|
|
GOD REVEALS HIS RIGHTEOUSNESS TO PROMISE BLESSING FOR OBEDIENCEEXODUS 19:1-8INTRODUCTION There comes a point in the life of every child as they grow from infancy into a toddler when, at least from the child’s point of view, the parent changes. Prior to arriving at this point the parent appears as the source of all the good in the infant's life. He responds to the child’s every cry. She is attentive to the needs of the child and exercises all of her energy and wisdom to meet the needs of the child. From the child’s point of view the parent’s love has no conditions. However, there comes a point when the parent says no to the child and threatens discipline for disobedience. There comes a time when the parent begins to promise certain benefits to the child based upon the child’s performance. Suddenly the parent’s love appears to have conditions. The parent will resist the child’s cry for help and bring the pain of discipline into the life of the disobedient child. I recall the look of shock on the faces of my children when they first encountered the parental “no” and the pain of discipline for disobedience. If the child could speak he or she would question the parent to find out why the parent has changed. The child might ask questions like these: Why the sudden change of demeanor? Why are you requiring these things of me? Why are you bringing pain into my life when for all these months you have only brought me comfort and help? Why have you laid down the law now when for all this time your love towards me has been unconditional? It is just this sort of situation that we encounter in the first eight verses of Exodus 19. The 430-year history of Abraham and his descendants that is recorded for us beginning in Genesis 12 up through Exodus 18 is a history of God’s caring for and nurturing and protecting his chosen people without condition. This is the first time that God has said to this people, to these children of Israel, “If you will obey me, then I will bless you.” Through all those years, while God has given directions to his people, he has never conditioned any of his promises upon their obedience to him. He has never threatened to punish them for not doing what he asks. There are no “If…Then” statements made by God to the house of Jacob up to this point. So there is a great big question mark hanging over v. 5. Why, after all these years of God’s caring for these people without any conditions does he now, at this time, tell them that his blessing will only be given to them on the condition of their fully obeying his voice and keeping the demands of his covenant? The answer to that question is what we are going to be considering this morning. It is not the same answer that a parent would give to her chastised toddler so you best pay attention. MAIN POINT God requires obedience to his law as the condition for his blessing because…I. He aims to exalt his grace (vv. 1-4) The first four verses are dripping with grace. Grace is God doing good to those who deserve to have evil done to them. First, if you will remember, God told Moses back in Exodus 3, when he first told him to go to Pharaoh and tell him to “let my people go” that the sign that it was God himself who had given this command would be that Moses would lead the people of Israel back to Mt. Sinai where they would worship the Lord. Here we see the fulfillment of that promise. God, against all hope and contrary to all the expectation of Moses and of the people of Israel has brought the people to Mt. Sinai just like he said. He did this for Moses and Israel because he wanted to do it and not because of anything they did or said. In fact, as we saw throughout our study of Exodus 1-17, Moses and Israel resisted God’s work all along the way. The story of the Exodus is the story of free and sovereign grace. God did not act on behalf of Israel because of anything that Israel did or didn’t do. In fact, as we’ve seen and will see again, the people of Israel were idol worshipping pagans just like the Egyptians whom God destroyed. Verse 4 is such a succinct and graphic statement of God’s sovereign grace. God destroyed Egypt. God carried Israel across the Red Sea and through the desert like an eagle carries her young on her back as they learn to fly. God did exactly what he said he was going to do, he brought Israel to himself on Mt. Sinai. He brought them to himself without their fulfilling any conditions. They obeyed no laws, nor did they perform any great acts of heroism. They merely walked out of Egypt and across the Red Sea and through the desert. God did it all through his Savior and Mediator, Moses. Verse four is the gospel of Jesus Christ in the OT. Listen to this statement of the gospel in 1 Peter 3:18, "Christ died for sins, once for all, the righteous for the unrighteous, to bring you to God." This is the goal of God's saving work through his mediator, Jesus Christ, to bring us to God. God is the goal of the gospel. Christ didn't die so you and I can have a happy, guilt free life on planet earth but so that we will be brought safely to God himself in his eternal kingdom. God brings us to himself not through our work but by the work of his savior and mediator Jesus. We’ve repeatedly seen throughout the story of Abraham and his descendants that God chooses, protects, delivers, provides for Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, his sons and now this nation of sons and daughters by his grace and not because of them. However, my point here is that one of the reasons that God is now telling Israel that he will only continue to bless them based upon their obedience to his commands is to magnify, to display, to show off his grace. What do I mean by that? The conditional command would appear to be the exact opposite of grace as grace is doing good to those who deserve to have evil done to them. The promise to do good to those who obey and, the implied corollary, to do evil to those who disobey is justice, not grace. So what do I mean that God gives this conditional command in order to show off his grace? As readers of this history, we know that God has been acting in grace towards the people of Israel. However, if you were to ask one of the characters in the story, an Israelite, “why do you think that God has delivered you from Egypt?”