Speaker 1: This is a part eight this week in our series on, Moses and the book of Exodus. And I don't know about you, but I'm hoping that this has been a lot of fun for you. It has been for me. I am really ready to start turning our attention to Advent and the Christmas season completely. At the same time though, I am a little sad to be kinda moving on from Moses for a little while and coming back to him because there's just so much great stuff here in the Moses story that we've been able to hit on, but also stuff we've had to kind of fly by.
Truthfully, even given eight weeks to spend time with Moses, we barely really let this story, breathe because there's so much there. And I don't know if you've realized this, but I can spend a lot of time with just a couple verses teaching about them and talking about them. And so when you give me eight weeks to go through a book that has 40 chapters, there is just inevitably going to be a lot of material that's been left on the side. And so my hope is that at some point in these past two months, or maybe even now over the Christmas season, that you will have an opportunity to actually sit down as an individual with the book of Exodus and kind of read through and absorb some of the stuff that we've had to skip through as a community here on Sundays. And so my real hope is what this series has done for you is just giving you a little bit of a glimpse, a little bit of background, and then hopefully a lot of interest to continue learning about Moses and and what his story is about.
Now that said, I do have one more week to talk about him. Last week, I promised that we would end the Moses story with the 10 commandments, also known as the Decalogue, and so that's where we want to focus today. I do also, as I mentioned, wanna end with the Eucharist, And so it's appropriate that as we move to begin to really focus on the season of Advent, that we look to see how we connect our study of Moses to our experience of Jesus, especially this season. And so we're gonna do that as we go. But before we do all that, I actually wanna start with a chance to look back on where we've been for the last seven weeks because that's really important.
Before that though, let's pray. God, we come today having watched and wrestled, having attempted to glean something of your character from these stories in the book of Exodus. And these are lessons to be learned. There are insights to be had. There are truths to be taken a hold of for sure.
But our real prayer is that beyond any lesson, we would begin, and we have begun to see something of you in the midst of our study in your word. That your character would become more clear to us as we read, and that your graciousness would sink into us as we place ourselves into these stories. That we would discover who it is that you are showing yourselves to be in our lives. Ultimately, we're not here for tips and tricks. We're not here for contemporary life technology.
We're here to meet with you, to know you, to see you, to understand how it is that you want us to represent you in your world. And so as we look back today on where we have been in this series, as we look forward today to how you point us towards Jesus, the incarnation, and his life. We ask that you would help us see past the rules and the regulations and the commands and the instructions, to see your heart and your invitation and your grace that undergirds everything in the scriptural story. So as we turn to Christmas and the miracle of the incarnation, at the mystery that the God of the universe would come and he would walk with us. Help us to seek out the grace and the compassion we see so clearly in Jesus and know that is who you have always been.
In the strong name of the risen Christ, we pray. Amen. Okay. Because this is the last of eight weeks, where we have the opportunity to look at Moses, I wanna do a fairly extensive recap of this series here. We started way back in Exodus chapter one, with Moses as a Hebrew baby, born in a time, where the Pharaoh or the king of Egypt had forgotten the debt that the empire of Egypt had to, Joseph, who was also a Hebrew.
Now Joseph, if you go back to the book of Genesis, starts out as a slave in Egypt, rises his way up, ends up becoming an adviser to the king. In fact, he is the second most powerful person in the empire. But Exodus begins in chapter one by telling us that a new king, a new pharaoh has come to power, a king to whom Joseph meant nothing. That's where we started. And so rather than remember the past, rather than learn from the past and build on the past, this pharaoh actually becomes paranoid about the present.
And he worries about this growing population, this perceived threat of the Hebrew people that are living in Egypt. And what he does is he orders that all the male Hebrew children be executed. He wants them thrown into the Nile River. Moses' mother, however, as we read, takes the baby, hides him in a basket that's been prepared to float, and sets him off floating down the river. Now the basket ends up crossing paths with the pharaoh's daughter.
