Union Church

Listen along as we wrap up Exodus and see the hope of Easter.

“For a while” is a phrase whose length can't be measured. At least by the person who's waiting. - Haruki Murakami

“We don't believe something by merely saying we believe it, or even when we believe that we believe it. We believe something when we act as if it were true. Actions are not impostions on who we are, but are expressions of who we are. They come out of our heart and the inner realities it supervises and interacts with.” Dallas Willard 

Exodus 34:6-7 

Romans 8:34-39

1 Peter 1:3-7

2 Cor 3:16-18

Listen along as we continue our series through Exodus.

Notes//Quotes:

Text for reading: Exodus 19:1-6 - Scott

“We can imagine our octogenarian mountaineer in joyful fellowship with the God whose patience he had exhausted at this spot some months earlier.”

10  “He found him in a desert land,

“Oh, that we had died by the hand of the Lord in the land of Egypt, when we sat by the pots of meat and when we ate bread to the full! For you have brought us out into this wilderness to kill this whole assembly with hunger.” - Exodus 16:3 NKJV

“It’s three months since they've left Egypt. They started a new calendar the moment they stepped foot out of Egypt. So now time is being reckoned in relation to his work of deliverance. And he tells them, we're entering into covenant. If you obey me and keep my covenant, then out of all the nations, you're going to be my treasured possession.” 

“9 But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for his own possession, that you may proclaim the excellencies of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light. 10 Once you were not a people, but now you are God's people; once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy. 

Listen along as we continue our series through Exodus.

Exodus 14:5-31

“The story of God is the story of salvation, centered on the One whose name means “Yahweh is salvation,” and here is what that looks like: deliverance from slavery and certain death, announced by faith, and received as a gift through trust and obedience.” - Chris Wright

Ezk 18:23

Prov 3:6-7

“Almost anything in life that truly matters will require you to do small, mostly overlooked things, over a long period of time with him.” Zach Eswine

Listen along as we continue our series through Exodus.

Notes//Quotes:

Exodus 12:1-13

“Liturgies aim our love to different ends precisely by training our hearts through our bodies.”. - James K.A. Smith 

Exodus 12:29-32

13:17-22

Whenever Israel returned to God in such times of national repentance, covenant renewal, or restoration, they returned to the foundational historic event of their national existence—the event on which their identity and faith was founded: God’s great demonstration of compassion, justice, and redemption, the exodus. They needed to be shaped again by the story that had first shaped them and respond to its promise and its demand in renewed worship and obedience. They needed to tell and hear again the story they were in, the story of God and God’s people, and then live in the light of it.For us, individually or as Christian communities, times of revival and renewal will always include going back to the cross and resurrection of Christ, back to the redemption story that defines the good news for us and the world, the story that shapes our identity, our mission, and our future. As it was for Israel, the road to renewal and restoration for us has to be the road of remembrance. For even as Christians, we so easily forget the story we are in. We need, just as much as the Israelites, to hear and tell again and again the story of God, the foundational biblical narrative of our redemption, and then live in the light of it. Chris Wright

Jesus is a teacher who doesn’t just inform our intellect but forms our very loves. He isn’t content to simply deposit new ideas into your mind; he is after nothing less than your wants, your loves, your longings - James KA

Listen along as we continue our time through Exodus.

Exodus 7:1-13

 2 Tim 3:16-17

“One could object that it is not worthy of God to wield the sword. Is God not love, long-suffering and all-powerful love? A counter-question could go something like this: Is it not a bit too arrogant to presume that our contemporary sensibilities about what is compatible with God’s love are so much healthier than those of the people of God throughout the whole history of Judaism and Christianity? If God were not angry at injustice and deception and did not make the final end to violence God would not be worthy of our worship.” - Mirolsav Volf 

6:6-8

“How are we to interpret all this? With humility, would be a good place to start. There is (and always will be) a mystery in holding together the sovereignty of God and human moral responsibility for our own willed choices and actions. Yet we must, without hesitation, insist that the Bible affirms both, frequently and unequivocally, however difficult it is for us to reconcile them in our human logic” - Chris Wright

“after six occasions of pharaoh hardening his own heart, we at last read that God hardens his heart, it is not so much that God is causing him to make those choices but that God gives him up to the choices he has shown himself determined to make and allows the consequences to take their course” Chris Wright

Listen along as we continue our series in Exodus.

Exodus 5:1-9, 6:1-8 - Scott Reading

“The exodus is a battle of the gods, in which only one can emerge from the ring victorious…The conflict between the deities: Egypt's against Israel's, the false against the true, the serpent against the seed, Pharaoh against the Lord. It is a mismatch. Battles against the Lord always are.”

