I guess it is probably hard to forget an event like the Exodus, and the moments of the Passover – at least in the short term. But, God knows his mob. He knows that they forget quickly. He knows that they will be rebellious, and wander in the wilderness for forty years. He knows that he needs to command them to remember, especially when it is only Joshua and Caleb who will enter the land of Israel from the slavery of Egypt.

And so, as they leave, God commands ‘statutes’, laws to enforce remembering – remembering the night of the Passover, remembering the strength of God who saved them, remembering their identity as ‘my firstborn’.

The God who commands this remembering is the God who knows them, and so he orders their route as they leave. He is the God who follows through faithfully and relentlessly on his promises – just look at the bones of Joseph. And he is the God who is their constant companion, even as they wander in rebellion.

He is our God!

The Passover is one of the seminal moments in God’s commitment to reverse the curse of sin in this world. It is the climax of His work to save His people from Egypt – for people to know Him, for His ‘firstborn son’ to be saved, for them to dwell with Him and be His people.

In this sense, the last of the signs and wonders is both a salvation and a preparation. As the LORD sweeps over Egypt, delivering His judgement of death on those who have refused Him, in each of the households of His people, a perfect lamb has died. This lamb’s death is a substitute for God’s firstborn son, taking the judgement of death. This lamb’s blood protects God’s people, preparing them to be acceptable to live with God.

As God’s mob obediently do as He commanded, they are trusting in His provision – they are trusting in His kind mercy.

And so, they are both saved out of Egypt, and they are made acceptable to dwell with the God who has visited this world. Can you think of any other event that is similar to this?

Last week we considered why God saves His people. But God’s salvation and judgement often go hand in hand. Indeed God’ s judgement of His enemies is often the means by which He saves His people.

In Exodus 7:8-10:29, we are given three reasons why God judges the Egyptians; To reveal Himself to the world, to display His power and authority and humble both His enemies and His people. The implication for God’s enemies is that they should repent and turn to Him for salvation while His people should learn to serve Him in humility because they recognise that except by His miraculous power, no one can be saved from his judgement.

Why does God save His people?

There are several reasons that the Bible gives for God saving His people; to rescue us from sin, because of his mercy and goodness towards us, because He loves us, to spare us from his judgement, to restore our broken world. All these are right reasons for God saving His people, but they are deficient. They are deficient because they reduce God’s saving purpose to our comfort.

In Exodus 5:1-7:7, God lifts our eyes beyond ourselves and shows us that the primary reason He saves His people is to reveal himself so that He might be worshipped by all.

God’s people are exactly where God planned. God himself knows, and has committed to dealing with, their God-issue. God has commissioned Moses for the job at hand, because of God’s own character. And then we get these three strange, seemingly disconnected episodes, before all the fireworks begin.

What are we to make of them?

I think they emphasise the seriousness with which God, and his commitment, and his work, and his nature, are to be taken. God is holy and glorious. To meet God face-to-face is to be struck with fear. To truly understand the revelation of God is to be confronted with our own sinfulness. This means that we must take God himself, God’s commitment to his people, and what God deserves seriously.

In a culture where being serious and sensible is not a sought-after character trait, in a world where relationships are measured in seconds, news is communicated in tweets, and self dominates everything, these three strange episodes remind God’s mob of the seriousness of God.

We come, today, to the moment of Moses’ commissioning and motivation for the work of God. It is a moment in Exodus which is awe-inspiring, confronting, humorous – and much discussed. And at the heart of it is the commissioning and moving of Moses to be the instrument of God’s commitment to his people.

There is much we could say here, but I think this much is crucial: it is God’s holiness and glory that is both the foundation, and fount, of Moses’ work. In this sense, we have a pattern for ministry throughout God’s word: it is the nature and reputation of God himself that is the foundation, the wellspring, the motivation, the equipping, of all forms of ministry by God’s mob. Anything else will be counterfeit, will be broken, and will be driven (ultimately) by a concern for our reputation and significance, and not God’s.

What kind of ‘saviour’, what kind of ‘deliverer’, do God’s people need?

The need for their deliverance is not in doubt – by the end of Exodus 1, God’s people are oppressed by the profoundly anti-life forces of those arrayed against God (who is fundamentally pro-life and good). In slavery, with the lives of their children threatened, God’s people need a deliverer. And the implication is that they need a deliverer who is mighty and magnificent.

We meet Moses – a baby, threatened, remarkably saved, taken into Pharaoh’s household. And we are meant to notice his uniqueness, but his confused cultural heritage is problematic. As he reaches mature adulthood, our hopes are raised… but then he moved progressively away from his people, to the margins of society, and rejected by his own.

What kind of deliverer is this?

But it is the parallel ‘seeing’ of God that returns our hopes to the right place. Moses has potential but it is God who is powerful, because of his promises. In this way, Moses is both a tie to what God has already done (a people created by him) and the shadowy template for the Saviour still to come.

Reformation Sunday—the Anabaptists

There is so much that we enjoy as a wider society, and as a church, that we take for granted. The whole idea of the nation-state, the process of liberal-democracy, the wonderful privilege of religious freedom, accessibility to information, education, a free-market economy, the Bible in English...and all of these privileges can be traced to the Reformation.

This cataclysmic event of the 1500s was really the climax of a long period of fermentation, and it’s consequences remain vitally active—and debated—even today. Within the Reformation, there is a wing that has been labelled ‘the radical reformation’. And within that wing, there is a group that was pejoratively described as ‘the Anabaptists’ - the ‘rebaptisers’.

There is much about this group that I love, and which we can applaud and agree with—their wholehearted view of Jesus and God’s word and making decisions in line with that, and their embracing of the notion that the church is on the outside. But there is also much that is problematic … and today we will be looking at the Anabaptists.

‘I will sing the wondrous story’ is one of my favourite Christian hymns. In the second verse it has lines that capture the truth of so much of our experience as God’s mob: ‘Days of darkness still may meet me, sorrow’s path I oft may tread’. For anyone of God’s mob, those words ring true – and even more so when the very promises of God – and our good obedience to them – have led us to such a situation. In fact, Jesus could have sung those lines at any moment. God’s mob, at the start of Exodus, could sing those lines in a choir of slavery.

But, F.H. Rowley knew the truth of God’s word – perhaps even Exodus 1 itself. That is why the lines just quoted are paired with these lines: ‘but his presence still is with me, by his guiding hand I’m led’. God is not absent in those moments – the continuity and unity of his promises guarantee us of this. Moreover, his presence is not passive but active – and so, in Exodus 1, we have the great battlelines made clear, and God’s people assured. The salvation, and the triumph, is about to unfold!*

*Credit to Alec Motyer (‘The Message of Exodus (Bible Speaks Today commentary)) for making this connection for me.

What is the Bible? What makes it so special?

What use is it? Why do I, do we, need it?

As we have been hearing – in this brief interim between sermon series – from Psalm 119, it struck me that these basic questions are questions with answers we have assumed. But, how we answer these questions is crucial for how we understand and handle God’s word. In fact, it would be fair to say that these are first principles questions and answers.

You see, if we do not understand these questions, and their answers, then the Bible becomes a book of advice, a set of guidelines, a magic formula, something wise, even something man-made. And when we start down this path, we start down the path where we are returned to the centre of the universe, and God is marginalised.

So, how would you answer those questions – and what does that actually mean?