If you would, turn in your bibles to Exodus chapter 17. One of the things that I'm excited about in going to 2 services is that it's a little more intimate feel. We could do some things we haven't been able to do for a while. We'll have times of more small group prayer later. But also Q and A.
Joel Brooks:We used to do that a lot more often. Since we grew larger, a lot of y'all have just kind of clammed up and been quiet. But before I even open up in Exodus 17, we've been going through a whole lot, in these last few months as we've gone through Exodus. We've looked at, the slavery of Egypt or the Israelites. We've looked at the plagues, the Passover, the Red Sea, the manna, the striking the rock.
Joel Brooks:So real quick, y'all y'all have any questions up to this point? Something that maybe I didn't address as we were going through this or something you want clarification on. I'll just open that up before we dig into the Lord's word this morning. Anybody? Gosh.
Joel Brooks:I hate this Britney Spears mic thing. Alright. Go ahead, Colin. Relevant to some degree. Yeah.
Joel Brooks:I'm looking at it a little bit, mainly because you might have some modern archaeological articles talking about, well, it's just impossible that 2,000,000 people went through the desert in these areas, and there's no archeological evidence for that. And without digging too much into that, Two possibilities. 1, yes, indeed. God took 2,000,000 people through, and we really don't have the archeological evidence to support that. Or 2, when this was later, written down, let's say during the time of Solomon, there were about 2,000,000 people there.
Joel Brooks:And they always saw the Exodus as their story. They write it that way. You would see Paul in the New Testament when he talks about when the Israelites drank from the rock, he says that we drink from the rock. He includes himself in this story, and the Israelites have always seen themselves in that. So it's possibly that the numbers were just they inflated them as a possibility just because they saw themselves as being part of this.
Joel Brooks:So either one, whether they really came through with that great a number or whether Israel's just seeing themself, I don't think really affects the story greatly in that regards. Good question. Anybody else? I'm going to have to work on this morning thing. In the afternoon, y'all are alive and a little tired.
Joel Brooks:You know, maybe the kids have been gnawing at you all day, and now y'all just kinda look tired. Alright? We're gonna wake up. Anybody else? Alright.
Joel Brooks:Well then let's look at chapter 17. We looked at the first part last week. We want to pick up in chapter or verse 8 this morning. Then Amalek came and fought with Israel at Rephidim. So Moses said to Joshua, choose for us men and go out and fight with Amalek.
Joel Brooks:Tomorrow I will stand on the top of the hill with the staff of God in my hand. So Joshua did as Moses told him and fought with Amalek, while Moses, Aaron, and Hur went up to the top of the hill. Whenever Moses held up his hand, Israel prevailed. And whenever he lowered his hand, Amalek prevailed. But Moses' hands grew weary.
Joel Brooks: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. And Joshua overwhelmed Amalek and his people with the sword. 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. And Moses built an altar and called the name of it, the Lord is my banner, saying a hand upon the throne of the Lord.
Joel Brooks:The Lord will have war with Amalek from generation to generation. Pray with me. Lord, I pray that you would awaken our hearts and our minds to receive Your Word. We believe that Your Word can change us through the power of Your Spirit, and I pray that that would happen at this time. Father, we have come in this place because we want to know you.
Joel Brooks:Jesus, we wanna know you. Spirit, we want to know you. That's our hope. I pray that my words would fall to the ground and blow away and not be remembered anymore. But Lord, may your words remain and may they change us.
Joel Brooks:We pray this in the strong name of Jesus, Amen. Now I have to confess, I nearly skipped over this passage when I was kind of outlining what we would look at as we went through the book of Exodus. It's a great story. I just didn't know exactly what I would preach from when looking at it, but it kept intriguing me and God just kept bringing me back to this, so I thought we would give it a look. The reason this text intrigued me so much is that it's different.
Joel Brooks:This is the first time in the history of Israel in the book of Exodus that the people are now asked to do something in regards to their enemies. For the first time, they're told to fight. You compare this to when Pharaoh and his army were closing in on the Israelites at the Red Sea, and you get that famous verse when Moses, he stands up and he says, Fear not. Stand firm and see the salvation of the Lord, which he will work for you today. And so the Israelites were to do nothing except stand and watch God slaughter their enemies, but not here.
