A Pagan Priest and the People of God

Exodus 18

For the last month we had a young man named Zane visiting us from the U.S. Zane actually lived in Paris for six years and came to Connexion for a lot of that time; he moved back to the U.S. a few years ago. We knew him well back then, so we had him over last week to spend the afternoon with him. He was telling me about conversations he had had with people in the church, questions he would ask.

One of those questions was, how has Connexion changed in the time he’s been away? And one of the answers he got was surprising to me: someone said, “Connexion is becoming a ‘missionary church.’”

I wasn’t quite sure what that meant, and I’m still not. We’ve always had a lot of missionaries in our church who are in Paris for various reasons. We have our Dimanche de la form’ throughout the year, and we have a new theme for those training sessions every semester. The theme this semester has been missions. We have two short-term missions trips organized for this semester as well—so maybe all that is where that answer came from.

At any rate, here’s my precision to this idea that “Connexion is becoming a missionary church.” If by that, you mean that we are becoming a church that is entirely focused on sending people out to other countries to be missionaries, then you’re wrong—that is part of what we’d love to do, what we have always wanted to do, but not all of it.

However, if by “missionary church”, you mean a church that is devoted to the mission Christ gave to the church, to go and make disciples of all nations, including our own, then you’re right: we are a missionary church, and we always have been. It’s difficult to find the right balance in explaining what it means to be a church on mission, so our speaking about the nations this semester has been a much-needed “rebalancing” for us.

All of this may seem unrelated to the passage we’ve just read, Exodus 18, but it’s not; in fact it is very pertinent.

Exodus 18 acts like a hinge; it is a transition passage. The first half responds to everything that came before, and the second half helps prepare for everything that will come after.

If you remember, last week we saw the first time that Israel, as the free and independent people of God, is attacked by a foreign nation. And we saw God’s judgment against that nation, almost as a warning: if you raise your hand against God, he raises his hand against you.

And then, right after, we have an arrival that feels a long time coming: the arrival of Moses’s family.

If you weren’t here for the beginning of our series, we need some context.

In Exodus 2, we see Moses flee Egypt after killing an Egyptian who was beating a Hebrew. (This was before God ever called to him, before he became the figure he is in chapter 18.) He goes to a country called Midian and comes across these young women watering their father’s flock. They’re set upon by some shepherds but Moses intervenes and keeps them safe, waters their flock.

The women’s father Jethro, the priest of Midian, invites Moses in for a meal to thank him, and Moses ends up staying with him, and eventually marrying one of his daughters, Zipporah, and they have a son, Gershom. (At some point later they have another son, Eliezer, as we see in v. 4, both sons named after significant moments in Moses’s life.)

Then God calls Moses from the burning bush to go free his people.

At some point between his departure from Midian and now, Moses sent his family back to Midian to stay with his father-in-law. We’re not sure why, it could have been for any number of reasons—the most likely, in my opinion, is that he sent them back to Midian simply to keep them safe.

But now that Israel is free, and they’re out of Egypt, Jethro brings Moses’s wife and sons back to him.

Chapter 18 is almost entirely focused on Jethro, whom we’ve barely seen in this story. And what we see is fairly extraordinary, and—like I said—it serves as a hinge around which the entire book of Exodus turns.

A Pagan's Response (v. 1-12)

So remember what we talked about last week: this is the first time that Israel has been on their own as a free nation. They were a big family when they arrived in Egypt, and since they had become a people, they had been enslaved in Egypt. This was the first time they were a people on their own, outside of that context of slavery.

And right away we see how a pagan nation responds to them. Amalek attacks Israel, raising their hands against the throne of God himself (as we see in 17.16).

This is one way the nations will respond to God. (And when I say “the nations”, I mean any people or people group who don’t belong to God’s people—at this time, the people of Israel.) That’s the way some nations will respond to God’s presence and God’s people: through conflict.

Another way the nations will respond to God was mentioned back in chapter 15, in the song the people sang after God brought them through the Red Sea:

14  The peoples have heard; they tremble; pangs have seized the inhabitants of Philistia. 15  Now are the chiefs of Edom dismayed; trembling seizes the leaders of Moab; all the inhabitants of Canaan have melted away. 16  Terror and dread fall upon them; because of the greatness of your arm, they are still as a stone…

God’s works in this book are impressive, to say the least. So one way the nations will respond to God’s presence and his people is fear, dread, trembling.

But in today’s text, we see a different way for the nations to respond to God’s presence and his people.

Jethro brings Moses’s wife and sons back to him, and the two men spend some time together. (Fortunately, it seems that Moses and Jethro have enjoyed a good relationship since they first met in Midian.) They hang out in his tent, or perhaps walk around the massive camp, and Moses tells Jethro everything that happened in Egypt and since then, everything God did.

Jethro sees God’s presence when he sees God’s people. He sees how God has dealt with his people. But he doesn’t go on the offensive, and he isn’t afraid. He rejoices.

V. 9:

9 And Jethro rejoiced for all the good that the Lord had done to Israel, in that he had delivered them out of the hand of the Egyptians.

10 Jethro said, “Blessed be the Lord, who has delivered you out of the hand of the Egyptians and out of the hand of Pharaoh and has delivered the people from under the hand of the Egyptians. 11 Now I know that the Lord is greater than all gods, because in this affair they dealt arrogantly with the people.” 12 And Jethro, Moses’ father-in-law, brought a burnt offering and sacrifices to God; and Aaron came with all the elders of Israel to eat bread with Moses’ father-in-law before God.

This isn’t just acknowledgement of a fact, like when you go into someone’s new apartment for the first time and say, “Wow, it’s very spacious.” What Jethro does is much bigger than that. He worships: “Blessed be the Lord,” he says. And then he makes a confession:  “Now I know that the Lord is greater than all gods.”

He doesn’t become an Israelite—and no one’s asked him to—but he makes a statement about who God is, and he acts on that statement in reverence of God: he makes a sacrifice to God and eats with Moses and Aaron and the elders of Israel in God’s presence.

This is huge. This is a profession of faith. Jethro is not a member of God’s people. He is a pagan priest. And yet, after hearing what God has done, he rejoices and proclaims that the Lord is greater than all gods, then he comes together with God’s people to eat a meal in God’s presence.

We cannot rush over this too quickly. Tim Chester called this moment—particularly v. 12—the climax of the exodus, and he’s right.

One of the explicit intentions of God in all the Bible is that God’s people show the nations who God is.

Let’s take an example; we’ll see this in a couple of weeks, but I don’t know how much time we’ll have to spend on it. In Exodus 20, God gives Moses the Ten Commandments. One of those commandments, in v. 7, says this:

You shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain, for the Lord will not hold him guiltless who takes his name in vain.

Now there has been a lot of talk about what exactly it means to take God’s name in vain. Some people say it’s about using God’s name as a swear word: we weren’t allowed to say “Oh my God” or “Jesus Christ!” when I was a kid. Some people connect it more to praying or declaring things: saying things like, “Yes, we proclaim that you will no longer have migraines, in the name of Jesus!”, and expecting those things to happen.

Of course, we shouldn’t do these things either; we don’t let our kids say “Jesus Christ!” when they’re frustrated, and we can’t use Jesus’s name as a kind of skeleton key to open whatever door we want opened.

But that’s not what this commandment is talking about. It’s not about swearing, or using his name for selfish purposes, or even about using God’s name lightly, as the Segond 21 says. It’s not primarily about how we speak.

Carmen Joy Imes wrote a wonderful book called Bearing God’s Name; the entire book is devoted to this question. She makes incredibly persuasive arguments from the biblical text—she convinced me—but I don’t have time to go through them all now. The main takeaway is that the word for “take” in Exodus 20.7 literally means to “carry” or to “bear.” The people of God were called to take God’s name—his proper name, not “God” in the general sense but “Yahweh”, the name with which he revealed himself to Moses—and carry it to the nations.

To put it another, more modern way, Exodus 20.7 is more about evangelism than just the way we speak—evangelism through our lives. By the way the people of God live, they were called to show the nations what God is like, what is behind his name—the holy character that God’s name represents. This commandment is a warning against claiming God’s name as a people, and yet living in a way that is not in keeping with that name.

In Exodus 18, the people still haven’t received God’s law; there’s still a lot they need to change. But through Moses’s testimony and what Jethro sees, Jethro sees and recognizes who God is. In v. 12, he makes a sacrifice to God, a burnt offering; and he sits down with Moses and Aaron and the other elders of Israel to eat a meal. In this meal, we see the nations—in Jethro the pagan priest—responding to God’s revelation with faith, with a profession that God is who he claims to be.

This meal, which brings together Israelite and pagan to worship the one true God, is a foreshadowing of what was to come. It is repeated every time the church comes together. It is a picture of the great invitation that Jesus Christ would bring through his life, death and resurrection, throwing the doors wide open to all tribes and tongues and peoples.

We do the same thing every week. Our meal is the bread and the cup, which represent the body of Christ and the blood of Christ. The finished work of Christ unites us in faith to one another—many nations, worshiping and honoring one God.

A Pagan's Help (v. 13-27)

Given the heights of v. 1-12, and everything they represent, the second half of chapter 18 may seem a bit mundane in comparison. But in fact this section is really interesting, for a number of similar reasons.

V. 13-16 describe the situation. Moses sits to “judge” the people from morning until evening.

What does it mean to “judge” the people in this sense? It’s not just a matter of criminal affairs (though that was surely part of it). This camp is huge—counting the women and children, likely around two million people. You put that many people together, there’s going to be friction. There are going to be disagreements. And someone will need to make decisions about what to do.

Moses is the guy who’s doing this now. Why is he the guy? Because: who else is there? Maybe Aaron, but Aaron was never explicitly designated for that function. Moses is the one who’s holding the staff of God, after all; he’s the one whom God chose to lead his people. So inevitably, he ends up being the one getting caught up in the details.

This happens all the time, doesn’t it? We start one thing, and get preoccupied in the urgency of that thing, and before we know it we’re taking on a million other things like it—and we don’t even realize that it’s way too much, we’ve bit off far more than we can chew. That’s the situation Moses is in. It’s not hubris on his part—Numbers 12 tells us that Moses was an extremely humble man—it’s just… Who else is there? It’s the classic dilemma of focusing on what’s urgent rather than on what’s important.

Moses can’t see it, but interestingly, chapter 18 is told almost entirely from the perspective of Jethro. Jethro, the outsider, who hasn’t been with Israel all this time, comes in, and right away, he can see the problem. This is one reason I love reading the Bible with people who didn’t grow up in church; they’ve got enough distance from it to recognize things we can’t see because we’ve had our noses pressed up against it for so long.

So Jethro sort of casually asks Moses, “What are you doing?”

And Moses explains, like to a child: “Well, they’ve got problems, and they come to me so I can ask God what they should do, and I tell them.”

Jethro’s response is perfect: “That’s nuts.” V. 17:

What you are doing is not good. 18 You and the people with you will certainly wear yourselves out, for the thing is too heavy for you. You are not able to do it alone.

