penalty match the crime. It also shows God’s concern or his priority of human life over property. Even the thief who steals something does not deserve to have his life taken away for that crime. And so God values human life even over human property.

And so with all that in mind then, let’s look at these laws to understand what they meant to the people of Israel, to whom they were given. The first four verses deal with two different situations. Verses one and four are concerned with the theft of an animal, an ox or a sheep or a donkey. And as you can imagine in that society, that was a primary, if not the primary, source of wealth for people. Animals were very valuable because they were so vital to that economy, the livelihood of people then.

And so if a man steals another person’s animal and then he goes to kill it or to sell it, his penalty was that he would have to give back to the victim not only one animal to replace the one that he stole, but that he would have to give back four or five additional animals depending on the kind of animal that he stole. In verse 4, however, if the thief was caught with the animal alive, he had not killed it, he had not sold it, he’d only have to pay back the owner double for what he stole. So he would have to give the owner back his original animal, and then he would have to provide one more just like it to the owner.

And that was a way in which the law treats this crime of or the previous crime of killing the stolen animal or selling the stolen animal, that was a much more severe, that was a much more serious crime. And so he had to pay back fourfold or fivefold. But if the thief could return the original animal, he had to pay back double. And of course, this could have given the thief some pause to consider after he had stolen the animal, before he killed it, before he sold it. Perhaps he would think that it would be better not to do that because if I’m caught, then I will probably, I will have to pay back fourfold. And so perhaps this law was something of a deterrent.

In fact, when we compare these laws to those in Leviticus, it appears, when we look at the Levitical laws, that if a thief did repent of his crime, if he did confess his crime, the penalty was that he would have to restore that animal and then add a fifth to it. So he would add a fifth of the value of the animal that he stole. That was quite a bit less than repaying double. And so the law recognized, and again, God, the law giver, was acknowledging that the penalty ought to be less severe for the thief who confesses it, who willingly surrenders the animal, who repents of his sin.

Verses two and three address what we would call a home invasion. If a thief breaks into someone’s house and it is at night and the homeowner kills the thief, the homeowner was not guilty of murder. And that’s because it was dark. The homeowner, he couldn’t tell if the invader was armed. He couldn’t tell if his life was a threat. And so he could use deadly force in that situation. It was justified. However, if a thief broke into someone’s house during the day, the homeowner could not kill the thief. If he did kill the thief, he would be guilty of that man’s blood. He would be guilty of murder.

And the reason for this law was to prevent unnecessary, needless killing. If a thief broke in during the day, and presumably if it was clear that the thief did not present a threat to the homeowner, his life was not a threat, the homeowner did not have the right to kill the thief just because he had broken into his home. And again, you see God’s concern for a fair penalty. Even a thief, though a criminal, in this case, did not deserve to die for his crime.

Verses five and six address cases where one person is careless and negligent and causes damage to another person’s property. This can happen by allowing his animals to graze in his neighbor’s field or garden, or he sets a fire, he’s careless, it gets out of control, it starts to burn up his neighbor’s stacked grain. And the penalty in these cases was that the wrongdoer must make full restitution to his neighbor. He must make full restitution from the best of his own field and vineyard.

And note that in these situations, the person who did the wrong, he is not required to pay back double. He is only required to replace what was destroyed or damaged by his animal, by his carelessness. And so the law was more lenient towards those who did not have the intent to steal something, but those who were simply irresponsible or careless and destroyed their neighbor’s property by their negligence. But it was still fair. The law was fair. The guilty party still had to make restitution. The victim had to be repaid.

Verses seven through 13 deal with situations in which one person gives to another person his money or possessions or animals for safekeeping while he was away. And if you think about it, this makes sense. This would have been a common practice in those days. They didn’t have banks like we have today or modern locks or security systems and so on. And so when you went away on a trip, you might give your valuables to your neighbor for protection. But what happens if your neighbor, while he’s keeping them, steals them from you? Or what happens if he just says that they were stolen, but really he is the one who stole them?

Well, these laws address these cases, and again, the guiding principle is restitution. If a thief is found with your goods, then the thief must pay double. But in the case that no thief is found, there are instructions in verses eight and nine to follow a procedure to determine the guilt or innocence of the person to whom you entrusted your goods. Unfortunately, the instructions aren’t super clear. The Hebrew is difficult to interpret. Scholars don’t know exactly what verses eight and nine are saying, but in some way, it seems, probably involving the authorities with some kind of appeal to God, there is a judgment that determines whether the person you entrusted your possessions to, whether he had stolen them himself or whether they had been stolen from him. And if it turns out that he had stolen them, then he has to pay you back double. And so that’s that principle of restitution, even more so because it was theft.

