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Our Christian formation classes are taught by the clergy of Church of the Incarnation (Dallas, TX). Journey with us as each season unfolds.
Alright. Let me pray for us. Father, thank you for this new day. Thank you for this weekend. I thank you for, again, this opportunity to study the scriptures.
Dr. Stephen Bagby:I pray that we would again have open hearts, open minds to receive what you would have to give us today. I pray that we would walk out of this class today and beyond with real openness and mindset and a heart set that would allow you to lead our steps and allow you to guide us, Lord, in this journey as we look back at Israel's journey coming out of Egypt and into the promised land. And we pray that this would be an understanding, not just an interesting observation of what happened in the past, but that this is part of our story as well. And that this is our story that should have shaped the way we think about our lives today and beyond. I pray that that would be our mindset, Lord, and on our hearts.
Dr. Stephen Bagby:I pray these things in Christ's name and by the spirit. Amen. Okay. I think we met, what, two weeks ago last time? And I think I may have given you some homework to do to sing the song of Moses.
Dr. Stephen Bagby:Remember we talked about that? Exodus 15 is where we left off. The people of Israel have just left Egypt and they have crossed the Red Sea in chapter 14 and they are no doubt experiencing this joy and this euphoria and this this sense of overwhelming love and the grace of god that has come over them as a result of this and of course, we then encounter this song from Moses. And again, it's one of these things that's easy to skip over as you're looking at the Bible and go, okay, Moses sang a song. But this is a song of Moses.
Dr. Stephen Bagby:This is not a letter of Moses. This is not a journal he wrote. This is a song in chapter 15 of Exodus. And so, it must be sung, it must be rejoiced, it must be shouted, and no doubt the Israelites did sing this and shout this over the course of many years and centuries. In fact, it's probably our oldest form of poetry or song in the entire Old Testament.
Dr. Stephen Bagby:And so, it is a song that should remind us of God's provision and God's grace in our lives. And for me, it speaks to also this idea of freedom. You know, we talk about this idea of freedom. And I mentioned this last fall when I was going through the Genesis class, and I think we were talking about Joseph. But I'll mention it again here.
Dr. Stephen Bagby:This idea of freedom. What do we mean by freedom? Freedom from what? What did the Israelites have freedom from by the time they're in chapter 15? Servitude.
Dr. Stephen Bagby:Servitude.
Participant:Slavery.
Dr. Stephen Bagby:Anything else?
Participant:Oppression.
Dr. Stephen Bagby:Oppression. Yeah. Pharaoh himself, king of Egypt, and so forth.
Participant:The boys being killed.
Dr. Stephen Bagby:Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Murder and so forth. And a lot of times when we think about freedom, we really limit ourselves to thinking about freedom from.
Dr. Stephen Bagby:And remember, if you were in the class last fall, we talked about this. We tend to have a one-sided notion of freedom. We sort of carry this ourselves in contemporary American society, and I think we often kind of pour this into the text as we read it too. And we think about freedom, we're like, okay. They're free now.
Dr. Stephen Bagby:But freedom is a double edged or a two sided coin. It's not just freedom from, it's freedom to. Okay? Freedom from bondage, slavery, murder, all those things. But God didn't just leave them scattered.
Dr. Stephen Bagby:God didn't just leave them aimless. God didn't just leave them wandering. He gave them a goal. He gave them a destination. He gave them a freedom too.
Dr. Stephen Bagby:And that's a critical component as we think about this in the text. Israel was freed from those things we mentioned. What were they freed then to? Okay. Freedom to worship Yahweh in the way that they've been wanting to worship Yahweh, right?
Dr. Stephen Bagby:What else?
Participant:Govern themselves.
Dr. Stephen Bagby:Okay, like actually numbering them? Like in is that what you said? Governing. Oh, governing. I'm sorry.
Dr. Stephen Bagby:I thought you said numbering. Well, I was thinking the book of numbers. Maybe they did do a census there. Yeah. Governing themselves.
Dr. Stephen Bagby:What else they free to?
Participant:Out of the land. The
Dr. Stephen Bagby:land, right? They're free to inhabit the land that was promised to them, right? A long time ago. They're also free to what? They're free to pursue holy lives, right?