So Jethro gives Moses some really basic advice. He tells him that Moses should be the one to come before God and ask for instruction, and that Moses should tell them how God wants them to live. (That’s coming very soon, when God gives Moses the law.) And then, Moses should delegate. V. 21:

21 Moreover, look for able men from all the people, men who fear God, who are trustworthy and hate a bribe, and place such men over the people as chiefs of thousands, of hundreds, of fifties, and of tens. 22 And let them judge the people at all times. Every great matter they shall bring to you, but any small matter they shall decide themselves. So it will be easier for you, and they will bear the burden with you. 23 If you do this, God will direct you, you will be able to endure, and all this people also will go to their place in peace.”

There’s a lot of good, common wisdom in what Jethro says—it’s something I had on my mind for years at the beginning of the church, when I was wearing multiple hats; I often thought of this passage and felt like Jethro was being my own personal tutor. It’s why I’m so thankful for the team God has given us here—I don’t have to wear every hat, because I’ve got godly, dependable men and women with me who can do the things I can’t do.

And I’m thinking a lot about it now these days too, but from the other side. I’m watching a group of men and women giving so much time and effort to the building project, and I’m seeing how dedicated they are…and I’m worried that they’re going to run themselves into the ground. So I’m thinking about the best ways to help them work well without burning themselves out.

But there’s a lot more going on here than just practical wisdom on how to delegate.

First of all, Jethro’s advice reiterates what we saw last week. Israel’s victory against Amalek was dependent on Moses’s ability to keep his hands holding up the staff of God. But he could not do it on his own.

That’s what we see again here: even if Moses is the man God has chosen to lead Israel, he is not the Savior. He’s just a man, and he can’t do this alone.

Secondly, Jethro’s advice wisely places the emphasis, not on skills, but on character. Moses should find able men (so competence is necessary), but what should characterize them above all else is that they fear God, are trustworthy, and hate a bribe. Moses should make sure that the people he puts in charge won’t be susceptible to pressure, won’t try to sway the hands of justice because it would be more rewarding for them personally.

It’s reminiscent of Paul’s list of qualifications for being an elder of the church in 1 Timothy 3 and Titus 1. An elder should be competent (“able to preach”), but above all, he should display godly character.

So why is this part of the chapter significant? It’s not because Jethro gives Moses good advice, but because Jethro’s advice gets the people ready to receive the law.

In chapter 19, they’ll arrive at Mount Sinai, where God will give his law to the people. The law of God will radically reorganize everything about this people, from their loftiest spiritual goals to their most mundane practices. There will be a lot of practical application, a lot of situations in which they won’t quite know how to put the law into practice.

They’ll need help. They’ll need judges. They’ll need leaders.

By God’s grace, through this event, the structure necessary to begin obeying the law is already in place, before they ever get to Mount Sinai.

And isn’t it incredible that the man perhaps most responsible for preparing the people to become the people of God, to truly “bear his name”…was a pagan? It wasn’t Moses; it wasn’t even an Israelite. It was a pagan priest who recognized a need and who had enough wisdom to see how to meet that need.

It’s another echo of what would come later. The church could have so easily been structured differently—how easy would it have been for them to say, “All pastors and leaders in the church must be of Jewish origin, even if the members of the church are not Jewish”? Jesus was Jewish; all of the apostles were Jewish; a mentality of ethnic superiority could easily have extended out beyond that group of men.

But it wasn’t. Those who were set up as elders in the churches were both Jewish and Gentile. It didn’t matter where they were from, but rather what they were like, their character.

This passage is so important for understanding what’s happened so far in the story, and what’s coming next. In the first half, we see a man representing the nations responding in faith to what God has done for Israel—the proper response to the wonders God displayed in chapters 1-17. And in the second half, we see this same man, from a foreign nation, integrally involved in preparing the people of Israel to live as God’s people, in chapters 19-40.

Conclusion

Now, surely this passage isn’t here only to orient us in the story; it’s not only a transition. No: this text establishes two great principles that still apply today.

Firstly: the grace of God to his people, and the people’s response to that grace, is meant to invite all peoples to faith in God.

The message of the gospel is of singular importance; there is no evangelism if the good news of Christ is not proclaimed by God’s people in such a way that those who hear it are able to understand.

But the proclamation of the message alone is not enough. God’s hand at work should be clear from what people see when they look at us, not just what they hear when we speak to them. That’s why it’s not enough for a pastor to be a good preacher, and faithfully speak the truth of the gospel; he must live in accordance with what he preaches. Otherwise, his preaching is dangerous, even if what he says is true.

This is what Jethro saw, even if it was before the law, so the image the people were meant to display wasn’t totally complete. Moses told Jethro what God had done; Jethro saw this new people gathered in the desert to worship the one true God—and he was convinced. He celebrated God’s works among his people and joined them for a meal in God’s presence.

And afterwards, he went back home. Our home group was wondering if that meant Jethro didn’t really have faith in God, because he didn’t stay with them. The text doesn’t give us that kind of information—but I don’t think so. Jethro’s return to Midian seems more like a missionary trip. We don’t know what kind of priest he was before, but given what he says in v. 10-12, I think it’s safe to assume what kind of priest he was after: a priest who returned to Midian to tell others of the one true God, the God of Israel. It’s an assumption, but I’m happy with it.

The grace of God to his people, and the people’s response to that grace, is meant to invite all peoples to faith in God. This is one reason I love our church. We have so many nations represented in our church—over forty, last time we checked. We are a larger-scale picture of what we see in Exodus 18. And this is why we’ve been speaking so much about missions lately: the mission Christ gave the church is incomplete as long as it is only focused inward. We won’t all go to foreign countries to preach the gospel; but the nations are the goal. God’s plans are not limited to one place or one time; they are universal, and they are eternal.

That’s the first thing. Here’s the second: we see that Moses had been shoe-horned into this role of judge over the people, and God used Jethro to show him, and everyone else, that Moses wasn’t up to the task. No one—not Moses or anyone—could be a judge of God’s people on their own. God is the Judge of his people; God gives and manages the law.

Moses’s inability to be the perfect Judge for God’s people reminds us that someone else would have to fill that role: Jesus Christ, the Son of God, the Savior of the nations, is the perfect Judge Moses couldn’t be. He instructs us in God’s law and his character through his Spirit, and one day he will return to judge the living and the dead.

So our call, whoever we are, wherever we’re from, is to submit to him. To read his Word, and understand how he calls us to live. To listen to his voice, and obey what he tells us to do. And to trust that before he judges us, he himself was judged for us. He took our sin upon himself and received the judgment we deserve, the punishment we deserve for our sins, so that when he returns to render the final judgment, he can look at us and definitively declare that we are perfect—not because we are perfect, but because he was perfect for us.

Our perfect Judge reigns over us, guides us, and is returning for us. Let us bear his name well, and live in faith in him, and call the nations to that same faith.

Hands Raised in Victory and Judgment

Exodus 17.8-16

I remember the first time I ever saw a kid being actively mean to our daughter Zadie on the playground. She must have been about two years old. And I saw a kid walk up behind her and just give her a shove on the back; she fell right over onto her face.

I saw red. I jumped up, and I ran to my baby, and I didn’t shove the kid back like I wanted to (“See how you like it!”)…but oh, I wanted to. I did tell him no, and gave him a super menacing look—I wanted it to be clear that if you mess with my baby girl, you mess with me; and I’m a lot bigger than she is.

That’s sort of what we see in our passage today, except of course it goes much further.

God showed the people of Israel that he was their Rescuer, after liberating them from slavery in Egypt. Then, in the text we saw last week, God showed that he was their Provider, by miraculously providing them with food and water in the desert. In this text, we see God reaffirm his role of Israel’s Protector. But in fact we see something else as well, something even more significant: we see God displaying once again his right and his role as Judge.

This seems like a simple passage, and on the surface, for the immediate story, it is. However, if we take it in the context of the larger story of the Bible, we find that there’s more going on here than we might first imagine.

God Fights for His People (v. 8-13)

So we’ve just come out of this cycle we observed last week. Israel needs something, they quarrel with Moses about it, Moses brings the need before God, and God patiently provides for the need. In the verses just before this, God tells Moses that he will stand on the rock at Horeb, he tells Moses to strike the rock, and water comes out of the rock to give the people enough to drink.

We’re not exactly sure how much time has passed when we see them again in v. 8, but we should keep their general mentality in mind. So far, their mentality has been fear for themselves, and discontent with Moses’s leadership. That mentality will be stretched almost to the breaking point starting in v. 8.

8 Then Amalek came and fought with Israel at Rephidim. 9 So Moses said to Joshua, “Choose for us men, and go out and fight with Amalek. Tomorrow I will stand on the top of the hill with the staff of God in my hand.”

Now, who was Amalek? Amalek was the leader of a people group who lived in the northern Sinai peninsula. We know that the people of Israel are descended from Jacob, Isaac’s son—the man through whom God chose to extend his promise to Abraham. According to Genesis 36, Amalek is a descendant of Esau, Jacob’s brother. So the people of Israel and the people of Amalek were distant cousins.

In this text we don’t have any details about how they came to fight against Israel or why, but we get a little more information later on in Deuteronomy 25.17-18:

17 “Remember what Amalek did to you on the way as you came out of Egypt, 18 how he attacked you on the way when you were faint and weary, and cut off your tail, those who were lagging behind you, and he did not fear God.”

So there we see the how and the why: Israel’s camp was very big, over 2 million people, they had been walking in the desert for a while now and were tired. Amalek came and attacked the easiest prey, Israelites at the very back of the camp—those who were weakest and defenseless. And they did it, we see at the end of v. 18, because “they did not fear God.” There may have been other reasons as well (maybe they wanted supplies or riches, because Israel took a lot of wealth out of Egypt with them), but the ultimate reason they did it is because they didn’t fear God.

So when Moses finds out that Amalek is attacking the back of the camp, he turns to a guy we see mentioned here for the first time: a man named Joshua. Joshua would soon become, in a sense, Moses’s right-hand man; he would be the man to take Moses’s place after he died.

Moses comes to Joshua and tells him to choose some men and go out and fight Amalek.

It’s hard to overestimate what a daunting order this would have been. The last time an army came against them, it was the army of Egypt, and God didn’t let them come near Israel. He kept them at a distance while Israel crossed the Red Sea. How disappointing would it have been to hear that God wasn’t going to do that this time, that they would have to go out and fight?

In addition, Israel had never fought anyone. They’ve been slaves for the last four hundred years. They had no army; they didn’t have armor or chariots or training. Maybe they had some weapons, but they were by no means heavily armed. Basically Moses is telling Joshua to go around the camp and say, “Hey, you look tough. Come with me. Do you have anything sharp? Grab it.” And this ragtag group of men are going out to fight an army.

Now while Joshua and his “army” does this, what is Moses going to do? He’s going to go up on a hill with two men, and with God’s staff in his hand. That’s all he says.

If the people of Israel thought it was hard to trust Moses’s leadership before, imagine how hard this would have been for them.