She sees the basket. She finds the baby. She takes pity on this child, and she ends up taking him back to live in the royal palace. And so very first thing that we learn about Moses before he is even old enough to speak is that all of these things that were meant to kill him and harm him and destroy him, the Nile River, the royal family of Egypt, even these somehow become sources of blessing for him. And I don't want to suggest at all by this that every terrible thing that ever happens to you will somehow end up with you living in the lap of luxury?
It's not gonna happen. I'm sorry. It won't. But is it possible that even in the midst of our struggle, we can understand that somehow God is working, God is investing, God preparing us for something. Next, we see Moses as a young man.
And one day, he walks out from the palace and he sees a slave being beaten by his master, and he intervenes. He jumps in. He defends the powerless. He actually kills the aggressor. And we talked that week, and I said, I don't wanna defend Moses' violence here.
I think we see that as the story plays itself out, how aggression makes us suspect and how violence actually undermines our best attempts. And yet, in Moses, we do see this willingness to look below the surface of our world. And this is a young man who grows up in the royal palace of Egypt. His life is lived in the most opulent, luxurious existence known to man at that point in history, an existence that is predicated completely on the work of slaves and slavery. That's how Egypt functions.
The Egyptian empire, depended. It was built on the back of oppression. And it would have been very easy for Moses to ignore all that, to enjoy his life in the palace. It would have been just as easy for him as it is for us to ignore the inequality in our world and keep our heads down. But he doesn't.
He went and he looked. He goes outside the palace. He watched, and what he saw was what it took to maintain his world. It took slaves, it took suppression, it took masters, and it changed him. And so Moses goes from a life that's destined to be lived in luxury to one that is actually characterized by struggle and sacrifice, and most importantly, this deep connection that Moses develops with God.
And so God speaks to Moses, the Bible tells us. In the Mishnah, the stories of the rabbis, they taught that God spoke to Moses specifically because Moses had been willing to go and live with those who were distressed. This is why God chose to spoke to him. But God speaks through a burning bush, at least that's what we tend to call it. The fact is though in the story that Moses sees the bush and he sees that it's on fire, but it doesn't burn.
It's not a burning bush. It's a bush that doesn't burn. The bush is on fire. Moses realizes it's not burning up. He goes over to see it, and that's when God speaks to him.
And given all the time that I've spent in my life sitting around campfires, staring at fires, being mesmerized by fires, I have often wondered how long you have to stare at something that's burning to realize it's not actually burning. Rabbis noticed this too. They actually wondered. Maybe this scene at the burning bush wasn't a miracle. Maybe it was a test.
Maybe God was looking for someone who noticed his world. Maybe God wanted someone who was aware enough of his surroundings to notice the thing that would go unnoticed by someone else. You paid attention, who's deeply present to what's going on. God has heard the cries of the oppressed in Egypt. Now he's looking for someone who is sensitive enough to notice the unnoticed, a bush that doesn't burn.
And so God speaks, and he reveals himself as the one who is, or the one who will be who he will be, or my favorite translation, the one we read from Ghenton Davies, I am who, and what, and where and when and how and even why you will discover I am. I am who you will discover me to be. So God is not just a great name, and God is not just a set of rules. God is not, however you and I decide we want to define him. He is always and only who he shows himself to be in a relationship with us.
I am who you will know, Moses. I am who you will get to know. And the first thing that God does in this relationship is to take Moses, pair him up with Aaron, and send him off to Pharaoh. Now Moses doesn't wanna go. Maybe he doesn't see the potential God sees in him.
Maybe that's it. Maybe he just doesn't want the responsibility. I don't want this on my shoulders. I don't wanna do this. But God is gracious, almost to a fault it seems like at times.
So he pairs him up with Aaron, and he sends him off to Egypt to free the oppressed. And when they get to Pharaoh, they have this first encounter with Pharaoh, and they are immediately, desperately intimidated by Pharaoh. They go, they say, let my people go, Pharaoh says no, and they're like, oh, woah, okay. Yeah. I guess that's true.
Maybe we could compromise here. And they immediately lose almost all of their courage in talking to Pharaoh. And so we talked in this series about how a no does not necessarily mean that God isn't on your side anymore. Sometimes things are hard. Sometimes you feel like God has called you to do something, and the first time you do it somebody says, no, it's not gonna work.