Dr. Stephen Bagby:Notice how the the freedom from precedes the giving of the law. Okay? Grace always precedes obedience. So they were free from chapters fourteen and fifteen. They were free to chapter 20.
Dr. Stephen Bagby:And same for us. Right? We're free from, as Christians, free from our sins, free from our our lifestyles that we had before in order to follow God, be obedient, live virtuous lives. And we have to keep that in mind as we think about this. I think the question that comes to my mind often is, okay, this is something we study for the Israelites, but what does it mean to us?
Dr. Stephen Bagby:How do we think about this? What's the question for us today as we think about freedom? So I think the question I would put before all of us today is, what has god freed us from?
Participant:Freedom from the culture to be in the world but not of it.
Dr. Stephen Bagby:Okay. Or maybe just even like on an individual level. What is god freed me from? Despair. Yeah.
Dr. Stephen Bagby:Or like, I mean, you could just think about this yourselves in your own lives. What sins, what bondage, what habits did god free me from and with that in mind, what did he free me to?
Participant:He freed me to mercy. He freed me from fear.
Dr. Stephen Bagby:Okay. So perhaps our there were some besetting sins that we had in our lives. Could be addictions, could be anger, could be whatever. But that's a question we have to ask ourselves, I think, based on what we see in the Exodus text is what did God free me from? And with that in mind, what is he freeing me to?
Dr. Stephen Bagby:It could be that he's freeing me to go back and help people who struggle with the same bondage and sins that I had. Or it could be that he's freeing me to something else that allows me then to lean into and to give to others in light of that freedom that I have in Christ? Right? So I think that's a good question for us as we think through this and I think that's something that we ought to be mindful of on multiple levels. Okay?
Dr. Stephen Bagby:We like to throw this word freedom around politically, religiously, in a lot of different ways. And what we often mean is the from part. And we don't ever really talk about the to part. Either we can't agree on the two part or we don't even know that the two part exists. What are we free to do in our lives today?
Dr. Stephen Bagby:And so God freed the Israelites from Egypt to worship him and live holy lives, which we're going to see for the rest of Exodus, for Leviticus, for Numbers, and beyond. The freedom to really displays itself throughout the rest of the Old Testament. Robert Jensen has this great quote, which I sort of summarize right now. Robert Jensen was a twentieth century theologian who I think died a couple years ago. He says, the God who raised Jesus from the dead is the same God who raised the Israelites out of Egypt.
Dr. Stephen Bagby:This is one God across the Scriptures. The same God who raised Jesus from the dead is the God who raised the Israelites out of Egypt. And so he takes them out of Egypt with Moses in the lead, and we see in chapters 15, the Song of Moses, chapter 16, we encounter this struggle, this journey that they're on, right? And what do we see in 16? We start to see some murmuring.
Dr. Stephen Bagby:Grumbling. Grumbling, Right? I mean, can we not understand that on some level? Right? We often see the Israel, oh, poor Israelites.
Dr. Stephen Bagby:You know, they always complained and they always fell into idolatry. Good thing I never do those things. You know, we sort of have this like distance we have with Israelites often. I mean, at least I thought that way for many years, and then I was like, oh, wait. I'm a little more like Israelites than I thought, you know.
Dr. Stephen Bagby:I and so maybe this applies to me more than I realized. And so 16, we see bread provided from heaven, the manna. 17, they're thirsty, right? We see water provided from the rock. And we see these things, this provision from the Lord.
Dr. Stephen Bagby:Remember we talked in the first few weeks in this class about how one of the dominant themes of the book of Exodus is this idea of creation theology. You know, we tend to think of creation, we think of the book of Genesis, but creation theology permeates the whole Bible. And when you look at Exodus through the lens of creation, what do you see? These first several chapters of Exodus, creation is, like I said, going berserk. Right?
Dr. Stephen Bagby:And now what do you see in chapters sixteen and seventeen? There's provision. It's that there's a harmony between creation and the people, whereas there was disharmony before. So on some level, we need to be thinking about creation in light of obedience, in light of how God would have us live our lives. There's a strong sense in which the disobedience you see with the Egyptians and with Pharaoh led to this craziness in creation throughout the whole plague chapters.