—it would not be hard to imagine him saying that the reason God did this is because of how good Israel is. God loves Israel more than Egypt because Israel is more lovable than Egypt . During the previous 430 years there has been no statement by God concerning his moral standards. There has been no law that tells people what is right and wrong. Having no law against which to compare themselves can only lead to one conclusion for a human being; I am a basically good person. From this point forward all of Israel will know what God requires. Therefore, his grace will be magnified as he continues to be kind to Israel while they blatantly disobey God’s revealed will. What the law is going to do is make it obvious that Israel does not love God, nor care about what God wants. So when he continues to protect them and provide for them, it will be evident that his care is entirely gracious. The whole universe, including those in Israel with eyes to see, is about to discover that God does not do good to Israel because Israel is good. Rather God does good to Israel because God is good and full of grace. This will be made vividly clear because God is now making a conditional covenant with Israel . This is always one of God’s purposes for giving his law and promising to bless people in accord with their obedience to the law. When we learn what God requires of us, that we should love him with our whole being and love our neighbor as ourselves, we immediately are confronted with the grace of God. We know that we do not love God and neighbor as we ought. We know that God has promised death to those who do not obey and life to those who obey. Therefore, when we continue to live and enjoy the pleasures of this world, we immediately are confronted with God’s grace. The most puzzling question in the entire universe is not why do bad things happen to good people--because there are no good people. All of us are obviously lawbreakers, now that the law of God has been revealed. Therefore, the question that ought to puzzle us is why are all these good things happening to a person like me who has so flagrantly broken God’s laws? Why am I not being treated as I deserve, with death and hell? Without the law no one would know they are disobeying God. Without the just promise of blessing and just threat of cursing attached to the law no one would know that they are the recipients of enormous grace simply by being alive and having any pleasure on earth. In the case of Israel, this command with a promise ought to highlight the enormity of God’s love and provoke faith and love as they consider how badly they have failed to love God and neighbor and yet they have experienced such an incredible salvation in God’s delivering them from Egypt. Let me ask you, what’s your first response when you hear God say to you that if you will obey me I will bless you? I hope your first response is amazement and gratitude that you are not dead and in hell but alive and breathing and enjoying all the pleasures of life. God's promise to bless for obedience and to curse for disobedience is meant to display his great grace in giving you life and breath and everything else. God requires obedience to his law as the condition for his blessing because…
II. He aims to exalt his justice and to humble people (vv. 5a & 7-8) Justice means getting what you deserve. To say that God is just is to say that God always rewards people according to what they have done. Good people receive good from the Lord and evil people receive evil from the Lord. That is what it means for God to be just. Before God gives the law, no one knows what good is or what bad is. Without the law, there is no transgression. It was just for God to punish Egypt because they willfully disobeyed God’s command to let Israel go. God gave a command and also told the Egyptians the just consequences for not obeying his command. When they refused to obey his command he fulfilled perfect justice in their case by doing to them exactly what he said he would do to those who disobeyed the command to let his people go. However, from the time of Adam to the revealing of the law on Mt. Sinai, there has been no command from God to the human race describing his will and the consequences of obedience and disobedience. Therefore, God gives his law with its promises of blessing and cursing in order for him to display his justice in punishing the disobedient. If there is no law, then no one can know if God is simply being impulsive because he has the power to do what he wants or if he is actually giving people what they deserve. The presence of the law makes his justice in punishing the disobedient crystal clear. Almost two years ago I had firsthand experience that without the law there is no transgression but when the law is given then sin and the justice of condemnation is clearly revealed. I went with a friend to Mongolia to help teach the leadership of a church in Ulan Baatar with which our friends are working. Our friend, who is an avid hunter, asked me to bring ammunition for his two rifles with me from the U.S. as ammunition was hard to come by in Mongolia. I purchased 650 rounds and packed them in my bags. When I got to the airport, prior to boarding the plane I showed the ammunition to the people at the ticket counter and to representatives of TSA and asked them if it was OK for me to transport the ammunition to Mongolia. After a long discussion and looking on their computers they assured me that it was not a problem to take it with me. After about 20 hours in the air we arrived in South Korea where we were going to spend the night prior to our final 3 hour flight into Mongolia. When I went to pick up my bags to go to the hotel for the night I noticed that one of them had a weird looking device locked to the handle. As I left the baggage claim area an alarm went off and I was immediately surrounded by a half dozen serious looking Koreans, several of whom carried weapons. I soon found out that it was illegal to transport ammunition into South Korea unless you had a permit to do so. The laws of Korea were not known to me and so I did not know that I was breaking the law. When the law was revealed to me I immediately knew that I was breaking the law. The justice of the Korean government was put on display