“Their words in 5:1 have all the hallmarks of a bold prophetic word, beginning with the classic “Thus says Yahweh” (author’s translation) and framed as a simple imperative, “let my people go.” At first reading it sounds impressively courageous as a direct word from God. Except that it was not. That speech in verse 1 was not actually what God had told Moses to say to pharaoh, and the narrator knows this, since he records Moses and Aaron reverting in verse 3 to the words God had actually given Moses in 3:18. — Christopher Wright

“That “long tradition” includes not only Job and the writers of many a psalm of lament, not only the poet who produced the prolonged and searingly poignant protest called Lamentations, but also the prophet Elijah (1 Kgs 19) and, especially, Jeremiah, whose depression and desperation lead to outbursts of astonishing honesty, some of which employ Moses’s imploring “Why …?” (e.g., Jer 12:1–4; 15:10–21; 20:7–17). That “Why …?”—echoing through the pain of so many in the Old Testament—is heard from the cross at the moment of that greater exodus that Christ accomplished there. And indeed, it was a “Why …?” taken straight from the Scriptures that shaped Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection. “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?” (Mark 15:34; Ps 22:1). We know why. And Jesus, too, knew why. He was doing what he had come to do, bearing in his own divine-human self the full and terrible weight and cost and consequences of the sin of the world. But the agony of doing so draws forth this cry of dereliction. Even in the silence of heaven at that moment, we may hear the echo of exactly what God said in answer to the “Why?” that Moses asked.”

"Standing on business" means to firmly prioritize your responsibilities, commitments, and personal values in a professional or serious manner, essentially indicating a dedication to taking care of your business and following through on your words with actions; it implies a sense of duty, assertiveness, and a no-nonsense attitude towards achieving goals.”  

“God just gets on with business. This is really good news for you and me because sometimes we lack faith in God, we lack enthusiasm, and we're not sure if God is going to make good on his promises. God's promises however, do not depend on us, they depend on him. And so, even if we're in a period of discouragement, we're not in danger of derailing God's plan. God will carry out the promises that he made with or without our participation. And here, God isn't just going to save the ones who are on his side and who are excited, he is going to save all of the Hebrews. He's giving them time to come around and by the time they leave Egypt, they will be on board and he will be able to rescue them.”

Listen along as we continue our series through Exodus.

Text: Exodus 3:1-6

“What Moses does mean by this? Did he mean that he became a foreigner to those who no longer accepted him? To the Egyptians, the Hebrews, or that now he's in Midian and he doesn't belong here either? Moses is a misfit and he has this hybrid identity that doesn't really belong.” 

“What is the significance of the fire’s being in the bush but not of the bush? It indicates that the fire Moses saw was independent of the bush—it was not using the bush for its fuel. That’s why the bush wasn’t consumed. It was burning from its own power. It was self-generated. This is a biblical example of what we call theophany, meaning “God made manifest.” The God whom we worship is a spirit. He is invisible, and His invisible substance cannot be seen by the human eye. But there are occasions in redemptive history where the invisible God makes Himself visible by some kind of manifestation. That is called a theophany, and it’s what we see with the burning bush.” — R.C. Sproul

 “God is not only identifying himself as Yahweh, the God who made a covenant with Abraham to bless him and multiply him and bring him into the land and make him be a blessing to all nations. Not only is He that God, but at the same time He’s defining who Moses is. He belongs in that covenant people and the God of his father is that God, the God Yahweh. So he's grown up in an Egyptian context where there are lots of deities, lots of temples, lots of priests worshiping these different deities, and in his first encounter with God he finds out simultaneously who God is, and who he is, and that settles things for him. Going forward, his hybrid identity gets resolved and I think this is how it works actually for all of us. When we come to fully encounter the God of the Bible (Yahweh who revealed himself in Jesus)…as we come to know Yahweh we come to know ourselves. There's no real way to know who we are outside of knowing who God is, who God has created us to be, and who He's called us to be.” — Dr. Carmen Imes

“Our wisdom, in so far as it ought to be deemed true and solid Wisdom, consists almost entirely of two parts: the knowledge of God and of ourselves. But as these are connected together by many ties, it is not easy to determine which of the two precedes and gives birth to the other. For, in the first place, no man can survey himself without forthwith turning his thoughts towards the God in whom he lives and moves; because it is perfectly obvious, that the endowments which we possess cannot possibly be from ourselves; nay, that our very being is nothing else than subsistence in God alone. In the second place, those blessings which unceasingly distill to us from heaven, are like streams conducting us to the fountain. Here, again, the infinitude of good which resides in God becomes more apparent from our poverty. In particular, the miserable ruin into which the revolt of the first man has plunged us, compels us to turn our eyes upwards; not only that while hungry and famishing we may thence ask what we want, but being aroused by fear may learn humility.”     — John Calvin

“Yahweh is and always will be “God with”—God with those who faithfully obey his sending; God with his people in good times and bad; God with the poor and needy in their affliction; and eventually, Immanuel, “God with us.” —Christopher Wright

Questions:

Listen along as we look at Exodus 2.