Some things that are worth doing are hard. In fact, most of the things that are worth doing in your life will be hard. Somebody's gonna say no. And so eventually, God encourages them. They regroup.
They go back to Pharaoh. God has their back, but Pharaoh's heart is hard. And we got to one of the very difficult stories in the Old Testament. God hardens Pharaoh's heart. What is up with that?
Right? Does God set Pharaoh up here as he hardened his heart and then punished him for it on the other side? What's the deal? Well, in Exodus, nine times we are told that Pharaoh's heart is hardened. Five times, God is said to be the one who hardens Pharaoh's heart.
Four times, Pharaoh is said to be the one who hardens his own heart. And I think perhaps our attempts to make this really nice and neat and to delineate very clearly and cleanly between God's actions and our free will, perhaps this is simply impossible. Is God the good shepherd who searches and seeks and finds us and brings us home? Or are we the ones who take up our cross and follow Jesus? That may be yes.
I don't know. Is it God who gives Pharaoh over to his own worst tendencies? He says, if you wanna harden your heart, you can do it. Or is it Pharaoh who resists and pushes and turns away from what is good and true and right, and maybe the answer is just yes. And I know that's really frustrating for some of you.
Some of us are just wired to search out very clean, clear, articulate answers. That's just how we work. But the Bible is not always about the how. What it is is very clear about the why, and sometimes we struggle with the how. We know though that God cares about the oppressed, God is invested in the human story, God loves you.
And the how he does that, the how it works it out, the how it will look like in your life is unique and as personal as the 6,000,000,000 people that inhabit this earth right now. And it has to be if God is relational. The how is unique and as personal as everyone here in this room, it's as unique as you are. What we trust is that the why is constant and clear. The why is because God loves us.
And we see this incredibly clearly post Exodus. How the people come out of Egypt, the first thing they do is they grumble and they complain. They say to God, we don't have enough food. Remember this, it's been forty five days since we had a good meal. This stinks.
The problem is they don't actually go to God with that complaint. They don't actually bring a very legitimate concern to God and say we're hungry. What they do is they grumble, and they murmur, and they forget what it means to be honest with God. And so even when God is gracious and brings them food, because they don't know how to be honest with their complaints, they don't know how to be honest in their gratitude either. So they get this miracle bread, and rather than say thankful, they're like, we would like more meat.
We want better food. And so we talked about how legitimate complaint, expressing your concerns and your lament to God, and healthy gratitude expressing your thankfulness to God are actually often two sides of the same coin. Because they are both indicative of our ability to be honest and open with God. If you can't talk to God about about what's bothering you, you probably don't know how to thank him for what's good either. This is a relationship.
God is not asking you to slap on a smile when you're sad. He's not looking for you to say thank you when you hurt. What he's hoping for is the kind of a relationship where you come to him for help when you need it, and you return to him to say thank you when you can. And so finally, last week, we saw why all of this builds to such a disappointing conclusion where we find the Israelites worshiping around a golden calf. Because when we read the text really carefully, we realize that what's going on here is that Israelites haven't actually abandoned Yahweh.
They're not swapping out Yahweh for another deity. What they're doing is they're trying to worship Yahweh, they're just not doing it well. They build this golden calf, they set it up, and then they say we will have a festival to Yahweh in front of the golden calf. And the problem is they wanna represent Yahweh with an image of fertility and blessing. Calf, especially a golden calf, is a very strong image of fertility in ancient Near East cultures.
So they wanna represent God with one very narrow slice of their experience, blessing, fertility, wealth. The problem with thinking about that God way a God that way is that God is not interested in being your fertility God. He's not interested in being your prosperity God, your political God, your war God, your religious God. He's interested in taking a very central place in how we imagine everything that it means to be human. And so how we worship is important, but so is how we speak.
And how we are blessed is important, but so is how we shop. What we believe is very important, but so is how we vote, and how we care, and how we act, and how we push for change in God's world, how we help to participate in building the kingdom of God. Everything that you do as a human being is part of what it means to worship God well. And this is why after seven weeks of talking about and learning alongside Moses, after seeing how God prepares and then reveals and then pushes and then develops and encourages and builds up Moses, We are just now finally ready to approach the 10 Commandments. Because one of the real problems that happens when we tend to approach a section like the Decalogue is that very often we wanna read this as if it was a standalone section.