In verses 10 through 12, you give to your neighbor an animal for safekeeping. And if while your animal is in your neighbor’s care, it dies or it’s injured or it’s driven away, your neighbor must swear an oath that he has not stolen it. And that settles the matter. By swearing an oath, that would have deterred at least some people, because an oath is a very serious thing, swearing something to be true in the name of the Lord would have deterred some people, at least, from not lying about what happened to his neighbor’s property.

Interestingly, in verse 12, if your animal is in your neighbor’s care and it is stolen from him while it is in your neighbor’s care, the neighbor himself must make restitution to you. And the idea here seems to be that if you entrust your animal to your neighbor, that he should be extra careful with that animal to make sure that it is not stolen from him while it is in his safekeeping. But according to verse 13, if your neighbor can prove that your animal was torn apart by wild beasts, he can produce the carcass, then he doesn’t have to make restitution.

Finally, in verses 14 and 15, these deal with borrowing or renting things, animals from others. If you, for example, if you borrowed my ax and it broke, you would owe me a new ax. However, if you borrowed my ax and I was with you while you were using it, then I would have to replace the broken ax myself. I’m out of luck. But if you paid me to use my ax, that is, if you rented my ax from me, and then in that case it was understood that the rental agreement that we had, that under that agreement I would be responsible for any damages to the ax while you borrowed it. And so these are the laws then that dealt with, in Exodus, theft and the accidental destruction of others’ property.

So having considered these laws, let’s ask the question, what can we as Christians learn from these laws in the lights of the gospel? Well, there are two lessons we can learn from them. First of all, these laws could only limit sinful behavior. They could not cure a sinful heart. These laws could only minimize limits, contain sinful actions on the part of other different people, but they could not address the heart. They could not cure a sinful heart. There is not a word in these laws about the heart of the one who committed theft or the one who damaged his neighbor’s property. The sole concern here is what he must do to make things right with his victim.

And of course, that’s because these laws were establishing justice and equity, fairness in in the nation of Israel among the Israelites and their dealings with one another. There had to be some laws to govern their relationships with one another. And so that was important, that was vital. However, that was not God’s primary concern for his people when it came to their wealth and possessions. Rather, God’s primary concern was for the heart of his people. God’s primary concern was what would be my people’s heart or their attitude, their orientation towards the wealth, towards the possessions that they would acquire.

Would the Israelites see their wealth and possessions as gifts from God to be used in serving and glorifying Him? Or would the Israelites look to their money or their possessions or their wealth for security, for life, for happiness? That was the chief concern that God had for His people when it came to their wealth or possessions. When we turn to the New Testament, we know what the answer to those questions was, at least for some of the people of Israel, maybe even most of the people of Israel, and that is they had a completely wrong view of their money and goods.

And where the Israelites went wrong in their thinking was this. They thought that as long as they kept these laws, as long as they avoided stealing from their neighbors, as long as they were not guilty of any of the sins described in these laws, then that was all that really mattered to God when it came to their possessions and their wealth. But Jesus, when he came into the world, he revealed what truly matters to God concerning wealth.

In Luke chapter 12, we read of a man who is near Jesus in a crowd and he yells out to Jesus. He says, teacher, tell my brother to divide the inheritance with me. Now, we might think that this man had the right idea, that he was perfectly justified in looking to Jesus, this teacher, this rabbi, to help him arbitrate this dispute that he had with his brother over their father’s inheritance. In fact, if you think about it, there’s no better person in the world to whom this question could be brought to than Jesus himself. After all, this is Jesus. This is God incarnate, this is the same Lord who gave the law to the people of Israel, the great law giver. He is the one who spoke these laws, delivered them to Moses. And so who else but Jesus could deliver a right verdict in this case? He would be the most impartial, the wisest, the fairest judge of all to decide who was in the right, who was in the wrong.

