Good morning my “Walking with Jesus” ‘friends.
No matter where you live in the world, as you head out into your day today what will guide the many choices you will make? Your family culture: laws of the city in which you live; your habits or your desires? Our choices write the story of our lives, don’t they?
I left you yesterday standing at the base of Mount Sinai with Moses and about 1 million Hebrew slaves. For most of them, all they’ve ever known is living choiceless lives. Their only option everyday was obedience to their slave masters or a beating! Exodus 19 & 20 tell us Mount Sinai was shaking violently and smoking like a volcano. A powerful voice, God’s voice, was speaking His Covenant Commandments for His people.
Understandably, the people were terrified as they heard the voice of God telling them His expectations of how they should live every day for His glory and their good. But sadly, the people allowed their fear to steal their sense of great privilege. God loved them and had rescued them from their slavery! But the record says, “The people stayed at a distance and said to Moses: ‘Speak to us yourself and we will listen. But do not have God speak to us or we will die.” (Ex. 20:19)
So easily we feel intimidated, even frightened by God’s Majesty, His Holiness, His power and we look for a place to hide, don’t we? But would you want a small, unimpressive God? Moses, who had now been four times up Sinai to meet with God, begged the people to come closer and fully engage this memorable encounter with God. That’s what I’m trying to do with you, my ‘WWJ’ friends.
Each day I try to invite you, wherever you are around the world, to step OUT of our mundane, routine, anemic, self-centered living and step INTO a fresh encounter with God and actually invite God to overwhelm you with His majesty!
Sadly, the people at Sinai did what you and I do way too often. Moses records it like this: “Moses said to the people: “Do not be afraid. God has come to test you, so that the fear of God will be with you to keep you from sinning.’ But the people remained at a distance, while Moses approached the thick darkness where God was.” (Ex. 20:20,21)
This was a defining moment! The people turned away from God’s invitation for closeness and asked Moses to be their mediator with God! Did you notice Moses used a phrase repeated by King Solomon and many others later in history: “the fear of God”? In fact, King Solomon wrote “The fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom, but fools despise wisdom and knowledge.” (Proverbs 1:7; Ps. 111:10)
Yes, we understand fear don’t we, and sometimes it’s justified. There are things we should be afraid of. God’s wrath and punishment is certainly something to fear for those who reject God’s redemption plan through Jesus! But ‘the fear of the LORD’ also means holding God in the highest of respect, standing in awe of God and all His majesty and grandeur.
We put ourselves in a very dangerous place when we minimize God or marginalize God or ignore God or reject God. Creator, Almighty, Holy, Sovereign God is more than deserving of our fear and greatest reverence and when our life choices reflect a ‘fear of the LORD’, then we are living our God design as a person made in His image! But for these Israelite slaves this fearsome encounter with God at Sinai was simply too much and they backed away despite Moses’ urgent appeal. This was a sad choice the Israelites as a people have regretted from that day to this!
As the people backed away, Moses moved forward and for a fifth time Moses hiked up Mount Sinai to meet with God. What Moses heard from God, he wrote down and we have recorded for us in Exodus 21,22,23. These were primarily social laws God gave His people. They would distinguish the Israelites from all other people on earth. These laws were moral and ethical. They called people to respect each other with particular attention given to women, children and the elderly. May I point out a few very significant things God put before the people?
1. Ex. 21:2 Slavery was common among all people groups in those days.
For many people it was their means of survival as they depended on their master to provide basic essentials for them like housing and food. But God made it clear that slavery should have a time limit!
Hebrew slaves should be set free in the seventh year! Hopefully by that time they will have learned a trade and perhaps accumulated enough resources to live independently and successfully. Do you see God’s compassion and His desire that every person would lead a responsible and meaningful, God honoring life?
2. Ex. 21:5,6 But God also established an option for freed slaves to remain lifelong servants, by choice.
It was called a ‘bond servant’, and you may recall the apostle Paul used that term to describe his relationship with Jesus, His Savior and Lord. (Rom. 1:1, 11-23)
3. As you read through these three chapters, you’ll find a long list of crimes for which God urged capital punishment! What? Why?
Because God holds human life to be sacred, for we are made in God’s image and have the potential to be redeemed by the atonement death of God’s Son Jesus. Too many societies, then and now, flippantly allow anarchy, brutality, unrestrained violence and lawlessness to minimize the value of human life from conception to natural death. God wanted His people to cherish, revere, honor and protect life… and punish those who don’t.
4. Ex. 22:22 God identified the plight of WIDOW and ORPHAN as being victims of the sad reality of death, which of course was not part of God’s original design, but part of the curse on our sinful rebellion against God.
God warned HIS people to be compassionate toward and care for widows and orphans. No other society in the world was doing that!
5. God warned His people about the great danger of peer pressure, even mob violence. “Do not follow the crowd in doing wrong…”
God said in Ex. 23:2. God urged His people to be compassionate to aliens, foreigners and refugees (Ex. 23:9)
6. God called His people to understand, celebrate and protect the weekly Sabbath.
One day in seven to physically rest, emotionally refresh and spiritually re-align with God! (Ex. 23:12) No other people in the world had this priority, but God wanted it to be fiercely protected by His people!
And may I give you one more unique priority God gave Moses for His people? Three times each year they were to stop all normal activity and praise God with a very specific festival of worship. (Ex. 23:14-17)
These would each be week-long festivals which would unify God’s people together in their God given identity and their shared, generational experiences with God. Eventually God called them to gather in Jerusalem, if at all possible, for these great festivals, the most famous of which, of course, is Passover.
As God concluded these three chapters of laws and guidelines for living God honoring lives, He promised again that He would go with His people, leading them to their land of His Covenant and He would BE among them. God then repeated the Land Covenant promise God had first given to Abraham, years before in Gen. 15:18-20.
In recent months as you’ve listened to the rhetoric about the land of Israel you may have heard the statement: “from the river to the sea”? That statement is rooted right here, in Exodus 23:31 for God told Moses: “I will establish your borders from the Red Sea to the Mediterranean Sea, and from the desert to the Euphrates River. I will give into your hands the people who live in the land, and you will drive them out before you. Do not make a covenant with them or with their gods…” And with that, Moses headed down Mount Sinai to explain to the Israelite people all he had heard from God. It was a blueprint for living God honoring lives, distinctive from all other peoples on the planet!
Let’s pause right here. What would you say is the blueprint you are using for living your daily life? Oh, so much to think about as we read Exodus 21,22,23. Please don’t let it be just a laundry list of do’s and don’ts. Think more deeply about the lifestyle God was defining for these people which would be so very different from the brutal slavery they’d known.
I wonder what God will say to you today as you read it. In the Grand Narrative link below are more notes and ‘lessons learned’, and here’s a wonderful new song to lift our hearts in worship, and I’ll meet you here again tomorrow, my friends…
Today’s Scripture: Exodus 21-23.
Choose below to read or listen.
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Exodus 22
Exodus 23
Bible images provided with attribution to www.LumoProject.com.
Have a comment or question about today’s chapter? I’m ready to hear from you, contact me here.
Pastor Doug Anderson
“Let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us, with our eyes fixed on Jesus…” (Heb. 12:1,2)
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