Dr. Stephen Bagby:And now you start to see this harmony of creation. All a sudden, water comes from where? Of all places, a rock. There's
Participant:this
Dr. Stephen Bagby:sense of unity and harmony in creation itself. So it's not that creation is against us in an absolute sense. It's that creation is harmonized more when we see obedience among the people. And that's one of the messages or literary devices we're seeing here in the book of Exodus. As one commentator says, water from Sinai testifies to the fact that moral order and cosmic order are inextricably interconnected.
Dr. Stephen Bagby:Okay? And so we see this throughout. And of course, then we get to chapter 19. We're gonna fly through today. So if I'm moving fast, there's a reason.
Dr. Stephen Bagby:We gotta finish the book of Exodus today. And that's no fewer than what? 21 chapters? I was never good at math, but 40 is where it ends. I know that.
Dr. Stephen Bagby:And we're on 19 right now, and so we're moving into 19. And Israel arrives at Sinai in chapter 19. And chapter 19 is one of those chapters in your Bible I'm not someone who writes in my Bible or writes in books, but if you are someone who does, you'll want to circle that chapter. This is one of the key chapters, most important, or hinge, I call hinge chapters, in the entire Bible. No doubt in the entire Old Testament.
Dr. Stephen Bagby:Okay? Israel's arrival at Sinai. And what we're going to see over the rest of the book, once they get to Sinai, from 19 all the way to 40, we're going to see a certain literary cadence occur, literary technique occur in the book of Exodus. We're going to see a story, then we're gonna see law, then we're gonna see a story, then we're gonna see law, then we're gonna see a story, then we're gonna see a tabernacle, then we're gonna see a story, then we're gonna see tabernacle. This is an intentional literary device, I think, that's being used to help us think through Israel's story and their history and what's expected of them.
Dr. Stephen Bagby:And so it has a certain rhythm as we go through. I mentioned chapter 19 because they arrive at Sinai in chapter 19 and they don't leave for an entire year. Okay? And so they stay in Sinai for about eleven months, technically. So they're in Sinai for that period of time, and they're gonna be at Sinai from Exodus 19 through the rest of the book of Exodus, through all of the book of Leviticus, and through the first 10 chapters of the book of Numbers.
Dr. Stephen Bagby:Okay? That is 58 chapters of the Pentateuch is happening in one place in one year. That's 40% of your Pentateuch. Right there is this eleven month span. And I think that the reason why so much attention is given to it is because it is arguably the most formative year in Israel's history in the Old Testament.
Dr. Stephen Bagby:When you think about Israelite history, I think the author wants to focus on this story of like how Israel really understood itself as a nation. How they understood their worship of Yahweh. What it means to be holy, what it means to be followers of the law, what it means to worship Yahweh. And so you see this real strong focus occurring over the course of that time. And what it means is we'll get into the book of Leviticus later this spring, what it means to live in the presence of a holy God.
Dr. Stephen Bagby:I mean, as I mentioned a couple weeks ago, that is really the essence of what the book of Leviticus is all about. What it means to live in the presence of a holy God. What does that entail? What does that look like? And the book of Exodus is fascinating in this regard.
Dr. Stephen Bagby:And so we have here in '19 what I call sort of a key missiological text. We talked about the mission of God a lot last fall in relation to Genesis. Okay? It's God's mission, it's not ours. God's mission, what he's doing in the world, God invites us into that.
Dr. Stephen Bagby:He invites us to be participants in his mission in this world. And we have here in Exodus nineteen five and six, if you can grab turn in your Bibles, or I don't know if I have it on a sheet or not. Exodus nineteen five and six, a key missiological text. And it says this, this is God speaking to the Israelites. Now, therefore, if you obey my voice and keep my covenant, you shall be my treasured possession out of all the peoples.
Dr. Stephen Bagby:Indeed, the whole earth is mine, but you shall be for me a priestly kingdom and a holy nation. These are the words that you shall speak to the Israelites. Okay? What is easy to miss in that text right there is this idea of mediation. Okay?
Dr. Stephen Bagby:There's various levels of mediation that occur in our Bible and in our theology. And one thing we're we need to be mindful of is that we see in the Old Testament, or especially in the Pentateuch here, that Moses is a mediator between God and the people. Right? Like, everybody knows that. So he plays this mediatorial role between God and the people.