But Joshua is faithful; he does what Moses says. He goes out and starts gathering men, and Moses goes up on the nearby hill with his brother Aaron and a man named Hur. (We know almost nothing about Hur except that he was from the tribe of Judah, and he was the grandfather of Bezalel, whom God would later choose to build the tabernacle.) And what happens is extraordinary. V. 10:

10 So Joshua did as Moses told him, and fought with Amalek, while Moses, Aaron, and Hur went up to the top of the hill. 11 Whenever Moses held up his hand, Israel prevailed, and whenever he lowered his hand, Amalek prevailed. 12 But Moses’ hands grew weary, so they took a stone and put it under him, and he sat on it, while Aaron and Hur held up his hands, one on one side, and the other on the other side. So his hands were steady until the going down of the sun. 13 And Joshua overwhelmed Amalek and his people with the sword.

Now I want to address a common misconception before we go any further, because I assume that a lot of you will have thought of this already, if you read the text this week.

One of the most common mistakes people make when they read this passage—and it’s a mistake I myself made for a very long time—is to imagine that it’s about prayer. As long as Moses’s hands are raised (in prayer, we think), Israel wins; when he lowers them (when he stops praying), Amalek wins. Raising hands is an image we often associate with prayer.

Obviously, prayer is a vital part of the life of God’s people. We need to pray, and to “pray without ceasing” as Paul said (1 Thessalonians 5.17), because the norm that God has established is to accomplish his will through the prayers of his people. So I’m not saying prayer isn’t important.

But prayer isn’t the focus of this text. Prayer is never mentioned in this passage; Moses never says he’s going up on the hill to pray.

What is mentioned is what is in Moses’s hand when he lifts it up: the staff of God. In v. 9, Moses told Joshua: “Tomorrow I will stand on the top of the hill with the staff of God in my hand.” This staff was the staff which Moses first used before the Pharaoh, to convince him of God’s power. It was the staff with which Moses had struck the waters of the Nile so it turned to blood; it was the staff with which he struck the rock in the previous passage, so that it gave the people water. This staff wasn’t a magic wand, but it was often used as a symbolic picture of God’s power and authority.

Look at v. 11 again:

Whenever Moses held up his hand [singular], Israel prevailed, and whenever he lowered his hand [singular], Amalek prevailed.

Which hand was he holding up? Presumably, given what he just said in v. 9, he was holding up the hand in which he held the staff of God. Then v. 12:

12 But Moses’ hands [plural now] grew weary, so they took a stone and put it under him, and he sat on it, while Aaron and Hur held up his hands, one on one side, and the other on the other side. So his hands were steady until the going down of the sun.

Why both hands now? The text doesn’t say explicitly, but my guess would be, the hand holding the staff got tired, and he needed both. Have you ever tried to hold anything up over your head for a long period of time? Anyone who has tried to hold a baby and drink a cup of coffee at the same time knows the struggle. After a while, your arm gets exhausted.

So the point here isn’t why Moses’s hands are lifted, but what he’s holding when he lifts them: the staff of God. As long as God’s staff is raised against Amalek, Israel is victorious.

Now I said the point of this passage isn’t prayer; what is the point?

The point is twofold. First of all, by sending Moses to the top of the hill with his staff, and by showing that Israel’s victory depended on Moses’s holding that staff up, God is showing the people, in perhaps the clearest way he has so far, that Moses is the man God has chosen to lead Israel.

They need to get this in their heads, because they are regularly quarreling with him over the state of things and their exit from Egypt. Moses is the man God has chosen for this particular job.

But at the same time, as we see here, Moses is just a man. He’s not a god. He’s weak. His hands get tired. He has to sit down and have his brother and a buddy help him keep his hands holding that staff up.

So the second thing God wants to make clear is that even if he has chosen Moses to lead the people, Moses is not their savior; he is not their protector or provider. God is. That’s why it’s referred to as “the staff of God” in his hand. It is not Moses who is giving Israel the victory when the staff is raised; it’s God.

For the first time, the people of Israel are required to fight to defend themselves. And they are woefully outmatched and unexperienced. So what a blessing it must have been to discover that in fact, they weren’t the ones doing the real fighting. God was fighting for them. God was giving them the victory.

And through God’s power, represented by the upraised staff, Joshua overwhelmed Amalek and his people with the sword (v. 13).

God Judges His Enemies (v. 14-16)

I know that this is going to be difficult for some people to hear—we love the first part, that God fights for his people, but the idea of God having enemies, and actually judging those enemies, is harder to swallow. And yet, that’s exactly what we see here. V. 14:

14 Then the Lord said to Moses, “Write this as a memorial in a book and recite it in the ears of Joshua, that I will utterly blot out the memory of Amalek from under heaven.” 15 And Moses built an altar and called the name of it, The Lord Is My Banner, 16 saying, “A hand upon the throne of the Lord! The Lord will have war with Amalek from generation to generation.”

So the first thing God tells Moses is, “Write this down.” It’s the first time (unless I’m forgetting something) that we see a reference to Moses writing down an event that has transpired. He’s to write it down in a book and read it to Joshua, presumably that he might pass it on to the people and to future generations. What is he to write down? “That I will utterly blot out the memory of Amalek from under heaven.”

Now this would happen eventually, in the sense that the culture of the Amalekites has been lost to history. They continued to be enemies of Israel in the future, were eventually defeated by Gideon and Saul, and finally destroyed completely during the reign of Hezekiah. God did what he said he would do.

But why is his judgment on Amalek so severe? We didn’t see God say the same thing about Egypt, even though they had enslaved the people of Israel for centuries. Comparatively speaking, what Amalek did was bad, but it wasn’t bad as that.

God’s judgment on Amalek is so severe because it’s not just about Amalek: it’s bigger than just this one people.

This was, in a certain sense, the beginning of a new era. Israel wasn’t a people when they arrived in Egypt; they were just a family. As they grew and became a people, they were subjected to slavery in Egypt, and this is the first time in centuries that they are finally free. This is the first time that Israel, as a people, has any kind of autonomy.

And this is the first time a foreign people stood as enemies of God’s free and chosen people—and by extension, enemies of God himself.

So the question is, what message does God want to send through this event? How does God respond to those who rise up against him? He responds by judging them.

This isn’t the first time we’ve seen it this kind of thing, this conflict between someone who is “with God” and someone who is not “with God.”

There’s the conflict between Esau and his brother Jacob, the one through whom God chose to extend the promise he made to Abraham.

There’s the conflict between Cain and Abel, when Abel’s offering was acceptable to God and Cain’s wasn’t.

From the very beginning, those who are with God are set upon by those who are not with God.

And it isn’t limited to the past. The struggle between God’s enemies and God’s people would continue on in the future. Babylon versus Israel. Rome versus the church.

And then, in a larger sense, the world versus the church. Jesus told his disciples in John 15.18-19:

18 “If the world hates you, know that it has hated me before it hated you. 19 If you were of the world, the world would love you as its own; but because you are not of the world, but I chose you out of the world, therefore the world hates you.

God’s people will always be set upon by those who are not his people. It’s the people of God versus the people of Satan.

That might seem harsh, but Jesus clearly said in John 8.42, 44:

If God were your Father, you would love me, for I came from God and I am here… 44 You are of your father the devil, and your will is to do your father’s desires.

Whether we know it or not, we are all one or the other: children of God or children of the devil. If we are not the people of God, we are by default his enemies.

And that is what Amalek proved by attacking Israel. We don’t know what they knew about the Israelites before coming after them, but according to our text they weren’t just attacking this particular people group; when they attacked Israel, they were attacking God. Moses says in v. 16 that their hands were lifted against the throne of the Lord. (Note: The Hebrew here is obscure, and often translated as “my hand is lifted to the Lord’s throne,” or something to that effect. But again, the context of the passage does not indicate prayer, but rather God’s judgment against the Amalekites, so the more likely reading is “their hands were lifted against the throne of the Lord...”) And this is why the Lord will have war with Amalek from generation to generation.

This is a simple and difficult fact that we see all throughout Scripture: when our hands are “raised up” against God, in defiance of God, in rebellion against him, God’s hands are (figuratively speaking) raised up against us in judgment.

Now if that were the end of the story, of course this would be the most depressing sermon ever, and it would barely be worth preaching, because even God’s people would over and over again position themselves as enemies of God. Or rather, they would claim to be the people of God and act like his enemies. They would forget him. They would disobey him. They would worship other gods.

And the same is true for each of us. Left to ourselves, every human being who ever lived is an enemy of God and persists in raising our hands against him. We want to be our own gods, we want to be our own masters, and if someone tells us that the God of the Bible is the one true God who has authority over our lives, we want to reject him because no way am I going to give someone else control over my life.

Left to our own natures, we are all God’s enemies, and we are all subject to God’s judgment. And that judgment isn’t merely a defeat on the battlefield; God’s judgment is eternal.

That alone is difficult to preach. Preaching isn’t just speaking publicly about what is true; preaching is celebrating what is true, through its proclamation. If all there was to say was that we have rebelled against God and will be judged by him, it would be hard to celebrate.

But the story isn’t over. Moses was just a man; he couldn’t keep his hands up on his own, to ensure victory for Israel. But as Tim Chester wrote (I’m paraphrasing), one day, centuries later, there would be another hill, and on this hill, another man, a man with God’s own authority, would lift up his hands. But this time, he wouldn’t lift up his hands to give judgment; he would stretch out his hands to receive it.

Remember we saw earlier that one of God’s goals, in putting Moses on that hill with his hands raised holding the staff, was to show incredulous Israel that Moses was the man he had designated to lead them. God does the same thing with Jesus: he puts Jesus on display for all to see, giving them everything they needed to know that he truly was the Son of God, that he truly was the Savior whom God had sent. But Jesus’s sign of authority does not come through military might; it comes through sacrifice.

Jesus Christ, the Son of God, had all authority to dispense judgment on his enemies—including his own people, who had rejected him. But instead, he took the place of his people and received the judgment we deserved when he was crucified. And three days after his death, he was raised to life again, proving that God’s judgment against his people was definitively given.

So that is the situation, even as it stands today. Those who turn away from their rebellion, submit to God and place their faith in Christ are declared righteous, saved by Christ’s sacrifice. God’s judgment has been rendered against us, and it will not fall on us, because it fell on Christ.

But those who persist in their rebellion against God do not have the luxury of that assurance. Jesus said in John 12.46-48:

46 I have come into the world as light, so that whoever believes in me may not remain in darkness. 47 If anyone hears my words and does not keep them, I do not judge him; for I did not come to judge the world but to save the world. 48 The one who rejects me and does not receive my words has a judge; the word that I have spoken will judge him on the last day.

So what do we do? Moses gives us a clue; in v. 15, it says that Moses built an altar and named it “The Lord Is My Banner”. A banner was a military object; it was a kind of flag that served as a rallying point, the place where the soldiers would gather when the battle was over, the place they looked toward to remind them why they were fighting.

For God’s people, the banner is no flag; the banner is God himself. He is the point we run to. He is one we gather around. He is the one we direct our lives toward.

Conclusion: Christ Our Banner

So faced with this remarkable text, how are we called to respond?

Firstly, we are called to recognize that on our own, we are enemies of God, and subject to his judgment. And if we persist in our rebellion against him, his hands will be forever lifted up in judgment against us.