As if you could just open your Bible, turn to Exodus 20, read what you find there, close the book, and have any idea of what it is you just read. Spoiler, you can't do that. It doesn't work. Because the 10 commandments are set within the story of a God that is engaged in the process of revealing himself to his people. As Old Testament scholar Andrew Sloan writes, he says, it is possible to take the 10 commandments out of their canonical context and look at them as an isolated abstract set of religious and moral commands, and many people do exactly that.
But as Sloane says, to do so is a mistake. To think you can take the 10 commandments and put them at the front of a classroom or in front of a courtroom and say, that's enough. You don't need the rest of the story. It's a mistake. Because the 10 commandments we're about to look at are not just a random set of moral principles.
Now, yes, God descends onto a mountain to give them to Moses, but the commands themselves didn't just drop out of the sky. They are part of this unfolding relationship between the God Yahweh and his people Israel. They are a partial expression of the moral vision that God has for the world. Another way to say that is this, the 10 commandments are not first set in stone, they are first set in a story. And so when Jesus comes on the scene some thousand years after the exodus and he says this, you have heard it said.
Probably read that from Jesus before. Matthew five twenty one, you have heard it said, you shall not murder. But I tell you, anyone who's angry will be subject to judgement. Ment. Matthew five twenty seven, you've heard it said, you shall not commit adultery.
But I tell you, anyone who looks lustfully has already committed adultery. Matthew five thirty eight, you've heard it said, eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth. I tell you don't resist evil. Matthew five forty three, you've heard it said, love your neighbor, hate your enemy, but I tell you, love your enemies, pray for those who persecute you. This is not Jesus undermining the 10 commandments here.
You've heard it said, but I tell you. Neither is this Jesus just reinscribing the 10 commandments either. What this is Jesus doing is continuing the story that was started back then. So at the start of Matthew five, just before Jesus goes into all these you have heard it said statements, he says this, do not think I have come to abolish the law or the prophets. I've not come to abolish them, but to fulfill them.
That word fulfill in Greek is the word plero. It means not just to complete in the sense of like a theoretical action, but it's actually most, closely associated in Greek with the very simple image of filling up a bottle of water. It's a very tangible image it's speaking up here. He says, I've come to fill up the prophets. So God starts a story all the way back in Genesis, and he slowly pours more and more and more of himself into the story until we truly learn what it means to see him.
Now Jesus is just filling up the story more. And so everything that we have been watching and studying and learning about this past seven weeks with Moses has been God showing more and more and more of himself to us and the Israelites. It has been God slowly inviting Moses to know him more. Slowly inviting the Israelites to trust him more. Slowly building a story that will one day lead to Jesus and his incarnation and his crucifixion and his resurrection and eventually to the kingdom of God.
But three thousand years removed from the context of Sinai, if we try to jump straight back to the rules without spending time to see God and how he has been revealing himself in the story, I think we risk actually missing the point of the story. Because the rules are an expression of the relationship, not the other way around. Just look at how God begins the 10 commandments. God says, and God spoke all these words, I am the Lord your God who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery. That's where he starts it.
Everything you're about to read following that follows on from what you just read over the past seven weeks about how God saves the Israelites. Steve Chalk is a British writer, and he tells a story in his book, The Art of Living Beautifully. He's on one of these radio shows on the BBC. It's about religion, and he's an English guy, so he gets invites like that. But the presenter, at one point in the conversation, turns to him and asks, why is God so miserable?
I mean, he is such a downer. Everything he says is don't do this, don't do that, don't desire what other people have, don't commit adultery. I mean, it's kind of pathetic for a supposed God of the universe. Isn't it what's his deal? And I can admit, I have had almost that exact same set of questions asked of me at different times, like why is God such a downer here?
