FOUNDATIONS FOR PEACE

August 4-5th 2012
EXODUS 24:3-11
10th Weekend after Pentecost
Pastor Tim Smith

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3 When Moses went and told the people all the LORD’s words and laws, they responded with one voice, “Everything the LORD has said we will do.” 4 Moses then wrote down everything the LORD had said. He got up early the next morning and built an altar at the foot of the mountain and set up twelve stone pillars representing the twelve tribes of Israel. 5 Then he sent young Israelite men, and they offered burnt offerings and sacrificed young bulls as fellowship offerings to the LORD. 6 Moses took half of the blood and put it in bowls, and the other half he sprinkled on the altar. 7 Then he took the Book of the Covenant and read it to the people. They responded, “We will do everything the LORD has said; we will obey.” 8 Moses then took the blood, sprinkled it on the people and said, “This is the blood of the covenant that the LORD has made with you in accordance with all these words.” 9 Moses and Aaron, Nadab and Abihu, and the seventy elders of Israel went up 10 and saw the God of Israel. Under his feet was something like a pavement made of sapphire, clear as the sky itself. 11 But God did not raise his hand against these leaders of the Israelites; they saw God, and they ate and drank. (NIV-1984)

This is the Word of the Lord.

It was the moment when it truly began. Up to this point, Israel had been a family God was looking after. He had made promises to Abraham, to Isaac and to Jacob. God had watched over them as they immigrated, 75 of them, to Egypt to survive a famine, and God had just brought them back out of Egypt four centuries later, now closer to two million people. The Lord had revealed his true name to them, promised to protect them and to provide for them, and he was preparing to give them his holy Law, beginning with the Ten Commandments.

Later, he would describe them as “his covenant people.” And this was the making of that covenant. As Moses strapped on his sandals to head up the mountain to receive the Law, God invited the people to make sacrifices and share the meal with one another. It was the original covenant meal. The Passover had been the covenant of the firstborn. But this—this was the Covenant of the Mount Sinai, the covenant under which the Old Testament Church would live until the coming of Jesus Christ, who fulfilled all its terms and removed the burden of its laws for all time.

It was also a preview of things to come.

A week from now, the 30th Summer Olympics will come to an end, and I’m sure that we will see a fantastic montage of all the greatest moments that took place this year. There will be great swimming and running and volleyball and rowing victories–not to mention a first ever gold medal in Judo– and there will be exciting music and somber narration.

All of the moments that are truly special will be strung together and placed before us, and if it’s anything like what we’ve seen in the past, I’m certain that it will be very gratifying, very satisfying, and quite memorable. The purpose of that kind of a scene is to plant special memories and commemorate what has taken place. And in case you missed an event or two, it will be your chance to see at least the most important moments so that you can say: “I saw that myself.”

Here we have the very opposite. We have highlights of the whole Bible—but before any of those things actually took place. It’s like—well, going back to the Olympics this week, it’s like the day when I came home and had heard about some particular athlete’s great victory winning a record number of medals, and I shared that with my wife, but she said, “No—don’t tell me, I haven’t seen it happen yet!”

We begin with a preview of heaven itself. Moses builds an altar representing of course God’s presence among his people—that’s exactly what our altar represents here before us—and around it, Moses sets us twelve stones, one for each tribe of Israel. And that’s a scene from the last book of the Bible, from Revelation, where John sees the Lamb of God, sacrificed for our sins, sitting on the throne of God, and this of course is God’s presence among his people, and there all around are the Twelve Elders of the Tribes of Israel, representing all of God’s Old Testament believers. In Revelation, John also sees the Twelve Apostles, representing all of God’s New Testament believers, but the scene is still the same. God’s people around God himself.

Next, we have burnt offerings and fellowship offerings, made by the young men of the tribes. This is a preview of something that, if you look carefully at Exodus, you will realize hasn’t begin yet. Israel has no system of burnt offerings to the Lord yet. God is still in the process of appointing what kind of offerings he wants done, and when.