Joel Brooks:Here God tells Moses, I want you to send people to go and fight. He doesn't send a destroyer. He doesn't send any plagues. He doesn't part a sea. Instead, he says, go pick up swords, and I want you to meet them on the battlefield.
Joel Brooks:So this is something new that is happening here. God is saying, all right, you want to go to the promised land. You're gonna have to fight for it. It's not just going to be given. We see something similar to this in the very next chapter.
Joel Brooks:We didn't read it, but in chapter 18 in which Moses is described as now having to do a new kind of work. Moses, from sunup to sundown, he would sit and he would listen to the people come with their complaints or with different things all day and he would act as judge. And it said that it exhausted him. And so his father-in-law came and said, Moses, you can't keep doing this. You're gonna kill yourself.
Joel Brooks:You need to set up structures. You need to now start working to divide Israel into groups of people, appoint different leaders to take charge of different things. You can't do this all yourself. Just as a side note, as a minister, I find it really interesting that what nearly killed Moses was not pharaoh. It was not the Red Sea.
Joel Brooks:It was not hunger. It was not thirst. It was the daily task of ministry. It was the constant emails, phone calls. It was all of that coming in and you realizing your limitations to where you can't do it and how that would just weigh him down and it would exhaust him.
Joel Brooks:God says, all right, you want to get to the promised land? It's time for you to do something. Set up structures, set up systems in place. The elders and me, we got together months ago, and this is one of the texts that we looked at when deciding to go to 2 services or not, and just how we would set up the structures of our church. It's like to be a responsible shepherd, we're gonna have to do things.
Joel Brooks:We're going to have to organize things and set up things in such a way God wasn't just going to miraculously give Moses more strength and do everything. And so we see this happening in chapter 17 and 18 that God is bringing Israel up alongside and saying, it's time for you to start doing some work, putting in some effort as we go to the Promised Land. And if you want to put some theological words to this, I think what you were seeing is sanctification or living a life of obedience. So far up to the in this book, we have seen people a slave to sin, saved by God, redeemed, set free to worship, but now they are told to obey. Now they are told to fight evil and to live out a faith that God has been working within them.
Joel Brooks:And so before God worked for them, He worked on their behalf, but now you see God working both for them and through them. So this is a fundamental change in Exodus. He is still working for them, but now he's working for them and through them as they continue on their journey to the promised land. And what we see here is God is not content just to save us. He saves us, but then He begins to sanctify us, and then He begins to use us for His purposes.
Joel Brooks:So you're not just saved in order to be saved. That's not what God's doing here. You were saved, and then you were given a task. You were saved, and then he puts you to work to fight evil. You were saved, and then you were empowered by God to now work hard for his kingdom.
Joel Brooks:But you're not saved to just sit. You're not saved just to be saved. You're not saved in order to just keep living the same lifestyle that you were living before. You are not saved in order to remain in your sins. You're not saved to sit at home or sit at your desk at work and not share your faith.
Joel Brooks:God has a task for you, a purpose for you. Paul says it well in Philippians 2 when he says, You are to work out your salvation with fear and trembling. And what he's saying is God has worked in your salvation, and now it's time for the outworkings of what God has worked in. A matter of fact, that's the evidence that God truly has changed you from within. So now God is working both for them and through them to advance His kingdom.
Joel Brooks:Let's take a closer look at the story itself. It begins with Amalek or the Amalekites. They come to Israel, and they attack it. We know more about the story later in Deuteronomy 20 5. Moses recaps the story, and we learn a few more details.
Joel Brooks:The Amalekites, they came and they attacked the rear of Israel as Israel was going through the desert. It says that they cut off the tail of Israel. They cut off those who were lagging behind, meaning they hit the elderly, they hit the women, and they hit the children. That's who the Amalekites were going after when they fought Israel, the weak links there as they went through the desert. And so God tells his people to fight, fight this evil.
Joel Brooks:Now the Israelites are not fighters. They are brick masons, if you remember. That's that's what they they've done for 100 of years. They have made bricks, and I'm sure if they had challenged the Amalekites to a brick off, you know, instead of, they would have won hands down, but they didn't know how to wield swords. They were not used to open combat.