Dr. Stephen Bagby:But what's easy to miss is that Israel itself is a mediator between God and the nations. Israel plays a mediatorial role throughout the Old Testament and in the nations themselves. And so what we see here exemplified much like the way like a priest plays a mediatorial role. What we see here is that Israel itself and the life they have of worshiping Yahweh, that life is to be seen as a microcosm of what is possible for the whole world. It's not just Israel's story sealed off by itself.
Dr. Stephen Bagby:It's Israel's story so that the nations can be invited into that and can be worshiping accordingly, can know the true God. They can know their creator. This is a way for them to be drawn in to know their creator himself. And so Israel plays this mediatorial role for the nations themselves, and it is a microcosm of this life. Okay.
Dr. Stephen Bagby:So as we keep moving through 19, they're there in Sinai. Where was Sinai? I don't know. Somewhere in that peninsula. Right?
Dr. Stephen Bagby:You know, there's always debate about where is Sinai? Where is Sinai? I think it's somewhere in that peninsula. You know, Sinai Peninsula, some specific location there. A lot of books written on this.
Dr. Stephen Bagby:But nevertheless, they spent eleven months there, and that was formative for their lives. And, of course, we see then the giving of the 10 commandments here. And the 10 commandments are what's also called the Decalogue, the 10 words, 10 sayings. The 10 commandments are given in Exodus 20. The other place you find them is in Deuteronomy five.
Dr. Stephen Bagby:The 10 commandments, we, you know, we could do a whole series on the 10 commandments themselves, obviously. But just wanna say a couple things. As Dallas Willard said, the 10 commandments are not the source of rightness, but the course of rightness. Okay? It's not the source of being right with God.
Dr. Stephen Bagby:It's the course that Israel takes in being in right relationship with God. This obedience that they are expected to follow. There's a lot of talk about, you know, what comprises the 10 commandments, how to think about the structure and everything. Most people tend to think, I think, the first five commandments you see are more what we call, like, vertical in nature. They they deal with relationships that are vertical all the way from starting with, you know, have no other god, you know, worship the one true god, no other gods, do not make any idols.
Dr. Stephen Bagby:This kind of vertical relationships down to honoring your father and mother. Then the next five laws being more horizontal in nature. Horizontal relations, do not murder, do not commit adultery, things like that. And so you have this kind of vertical as it were and horizontal kind of approach to the 10 commandments. And again, this is not for Israel a way for them to sort of follow the law for its own sake.
Dr. Stephen Bagby:They are following the law and being obedient to God for the sake of the world. And so as they go forward with this law, which is part of the freedom too, it helps guide them in this freedom too. They are then able to be a light to the nations. And, course, then again, this is part of the missional what I call the missional thrust of the book of Exodus. And of course, when we think about the law, we often think, you know, what role does the law play in the Christian life today?
Dr. Stephen Bagby:And Christians have come up with all sorts of answers to this. Some Christians say, well, you know, we can't really can't really follow the law. We can't really do that. Other Christians say, yes, we should follow the law all the way and so forth. But I really wanna sort of focus on how Jesus interpreted the law.
Dr. Stephen Bagby:You know, we look at this in terms of when we look at the Gospels, our minds often go to, well, I remember Jesus said things like, you have heard that it was said, but I say to you You have heard that it was written, but I say to you And there could be an easy tendency for us to say or to think that Jesus is offering some sort of radical reinterpretation of the law. It's easy to kind of maybe buy into that kind of thinking, but I don't think Jesus is really offering some sort of radical reinterpretation of the law as if he's some sort of like, at odds with the law. I think what he's doing is really just drawing out the hidden, not the hidden, but the deeper deeper meaning of the law. And I think what he's doing is often drawing out the meaning that's been neglected throughout time. Okay?
Dr. Stephen Bagby:Yeah. I didn't technically murder that person, but I've hated him for ten years.
Participant:I didn't technically commit adultery, but yeah, I've been lusting of you.
Dr. Stephen Bagby:You know, so forth. There's this meaning that the law always has an intent behind it.
Participant:Yeah. Well, when they say law in that sense, do they mean the 10 commandments or do they mean you don't eat this and that and you're you have to dress this way
Dr. Stephen Bagby:and Mhmm.
Participant:And stuff like that.