And there are the young men making these offerings. We’re not told what tribe or tribes they’re from, because there are no appointed tribes yet to supply priests for Israel. In fact, the custom was that the heads of the families would make offerings and serve as priests—that’s what we saw in the book of Genesis, when Abraham served as priest for his family, and Isaac for his, and Jacob for his, and so on. But here the young men served. This reminds us that God’s plan was that we all should serve him in righteousness and in purity forever. The rebellion that took place against Moses shortly after this ended with only Levites serving as priests, and that regulation was in place until the moment that Jesus Christ served as our true High Priest and offered his own innocent and holy body on the cross, once and for all time, once and for all sins, ending and fulfilling the Old Testament regulations.

There was also here the Blood of the Covenant. Moses took the blood from the sacrifices, and he poured half of it on the altar—the reminder of God’s presence among the people—and then he sprinkled half of it on the people themselves, to show that they were under the covenant, too. Can you imagine their Twelve vast families, arranged in tent-cities all around the foot of the lofty mountain, and Moses walking up and down pathways like streets within those tent-cities, flinging blood with a stick from a broom tree on each group? The spatters hitting the people as they sang songs, the song getting softer now as Moses approached, so that perhaps it was perfectly quiet as the great prophet of God actually passed by—and a tiny spatter of blood as he moved on to the next group. Did a drop actually touch your forehead? That blood is the blood of the covenant, the blood that makes you part of God’s chosen and holy people. For now you are no longer an extended family on the run, seeing miracles and wondering where you’re going. No—now you are the covenant people. Now God would give his laws. Now God would hold you accountable to those laws and to that way of life until the Messiah comes.

This blood pointed ahead to the blood of that Messiah, of the Savior Jesus Christ. He shed his blood once, for all, and like this blood at Sinai, the blood of Christ was also the blood of the covenant. But not this covenant. The blood of Jesus was called something new. Listen to familiar words from Luke 22:

“In the same way, after the supper, he took the cup, saying, “This cup is the new covenant in my blood, which is poured out for you.”(Luke 22:20).

Those are the words that we cherish and that we silence ourselves to hear whenever we share the Lord’s Supper. This new covenant is what brings us forgiveness directly from the cross into our hearts, through faith in our Crucified Covenant Christ.

This is essential to our relationship with God. Think of what our sins do to us. Our sins smash the altar and knock over twelve pillars. That image of heaven with all believers worshiping around the throne of God? The glimpse is gone—heaven flies away out of reach like a jet plane lifting into the sky. There’s no way for us to jump and grab hold; it’s vanishing into the clouds until its white contrails become part of the clouds themselves. Our sins drag us back and shackle us to our guilt and pull us underground, so that without Christ, without the blood of the covenant, we are helpless, hopeless, and condemned. They say that in some prisons, the architects make the windows especially narrow and deep to heighten the prisoner’s constant realization of no escape. And that’s how it is with mankind in our sins. And we even sin against the blood of the covenant. When we spurn the Lord’s Supper, when we question God’s wisdom in establishing closed communion, when we are tempted to invite anyone forward who does not share our confession of faith despite Paul’s warnings and injunctions in 1 Corinthians 10-11, then we call down judgment on ourselves and not only those who call down God’s judgment by drinking the blood of the covenant in an unworthy manner.

And then—as we realize the depth of our guilt, like the depth of inescapable prison windows, God himself comes and invites our repentance. He invites us to his table like the seventy elders of Israel, and he spreads his forgiveness and his grace over us like that mysterious “Sapphire pavement” in our text, so that although we do not yet see him clearly, we see his grace, we see his love. We feel the effects of his sacrifice and we know that in this meal, in the blood of the new covenant, we have the forgiveness of our sins, the assurance of eternal life, and the joy to serve our God in this lifetime and the next because we, too, are children of this covenant through Jesus Christ, who gives us the peace of God which transcends our understanding, and which guards our hearts and minds in Christ Jesus. Amen.