Secondly, we must see that God loved the world so much that he provided a way to not receive his judgment. Jesus Christ lived our life and died our death; he was judged in our place.

Thirdly, we must see that in such a situation, the only response that makes any sense is to turn away from our sin and turn to Christ, to the Lord our Banner, and place our faith in him, and direct our lives toward him, and learn to be like him.

And fourthly, we must see that as we struggle to grow to be like him, the Lord fights for us. He doesn’t just fight for our salvation; he fights for our holiness. He fights to make us like him.

So whether you’re a Christian or not this morning, take heart. It is possible for every person here this morning to leave this place with a single focus, a single rallying point in front of their eyes, and to leave knowing that the God who created the universe, the God who should by all accounts judge us, instead loves us, and fights for us.

Turn to him—maybe for the first time, maybe again. Turn to him; run toward the Lord Your Banner, and let him win.

Three Tests: God's Provision

Exodus 15.22-17.7

The people of Israel, held under slavery for centuries in Egypt, were finally free. God brought them out of Egypt with great power, visiting plagues on the people of Egypt when the Pharaoh refused to let Israel go free. Finally the Pharaoh relented and let the people go—and then he quickly changed his mind and chased after them. God held him at bay while he separated the waters of the Red Sea and allowed the people of Israel to cross over on dry ground. Then, when the Pharaoh and his army chased them into the sea, God let the waters go, and the sea swallowed them up.

At the end of chapter 15, it’s now been three days—three days since God showed himself to be Israel’s ultimate Protector. In today’s passage, God moves from the role of Protector to that of Provider. But he doesn’t do it simply—as is often the case with God, there is a goal behind the way he does what he does. Here we see him begin to train the people of Israel in obedience—as someone put it, “After getting Israel out of Egypt, he has to get the Egypt out of Israel.”

On the one hand, although they were slaves in Egypt and their lives were hard, they still had their basic needs provided for. The Egyptians wouldn’t have wanted them to be weak, or they wouldn’t be able to work. So this was their first experience, not of pain and suffering, but of true deprivation.

On the other hand, God doesn’t want slaves; he wants joyful obedience. And for people who had been through what they just had, joyful obedience wouldn’t be easy to muster; understandably, they would have been wary of any kind of authority after their lives with the Pharaoh. And if God wants his people to joyfully obey him, he knows they will need to trust him to provide, not just when things are easy, but when they’re hard.

So he’s going to start training them in that trust now.

There are three separate episodes in our passage in which we see him do this. We’re going to look at them quickly, and then we’ll try to bring them together to see the larger picture of what’s happening here.

1. Bitter Water Made Sweet (15.22-27)

The first time takes place three days after they leave the Red Sea, three days after the song we saw the people sing last time. And it’s so predictable—God sends the people into the wilderness, into the desert, so naturally, it’s hard to find water. Chapter 15, v. 22:

22 Then Moses led Israel on from the Red Sea, and they went out to the Wilderness of Shur. They journeyed for three days in the wilderness without finding water. 23 They came to Marah, but they could not drink the water at Marah because it was bitter—that is why it was named Marah. 24 The people grumbled to Moses, “What are we going to drink?” 25 So he cried out to the Lord, and the Lord showed him a tree. When he threw it into the water, the water became drinkable.

It’s a kind of reversal of the first plague they saw in Egypt, isn’t it? In the first plague God sent against Egypt, he took the good water of the Nile and turned it into blood—he made it undrinkable. Here, he takes undrinkable water and makes it pure again.

And then we read (in the second half of v. 25):

The Lord made a statute and ordinance for them at Marah, and he tested them there. 26 He said, “If you will carefully obey the Lord your God, do what is right in his sight, pay attention to his commands, and keep all his statutes, I will not inflict any illnesses on you that I inflicted on the Egyptians. For I am the Lord who heals you.”

27 Then they came to Elim, where there were twelve springs and seventy date palms, and they camped there by the water.

So you see what happens—the people worry about their material need, the need for water; God miraculously provides for that need by making the water drinkable. Then he pulls them toward obedience. “If you obey my commands, none of the things that happened to the Egyptians will happen to you. I will not be the God who harms you; I am the God who heals you.” He’s teaching them to trust him.

And after that, he goes beyond the miracle—he directs them to Elim where there are all these springs and date palms, enough for everybody to have their fill.

2. Bread and Meat Provided (16.1-36)

Then when we start chapter 16, we skip ahead in time. Now a month and a half has gone by. The food the Israelites took with them from Egypt is gone. Now a new need has presented itself—it’s no longer thirst, but hunger.

So what happens? They complain again. V. 2:

2 The entire Israelite community grumbled against Moses and Aaron in the wilderness. 3 The Israelites said to them, “If only we had died by the Lord’s hand in the land of Egypt, when we sat by pots of meat and ate all the bread we wanted. Instead, you brought us into this wilderness to make this whole assembly die of hunger!”

4 Then the Lord said to Moses, “I am going to rain bread from heaven for you. The people are to go out each day and gather enough for that day. This way I will test them to see whether or not they will follow my instructions.

Notice how the people of Israel act, and how God responds. The people forget that in Egypt they were slaves and they were miserable, they had literally suffered the mass murder of their little boys just a few decades earlier—and they’re talking about how much better things were in Egypt!

And yet, God doesn’t punish them, but instead promises to provide for them. This is how he responded to them before, and this is how he responds to them again here.

Why is he so patient? Because Israel is like a baby here—you don’t punish a little baby for crying when they’re hungry, or when another kid takes a toy they wanted. A little baby doesn’t know any better. We’re generally much more patient with little babies than we are with older children, because older children should know better.

That’s what’s happening here: God is patient with them, and in his patience he is teaching them to obey. Look again at v. 4:

4 Then the Lord said to Moses, “I am going to rain bread from heaven for you. The people are to go out each day and gather enough for that day. This way I will test them to see whether or not they will follow my instructions. 5 On the sixth day, when they prepare what they bring in, it will be twice as much as they gather on other days.”

So God clearly states his intention: he’s not merely going to provide for them, but he will test them to see whether they will follow his instructions. What are his instructions? We see that in the verses that follow, which we read earlier: every evening God will send quail for meat, and every morning he will send bread from heaven, which they came to call manna (which literally means, “What is this?” because they don’t know what it is at first).

So every evening the people will gather meat, and every morning the people will gather bread. They’ll only take what they need for the day, and they won’t keep any excess, because it won’t keep until morning. They’ll do this for five days, and on the sixth day they’ll collect double, because on the seventh day they’ll rest (we’ll come back to this).

Those are the instructions: don’t gather too much, don’t keep any leftovers—everyone gets what they need, and no more.

Why? Because God wants the people to learn to depend on him to provide for their needs, and he wants them to know that he will always provide. He’s not a fickle master like the Pharaoh, who might suddenly double their workload at a moment’s notice.

And they see it: twice they disobey God’s instructions, in v. 20 and in v. 27. But still, God doesn’t punish them—he knows they’re still learning. He patiently provides for their needs.

3. Water from the Rock (17.1-7)

At the beginning of chapter 17, we see the same thing again. V. 1:

The entire Israelite community left the Wilderness of Sin, moving from one place to the next according to the Lord’s command. They camped at Rephidim, but there was no water for the people to drink. 2 So the people complained to Moses, “Give us water to drink.”

“Why are you complaining to me?” Moses replied to them. “Why are you testing the Lord?”

3 But the people thirsted there for water and grumbled against Moses. They said, “Why did you ever bring us up from Egypt to kill us and our children and our livestock with thirst?”

This is starting to get ridiculous. Remember, God is still sending them quail in the evening and bread in the morning, every day. They can still see God providing for them. But they don’t see any water here in this wilderness, so just like at the Red Sea, they start doubting and complaining, worrying about their needs.

And once again, God responds with incredible patience. V. 4:

4 Then Moses cried out to the Lord, “What should I do with these people? In a little while they will stone me!”

5 The Lord answered Moses, “Go on ahead of the people and take some of the elders of Israel with you. Take the staff you struck the Nile with in your hand and go. 6 I am going to stand there in front of you on the rock at Horeb; when you hit the rock, water will come out of it and the people will drink.” Moses did this in the sight of the elders of Israel. 7 He named the place Massah and Meribah, because the Israelites complained, and because they tested the Lord, saying, “Is the Lord among us or not?”

(In case you were wondering: “Massah” means “testing”, and “Meribah” means “quarreling.”)

What’s changed about this particular instance is that instead of God testing the people, to see if they will obey, the people test God, to see whether he will provide. Just like children often do with their parents. There is a push and pull between God and the people, where their trust is being stretched and grown. Later on in the book we’ll see that the people’s trust has its limits, just as God’s patience has its limits. But for now, they’re still learning.

These three events are the beginning of that learning process. God has set them free, yes, but by sending them into the wilderness, he’s also willfully depriving them. In Egypt, they had meat and they had bread—but they were slaves. And God does not want slaves; he wants joyful obedience, the obedience of children who love a good Father.

So he starts depriving them of old things, in order to reshape their affections around essential things. That deprivation is painful at first, and it’s hard for them to understand—but it is necessary for them to learn to trust that God will not only protect them, but he will also provide for them.

God’s Provision for His People’s Needs

So we’ve seen the basic story. Now I’d like us to dig a little deeper, because as is almost always the case in this book, the simple things we see are actually showing us patterns that will continue far beyond the story we’re reading.

In this passage we see that there are four essential things that characterize God’s provision for the needs of his people. And these characteristics of God’s provision carry over in the New Covenant that Christ established with the church.

1. God’s Provision Is Necessary.

The first time God tests the Israelites, he tests them by depriving them of a real, genuine need: the need for water.

Think about the situation they’re in: for any new society, particularly an agrarian society, the questions they’re going to be asking at first are extremely basic. How do we drink? How do we eat? You can live for a good while without food, but without water, you won’t last long.

God shows here that he isn’t merely concerned with Israel’s spiritual provision, but with their material provision as well. He knows they need water; he knows they need food. So the first thing he does is to test them—will they trust God to provide for their most basic human needs? Will they obey him even when they’re not sure exactly how he will provide?

This is an incredibly important question, because God knows what their deepest needs actually are. He knows that even more than food or water, they need him.

And of course the same is true for all of us. Remember when Jesus meets the Samaritan woman at Jacob’s well, in John chapter 4. He asks her to give him a drink from the well, and then he says (John 4.13-14):

“Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, 14 but whoever drinks of the water that I will give him will never be thirsty again. The water that I will give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life.”

The most profound need of God’s people is God himself. But we’re separated from God because of our sin, so Christ came as our Substitute: he lived our life and died our death and was raised so that we might become righteous in him. We can only come to God through Christ, through his perfect work, and when we do, we are reconciled to God, and find eternal life in him. That is our biggest need.

But God knows that at least at the beginning, the need to be reconciled to him may not feel as strong as the need for water when we’re thirsty, or the need for food when we’re hungry. So he shows Israel that he will provide for these most basic needs, in order that they might trust him to also provide for their greater need.

2. God’s Provision Is Limited.

This one is a little harder to swallow, but it’s important.