Joel Brooks:This is outside of their gifting, and so God is asking them to do something that was pretty uncomfortable. But they have this secret weapon, if you will, and it's Moses' hands. This is when the story really gets bizarre. Moses meets with Joshua, and he goes over the battle plan, and the battle plan is this. Joshua, you go fight, and I'm going to go this way.
Joel Brooks:I'm gonna go up the mountain here, and I'm gonna raise my hands. It's interesting that Moses, he meets with Joshua, and keep in mind, the elderly, women, children are being slaughtered, and he doesn't talk strategy. Doesn't say, okay, this is what the military needs to do. This is where we need to position ourselves. This is how we need to outflank them here.
Joel Brooks:He doesn't go through any of that because he realizes that is not how the battle's won. Yes, they're gonna have to fight, but that's not how the battle is won. He says, You go fight, but I'm gonna go up on the mountain. The mountain is where the real action is at. It's where the real battle takes place, and you can see this even in the way that the story is written, and the focus is not on the battlefield.
Joel Brooks:The focus is on Moses and what Moses is doing up there on the mountain. That's where victory will be decided. And so Moses, he goes up on the mountain, he looks down on the battlefield and he raises his staff. Actually, we see in verse 12, it says that he's raising both hands, a staff in one hand, but he's raising both hands. And as long as his hands are up, Israel is winning the battle.
Joel Brooks:You could say that Israel had the upper hand. I needed a groan. I just wanted to see if y'all were paying attention, all right? But when his hands were lowered, the Amalekites began to win. And so I mean, you're reading this, you're like, what in the world?
Joel Brooks:What is going on here? I mean, first off, why is Moses raising his hands? What does that do? Unfortunately, it doesn't really tell us. We're not sure.
Joel Brooks:We can speculate and make some educated guesses. I would think, for starters, he is likely praying as he raises his hands up on the hillside. Lifting your hands was a common gesture of prayer. Psalm 28:2 says, hear the voice of my pleas for mercy when I cry to you for help, and when I lift up my hands towards your holy sanctuary. Lifting up your hands in prayer was the way you cried for help.
Joel Brooks:You sought the help of the Lord, and I think we certainly see this happening here. Moses is likely interceding on behalf of the people. And what we see is wielding a sword is great and all, but prayer is the greater work, and actually, prayer is the harder work. I mean, Joshua's not getting tired as he is just out there fighting. He's not getting tired, but Moses gets fatigued.
Joel Brooks:You see that the spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak. It's hard to keep up this time of prayer. Now we we all, I think, instinctively feel this. It's, you know, how many of you have broken your New Year's resolution already? I could probably tell you what a lot of your New Year's resolutions were.
Joel Brooks:It was probably to pray more. It seems to be kind of the typical thing with Christians. We want to pray more, but then we realize prayer is exhausting. I had a friend of mine who was a Brazilian evangelist, and he would just, I mean, he could just go and just preach, you know, from, you know, morning till evening. He's just going nonstop, and he would be so tired and he made a comment to me one time.
Joel Brooks:He goes, I'm just so tired. I just gotta get away and pray. I'm like, well, I rest too when I close my eyes and I pray. But for him, it was rejuvenating. If he could get away for an hour and he could pray, he felt refreshed, and I thought, I don't understand that.
Joel Brooks:I really don't. Prayer is such a struggle at times. It's entering into the battlefield at times. It's where I get wore down. Prayer is the greater work.
Joel Brooks:It's the harder work, and that's what Moses is entering into here. So I think he's praying, but but more than that, as he is praying and as he's up there with his staff held high, he is acting as a symbol of the presence of God in their midst. As long as the people saw Moses, as long as they saw the staff, they knew that God is with us. God is here with us, and we cannot lose as long as they would see that. So Moses, he's up there.
Joel Brooks:He's meeting with God in prayer, and he's pointing people to God with his posture up there, acting as a symbol of God's presence. Now this is how we are to go about fighting evil. We look to God, realizing that the outcome of whatever we are going through is not dependent upon our own strength, our outcome is completely dependent upon Him. It's not by how we fight, but it's to whom we look. The story has a lot of similarities.