EXODUS 7:8-13
September 6th, 2009
14th Sunday after Pentecost
Pastor Tim Smith

Aaron’s Staff Becomes a Snake
8 The LORD said to Moses and Aaron, 9 “When Pharaoh says to you, ‘Perform a miracle,’ then say to Aaron, ‘Take your staff and throw it down before Pharaoh,’ and it will become a snake.”
10 So Moses and Aaron went to Pharaoh and did just as the LORD commanded. Aaron threw his staff down in front of Pharaoh and his officials, and it became a snake. 11 Pharaoh then summoned wise men and sorcerers, and the Egyptian magicians also did the same things by their secret arts: 12 Each one threw down his staff and it became a snake. But Aaron’s staff swallowed up their staffs. 13 Yet Pharaoh’s heart became hard and he would not listen to them, just as the LORD had said. (NIV)

Children’s Sermon: Limbo.
(1) Limbo Lesson #1. God sets the stick high sometimes to give us confidence and to give us experience.
(2) Limbo Lesson #2. God holds us up when he himself sets the stick down low.
(3) Limbo Lesson #3 (in the sermon): When God sets the stick down low and tells you to hold on, just stand back and watch what God can do.

What’s the most scared you’ve ever been? There was a saying during the Civil War after the horrible Battle of Shiloh by some soldiers who wanted to show how strongly they felt who would say, “I was more scared than I was at Shiloh.”

Maybe you’ve been frightened in an accident, or in a fight, or during the illness of a loved one, maybe especially a child. Maybe you’ve had a confrontation with a wild animal; I have a very vivid memory of a bitter February night in the days before cell phones with a flat tire on an empty highway and wild dogs—I assume they were dogs—snarling and howling just outside the fading beam of my car’s headlights.

Have you ever been scared to talk about God? There are many examples in the Bible of people who were commanded by God to go and speak up for him before some pretty powerful, pretty scary people. Think of Elijah all alone on Mount Carmel, facing 450 prophets of Baal. Think of Esther working up her courage to confront King Xerxes when all the Jews in Persia faced extermination. Think of the Prophet Jeremiah, knee-deep or hip-deep in the mud in a mostly empty cistern underground, his book of prophecy burned by the king, his messages warning the people of the coming exile ignored, and his life in very real danger.
Think of John the Baptist, bringing what many felt was a completely new message into Israel. Think of Paul standing before the Roman Governor, and finally before Caesar himself. Think of old John the Apostle at the end of the New Testament, in exile on Patmos, two or three days’ sail from his congregation in Ephesus, because, as Jesus says: “You cannot tolerate wicked men, that you have tested those who claim to be apostles but are not, and have found them false” and now, because he stood up for the truth, stood up for what was really the New Testament as opposed to what was not, he found himself far away and wondering whether he would live to see another day (Rev. 2:2).

Now think of Moses and Aaron. Their people had been in Egypt for more than four hundred years. During the first of those centuries, Joseph was the number-two man to Pharaoh himself. But when Joseph died at the age of a hundred and ten, something happened in Egypt. Egyptian chronology isn’t perfect, but a very good guess seems to point to the overthrow of the reigning family Joseph knew by the Hyksos, another nation that came to power and ruled for a couple of centuries until another native Egyptian group defeated them and drove them out. But for whatever reason—and paranoia about foreigners was part of it—this new Egyptian regime now enslaved some or many of the non-Egyptians living within their borders, especially those in large numbers. And no nation was bigger than the vast numbers of Israelites, living quietly as shepherds in the eastern Nile Delta, the Land of Goshen. And although a lot of really interesting things were going on at this time and in this place—the element mercury was discovered in Egypt, the first star chart was made, the Valley of the Kings was first used for royal burials and pyramid-building—what is important to us is that Moses was born, in 1526 BC, with this new Pharaoh on the throne who didn’t know anything about Joseph or the big famine four hundred years before. He just wanted the Hebrews to remain slaves.

And now Moses and Aaron were sent by God to this forgetful, hateful, greedy, jealous Pharaoh of Egypt, to say “Let my people go.”

It’s a little easier to understand why God gave these men miracles to perform in that situation. As it was, when Aaron threw down his staff and it became a wriggling snake, Pharaoh had all kinds of men who could do the same thing. The text says that Pharaoh had wise men, sorcerers and magicians who could all turn their sticks into snakes.