When God gives the people bread and meat, he gives them what they need, absolutely—but he just gives them enough each day for that day. With one exception, he doesn’t give tomorrow’s provision today; he gives today’s provision today.

The 19th-century English preacher Charles Spurgeon once spoke on those who had been martyred for their faith in the Bible, and someone came to him after the service and asked him, “If someone came in here today and threatened to kill you if you didn’t renounce your faith, could you do it? Would you be ready to die for your faith?”

Spurgeon responded, “If it happened today? Of course not. I’m not ready to die for my faith today.” The person looked surprised at his answer, so Spurgeon continued: “But I am confident that if that day should come, on that day, God will give me the strength I need to stand firm and die for him.”

God limited his provision in order to teach the people of Israel to depend on him every day. This is how you build trust. Trust can be destroyed in an instant, but it takes a long time to build. You can decide to trust someone, but the only way you can truly know they are dependable is if you have depended on them for something, and have seen them provide over, and over, and over again.

God knows this, so in his provision he includes a means to prove to the people that as he provided yesterday, he will provide today—and he will continue to provide tomorrow. So that they might trust him.

This is why Jesus teaches us to pray for exactly what God gave the Israelites: “Give us this day our daily bread” (Matthew 6.11). Lord, give us what we need today, and help us to grow in the knowledge and assurance that as you have provided for us today, you’ll also provide for us tomorrow.

Now of course this forces us to expand our idea of what we really need—much of what we think we need are actually things we want. And sometimes we genuinely do need something, and God holds back. That’s genuinely difficult, but there’s always a reason for it: either we didn’t really need it, or God wanted to teach us something through the wait. (God didn’t give the people water before they got thirsty; he let them feel the need before providing for it.) Often God will stretch us beyond what feels like the breaking point before he provides for us.

But again, he knows what he’s doing. Every time that happens, we’re forced to decide once again: will I keep obeying him? Will I keep following him? Will I keep trusting him, even when I don’t see his hand? And what a blessing it is to learn that he not only provides for our need, but even better, that he gives us the strength we need to remain faithful while we wait, and actually provides for other needs through the wait.

3. God’s Provision Is Abundant.

I say this for two reasons. The first is because God recognizes and provides for a need that the people may not even have anticipated yet: the need for rest. Read Exodus 16.4-5 again:

4 Then the Lord said to Moses, “I am going to rain bread from heaven for you. The people are to go out each day and gather enough for that day. This way I will test them to see whether or not they will follow my instructions. 5 On the sixth day, when they prepare what they bring in, it will be twice as much as they gather on other days.”

And then, in v. 29, we see what they are to do on the seventh day of the week:

29 Understand that the Lord has given you the Sabbath; therefore on the sixth day he will give you two days’ worth of bread. Each of you stay where you are; no one is to leave his place on the seventh day.” 30 So the people rested on the seventh day.

God doesn’t just provide for their material need; he goes beyond that, and provides a day of rest.  This is really interesting, because God provides this day of rest, the Sabbath, before he gives the law—the actual commandment that says, Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy won’t come until chapter 20. But already, this structure is in place: six days, you work, and on the last day, you rest.

God goes beyond what the people ask for, and provides for a need they didn’t see.

Here’s the second reason why I say that God’s provision is abundant.

It may seem like I’m contradicting myself, because I said just a minute ago that God’s provision is limited—“Give us this day our daily bread.”

So how can God’s provision be limited and abundant at the same time?

God doesn’t give them everything all at once; but he shows that he will provide for their need for as long as they need it. As long as that need is still there, the bread will always be there in the morning, and the meat will always be there in the evening.

We see a profound echo of this promise from God every time we take Communion together. 1 Corinthians 11.23-26:

On the night when he was betrayed, the Lord Jesus took bread, 24 and when he had given thanks, broke it, and said, “This is my body, which is for you. Do this in remembrance of me.”

25 In the same way also he took the cup, after supper, and said, “This cup is the new covenant in my blood. Do this, as often as you drink it, in remembrance of me.” 26 For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death—for how long?—until he comes.

God goes beyond providing for our basic, material needs; even those needs are not the most fundamental. The deepest need we have is our need for him—and we have him. Always, and forever, even in death. Every time we take the bread and we take the cup together, we remind ourselves that every day, the new covenant God established with his people in Christ is still new, still real, still active, still available. His mercies are new every morning.

If God saved you, he will keep you, because his provision for our salvation is abundant—it goes on as long as we need it to go on. It goes on forever.

Finally:

4: God’s Provision Is Trustworthy.

I’ll be honest with you: I’ve read this passage dozens of times, but in preparing this message, I noticed something I had never noticed before—and I wasn’t quite sure what to do with it.

Go back to the beginning of chapter 17. The people are thirsty again, so this time instead of God testing them, they test God—even while they see God sending bread and meat for them every day, they complain to Moses: “Why did you ever bring us up from Egypt to kill us and our children and our livestock with thirst?”

So when Moses comes to God to ask him what to do, look at how God responds—chapter 17, verse 5:

5 The Lord answered Moses, “Go on ahead of the people and take some of the elders of Israel with you. Take the staff you struck the Nile with in your hand and go. 6 I am going to stand there in front of you on the rock at Horeb; when you hit the rock, water will come out of it and the people will drink.” Moses did this in the sight of the elders of Israel.

I had always seen, of course, that Moses does what God says and hits the rock with his staff. What I hadn’t seen before was what God tells Moses in v. 6: “I am going to stand there in front of you on the rock at Horeb; when you hit the rock, water will come out of it and the people will drink.” When Moses hits the rock, God is on it. It’s almost as if the people deserve to be smacked, but God says, “No, smack me instead.”

Now, if this was all there was, I’d think I was reading too much into the text; it’s easy to attribute deeper meaning to something in the Bible that is merely descriptive. But that’s not all there is. God didn’t stand on the rock for no reason; he wanted it to be clear that when Moses struck the rock, God was there—the water wasn’t coming from the rock, but from him.

And we know this because in 1 Corinthians 10, the apostle Paul mentions this episode and says,

[The people of Israel] all ate the same spiritual food, 4 and all drank the same spiritual drink. For they drank from the spiritual rock that followed them, and that rock was Christ.

This is a complicated passage, and we don’t have the time to dive deep into every detail of it, but at the very least, Paul is saying one thing very, very clearly: this moment of Moses striking the rock, and the water coming out of the rock, is a picture of what would come in Christ. Christ was struck for our obstinance and our rebellion, and because he was struck, we have life: rivers of living water, as he said in John 4.

The rock that Moses struck was the final test in this first series of tests; it was the final test of the people’s dependence on God, and of his trustworthiness. And, as we’ll see later on in Exodus, in many ways they failed that test.

Jesus Christ is the final test for us.

We always wonder if God will provide for our needs. We always worry about whether or not we’ll have what we need to do what he’s called us to do.

Why do we worry? What more does God have to do to prove himself? He did not even spare his own Son but gave him up for us all. How will he not also grant us everything with him (Romans 8.32)?

There’s a reason why Paul wants us to see this. He says a little later, in 1 Corinthians 10.6, 11-13:

6 Now these things took place as examples for us, so that we will not desire evil things as they did… 11 These things happened to them as examples, and they were written for our instruction, on whom the ends of the ages, have come. 12 So, whoever thinks he stands must be careful not to fall. 13 No temptation has come upon you except what is common to humanity. But God is faithful; he will not allow you to be tempted beyond what you are able, but with the temptation he will also provide the way out so that you may be able to bear it.

You see, Paul is saying that the story of Israel’s grumbling and complaining, and their other failures which we’ll see later on in the book, were written so that we might be driven to holiness: that we might learn from their experience and become more like Christ.

Do you see how that changes the way we look at God’s provision in these chapters in Exodus? God’s provision is not mainly focused on comfort, or material sustenance, but on holiness. He definitely provides for their material needs, and he also provides comfort—he provides a day of rest. But mainly he provides for his people so that his people might be holy, and even our rest and our comfort and the moments of pleasure he gives us are meant to help us raise our eyes to the God who gave us that rest and comfort and pleasure.

The water from the rock was proof for the people of Israel that God was trustworthy—and they still desired evil things. Jesus Christ is the final proof we need to know that God is trustworthy.

So don’t desire evil things like they did. If God has done all this for you, you can trust him. His provision is necessary; it is enough for today; it is abundant; and it is absolutely trustworthy.

So trust him. Look at his faithfulness in the past, and trust in his faithfulness in the future. Resist temptation, stay faithful, and trust that God will provide.

Raised: Easter 2024

1 Corinthians 15

Easter is typically the day when preachers will take out their easiest sermons. They’ll pick one verse or two, and talk about those verses for twenty minutes and leave everyone feeling good.

I’m not going to do that this morning. If you’re here for the first time, and you’re not a Christian, I’m very happy you’re here…but I’m not going to let you off easy. We’re going to work our way through chapter 15 of Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians—the whole thing. All fifty-eight verses.

And we’re doing it because in this one chapter, we have an entire overview of what the Bible says about the resurrection of Jesus and what it means for us as Christians.

But I promise I’m not doing it to torture you. My prayer is that for those of us who are Christians, we will leave this chapter simply refreshed and energized and encouraged by spending some time thinking of what Christ did; and for those here who aren’t Christians, my prayer is that what you might hear, as hard as it is to believe, might make you want this.

Let’s turn to 1 Corinthians chapter 15.

Before we start reading, a bit of context, and a bit of warning.

First, the warning. It would be tempting for us to take this passage—which does indeed say a good deal about us—and make it about us. This passage isn’t ultimately about us, but about God, as we’ll see.

Secondly, the context. Paul is writing to this church in Corinth which has gone seriously off the rails—in their Christian lives, in their struggle to obey God, in the things that they believed… This was a church on life support. So Paul is writing to help correct certain errors; to call the church out on many of their incoherent behaviors; and hopefully, to set them back on the path the gospel would have them on.

This chapter addresses one particular error that some Corinthian Christians had fallen into. Some of them believed that although Christ was raised from the dead, Christians would not be. They believed that resurrection exists, but only for Jesus. Now, they of course knew that Jesus had raised some people from the dead, like Lazarus, during his ministry. But Lazarus, at some point, died again—he didn’t live forever. And their understanding was that once we’re dead, we’re dead. Our spirits may live on, but they would live on in a non-physical form.

What’s interesting is that many Christians still believe this today. Our concept of what will happen to us after we die, and after Christ returns, is very fuzzy. A huge number of Christians (as much as one-fourth of all Christians, according to polls) don’t believe we’ll have bodies in heaven. We imagine ourselves almost in a cartoon, floating on clouds and playing harps for all eternity, or in a forever-long church service. My mother-in-law, a confirmed atheist, said she found the idea of heaven awful, because it would be so boring.

I have to say, if that’s her picture of heaven, I agree with her. But that’s not what the Bible tells us about heaven at all.

So we’re going to look at what the Bible says about this. We won’t be able to see everything—this is an incredibly dense subject. Rather, we’ll focus on those aspects of heaven on which nearly all Christians, throughout the history of the church, have accepted as true. And it may be surprising for many of us.