Joel Brooks:We don't have time to go through them all, but a lot of similarities between Peter and when Peter's called out to walk on the waves. God calls Peter out of the boat to walk on the waves, and he's called to do something he doesn't normally do. And it says as long as he was looking at Jesus, as long as his eyes were fixed on Jesus, he had no problem walking on the waves. But the moment he started looking around, he thought, I wasn't made to do this, and he started to sink. Very similarly, as long as the people of Israel could look up and they could see Moses and know God's presence is with us, they were fine.
Joel Brooks:But when Moses wasn't there as the symbol and they could not see him, they began to falter. And when the Israelites looked to God through their mediator of Moses, they'd have this renewed strength, and they would win. And when we look to God, we'll succeed in whatever he puts before us. It's it's not a you don't have to be a rocket scientist to know what this text is about. I mean, look to God, and you will succeed.
Joel Brooks:Alright? We just need 3 points and a poem, and I can finish this right now. Alright? Look look to God, and you'll succeed. It's it's so easy to see, and yet it's so hard to live.
Joel Brooks:You know what I often look at to to feel good or to feel successful? I look at things like gas prices. Oh, gas prices down under $2. I'm feeling pretty good about the way things are going right now, just gas prices. I hold onto such stupid things.
Joel Brooks:I can look at the way, I can look at other people's kids. Alright? If their kids are really bad, I pat myself on the back. I'm like, I'm doing pretty darn good. Alright?
Joel Brooks:Like I had anything to do with the way my kids are, you know, if they happen to have a good day. I look at things that like my my body image or the way I exercise. That's how I evaluate whether things are going alright, as if I can maybe do more push ups than the other guy or something stupid. I was at the, the gym the other day, and there's this huge bodybuilder there. He actually wins all these competitions.
Joel Brooks:And, he is training 3 or 4 women over there, you know, just strutting around, changing, and he looks at me across. He goes, hey. Hey, Joel. Come here. Come here.
Joel Brooks:And I'm like, alright. He wants to use me as an example. So I walk over there, and he just grabs my stomach right here. He goes, see this? You eat a lot of dairy?
Joel Brooks:I was like, yeah. And he goes, he'd get rid of this if he got rid of his dairy. Thanks. And then he dismissed me. He was like I was I was nothing but a prop for, like, you know, the the spare tire.
Joel Brooks:If that was where I got my identity, if that's where I began to feel good about myself, I would just crumble. I look at so many other things to judge success and whether I'm doing well other than to look at the Lord. Simple lesson, hard to learn, really hard to learn. Well, back to this story. We see after the battle is over, after Israel has won, God tells Moses in verse 14 to write something down.
Joel Brooks:Look at verse 14. Says, 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. Now this doesn't seem like it's a big verse here, but this is of huge importance because this is the first time we have in all scripture God telling somebody to write his words down. Right here. Write this down.
Joel Brooks:This is the first scripture we have. Up to this point, God has allowed people to see His mighty works. He's allowed God to see His presence in the fire or in the cloud, and He's allowed people to audibly hear Him or to hear His voice through His servant Moses, but now God wants His words preserved by being written down. He wants people to read them. And from this point on, forever, we will always be a people of the book, a people who study God's words.
Joel Brooks:Now why does God do this? Why does he want his words written down? But why is this the first scripture? The first scripture is, I will utterly blot out the memory of Amalek from under heaven. That's it.
Joel Brooks:I mean, come on. Why not? God is love. Write that down. That could be the first thing, not I will utterly blot out this people.
Joel Brooks:Be honest, how many of you up till this point have ever given this verse a thought? All right, anybody? Anybody ever memorize this at Vacation Bible School if you grew up? Make the little craft sticks, write the verse, turn it into a magnet. Did you do that?
Joel Brooks:This is the first scripture, the first writing down of God's word. Why? Let's look at why God has us writing down his words, and then we wanna look specifically why these words. Well, God Moses had Moses write down words because he wants us to remember them. Not just remember, he wants us to remember and to meditate on them.