However, Jesus was not at all interested in arbitrating this dispute between these two brothers. He was not at all interested in being the Judge Judy to figure out which brother was in the wrong. He told the man in verse 14, this is again the gospel of Luke, man, who made me a judge or an arbitrator over you? And so Jesus’ first concern was not to make sure that this man got his fair share of the inheritance. Rather, Jesus was interested in uncovering the sin that was in the heart of this man. That is his sin of greed, his sin of covetousness, idolatry. And we know that was Jesus’s concern because he goes on to say in verse 15, take care and be on your guard against all covetousness for once life does not consist in the abundance of his possessions.

So again, let’s consider this man who came to Jesus with this question, this dispute over their father’s inheritance. He could have been in the right. His brother could have been a complete scoundrel. His brother could have been cheating him out of his lawful share of the wealth that they gained from their father. But the man, when he appealed to Jesus, he heard, hopefully he realized that he had a far, far greater problem than simply losing out on some worldly wealth. And that was he had a heart problem. He was driven by greed, by covetousness. And for Jesus, that was the real issue. It wasn’t who had the rightful claim to his father’s inheritance.

Now, if we can take that man’s attitude towards his wealth as typical of the Israelites in Jesus’s day towards their own wealth and possessions, then we can say that as a people, the heart of the Israelites was in the wrong place. Their heart was not set on heavenly treasure. Their heart was set on their own earthly treasure. It’s not just the Israelites who went astray in this way, but that’s true for all of us. We all do the same thing. When we consider our wealth or our possessions, we think that the most important issues are simply a question of who rightfully owns what, what belongs to whom.

And so our natural way of thinking is all that really matters to God is that I don’t steal from others, that I don’t defraud others. As long as I avoid those sins, then God must be satisfied with me regarding my wealth and possessions and my attitude towards them. And when we read laws such as these in Exodus chapter 22, when we read the eighth commandment, thou shall not steal, we hear these laws, we feel good about ourselves, we haven’t stolen anything from anybody, or maybe we haven’t stolen anything in a long time from anybody, and in our sinful thinking we tell ourselves, because I’m not a thief, I might, I must be right before God. My heart must be right before God when it comes to my wealth and possessions.

This is what the rich young ruler thought who came to Jesus asking him how to inherit eternal life. He told Jesus that he had successfully kept all of God’s laws from his youth, including the eighth commandment, thou shall not steal. But Jesus said to the rich young ruler, he said, one thing you still lack, sell all that you have and distribute to the poor and you will have treasure in heaven and come follow me. And of course, that was the one thing that the rich young ruler could not do. He could not sell his possessions. He could not part with his wealth. And so instead he parted from Jesus. He walked away from the one who alone could give him that eternal life that he desired and asked for. And he did so because he loved his wealth more than he loved Christ, more than he loved the son of God.

The rich young ruler, he was upstanding. He was moral. He was upright. According to these laws of Exodus, he had kept every one of them to the T. He had kept the 10 commandments, at least in his external behavior. All that he owned, that great wealth that he had, it was all rightfully and properly his. He didn’t defraud anyone. He didn’t cheat anyone. But his heart wasn’t right. He couldn’t sell his goods. He couldn’t part with his goods. He couldn’t follow Jesus because his money, his possessions were his God.

And apart from the grace of God, you and I would do exactly the same thing as a rich young ruler. It’s not enough to tell ourselves, well, we haven’t stolen the property of anybody, but we need to recognize that by nature, our hearts make an idol out of our wealth, out of our possessions, out of whatever property that God is pleased to give us.

We read of another man in Luke’s gospel who was guilty of this as well. Only unlike the just or unlike the rich young ruler, this man, he could make no claim that he was an upright and moral law-keeping Israelite. This man was a thief and he knew he was a thief. And of course, that is Zacchaeus, the passage that we read from Luke’s gospel. He was a tax collector. And as a tax collector, he became very wealthy. And he became very wealthy by defrauding those whom he taxed. But when Jesus encountered Zacchaeus and saw him up in the tree, he called him by name. He told him to come down. He told him that he was going to be his house guest that day.

Zacchaeus, he responded to his encounter with Jesus in a completely different way from the rich young ruler. Zacchaeus said in Luke chapter 19, verse eight, behold, Lord, the half of my goods I give to the poor. And if I have defrauded anyone of anything, I restore it fourfold. Probably Zacchaeus was thinking of this passage. He was ready to restore fourfold what he had stolen. And Jesus said this about Zacchaeus. Jesus said what he could not say about the rich young ruler. Jesus said of this tax collector, this thief, he said, today salvation has come to this house since he also is a son of Abraham.