Dr. Stephen Bagby:Yeah. I mean, I think in in this strict sense that I'm talking about, I think it's more focused on the 10 commandments because what Jesus mentioned specifically about murder and adultery and things like that, and those are actual some of the 10 commandments themselves. But, yeah, we could talk about that, like sort of like what laws, you know, the different senses of law throughout the Old Testament.
Participant:And then another question, thou shalt not kill, and what is it? The first chapter we had was
Dr. Stephen Bagby:Yeah. Yeah. Well, I mean, I don't have answers for all that but it's there's, you know, there I I mean, you're not going be surprised when I when I say that there's some debate about what what that word kill means in the law. Whether it means more specifically murder or if it's killing of any sort, even accidental or something like that. But yeah, I these are good questions.
Dr. Stephen Bagby:I I need to keep moving on though but one thing that speaks to though is is it's sort of like a hermeneutical practice for us, a way of interpreting text and thinking about the Bible as a whole. When we think about Jesus as pulling the inner meaning, the neglected meaning of the law, perhaps this shouldn't surprise us that much, is that when we read the Bible, it's easy to sort of develop kind of a surface interpretation of things. Maybe more of a almost like a physical interpretation of events. But the Bible is always drawing us to a deeper interpretation. In other words, we're not just to see things on the surface level.
Dr. Stephen Bagby:We're to draw the deeper meaning. And what I mean by that is that one, the law itself. Yeah. Don't murder. But also, don't be angry in your heart towards others, right?
Dr. Stephen Bagby:We know that. But there's also a sense in which the law, the Bible's drawing us to deeper meanings even in interpretation itself. We think about the rock of chapter 16. Was it just a rock? According to the apostle Paul, that rock was.
Participant:Jesus.
Dr. Stephen Bagby:Christ, right? And that bread I'm sorry, Rock was 17, bread and 16. That bread, was it just bread that fell out of heaven? Or was it Right? Christ, we know from John chapter six.
Dr. Stephen Bagby:And so this deeper meaning of the text itself, drawing that out, we know from the idea of promise. Paul, in Romans nine through 11, says, you know, the Israelites have had to basically makes an argument saying the Israelites have had a too too strong of an ethnic understanding of promise. The promise extends to whomever God chooses. Right? It's not about just sheer ethnicity, okay, or nationality.
Dr. Stephen Bagby:It's to whom God chooses. Okay? He sometimes chooses the younger, not the older. He chooses. And so you see this deeper understanding of it that Paul's trying to drive us to.
Dr. Stephen Bagby:Also, idea of geography. Okay? What is Israel? Is Israel just some sort of geographical political entity? Or are we expected to understand Israel in a deeper sense?
Dr. Stephen Bagby:After all, who is the true Israel?
Participant:In
Dr. Stephen Bagby:the New Testament, who is the true Israel? Jesus. Jesus is the true Israel, the one who lived up and fulfilled all the promises of Israel's history. Jesus is the true Israel, the obedient one. He says in John 59, the true vine.
Dr. Stephen Bagby:Right? He is the true Israel. So we need to have a deeper understanding even of our concept of Israel itself, not just geopolitical certain ways of thinking, but we need to think more in terms of Christ, who is that true Israel. And so he came came not to abolish the law, Jesus didn't, but to fulfill it. And so we're moving along here.
Dr. Stephen Bagby:As we get through these chapters, you're gonna again see story law, story law, story, tabernacle, story, tabernacle over the course of the book of Exodus. And I wanna sort of look right now at this idea of the tabernacle. Okay? We're in chapter 26 right now of Exodus. And as you think about the tabernacle, sometimes it can be hard to sort of distinguish.
Dr. Stephen Bagby:Okay. Well, what are we talking about? The tabernacle, the temple, what's the relationship between the two? I know those both of these are in the Old Testament. Both of these are places of worship in the Old Testament.
Dr. Stephen Bagby:The difference between the tabernacle and a temple is the difference between a tent and a house. Okay? So the tabernacle is something like a tent that can be moved. The temple is something more solid that is going to stay in one place in Jerusalem. And so what we have with the tabernacle and we're gonna talk more about the tabernacle later this spring when we talk about Leviticus, so I'll kind of come back into Exodus when I resume the teaching later this spring.
Dr. Stephen Bagby:But for now, we need to think about the tabernacle in terms of, like, heaven on earth. Okay? There's this idea that heaven has come down, as it were, on earth, and that God is present in the midst of his people. And that's just such a reality for the people of Israel that it affects how they even set up their encampments around the tabernacle. Who gets placed a priority around the tabernacle itself?