Joel Brooks:He wants us to remember who he is, what He has done, what He has said. We would not even be talking about this story if this wasn't written down 3,500 years ago, but we're here gathering in a room, talking about it because it was written down. And so over and over again, God is telling His people to remember Him. And we see this all through Exodus, and it's interesting if you walk through Exodus, you see He brings about different ways that we can remember Him. The writing down His words is just one of them.
Joel Brooks:If we remember back in Exodus 12, you had the Passover, and God sets up a Passover meal. And he says, This meal will be a memorial for all the generations after you. I'm gonna give you a meal in which you can remember me and my redemptive acts. Then you have God parting the Red Sea, and right after he parts the Red Sea, he gives Moses a song. And in Exodus 15, Moses sings a song.
Joel Brooks:Why? So that they might remember. He has commanded to teach the people this song so that they might remember how God saves. Then you have here God once again fighting their enemies, saving them, and saying, now you need to write this down as a memorial so that you might remember. And really, what you see as you're going through this part of Exodus is God is laying out the liturgical life of the church.
Joel Brooks:That's what he's doing, in which we seek the Lord, and we remember him through a meal. We remember him through a time of song. We remember him through a time in his word. Those are the ways that we remember him. And if you take into account Moses going up on top of the hill and praying, you can add prayer to that list as well.
Joel Brooks:So God, he he wants to be remembered by engaging our senses, engaging our hearts, engaging our mind because he knows we'll forget. My dad died over 20 years ago, and there are times I actually get a little panicked, because if I close my eyes, I can't remember what he looked like. I just can't remember. I know that it sounds awful. You know, he's your dad, and you can't remember what he looks like, but there's just there's times I just I think, what did he look like?
Joel Brooks:I can't remember. And this was a person who meant the world to me. This was a person, who who taught me so much, biggest influence on my life, and yet I couldn't, there's times I can't remember his face. Well, thankfully, I have pictures that I can look at and I can remember. And more than that, I've I've went to my mom's house and I picked 2 things to help me remember my dad.
Joel Brooks:This is kinda silly, but I went to the tool shed and I got a wrench that's about this big. This huge wrench, and that helps me reme I think anytime I'm using that one, my dad would be proud of me that I'm actually doing a task that demands this enormous wrench, and I just, I think about him. And the other is this, leather log carrier, which you split wood, and you just put it in there. I mean, it's nothing. It's just a piece of leather, but it was my dad's.
Joel Brooks:And so every time I'm getting firewood and stuff like that, I think of the I think of my dad. Those are just ways, those 2 little things that I bring him to my memory. There's a big difference though in me having these things in which I can remember my dad and what God is doing here. And it's this, my my dad no longer speaks to me. There's no longer any relationship that I have with him That has to wait for my next life, but God still speaks.
Joel Brooks:When we remember him through communion, we remember him through song and through prayer and through his word. We actually engage him through his spirit. He has given us those things to build a real relationship with him. So it's not just nostalgia. We get to meet God in the present as we remember Him in these things.
Joel Brooks:And of course, we see this. We see this liturgy, if you will, embodied in the life of Jesus. The last night before Jesus was crucified, what did he do? He had a Passover meal with His disciples. When He finished the meal, what did they do?
Joel Brooks:They sang a hymn together. Then what did they do? They went to the garden in which He prayed. And then what happened when he was on the cross? He is quoting scripture time and time again.
Joel Brooks:You have communion, you have song, You have prayer. You have the word. Jesus used these things to seek his father and to remember the redemptive acts of his father. How much more do we need these? That's why the church is so committed to these things, because God is not always going to part a Red Sea or do something so flashy as that.
Joel Brooks:He's not always gonna speak to people from a burning bush or from a cloud or a pillar of fire. That's not always going to be the case. But we are always going to be able to know who what he has done through these things, in particular through reading them in his word. This This is why we at Redeemer, we are so committed to these things. Now, let's look at why why God commanded Moses to write these particular words down.
Joel Brooks:I will utterly blot out Amalek from under heaven. Well, it's because the Amalekites were an evil people. There's no way around it. They were a completely evil people, and they will be a thorn in Israel's side for many generations to come after this. The Amalekites, they're gonna pop up in Numbers.