We don’t know how these magicians did what they did. Perhaps what they did was sleight of hand and only an illusion, as we would expect from a modern magician. Or maybe they were able to bring about a complete immobile stiffness in their snakes (this is called catalepsy) by applying pressure to the back of the neck. If we were going to be completely open to every possibility, and there’s no reason not to be since they were not using God’s power, it is also possible that those magicians employed the help and power of a demon–that this was in fact an actual “counterfeit” miracle (one that does not give glory to God) of the sort that Paul warns about in 2 Thessalonians.

The most important point of this miracle is that even though Pharaoh’s magicians could perform the same wonderful act, God’s staff, thrown down by Aaron the priest at the command of Moses the prophet, became a snake that swallowed the other ones.

People who keep snakes even today talk about the problem of cannibalism among serpents. In a closed environment, they gobble each other up all the time. And this is what happened here: God’s snake swallowed all the others.

But let’s look at another lesson from this “miracle matched by a miracle.” This first miracle before Pharaoh gives glory to God who has control even over creatures, right down to the serpent—and this miracle is yet another sign we have in the Bible that the power of the serpent (and by extension, of the devil) is subject to God, and that those who think they can manipulate such a creature for their own purposes should beware. After all, even though they turned their staffs into snakes, Aaron’s staff swallowed theirs.

We can also take comfort from this passage despite the fact the Moses and Aaron were matched in this particular miracle by these magicians. How often do we share our faith with someone, only to have them match our reasons for our belief with their own reasons for their unbelief? How often is a believer turned aside by the logic or the reason of a person who doubts? Moses and Aaron were matched in this first attempt as well, but they didn’t give up. God’s power was still present with their miracle, and God’s power is still present in the word of God we share, even when another person thinks they have won an argument. The word of God still works. We keep coming back; we keep on patiently sharing the miracle of the gospel, today and always, and God’s holy word will accomplish exactly what God wants it to accomplish.

Because the word of God works. Its miraculous power doesn’t depend on our skill or even on our success, it only depends on us sharing it. So we pray with the hymn we sang, “Do not let me waver.”

It’s so easy to waver as we stand with the rod and staff of God that should comfort us; the law and the gospel that give us everything we need to know about our Savior, but we waver in our resolve; we waver in our faith.

The sin of not trusting in God might be a common one—Peter sinks into the Sea of Galilee; Abraham starts up an alternative family and lifestyle because he thinks his wife is too old; Moses asks God (tells God) to just send someone else—it might be as commonplace in your life as it is in the Bible, but it’s still a sin. When we take that smoking, reeking stink bomb of a sin and pick it up and look at it, we will see it for what it is. It’s the sin of the big mirror. It’s the sin of putting myself and my ideas ahead of God. It’s the sin against which commandment? The First. It’s idolatry. It’s making an idol of me.

But that sin isn’t left out of the sins Jesus forgave. There isn’t any footnote at the foot of the cross. There’s no little asterisk above Jesus left shoulder: These sins are paid for, but these aren’t. It’s the same with the amount of sins paid for: It isn’t as if they’re paid for just a little bit, or 99%, and the rest is left up to us, now or later. No—all our sins, all your sins—are forgiven in Jesus. And with that forgiveness comes citizenship in heaven, membership in God’s family, brotherhood with Jesus Christ himself.

And work to do on earth today.

When God commands us to limbo under an easy stick—share your faith with somebody who’s already a believer—he does it to build up our confidence; to give us practice; to give us courage.

When God commands us to limbo under a low stick—share your faith when it’s going to get some resistance; live your faith when the going is tough—God promises to be there with us and to hold us up, like a parent holding up a child learning to limbo for the very first time.

But don’t lose track of what God says in these really tough, really impossible times: When God says “hold that limbo stick an inch off the ground and see what I can do,” he’s not telling you to get under the stick all by yourself. He’s telling you to trust him, and to watch what he can do. And God will accomplish what he needs to get done.

When the stick gets too low to get under; when the stick hits the ground at Pharaoh’s feet, just hang on watch what God will do.

Lord, do not let me waver. Amen.