as they treated me like a lawbreaker. I was detained by airport security and spent the next four days in Korea while their police worked with our embassy and other US law enforcement agencies to ascertain that I was no threat and could be permitted to go on to Mongolia, without Tom’s ammunition of course. In the end, I did not receive justice but mercy. If there had been no law that condemned the import of ammunition into South Korea then neither the justice nor the mercy of the Korean government would have been made known. In the same way, God by giving his law puts the justice of his condemnation of lawbreakers on display. The second part of my point here is that not only is God’s justice revealed by his giving the law with its promises but that the law is also meant to humble people. Look in v. 8 at how the people of Israel respond when they are told by Moses that God promises to bless them if they obey his covenant. They say, “We will do everything the Lord has said.” Now even if we aren’t familiar with the rest of the story and what is going to happen in the next forty days, yet, having read Genesis and Exodus 1-17 we can’t help but feel this response is overly optimistic. These people and their ancestors have not shown stellar character qualities. Abraham and Sarah, in their old age, concocted a scheme to obtain a son that involved Abraham having sex with one of their servant girls. When the servant girl began flaunting her pregnancy to Sarah who was 65 and barren, Sarah beat her. Then there’s the matter of both Abraham and his son Isaac lying about their relationship to their respective wives in order to save their own skin, even though it exposed their wives, Sarah and Rebecca to the sexual advances of other men. How about that conniving weasel of a younger brother named Jacob who deceived his old, blind father Isaac into giving the blessing of the firstborn to him rather than to his older brother Esau? Then there’s that act of genocide when Levi and Simeon, two of the sons of Israel, with their servants, slaughter the men of Shechem in their sleep and the other brothers then take all the women and children as slaves. There are many other examples of the unscrupulous and unfaithful character of these people that causes us as readers of this history to wonder at their exuberant promise to obey all God’s commands even before they know what God is commanding. Without a revealed law these people could easily continue in their proud estimation of their moral strength and integrity. However, once God reveals his law and thus makes it crystal clear what sin actually is, then people can no longer boast of their goodness. This is one of the great purposes of God’s law, to shut the mouths of human beings who naturally boast of their own goodness. These people are not lying when they tell God they will do all that he commands. They honestly believe that they are willing and able to obey God. This is the natural assumption of every human being about themselves. Humans regularly say that they want to do what God asks of them but humans do not do what God asks of them because they don't really want to do what God says. We want others to think we are good while not actually being good. In the thousands of discussions I have had with individuals about the gospel this is the great stumbling block between people and Christ. While most will admit they make mistakes, no one willingly admits that they do not and cannot obey God's laws. Most think that the reason God gave the 10 Commandments is so that by obeying them we will go to heaven. The only way that humans will ever humble themselves in admission of their true guilt and depravity is when they see the righteousness of God in his law and see how completely they have failed to obey. When you hear God say, "If you will listen to my voice and keep my covenant then I will bless you"--how do you respond? There are only three possible responses to that statement. One response is indifference, because you could care less if God blesses you or not. Your life has nothing to do with God. You are after your own blessing and don't need Gods. Another response is that you may be glad for this conditional promise because now you've got something to look forward to. You've got a real promise to work for and a clear path to follow to obtain it. You answer like the Israelites, "I will obey everything that the Lord my God says." The third and only honest way to respond to this is despair. If obtaining God's promise depends upon perfect obedience to the demands of his covenant, then I have no hope because I have never obeyed God's law and I know that I do not have the ability to do it. I pray that you are humbled by God's law and do not arrogantly presume that you are able to obey it. God requires obedience to his law as the condition for his blessing because…
III. He aims to create a new people (v. 5) I want you to notice the three phrases in vv. 5-6 that God uses to describe his reward for perfect obedience. He says that if they obey then they will be for him a treasured possession, a kingdom of priests and a holy nation. All three of these phrases are applied to Christians in the NT. In Titus 2:14 we are told that Christ "gave himself for us to redeem us from all wickedness and to cleanse a people for himself, who are a treasured possession and zealous for good works." In 1 Peter 2:9 we are told that those who believe in Christ and for whom Christ is precious are "a chosen people, a kingdom of priests, a holy nation, a people who are a treasured possession that (they) may declare the praises of him who called (them) out of darkness into his marvelous light." I want you to think with me what this means that the NT applies these promises to all who trust in Christ. First, when God says that he will only treat those who keep his covenant as his treasured possession, kingdom of priests and holy nation, he means it. He isn't playing games. He is perfectly just and he will only reward perfect obedience with these amazing promises. So how is it that believers in Christ are said to be the recipients of these great blessings when every Christian knows they have never rendered perfect obedience? Every Christian knows they have not fully kept God's covenant, so how can these