Dr. Stephen Bagby:Anybody remember? The The Levites, right? The ones who produce the priests, right? So they're the ones who they're acting as like mediators, as it were, here, and so they have a place of priority around the tabernacle itself, which we'll see more clearly in the book of Leviticus. And so this idea of the tabernacle, of course, is going to anticipate, and there's a lot of symbolism to Jesus himself.
Dr. Stephen Bagby:Right? God came to the people, and he is present with them in this tabernacle. And we know from John one fourteen that the word became flesh, and some translations say tabernacled among us. Okay? And so, we're going to look for this connection, this correlation, or this anticipation and symbolism as we go forward.
Dr. Stephen Bagby:We don't have time today. But this idea that that heaven has heaven on earth kind of theme throughout here. Okay. So things are coming together for Israel chapter 26 and beyond. You have all these laws.
Dr. Stephen Bagby:You have all these stipulations and so forth. And then and then you have the golden calf incident, right? In chapter 32. Okay. So, where's Moses when this happens?
Dr. Stephen Bagby:He's up on the mountain, right? Who's not on the mountain? Aaron. Aaron. Aaron, right?
Dr. Stephen Bagby:And so, Aaron is at very least complicit, right? If not a catalyst for this incident. Right? And so which is stark. Right?
Dr. Stephen Bagby:Aaron is always pretty much always cast in very positive light throughout the book of Exodus. And then this happens. How could Aaron have done this? And what's interesting too, and we'll wrap up here, is that this is not the only time in the Old Testament we see something like this. If you think forward to the book of Judges, remember Gideon?
Dr. Stephen Bagby:Gideon had this great life. He was this great judge. He was this hero in many ways. But how did he end his life? Do you remember?
Dr. Stephen Bagby:In almost an identical way that we see in the golden calf incident in Exodus 32. Gideon collected all the gold, all the gold earrings, put them together, and melted them together to create this ephod. And then the Israelites began worshiping that ephod, idolizing it. My translation says whoring after it. So there's almost like this identical incident that occurs many, many years later.
Dr. Stephen Bagby:And it's fascinating to me to think, gosh, these are some of the the great heroes of the faith throughout the Old Testament, and yet they could fall. And it's caution for us to think about in our own lives and think, an Aaron can fall into this. A Gideon can fall into this. Okay? And yet and I'll let you go here.
Dr. Stephen Bagby:And yet, right after that, right after that, in '33 and '34, what do we see? God restoring his people. Immediately after that, God restoring his people. It's one of the great themes of the Old Testament and the New Testament, the restoration of the people of God throughout the time. And so God does not leave them hopeless.
Dr. Stephen Bagby:God does not leave them in despair. God does not leave them in their sin. God restores the people of Israel. They had to wander. Yeah, they did.
Dr. Stephen Bagby:They did. And that's another interesting thing too, which I mentioned when I did a couple of weeks series in Advent too, is that if you read the Old Testament carefully, you'll notice that there's a sense of a collective identity, an organic unity among the people of Israel, is that generations are dying off too. And yet, they're spoken of as they were brought out of Egypt. They were restored. They were brought into the promised land.
Dr. Stephen Bagby:Even Haggai, remember, who's a thousand years after what we're talking about today. God says to Haggai, I brought you out of Egypt. I brought you out of Egypt. And so even someone like Haggai, who's living in this, like, exilic context way in the future, has a self understanding or a collective understanding, an organic understanding that he is connected to Moses and the other people of Israel in a real way, and that they were all in this together in ways that's hard for us to understand. Okay.
Dr. Stephen Bagby:That'll be enough for today. I wanna invite you back next week when Mark Lorette will take over and lead us through the book of Ruth. So, join us next week for the next, I think it's four week. We have three weeks but four week series on Ruth. On the back of your sheet that I handed out today is the schedule for the rest of the, oh, thank you.
Dr. Stephen Bagby:For the rest of the spring and I wish I had put that on the schedule originally. The sheets originally but join us for Mark as he leads us next week and beyond in the study of the book of Ruth. Yeah, thanks for your time. See you see you next week. See you.
Dr. Stephen Bagby:Yeah.