Joel Brooks:When when the Israelites, they hit the land of Canaan and they're right on the edge, who are they gonna see? Amalek. The Amalekites there, trying to keep them from taking the promised land. 400 years later, wanna see King Saul fighting the Amalekites, then King David fighting the Amalekites. Then later, when you get to the book of Esther, you're gonna come across a guy named Haman who decided he wanted to commit genocide to all the Jews, kill every Jew.
Joel Brooks:He was an Amalekite. Over and over, this evil is gonna keep rearing its ugly head. It's gonna keep fighting and opposing God's people. And so these Amalekites, they represent this ever present evil in this world and how it just keeps attacking us. Amalek represents the evil in your life, the one that you can never quite get rid of.
Joel Brooks:You keep thinking you deal with it. You keep thinking you've had this fight before, and it keeps coming back time and time again. And in these moments when you are under attack, when once again you fall into that same sin, you have those same doubts again, what do you have to hold on to in that dark hour knowing that God is with you and that God's gonna take care of this? God says you have my word. You have my word.
Joel Brooks:Put your hope in my word. You know, there is a day coming when evil will once and for all be wiped away, wiped off the place of this face of this earth. Matter of fact, it'll be so wiped away, evil will be so removed that we're gonna have a hard time even remembering it. Those sins that just bog you down so much, the darkness that never seems to leave your life, if it wasn't written down, there will be a day in eternity that you would not even remember it. You will need something to jog your memory.
Joel Brooks:That's why we have the Bible. The Bible tells us that God wins even in the darkest hours, even when sin and evil keep rearing its ugly head. And so we battle sin, we fight Satan, and yet we have to realize God has decreed their destruction. And we live in light of that. That was Jesus' hope when He went to the cross.
Joel Brooks:Think of it. What else did Jesus have to hope in when He was on the cross? Was there a certain feeling? He didn't have any feeling. He didn't have any friends.
Joel Brooks:He didn't have anything, just darkness consuming Him. Yet he had God's word, and he continually went to that over and over, crying it out from the cross. It was through that constant quoting of scripture that Jesus reminded himself of his own father's redemptive plan and what he was working when he couldn't see it. And so we take comfort in God's word. Now a question I ask almost at every sermon or at least at some point in the sermon is where is Christ?
Joel Brooks:Where is Jesus in all of this? It's been really fun having conversations with you all as as you've been trying to look through the text as well. I I need to give you a little warning. Finding Christ isn't like finding Waldo. I mean, it's not You're not like just kind of search like under everything.
Joel Brooks:Oh, I think I see a typology right here. That's not exactly how it works. For me, when I look at this text, Christ is found in the longing I have for Him to actually be there. It's the longing I have for Him to be there. Certainly, Moses is a type of Christ as he's up there, and he's interceding, But Moses fails.
Joel Brooks:He's weak. He's 80 something years old. He's frail. He can't keep doing this. Even the next chapter when when Moses is judging people from the morning to the evening, his body fails, and I don't want it to.
Joel Brooks:I want there to be a judge who will give me his full attention, will judge righteously all the time. I want there to be a God who is up on the hill interceding on my behalf all the time. And we do have 1 in Jesus who is the greater Moses. Hebrews 7 says Jesus is able to save to the utmost those who draw near to God through him since he always lives to make intercession for them. There's a few things there.
Joel Brooks:1, he always lives, not just lives to make intercession, but first know that Jesus always lives. He is never to die again. He is never fatigued. He is always there making intercession on behalf, and He lives to intercede for us. That's where I find Jesus, and this is my longing for Him.
Joel Brooks:And I pray that this morning that we would look to Jesus in all circumstances. We would look to him knowing wholly we can trust him as He fights on our behalf. Pray with me. Jesus, we wanna see you as more glorious than we do. We pray that through the power of your spirit, you would make that happen.
Joel Brooks:Lord, I pray that as we do things like take communion, sing songs, pray, open up your word, that these would not just be task. We wouldn't label them as something as cold as disciplines, but realize that these are means of grace. These are ways we remember you, get to know you, and through the power of your spirit, we get to experience you. Lord, I pray that we would do that here at this church. I pray we would do that now as we lift up our voices in prayer and song.
Joel Brooks:We pray this in your name, Jesus. Amen.