For the next number of weeks join us in digging into Psalm 119 as over the summer months some of the men from BCC open up God's Word for us! 

Everyone sings. With mixed results in terms of the sound made, but we all sing something. Christians sing, specifically speaking, because God has made his people sing. The gospel we sing about is that God has rescued sinful, treacherous people like you and me from punishment and hell and given us his underserved grace: eternal life, freedom from sin and death – through the atoning sacrificial death of the Lord Jesus on the cross.

But… I got a shock as I read the lyrics of this song from Exodus.

By way of context, the people of Israel had just crossed the Red Sea and witnessed the (14:31) great power that the Lord used against the Egyptians… The writer explains the impact this had on them… so the people feared the Lord, and they believed in the Lord. And then he wrote the final instalment of this part of Exodus in chapter 15:1-21.

These events - from the time you first heard about them - leave an extraordinary imprint on your mind’s eye. Walls of water, the Red Sea parted, miraculously the people of Israel walking through on dry ground. Followed by the clogged chariot wheels and then the final, terrible destruction of their Egyptian oppressors.

Reading it again, here’s what is so surprising about the Biblical text. The spotlight is not on these extra-ordinary visuals, as dramatically arresting as they most certainly are. It’s on the power and definitive victory of the Lord.

It’s hard to escape from the way this plague – the tenth – is very different from the nine others that came before it. You can’t miss – or at least shouldn’t miss – the fact that the final plague marks a new beginning not just to take note of, but that should never be forgotten. 

Have you ever looked at the skyline of Dublin and noticed some of the dramatic new buildings that have gone up in the last few decades?

Powerful cathedrals of wealth and prosperity – vast campuses – look at Dundrum, or the docklands. Each one dwarfing some of the church cathedrals that dominated the landscape for centuries.

Like that, sometimes God appears eclipsed in the dazzle of such a displays of power.

Intimidating isn’t it? When your teachers, your friends, most people you know even, suggest that faith in Christ, trust in Almighty God is nothing but a faded relic of history.

Here’s a message from The Bible for all of us in this climate:

Remember the Sovereign Lord who will save his people and judge his enemies.

That’s what we’ve been learning in Exodus: that The Lord is the God who rescues his people and so take a look at the account we’ve been reading today too…

We’ve been learning that Exodus follows the amazing story of God’s rescue.

In a very revealing dialogue with God – that we read together last time – God told a very hesitant Moses that this rescue of his enslaved people required not Moses’ prowess as their leader, but rather his intervention. God’s saving presence and action.

Moses, though, as we’ll see, hadn’t quite heard this right.

Yes, he listened to what God had said to him – and from 4:18 look how he returns to Egypt – his brother Aaron meets him and together they both explained to the leaders of the Israelites everything God had said.

But Moses has no interpretive categories for Exodus Chapter 5… it seems he still no way of understanding what’s happening.

The circumstances explode and leave Moses in a spin of doubt and despondency.

We saw last time that Exodus is the story of God’s rescue of his people. Moses – who burst onto the scene in chapters 1 and 2 - will definitely take a prominent role in that rescue story. But closely reading these chapters 3 and 4, we can’t miss what else the writer is communicating. The main thing! He wants us readers to know the name, the identity, the character, the authority, the presence, the empowering – of Moses’ leadership – but of the Lord. Only by his power can this older, nervous, isolated shepherd have any hand in the Lord’s salvation.

What we have in front of us in these chapters is dialogue… and as you’ll see, it’s a very revealing dialogue.

Exodus is the story of God’s rescue of his people.

These days, of course, there’s a newer story right front and centre in our thinking: the narrative of the big rescue from Covid-19, led by government and health experts, leading a bumpy roll-out of the vaccinations.

Reading Exodus, it's easy to see the similarities in our stories: the people of Israel & us in this moment: both stories of people caught in difficult circumstances, groaning for freedom.

We’d love to invite you to follow the narrative here in the Bible and to watch carefully how things transpire. People over centuries and centuries of human history have been stirred and directed by the book of Exodus to see that whatever else is on offer in any given season, we need to know the God who is ultimately in control and that it is him and him alone who rescues.

Luke the gospel writer was determined to provide certainty about Jesus Christ.

As he put together the eye witness testimonies, the findings of his careful investigations, he clearly demonstrated that Jesus was on a mission to save people – not in the first instance from social problems like poverty or even terrible physical disabilities like blindness. But more significantly, much, much more relevant, was Jesus’ mission to save people like us from our terminal sin condition.

Luke wasn’t interested in eggs and bunnies and the marking of a spring festival… he was, though, rightly concerned about - and devoted much attention to - the death of Jesus and what happened next.

It’s what happened next that changed everything then and changes everything for us now. What did happen? Luke explains...

If you were to collect everything ever written in print or digital form about Jesus, you would have an extraordinary, almost inconceivable amount of material. So much has been written you might think that most people should be able to sum up in a sentence or two what Jesus set out to achieve. Despite having a general of who Jesus is, many, many people struggle with that kind of clarity.  But, if we start with and focus on what the biblical writers like Luke wrote about him, examining the material that we saw last week was from eyewitnesses, carefully delivered and complied to give readers like us certainty, you really can have clarity about Jesus’ mission. And when his mission is clarified – I hope that you’ll respond to it.