And the difference between Zacchaeus and the rich young ruler was that by the grace of God, Zacchaeus came to have a radically new attitude towards his wealth and possessions. He was not only ready to make restitution to those whom he had cheated, but he was ready to part with his wealth, to give half of it to the poor out of his love for his savior. So what Zacchaeus had was a new heart. He was no longer devoted to his money, his possessions, but he was now devoted wholly to Christ.

And the lesson is this, is that when it comes to your wealth and property, you may be the most honest person in the world. You may be upright in all of your dealings with others. You may have cheated and defrauded no one. But if you have made wealth your trust, if you have looked to your property, your wealth, your money, as the way to secure comfort, security, hope for you, then in terms of your standing with God, what you need is a radically new orientation. You need a new heart towards your wealth and your property. And that is only a gift of God’s grace.

Only by the grace of God can we come to let go of worldly wealth as a means of our comforts, our hope, our security in this world. Only when you treasure the Lord Jesus Christ more than you treasure your money and your possessions will your heart be right with God. Only when you are ready by the grace of God to part with everything that you have in this world for the sake of following Jesus and knowing Him and finding in Him true treasure. Only then is your heart right and your heart is where God wants it to be. And that is a gift of God’s grace by faith in Jesus Christ.

The second lesson is this. We need a savior to make restitution for us to God. So all of these laws are addressing the sin of stealing, of mishandling the property, the possessions that people might entrust to us. But when we consider the sin of theft, when we consider the sin of stealing from another person in the light of the truth of who God is, the fact that God is the sovereign creator of heaven and earth, the fact that God is the sovereign Lord that all that he has made, Almighty God is the one who is the rightful owner and possessor of all things.

When we consider the sin of stealing in the light of who God is, we see stealing very differently. We see that when we steal from somebody, we are not just taking something that belongs to them, but ultimately we are taking something that belongs to God. We are robbing God, we are stealing from Him because He is the true Lord and proprietor of all things. And so in the truest sense of the word, you and I don’t really own anything. We are only stewards and trusted by God with whatever wealth and possessions he gives to us in this world. Ultimately, all things are his and his alone. The earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof, the world and all those who dwell therein. Psalm 24:1.

And so to steal anything is really to steal from God. And not only that, but when we consider that not just our material possessions, but all that we have, all that we are, our gifts, our talents, our time, our lives, our hearts, that all of this belong to God, then we can see that every time we fail to devote all that we have and all that we are to the service and worship of Christ, we are stealing from God. When we sin against God in any way, when we fail to devote everything we have to Him and His worship and service, we are robbing God of the glory, the honor, the praise that is rightfully His that we are to be giving to Him continually.

And so sin is robbing God. And with that in view then, since that is what sin is, stealing from God, His glory, in the light of these laws in Exodus, that raises the question, well, how do we make restitution to God? How do we compensate to Him? How do we repay Him from what we have taken? And the answer is, we cannot. We cannot possibly restore what we have stolen from God by our sin. And that’s because God is infinite. He is infinite in holiness and righteousness. And therefore to steal from him in any way, which is to say to sin against him in any way is to be guilty of a crime of infinite proportions. It is to have an infinite amount of guilt.

And so you and I cannot make restitution to God. We cannot repay him for the sin that we have sinned against him. We cannot compensate for our guilt against him or before him. The justice of God demands a restitution of infinite value, infinite worth, and even an eternity under the wrath of God is not sufficient restitution to God for the sin that we have committed against him. Only a restitution of infinite value can satisfy God’s justice. And that is exactly what Jesus Christ came to do.

That is exactly why Christ came into the world for sinners like you and me, so that by his suffering, what he suffered upon the cross, the judgment of God, the wrath of God, by his death upon the cross on our behalf, he has repaid the debt that you and I could never repay to God. Jesus Christ is our Savior. He has made a full, a perfect, a final restitution to God through our sins against him. He has paid the debt that you and I owe to him.

And so, as a believer in Jesus Christ, as one who belongs to him by faith, if your trust, your hope is in Jesus, as your savior from sin and death, you have the promise that that debt is paid, restitution has been made, God’s justice is satisfied, so that you can come into his presence now with that joy and freedom of knowing that there is no more guilt. There is no more sin. There is no more justice that needs to be dealt with before God, but that you are right with him, both now and forevermore. And so in the Lord Jesus Christ, your debt to the Lord is paid, your sins are forgiven, and you have received the gift of eternal life. Let’s pray.

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