promises be true for us? The answer is that Christ has obeyed God's covenant perfectly both in his obedient life and by his sacrificial death. He did what we cannot do: he obeyed God and he took upon himself the curse that is due to us for our disobedience. Therefore we who trust in Christ are treated as God's treasured possession, his kingdom of priests and his holy nation because of Christ's fulfilling the demands of the covenant in our place. God treats us as if we have kept his covenant because we are in Christ and he has kept God's covenant for us. Second, I want to think about what these three phrases mean. What does it mean to be God's treasured possession? Notice in v. 5 that God says that he is the owner of the whole earth. In other words he owns everyone and everything. Yet he says that he regards and treats all those who perfectly obey his covenant in Christ as his treasured possession. This means that God's choice of us is a free choice. He could choose any he wished to treat as his treasured possession. To be considered God's treasured possession out of all the peoples of the earth is an amazing thing. The God who possesses all things has freely chosen to treat us as his treasured possession not because of who we are or what we have done but because of what Christ has done. What have we done to deserve this privileged status? Nothing! However, not only are we chosen instead of all others but also we are treated as God's prized possession. All of us have possessions but we only have a few treasured possessions. Our treasured possessions are those items which bring us pleasure. They are the things we protect and maintain with the greatest care. We often think of these treasured possessions and treat them with great respect. Amazingly, God treats us as his treasured possession. We, sinners though we be, through Christ, give him pleasure, so much pleasure that he often breaks out in songs of joy as he considers us. He protects us and watches over us with his omnipotent power and infinite love. To say that we are a kingdom of priests is to recognize that God himself is our king and we are his subjects. He provides for, protects and commands us for our good just as the best of kings do for their own subjects. We are an organized society of people under the gracious rule of our wise and powerful king. We are not simply a random collection of individuals who have nothing to do with each other. We work together under his leadership for his purposes. What is that work which we perform at the behest of our king? We are priests. What does that mean? We represent God to men and we represent men to God. We are in the world as God's representatives declaring the greatness of our king and serving others so that they might join with us in glad submission to our king. We entreat our heavenly king on behalf of the world in which we live, imploring his mercy on our enemies and seeking the blessing of God's salvation for them. To say that we are a holy nation is not first a comment about our moral condition but about the focus of our lives and our relationship to God and the world. We are a nation who is set apart from the world and to God. He is our praise. He is what makes us great. We are unique in the world because he is our God and we are his people. Our affections, desires, dreams and hopes are fixed upon him and living with him forever. We are not fixated upon what the nations of the world are fixated upon. Our fascination with him is the fuel which drives our pursuit of holiness in life. A holy life comes as a result of being obsessed with him and his glory. Notice again that this identity is a corporate identity. We are a society organized around our identity as the people whom God has set aside to himself and for himself. The third and final thing I want to notice here is that while the vast majority of the Israelites were naively boasting in their own righteousness when they declared that they would obey God's covenant, there were some among them who were boasting in the grace of God. One of the things that the OT clearly teaches is that while all of Israel was the recipient of God's word, it was only a few, the remnant, the elect, believing Israel to whom all the promises actually apply. We saw this repeatedly in Genesis. It was Isaac, not Ishmael; Jacob, not Esau; Joseph and Judah; not the rest of the brothers, who were God's chosen people. Paul, in Romans 9-11 makes this very clear. In Romans 9:6 he says, "It is not as though God's word (his promise to Israel) has failed for not all who are descended from Israel are Israel." In Romans 11:1-6 he says, "I ask then, did God reject his people? Certainly not, for I am an Israelite myself, a descendant of Abraham from the tribe of Benjamin. God did not reject his people whom he foreknew. Don't you know what the Scripture says in the passage about Elijah, how he appealed to God against Israel…And what was God's answer to him? 'I have reserved for myself seven thousand who have not bowed the knee to Baal.' So to at the present time there is a remnant (of Israel) chosen by grace." One of the things we are witnessing in the profession of obedience by the believing remnant among Israel is that all those who are in Christ aim to obey. It is the manifest evidence of the work of the Holy Spirit that all who trust in Christ, all who are saved by grace through faith and not by works are God's workmanship, set apart to do good works which God prepared in advance for us to do. We are a people who yearn to do the righteousness we see revealed in God's law because we have been born of God's Spirit and given new hearts. There really is a people of God on this earth who are saved by the perfect obedience of Christ and who thus are eager to do good. We who are saved by Christ's perfect obedience respond to the law of God like the Psalmist who said, "I lift up my hands to your commands which I love, and I meditate on your decrees… The law from your mouth is more precious to me than thousands of pieces of silver and gold." We rejoice in Christ who perfectly fulfilled God's covenant demands for us and we eagerly seek to do the will of God from the heart. God requires obedience to his law as the condition for his blessing because…
© Copyright
2005 John Swanson.
|