Notes//Quotes:

Exodus 2:1-25

“The one universal balm for the trauma of war was tea. It was the thing that helped people cope. People made tea during air raids and after air raids, and on breaks between retrieving bodies from shattered buildings. Tea bolstered the network of thirty thousand observers who watched for German aircraft over England, operating from one thousand observation posts, all stocked with tea and kettles. Mobile canteens dispensed gallons of it, steaming, from spigots. In propaganda films, the making of tea became a visual metaphor for carrying on. “Tea acquired almost a magical importance in London life,” according to one study of London during the war. “And the reassuring cup of tea actually did seem to help cheer people up in a crisis.” Tea ran through Mass-Observation diaries like a river. “That’s one trouble about the raids,” a female diarist complained. “People do nothing but make tea and expect you to drink it.” - Erik Larson

Heb 11:23

God’s story is not one in which individuals or whole nations are simplistically portrayed as immutably good or bad. People change, times change—and the only constant is that God works in and through the see-saw and reversals of history to accomplish his purpose. - Chris Wright

“If God had perceived that our greatest need was economic, he would have sent an economist. If he had perceived that our greatest need was entertainment, he would have sent us a comedian or an artist. If God had perceived that our greatest need was political stability, he would have sent us a politician. If he had perceived that our greatest need was health, he would have sent us a doctor. But he perceived that our greatest need involved our sin, our alienation from him, our profound rebellion, our death; and he sent us a Savior.” - D.A. Carson

2 Peter 3:8-13

Listen along as we begin our series through Exodus.

Notes//Quotes:

Exodus 1:7-22

Books do not usually begin with the word “And.” But Exodus does, in the Hebrew text, and so do Leviticus and Numbers: the second, third, and fourth books of the Bible. You would not know this from most modern English translations, presumably because it is not considered good literary style to begin a sentence, never mind a whole book, with “And.” In Hebrew, however, although these are clearly whole books in their own right, each of them begins in a way that clearly connects them altogether as part of one long story that began in Genesis and stretches to the borders of the promised land by the end of Numbers. Deuteronomy, however, begins with a fresh telling of the same story and ends where it started, so does not need the connecting and forward-moving opening word “And.” - Chris Wright

The Pentateuch as a whole—the Torah—constituted the foundation of Old Testament Israel’s faith and identity, and the book of Exodus sets in place some of the largest theological blocks within that foundation. It showed Israel who their God was, who they were as God’s people, how God’s desire was to dwell in their midst, and how the grace of God was the only guarantee that their journey with God (or rather, God’s journey with them) could continue - Chris Wright

“Ironically, Genesis presents the mother of all Israelites oppressing an Egyptian slave, while Exodus presents an Egyptian king oppressing Israelites as slaves. To that degree, Sarah foreshadows pharaoh’s role, just as Hagar’s story prefigures Israel’s story” - Victor Hamilton

“The pogrom has reached its height. All Egypt has been recruited to destroy the population explosion of the enemy” Brevard Childs

The first exodus comes in the midst of a plot that should be familiar to anyone who has read the garden story in Genesis. The people of Israel are fruitful and multiply and fill the land, but the serpent-like king is tricksy, and he attacks the women, with a view to destroying their male descendants. Yet in contrast to the garden story, the women outmaneuver him. - Alastair Roberts

The unmissable proclamation heard in the openings of all four gospels, then, is simply this: “God is doing it again!” The God of Abraham is keeping his promise. The God of Moses is confronting the world’s pharaohs. The God of the exodus is on the way to save his people. Except that the ultimate confrontation and victory will not come about by God sending plagues upon the Romans but by God the Son becoming the Passover lamb, his flesh broken and his blood shed on the cross for the redemption not only of Israel but of people from all nations who put their trust in him. From this point on, the New Testament is replete with echoes of exodus and new-exodus themes, along with its references to the covenant and law given at Sinai, and the tabernacle - Chris Wright