We see a lot of things in this text, but we can summarize them in two amazing truths Paul lays out for us.

I.

The first one begins, as expected, in verse 1.

1 Now I would remind you, brothers, of the gospel I preached to you, which you received, in which you stand, 2 and by which you are being saved, if you hold fast to the word I preached to you—unless you believed in vain.

3 For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures, 4 that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures, 5 and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve. 6 Then he appeared to more than five hundred brothers at one time, most of whom are still alive, though some have fallen asleep.

(When Paul says “fallen asleep” in this chapter, he means “died”—he’ll use it again.)

7 Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles. 8 Last of all, as to one untimely born, he appeared also to me. 9 For I am the least of the apostles, unworthy to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God. 10 But by the grace of God I am what I am, and his grace toward me was not in vain. On the contrary, I worked harder than any of them, though it was not I, but the grace of God that is with me. 11 Whether then it was I or they, so we preach and so you believed.

There are subjects we can disagree on and still be Christians. This is not one of them. This issue is of first importance. We are all rebels against the reign of a good God—we have all sinned against him—and the only just consequence for our sin is condemnation. So God came down to us. Jesus Christ lived the perfect life we should have lived, he suffered the death we deserve for our sin, as the Scriptures said he would; he was buried, a totally dead man; and he was raised on the third day. He took our death, and he gave us his life, so that God could declare us righteous, and we could belong to him.

Jesus died and was raised, he appeared to the disciples, and that he was changed after his resurrection, but he was still visibly recognizable as the same person: he still bore the marks of the nails on his hands and feet; he still had the mark of the spear in his side. And he was physical: they could touch him; they could see him; he could eat food.

This is of primary importance: he really did live, he really did die, he really was raised, and his resurrection proved that his sacrifice for us was sufficient and accepted by God—proved that he really had defeated sin.

Really, that’s all we need. If the good news of the gospel stopped there, it would already be enough to deserve the rest of our lives. But the amazing thing is, God doesn’t stop there, and neither does Paul: he goes further. Essentially everything that comes after is the icing on the cake—the good news added to the good news. God didn’t have to go this far; he went this far just because he’s good.

And that’s what Paul’s going to do for the rest of the chapter: he’s going to give us the icing on the cake, by showing what the long-term effects of the resurrection will be for us.

Let’s keep going, v. 12:

12 Now if Christ is proclaimed as raised from the dead, how can some of you say that there is no resurrection of the dead?

13 But if there is no resurrection of the dead, then not even Christ has been raised. 14 And if Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain and your faith is in vain. 15 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. 16 For if the dead are not raised, not even Christ has been raised.

17 And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins. 18 Then those also who have fallen asleep in Christ have perished. [Permanently. Forever.] 19 If in Christ we have hope in this life only, we are of all people most to be pitied.

Do you see? He’s correcting another very common misconception. Christians often put all the emphasis on Jesus’s death, as if his death were the only thing that mattered. Believers see Jesus’s death as the ultimate thing that Jesus did for us. We are sinners—we are all rebels who have rejected God—and we are separated from God because of our rebellion. And on the cross, Jesus took our sin on himself and was punished for that sin in our place. That is wonderful news.

But here’s the thing: without the resurrection, his death means nothing. Without the resurrection, Jesus was just another man, like all the others. He’s now a pile of dust in a Jerusalem tomb.

Which means that everything we believe is meaningless: we are still under God’s wrath for our sins, and we still have no hope.

Thank God that is not what happened! V. 20 :

20 But in fact Christ HAS been raised from the dead, the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep. 21 For as by a man came death, by a man has come also the resurrection of the dead. 22 For as in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive.

We remember the story—Adam, the first man, rebelled against God and sinned. And when he sinned, his sin infected all of humanity. That’s how “by a man came death.”

So when God set in motion his plan to defeat sin and death, that defeat also came through “a man,” Jesus. Through man came death, and through a man comes eternal life. And Jesus is the first man to actually go through that process of dying and being raised to eternal life—that’s why Paul calls him “the firstfruits”.

And what are the firstfruits, in a vineyard or a garden? They are indicators: they show us what kind of fruit will come after.

23 But each in his own order: Christ the firstfruits, then at his coming those who belong to Christ.

In other words, what happened to Christ will happen to those who belong to Christ. V. 24:

24 Then comes the end, when he delivers the kingdom to God the Father after destroying every rule and every authority and power. 25 For he must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet. 26 The last enemy to be destroyed is death. 27 For “God has put all things in subjection under his feet.” But when it says, “all things are put in subjection,” it is plain that he is excepted who put all things in subjection under him. 28 When all things are subjected to him, then the Son himself will also be subjected to him who put all things in subjection under him, that God may be all in all.

29 Otherwise, what do people mean by being baptized on behalf of the dead? If the dead are not raised at all, why are people baptized on their behalf? 30 Why are we in danger every hour? 31 I protest, brothers, by my pride in you, which I have in Christ Jesus our Lord, I die every day! 32 What do I gain if, humanly speaking, I fought with beasts at Ephesus? If the dead are not raised, “Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die.” 33 Do not be deceived: “Bad company ruins good morals.” 34 Wake up from your drunken stupor, as is right, and do not go on sinning. For some have no knowledge of God. I say this to your shame.

So let’s sum up what he’s said so far. In this passage Paul is trying to do three things: firstly, he’s trying to explain why rejecting the idea that we will be physically raised from the dead is so dangerous—why it’s dangerous to think we’ll just be disembodied spirits for all eternity.

And he’s working backwards to get there. Usually we begin with Christ and work our way down to us. In his logic, he starts with us and works his way up to Christ. He’s saying, if we won’t be raised—physically, bodily raised from the dead—then Christ wasn’t raised either, which means our faith is meaningless… And if our faith is meaningless, then you’d be much better off doing something else.

Christ’s followers at this time were not just embarrassed by their faith, like we are today. They were killed for it. It was a dangerous thing to be a Christian (as it still is in many parts of the world today). But if we won’t be raised, then Christ wasn’t raised…so what’s the point?

And then he works back to where he began, saying, “But Christ was raised! So our faith is not in vain! We’re not suffering for nothing! If Christ was raised, then he will be ultimately victorious! He prove that he has defeated sin and death! Because he was raised, we will be raised too!”

And that’s his first point:

Christ’s resurrection assures our resurrection.

That is the promise: at Christ’s return, we will be raised, and our bodies—these bodies we have today—will be renewed, made perfect, all of the effects of sin removed. We’ll no longer get sick, we’ll no longer have pain, we’ll no longer die. And we’ll live forever in these perfect bodies in a perfect, physical world.

Why is this good news? For all kinds of reasons! This world has a lot wrong with it, but there’s still a lot to love about it. I love mountains. I love the sun. I love good food. It’s wonderful news to know that we’re not going to have to give any of that up, but we’ll get to keep it, and an even better version of it: a world set free from sickness and decay and natural disasters.

And for anyone here today who is sick, if you have a handicap of any kind, this good news is particularly poignant, because your body will be healed, in the most complete sense of that word. It will be perfectly and eternally healed, made absolutely perfect. When you look at yourself in the mirror, it will be you—but there will never again be a single pained expression on your face.

Christ’s resurrection assures our resurrection. That’s the first amazing truth.

II.

The second begins at v. 35:

35 But someone will ask, “How are the dead raised? With what kind of body do they come?”

THAT’S the question people would ask today.

To answer this question, Paul uses the image of seeds which grow into plants. Seeds are dry; there is no life in them; if they sit on a shelf somewhere, nothing will happen. But if you plant those seeds in the ground, and water them and give them sunlight…suddenly you have something different. V. 36:

36 You foolish person! What you sow does not come to life unless it dies.  37 And what you sow is not the body that is to be, but a bare kernel, perhaps of wheat or of some other grain. 38 But God gives it a body as he has chosen, and to each kind of seed its own body. 39 For not all flesh is the same, but there is one kind for humans, another for animals, another for birds, and another for fish. 40 There are heavenly bodies and earthly bodies, but the glory of the heavenly is of one kind, and the glory of the earthly is of another. 41 There is one glory of the sun, and another glory of the moon, and another glory of the stars; for star differs from star in glory.

42 So is it with the resurrection of the dead. What is sown is perishable; what is raised is imperishable. 43 It is sown in dishonor; it is raised in glory. It is sown in weakness; it is raised in power. 44 It is sown a natural body; it is raised a spiritual body. If there is a natural body, there is also a spiritual body. 45 Thus it is written, “The first man Adam became a living being”; the last Adam became a life-giving spirit. 46 But it is not the spiritual that is first but the natural, and then the spiritual. 47 The first man was from the earth, a man of dust; the second man is from heaven. 48 As was the man of dust, so also are those who are of the dust, and as is the man of heaven, so also are those who are of heaven. 49 Just as we have borne the image of the man of dust, we shall also bear the image of the man of heaven.

So he gives us two points of reference here: the “man of dust” (Adam), and the “man of heaven” (Jesus).

We know what Adam gave us: because of his rebellion against God, Adam made us ALL rebellious; because of his sin he made us ALL sinners. And sin gave us these bodies: these bodies which get sick and hurt and ache and age and die. Every time you have a cold, every time you have insomnia and are tired, every time you feel yourself aging...remember where it came from. It came from Adam. It came from sin.

So that’s what we have from the “man of dust”; what do we have from the “man of heaven”?

Again, what happened for him will happen for us.

Just like Jesus, our bodies will be changed—they will be made perfect and eternal—but they will still be us. I’ll be able to recognize you if I see you in heaven. Might take me a second, but I’ll see that it’s you.

But how can this be? How can God take the ashes of someone who was cremated thousands of years before (perhaps even ashes which were scattered in the sea!) and put them back together into an even better body than before, and put life back into the body? It’s not for nothing that Adam is called the “man of dust”.

This should be impossible; but with God nothing is impossible (v. 50):

50 I tell you this, brothers: flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God, nor does the perishable inherit the imperishable. 51 Behold! I tell you a mystery. We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed, 52 in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised imperishable, and we shall be changed. 53 For this perishable body must put on the imperishable, and this mortal body must put on immortality.

In other words, this should not be possible. Perishable beings should not be able to become imperishable. The only way for this to work would be for the imperishable—the divine; God himself—to come into our perishable humanity and give us what we are lacking. The only way for this to work is for God to become like us, and then use his divine power to reverse our perishable humanity and make us imperishable, clothing us in perfect, eternal humanity like a garment.

V. 54:

54 When the perishable puts on the imperishable, and the mortal puts on immortality, then shall come to pass the saying that is written:

“Death is swallowed up in victory.”

55  “O death, where is your victory?

O death, where is your sting?” 56 The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law.

It’s almost ironic that these verses are often read aloud at funerals. “Death, where is your victory? Death, where is your sting?”

It’s right there! In that casket! This person died: their body was made imperfect of sin, and this person was a sinner because he was born into a world where he was submitted to a law of perfect righteousness that he could not obey. There’s the sting of death. It makes no sense to say this at the funeral of someone who doesn’t know Christ.