But Chuck jumps in on the radio and he says this, does he really say all those things? I mean, does God actually say don't commit adultery? And and the woman who's entering says, of course he does. It's in the 10 commandments. And Chuck was like, oh, right.
Now I know what you're talking about. He says, it's just that when you said it, I didn't recognize it because of your tone. Of course, God says don't commit adultery. But it's not because he thinks that adultery sounds like fun, and God is like, oh, I don't want anyone to have any fun. Let's ban that.
It's not even just because adultery is something that God doesn't like, and so he bans it for us. It's not just arbitrary. You see, before we get to Exodus 20, all the way back before that story, what we're reading about is the God who introduces himself as the God who hears the cries of the oppressed. The God who looks for a leader like Moses. The God who searches out the people that he loves.
The God who says, my name doesn't matter. I am who you will discover me to be. And then he shows himself to be the God that is for Israel, not against them. The God who wants freedom for them. The God who wants food for them.
The God who wants what is best and good for them. So God doesn't start his relationship with the list of all the things he doesn't want them to do. He doesn't even start with the list of all the things that they should do in order to make him happy. He starts by saving them. And so when we read the story in context and we get to the 10 commandments, if we've been reading it at its proper place in the tale, we shouldn't be hearing, don't do this, don't do that.
What we should be hearing is, I love you, I'm on your side, I brought you out of slavery, I got you food, I brought you a leader, I saved you, so trust me on this. Don't steal, don't lie, don't murder, don't abandon me, don't cheat on each other. Because if you do, what will happen is it will unleash all kinds of destructive forces that will drag you all the way back down in the kind of slavery and oppression that you just left. It will be destructive, and it will be crushing, and it will be worse than you came from, so trust me. Divorced from the God who has shown himself to Israel and saved Israel and cared for Israel, the 10 commandments read very, very differently.
And truthfully, they're a disaster of regulation. And what does it mean not to lie? I mean, that does that really mean that you should just say whatever it is that pops into your head whenever you think it? Like, is it a lie not to say that? I mean, is that really going to create a healthy harmonious society for anybody?
I'm up here preaching. I make a point, point, and you're like, boring. I know that. I can tell when it's not working too. Fair.
But talk to me after. We can work on this together. Right in the middle of a message might not be the most helpful moment to say it. It's honest though. Alright?
Honesty is incredibly hard to legislate. What does that mean? Don't lie. As a social code, the 10 commandments are deeply flawed. 10 rules is not gonna make a functional society.
That's why the rabbis actually counted up 613 laws in Torah. And then not only that, but then they had the enormous Talmudic library that helped them describe exactly how all of those laws would play out in every possible situation they could think of, volumes and volumes of work. As a social code, the 10 commandments are very lacking. But as part of a story, as an expression of this budding relationship between Yahweh and Israel as guidelines that say this will help you continue to move in a good, direction. They are profoundly beautiful foundation for the story that God is pouring himself into throughout the scriptures.
This is why some of the rabbis would argue that the Decalogue, which just means 10 words, is perhaps a better name for Exodus 20 than the 10 Commandments after all. Now what if these aren't just commands? Take a look at this. On the left are the first nine commandments as we generally read them. You shall have no other gods before me.
You should create no false idols. Don't use the Lord's name in vain. Remember the Sabbath. Honor your parents. Don't kill.
Don't commit adultery. Don't steal, and don't lie. On the right is what we generally recognize as the final commandment, number 10, and it's a three parter. Maybe God just couldn't fit them all in. I don't know.
Maybe he got to the end. He was like, shoot. I promised 10. Now I've got these ones, but I like them. I'm just gonna stick them all together.
Either way, number 10 in Exodus 20 verse 17 reads this way, you shall not covet your neighbor's house. You shall not covet your neighbor's wife or his male or female servant, his ox, his donkey, or anything that belongs to your Here's a question. What's the difference between the commands on the left and the ones on the right? Some of the rabbis looked at this and they thought, well, having no other gods, no false idols, not using the Lord's name in vain, remembering the Sabbath, honoring your parents, killing, committing altars, speaking, lying, these are all external actions. Theoretically, if I watched you long enough and closely enough, I could determine if you had broken these commands.