But for someone who belongs to Christ, it makes perfect sense. We can say itbecause we know the person lying there dead in that box won’t stay that way. When Christ returns, he will raise us; and he will raise us in perfect, renewed, imperishable bodies.

57 But thanks be to God, who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.

Christ, the Son of God, God himself, became a man; he lived a perfect life; he died for our sins; he was raised in a perfect, glorified body; and

he gives his victory over sin and death to us.

His victory is our victory. His resurrection will be our resurrection. He will raise us, just as he was raised.

III.

Now the question here is, What difference does all of this make? Is Paul just telling this stuff to the Corinthians to make them happy? So that they’ll be comforted knowing that there is more after death than just an ethereal, spiritual existence?

Partially, probably. It’s quite possible that there were people in the Corinthian church, like there may be here today, who had doubts about the Christian faith, and Paul’s letter would have perhaps encouraged them to think more deeply about their faith, and even place their faith in Christ. And it’s quite possible God is doing that in some of you today.

This is wonderful news for people who are afraid—afraid of the unknown, of the future, of death. This means that everything truly will be okay. Think about that: we are the only people who can say that. We are the only people in the world who can truthfully, and with assurance, say, “I know it hurts, and it will probably keep hurting until he comes back, in one way or another. But I promise you, in all truth—everything’s going to be okay.”

No one else can say that, and what wonderful news it is.

But that’s not the only thing, or even the main thing. Paul is speaking mainly to Christians here, and he’s telling them all of this in order to drive them to the proper response. And we know this because he begins the last sentence of this chapter (v. 58) with the word “Therefore.”

58 Therefore, my beloved brothers, be steadfast, immovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, knowing that in the Lord your labor is not in vain.

In other words, given all that we have just seen, knowing that Christ’s resurrection assures our resurrection, knowing that Christ’s victory over death and sin is our victory over death and sin,

do not fear death, and serve your Lord.

The Christian life is a hard life. It’s harder in some places than in others. Some Christians today are being killed for their faith. Most Parisian Christians won’t have to die for their faith, but they’ll probably face ridicule; they’ll face losing friends or family; they may even face losing job opportunities.

Whatever difficulties your Christian life brings you, however, keep going. Be steadfast. Be immovable. Continue to obey your Lord. Kill your sin. Share the gospel. Do the work of the Lord, whatever work he gives you to do this day.

And do it because you know that your labor is not in vain.

Whatever pain you’re enduring today because of your faith is nothing compared to what you’ll gain from your faith when Christ returns.

We are suffering today. But we persevere. We remain steadfast. We remain immovable. That suffering in obedience is just our muscles burning; it is just a reminder that we are going somewhere. That one day we will be with him. That one day we will be like him.

Jesus lived for us, he died for us, and he was raised for us. And he did all of that so that we might be raised with him—that we might see him, physically, and hear his voice, and touch him and know him. And glorify him, forever.

If you know him, then don’t despair. Look at what is ahead of you and keep going: your labor is not in vain. 

If you don’t know him, then don’t imagine for a second that everything I said this morning is just for us. It is for anyone who turns to Christ in faith. Come to him, repent of your sins and trust in him, and believe that our end will be yours.

Now, I gave a warning at the beginning, and I’d like to come back to it as we close. It would be tempting for us to see everything Paul is saying here and to make it all about us. To think of ourselves as future superheroes because we’ll be given resurrected, glorified bodies like Christ. Or even worse: to somehow imagine that because he’s promised us these things, we somehow deserve them.

But this passage is not about us. This passage—from beginning to end, including all the things he says about what will happen to us—is about God. About what he has done. About who he is.

God didn’t need to create us. And he didn’t need to save us. He has always been perfectly complete in himself; he has always been perfectly and infinitely happen in the fellowship of the Trinity, and he didn’t need us to fill some kind of hole in his own heart.

And he didn’t send Jesus because we’re just that fantastic. Marshall Segal writes, “God did not write Holy Week into history because he was desperate to have you (cf. Acts 17:25), but because loving you, despite how little you deserved his love, would display just how loving he is—how glorious he is.”

So when you think about heaven, when you think about these wonderful promises, don’t think about them for your own sake. Let the comfort of these promises drive your eyes up to God, and be thankful for the blessing of simply knowing him.

The Decontamination

Exodus 15.1-21

God has divided the Red Sea in two, allowing the people of Israel to safely cross, then the Pharaoh and his army chased them into the sea, and God brings the sea back down on them. The people of Israel watch, amazed, as God exercises his judgment against their enemies…

And then, after a beat, Moses starts tapping his toe, and Aaron next to him begins to snap his fingers in rhythm, and Moses starts to sing a solo. Pretty soon all the people of Israel, all two million of them, have broken into song and dance, like in La La Land.

That’s not exactly what happens in this text, but it’s true that Exodus 15 can be a bit jarring to our modern ears. There is an explanation for it. It was customary at this place and time for women to welcome their men home with songs and dancing after a victorious battle. This time the men join in, because in this battle there was only one victorious warrior: God himself. (Even Moses is not mentioned in the song—finally, the people fully acknowledge the power of God alone.)

The form of the song suggests that this wasn’t just a song they sang this one time, but that it entered into the lexicon of songs they sang repeatedly. So rest assured: the fact that they’re singing here wasn’t as weird as it may seem when we read it today.

However, even if there is a cultural reason behind this song, it’s still difficult for us. It’s difficult for us, not because they’re singing, but because of the song’s content.

If you believe much of what you may find online today—all these descriptions of a God of love who only wants everybody to be happy and fulfilled, a God who accepts absolutely everyone unconditionally—this chapter is going to feel very odd, maybe even offensive. But this didn’t come from a blogger, it came from the Bible—the Word of God himself.

The first thing we need to remember is that nearly everything the people of Israel did together—their feasts and their sacrifices and their songs—had a pedagogical goal. Everything the people did was designed to teach the people something, and help them remember that thing.

So our big question today is, what was this song designed to teach us about God?

Two main things, in fact; but these two main things are absolutely monumental.

God Judges Evil (v. 1-10)

Like I said before, this song can be unsettling to our modern ears, because it describes God in a way we don’t often think of him. Let’s read the first few verses again, starting at v. 1:

Then Moses and the people of Israel sang this song to the Lord, saying,

“I will sing to the Lord, for he has triumphed gloriously;

the horse and his rider he has thrown into the sea.

2  The Lord is my strength and my song,

and he has become my salvation;

this is my God, and I will praise him,

my father’s God, and I will exalt him.

So far so good. Most of this sounds like the psalms we’d be comfortable singing. But then comes v. 3:

3  The Lord is a man of war;

the Lord is his name.

4  “Pharaoh’s chariots and his host he cast into the sea,

and his chosen officers were sunk in the Red Sea.

5  The floods covered them;

they went down into the depths like a stone.

6  Your right hand, O Lord, glorious in power,

your right hand, O Lord, shatters the enemy.

7  In the greatness of your majesty you overthrow your adversaries;

you send out your fury; it consumes them like stubble.

8  At the blast of your nostrils the waters piled up;

the floods stood up in a heap;

the deeps congealed in the heart of the sea.

Already, all of this is hard enough. But it isn’t just the violence of the events the song describes that we have a hard time swallowing; it is the fact of the people celebrating that violence. It seems like they’re reveling in it, almost in the way that spectators would cheer at a boxing match.

We have to remember something absolutely crucial if we’re going to understand why they’re singing. We must remember that the people of Israel here are not celebrating the deaths of the unrighteous. That kind of celebration would be understandable, given everything they’ve been through, and probably some of them felt that way. But Moses wrote these words under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit; his intent was not to encourage flippancy over the loss of human life. That’s not what they’re celebrating.

They are celebrating God’s justice, his judgment against evil. That is a very different thing. V. 9:

9  The enemy said, ‘I will pursue, I will overtake,

I will divide the spoil, my desire shall have its fill of them.

I will draw my sword; my hand shall destroy them.’

10  You blew with your wind; the sea covered them;

they sank like lead in the mighty waters.

This enemy was the enslaver of God’s people; their intentions were to exploit and destroy these people until there were none left. That God would execute justice against such evil is right. And anyone who has ever suffered injustice knows it. If you are abused or manipulated, or if someone you love is abused or manipulated or mistreated, you want to see the abuser come to justice. You want to see them punished. Even if you don’t want revenge against that person, the fact that they would suffer the consequences of their actions is right. It is just. Justice is a good thing to celebrate.

But that kind of thinking will only take us so far; our challenge isn’t going to be acknowledging that it’s a good thing for God to judge evil. If we follow that logic—that it’s a good thing for God to judge evil—all the way down to its root, we’ll realize that we should be targeted by that judgment as well.

When we talk about evil, we tend to think of the worst things imaginable. We think about genocide. We think about torture. We think about the Coliseum and the Holocaust and the famine in Ukraine under the Soviet Union. But evil isn’t merely all the worst things we can imagine. Evil, by definition, is the absence of good.

And that’s a problem for us, because Christ himself said that “No one is good except God alone” (Mark 10.18).

Now of course we tend to think that’s an exaggeration; I can think of twenty people off the top of my head whom I would consider to be “good” people, even great people. But we need to think about that word in a theological sense: what does the word “good” mean for God?

Think of Tchernobyl. Most of us know what happened there. In April of 1986, the reactor in the Ukranian nuclear plant at Tchernobyl melted down and exploded, sending out a plume of radioactive fallout that spread all over the nearby region. Over 91,000 people had to be evacuated, and an “exclusion zone” was formed; it’s still there today. This exclusion zone stretches over a thousand square miles, because the radiation within that zone was so powerful, everyone had to stay away. They had to set up systems to keep water from the exclusion area escaping into rivers.

Of course some areas were “worse” than others. The power plant itself was more radioactive than the surrounding towns. But all of it was uninhabitable.

This is what sin is like. Sin is radioactive. It is a contaminant. God will not go near it. God’s standard for good is infinitely higher than ours: nothing less than moral perfection will fit the bill, because God is morally perfect. He is, as verse 11 says, “majestic in holiness”.

And the contamination of sin goes much further than the contamination of Tchernobyl. Sin doesn’t just need to be isolated; it must be destroyed, because it is an affront to God’s holiness. If God is going to maintain his goodness—and the world he created good—sin much be destroyed. Sin must be judged.

The Pharaoh, and his enslavement of the Hebrews, is one example of sin at its worst. So the people celebrate God’s judgment, because it means decontamination. Imagine if, in the weeks that followed the meltdown at Tchernobyl, the people who lived in the surrounding areas were told there was a way to get rid of all the radiation. That there was no longer any danger for them, their sickness could be healed, and they could go home.

That is a good reason to celebrate.

God’s judgment of evil is absolutely worth celebrating, because that is how heaven is made possible: when evil is reduced to nothing, when all sin is eradicated, all that is left is holiness. That is heaven.

All of that, everything I’ve just said, you can learn from just this song, which reminds us of the events at the Red Sea.

Even so, by itself, that is an incomplete picture. The people were well served by learning that lesson, but it wasn’t the only lesson to be learned. There’s a whole other section of this song that, taken on its own, could be celebrated as true, but not fully understood until much later.