Right? I would see it. But coveting your neighbor's house or his wife or his property, unhealthy desire, is that something we could ever really measure as a society? How does that work? What if you're just really good at coveting?
You just do it very quietly. You you just got good at being jealous and envious, but keeping it deep down and bottled up inside. I don't know. And some of the rabbi said, maybe this last one isn't a command at all. Maybe it's a promise.
You see, if the Decalogue was meant as an expression of this budding relationship between Yahweh and his people, then maybe rather than just a list of commands, what God was saying was this. That if you can trust me and you can keep me at the center of your life, and you can stay away from idols that box me off and narrow my influence, if if you can keep only my name when you really mean it, if you can honor rest, if you can respect your parents, if you can refrain from killing and cheating and stealing and lying, then what I promise return is a life that is free from all kinds of unhealthy desires that will drive you insane. If you learn to trust me, you won't want for anything unhealthy. I promise. I mean, that helped to change your perspective maybe on what God is doing here.
Maybe you've had a sense in your life that there is gift in faith and in spirituality. But your experience of church or religion has been dominated by rules and drudgery. Does that help to bring back the vitality that you knew was in there somewhere? God is promising you a life free from wanting all kinds of nonsense. Maybe you had a sense somehow that the universe actually cared about you.
But your understanding of God, as it was expressed in Christianity or religion seems so consumed with judgment and measurement, it didn't make sense. Does this help to connect that divine hope that there is love and there's concern in the universe back to the person of Yahweh and God and how he expresses himself. I promise you, you won't be driven mad by wanting all kinds of things if you can trust me. If you have longed for a God who cares, not just about rules, but about you as an individual, does this help to begin to fulfill that hope that you had for who God was? See, this is why the 10 commandments have to come at the end of the story of Moses.
Because they only really truly make sense when we have already learned what it means to trust that God is for us. If we don't believe that he's for us and then we get the rules, it's like, oh, God. Come on. Are you just trying to weigh me down with this? Once we understand who he is and we see how he comes to us and we see how he saves us, not through his rules, we see that he is love.
And so as we close, a series on Moses and we transition to fully turn our attention to the season of Advent and Christ and his coming. This marker in our calendar where we slow down and we remember God coming to us. Where the God of the universe listened to the cries, not only of his people, but of all peoples, and he stepped into history to be part of the human story in order to fix and heal and redeem the human story. When we trust that God had built the story up to a level that he had poured himself off in enough that when he showed up, we would actually recognize him. In the light of this story that starts all the way back in Torah with Moses, in the light of a story that ends all the way forward in Revelation, we wanna participate in that story together.
And so we come to the table of the Eucharist, the good gift. That's all Eucharist means in Greek. But the good gift that God is primarily not a God of rules and regulations. He is first and foremost always a God of love and relationship and invitation. A generous father and a loving son desperately inviting us to discover the presence of his spirit with us.
This is what the decalogue points us to. This is what Moses and Torah and the 10 commandments and the Israelites invite us to move toward. And so as we celebrate the promise of the 10 Commandments, life free from want, and we anticipate the gift of the incarnation, life come to find us. As we remember the sacrifice of Jesus, life that simply cannot be extinguished. We welcome the invitation of the father, life that is connected to the source of all that breathes in the universe.
I wanna invite you, to come to the table, to receive the bread and the grape that represent God most most clearly evident in history, and recognize in that moment God at his most full. So as you eat, I wanna invite you to reflect on the Exodus and what we've been learning over the past eight years. And I wanted to invite you to anticipate the advent, the coming of hope into the world, but my prayer is that you will begin to see God clearly for who he is. And so I invite you to come. Come down the center aisle, take the elements, you can eat them right there, and then return to your seat.
And once all those who want to participate have come forward, I'll come back, we'll sing a song, and we'll say a prayer as we close. I invite you to come.
Speaker 2: This is a podcast of Kensington Commons Church. We believe that God is invested in the renewal of all things. Therefore, we wanna live the good news by being part of the rhythms of our city as good neighbors, good friends, and good citizens in our common life. Join us on Sunday or visit us online at commonschurch.org.