The song celebrates God’s judgment on evil, thus describing one of the main joys of heaven: a place where sin is no more, and where a holy God reigns over all.

But in heaven, there is not just the absence of sin and the presence of a holy God. There is also the presence of redeemed sinners. And that, at least from the little the people could know at this point, was incomprehensible.

God Dwells with Sinners (v. 11-21)

So far we’ve seen that God judges sin. That makes sense—we can wrap our minds around that. Sin is injustice; if justice is to be done, then that injustice has to receive its proper consequence.

But the mystery of salvation is this: not only does God rightfully judge sin, he also dwells with sinners.

In the first ten verses we see how the people celebrates God’s victory over the Pharaoh and his army in the Red Sea. But starting in, the song marks a certain transition.

V. 11:

11  “Who is like you, O Lord, among the gods?

Who is like you, majestic in holiness,

awesome in glorious deeds, doing wonders?

12  You stretched out your right hand;

the earth swallowed them.

13  “You have led in your steadfast love the people whom you have redeemed;

you have guided them by your strength to your holy abode.

14  The peoples have heard; they tremble;

pangs have seized the inhabitants of Philistia.

15  Now are the chiefs of Edom dismayed;

trembling seizes the leaders of Moab;

all the inhabitants of Canaan have melted away.

16  Terror and dread fall upon them;

because of the greatness of your arm, they are still as a stone,

till your people, O Lord, pass by,

till the people pass by whom you have purchased.

This hasn’t happened yet. God has led them out of Egypt, but he hasn’t yet led them to Canaan, the country he had promised to give them. All these nations that are mentioned—Philistia, Edom, Moab—are enemies the Israelites will have to fight against once they get there. But they haven’t fought anyone yet. They’re not in Canaan yet.

And in fact, the song seems to be speaking about something bigger than just Canaan, the land God promised to give them. Look again at v. 13: you have guided them by your strength to your holy abode.

And then, in v. 17:

17  You will bring them in and plant them on your own mountain,

the place, O Lord, which you have made for your abode,

the sanctuary, O Lord, which your hands have established.

18  The Lord will reign forever and ever.”

19 For when the horses of Pharaoh with his chariots and his horsemen went into the sea, the Lord brought back the waters of the sea upon them, but the people of Israel walked on dry ground in the midst of the sea.

Now there is a mountain coming up later in the story—the Mount Sinai, on which God would give Moses the law. But this can’t be the mountain they’re talking about here, because this mountain is the place which God has made for his abode, the sanctuary which his hands have established. It would be on this mountain that God would bring his people and plant them, making his dwelling place their dwelling place as well.

This mountain pops up often in the Bible, and is later referred to as Zion, or the new Jerusalem, or the new heavens and the new earth. Or, to say it the way we often say it today, heaven. Not heaven as it is today, but heaven as it will be: the place where God will dwell in the midst of his people, on a creation freed from the effects of sin and death. A place of perfect peace, perfect life, and perfect holiness.

So here is the question we are left with: How is this possible? We said it before: we are all contaminated with sin. We may not be as bad as the Pharaoh, but no one is good except God.

You see, this song poses a problem for which the people don’t have yet have an answer. How is it possible that God would “purchase” sinners for himself (v. 16)? How is it possible that God would lead sinners to a place where he himself will dwell with them (v. 17-18)?

This is the question that will start to be answered later on in the book, and this is the question that the church spent the first several centuries of her existence trying to answer: How can a just God forgive sinners?

It seems like a silly question for us today, because how many times have we seen stickers posted on traffic lights or bar windows saying, “Jesus saves”? How many times have we repeated 1 John 1.9 to ourselves: “If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness”? It seems obvious to us that God would forgive us of our sins; in fact, it seems unthinkable that he wouldn’t. This is why sometimes we still find ourselves asking the question, “Why doesn’t God save everyone?”

Remember Tchernobyl. When the meltdown happened, it wasn’t enough for you to not go near it; you couldn’t go near anything else that had gone near it. Trucks and hazmat suits had to be scrubbed clean with decontaminating solution. People had to be isolated. If rocks from the site got stuck to the bottom of your shoe, that was enough to be dangerous.

Sin is a contaminant. By all reasonable metrics, God’s justice shouldn’t be able to go near it.

And yet, what do we see in this song? We see God bringing a sinful people to his mountain, to his dwelling place, where they will live with him.

It shouldn’t be possible, but it is: God came into proximity with our sin, in the person of Jesus Christ. Christ took on a human nature like ours, and he came close. We see him not only not rejecting the sinners around him, but actively seeking them out. We see him go to the leper that everyone is terrified to approach, and actually touching him and healing him.

And not only did he come near our sin; he took it on himself. Paul says in 2 Corinthians 5.21: For our sake [God] made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God. Christ gave us his sinless life, and he took our sin, and his punishment on the cross was our decontamination. Now, when God examines us, he does not see our sin; he sees the perfect life that his Son lived for us, and he declares us righteous.

But here’s what most of us already know: one of the primary struggles of the Christian life is fully and continually believing that. It’s hard for us to believe that God has really and truly decontaminated us. We look at our lives, and we see plenty of sin—we feel it radiating off of us. How could God come near to that?

The apostle Paul actually goes into this in quite some depth in his letter to the Romans, which we studied last year. He explains that for every Christian, as long as we are still alive and living in this fallen world, we have one foot in two separate realities.

The first reality is the new life we have been given in Christ. That is, Christ’s sacrifice in our place removed both the power of sin, and the penalty of sin. Sin no longer has the power to control us, and it no longer has the power to condemn us. That’s the first reality.

The second reality is that even if we have been given new life in Christ—new hearts, new desires, and new minds to know him and love him—the one thing that hasn’t been made new, for now, is our body. We still have the same bodies we had before we met Christ. And those bodies are still weak; they are still used to sinning; they still want to sin.

The struggle between those two realities of our experience is what Paul describes in Romans 7.14-20:

14 For we know that the law is spiritual, but I am of the flesh, sold under sin. [There’s the sinful body, still used to sinning.] 15 For I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate. 16 Now if I do what I do not want, I agree with the law, that it is good. 17 So now it is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells within me. 18 For I know that nothing good dwells in me, that is, in my flesh. For I have the desire to do what is right [There’s the new desires, the new heart that came with Christ], but not the ability to carry it out. 19 For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I keep on doing. 20 Now if I do what I do not want, it is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells within me.

As long as we’re living on this earth, that’s what we have to deal with: new desires fighting against old habits. And one of the hardest things about this is that we’re always tempted to imagine that our old habits define us; we’re always tempted to imagine that our old habits have the ability to control us. But Paul says this isn’t the case. Romans 8.9-11:

9 You, however, are not in the flesh but in the Spirit, if in fact the Spirit of God dwells in you. Anyone who does not have the Spirit of Christ does not belong to him. 10 But if Christ is in you, although the body is dead because of sin, the Spirit is life because of righteousness. 11 If the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, he who raised Christ Jesus from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies through his Spirit who dwells in you.

So here’s what Paul is saying: at the cross, when God poured out his wrath on Christ, he didn’t remove the struggle, but he robbed sin of its power.

This is how the believer’s sin and the unbeliever’s sin are different—not fundamentally different but different in terms of their effect on us. Think of the sin of an unbeliever as an open wound. It is exposed to the elements; it hasn’t been cleaned; and now it’s infected. That infection is ravaging the body, because it’s being left untreated. If left unchecked, eventually an infection like this will kill you.

The sin of a believer is different. A few years ago my brother Jeremy (whom some of you know) was in a motorcycle accident. He was okay—he didn’t suffer any severe injuries—but he had pretty bad road rash on his arms, legs and back. So he got it treated. They took steps to prevent infection. And pretty soon his wounds scabbed over. They still hurt—he had a hard time lying down or getting dressed for several weeks, and they made his life difficult—but they couldn’t get infected, and they were healing. Eventually those scabs started falling off, revealing the clean, new skin underneath.

Now I know that’s gross, and I know that between this and Tchernobyl we’ve gone to some dark places today, but that’s appropriate. Jesus had to go to some pretty dark places to take care of this problem for us. Our bodies are still used to sinning, so we still have sin that we struggle with. Today, as Christians, our sin is like a scab. It still has an impact on our lives; it still hurts, and there are still negative consequences attached.

But that sin no longer has the power to control us, and it no longer has the power to condemn us. The Spirit of God living in us is giving life to our mortal bodies, and little by little, the scabs are falling off, revealing the new skin underneath. We’re learning to obey Christ. We’re learning to live more like him. We’re learning to follow him.

Brothers and sisters, the end result of God’s plan is the decontamination of the entire creation. God judges the evil of the Pharaoh and his armies in the Red Sea, and he promises to make a dwelling place for his people, where he will dwell with them.

We’ll find out in a few chapters how he provides for the purification of his people, so that he might dwell with them. But ultimately, he fulfilled this purification, this decontamination, perfectly in Christ. Once and for all, Christ suffered the judgment of the sin of his people, so now, although we still feel the effects of sin in our lives, we are no longer slaves to it, and it no longer separates us from God.

Now, we can come near to him, and he can come near to us, because that sin has been dealt with.

Now, that sin is slowly but surely being whittled away, like a scab falling off and revealing the new skin beneath.

We need to know this, just like the people of Israel needed to know that God would fight for them in the future. Because they would very soon need to persevere in their trust in God, and in their obedience to him. In the same way, we have to know that God will take care of us, will make us more and more like his Son, because we too must persevere in our faith until the end. And God will fight for us, to make sure that we get there.

Today, because we dwell with him and he dwells in us, we are becoming more and more like him; and one day, we will dwell with him fully and forever, freed from the effects of sin as well as its condemnation.

The decontamination of God’s creation is a marvelous thing, and absolutely worth celebrating. C.H. Spurgeon wrote:

“I, for one, am perfectly satisfied with everything that God does.… I make bold to say that I would have praised God as the waves went over Pharaoh; for the Lord did it, and he did right. I would have cried with Moses, 'I will sing unto the Lord, for he hath triumphed gloriously: the horse and his rider hath he thrown into the sea.’ I expect to be among the number, though some seem as if they would decline the service, who shall for ever bless God for all his dealings with mankind—the stern as well as those that seem more tender. The Lord God, even Jehovah, the God of the Old Testament, is the God whom I worship.”

My prayer for us is that we would lend a hearty amen Spurgeon’s sentiment. That’s exactly this that the people of Israel are doing. We read at the end, v. 19-21:

20 Then Miriam the prophetess, the sister of Aaron, took a tambourine in her hand, and all the women went out after her with tambourines and dancing. 21 And Miriam sang to them:

“Sing to the Lord, for he has triumphed gloriously;

the horse and his rider he has thrown into the sea.”

After the great celebration of the people of Israel, what happens? Miriam (a woman of some authority, since she was a prophetess) and all the women of Israel perform an encore, dancing and banging tambourines and singing the exact same thing they just sang: the Lord’s justice against Egypt was right. It was worth celebrating, because it was judgment against sin.

This is right—this is the God we worship.