All right, you can resume. Please remain standing.
As we read the word.
We're in the book of Exodus. We're going through there
looking at the life of Moses. We're in chapter 34.
And what's happened so far is the Lord's led his people out of
Egyptian bondage and into the wilderness, and he has taken
them to Sinai. And he's taken Moses up to the
mountain to give him the commandments and the
instructions on building the Tabernacle.
And while Moses is up there, they are worshipping the golden
calf. And then when Moses comes down,
before he ever gets down the mountain, he sees that they've
broken all the laws of God already, so he smashes the
tables of stone. He and the Lord engaged in a
conversation which we looked at last week.
And now we continue this conversation as Moses and the
Lord are talking, and Moses is going to be instructed by the
Lord to give it another shot, and he's going to tell him to
get two more tablets. And let's try this again.
So here now the word of the Lord, the Lord said to Moses,
cut for yourselves 2 tablets of stone like the 1st.
And I will write on the tablets the words that were on the first
tablets which you broke. Be ready by the morning, and
come up in the morning to Mount Sinai, and present yourself
there to me on top of the mountain.
No one shall come up with you, and let no one be seen
throughout all the mountain. Let no flocks or herds graze
opposite that mountain. So Moses cut 2 tablets of stone,
like the first rose early in the morning, and went up on Mount
Sinai. And as the Lord had commanded
him, and took in his hand 2 tablets of stone, the Lord
descended in the cloud, and stood with him there, and
proclaimed the name of the Lord. The Lord passed before him and
proclaimed the Lord the Lord a God, merciful and gracious, slow
to anger, abounding and steadfast love and faithfulness,
keeping steadfast love for thousands for giving iniquity
and transgression and sin. But who will by no means clear
the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the
children and the children's children to the third and 4th
generation? And Moses quickly bowed his head
toward the earth and worshipped. And he said, If now I have found
favor in your sight, O Lord, please let the Lord go in the
midst of us, for it is a stiff necked people, and pardon our
iniquity and our sin, and take us for your inheritance.
And the Lord said, Behold, I am making a covenant before all
your people. I will do marvels, such as not
have been created in all the earth or in any nation, and all
the people among them who you shall see the work of the Lord.
For it is an awesome thing that I do with you, the word of the
Lord. You may be seated, and so the
Lord summons mountain top experience for Moses.
And this is precisely what it is.
Did you detect in the text that Moses didn't know?
It may be at first, but he was attending a worship service.
First thing the Lord came out and did was preached to him.
He says the Lord proclaimed, the Lord proclaimed.
It's the Lord preaching to Moses and faith comes by hearing and
hearing by the word of God. And as God spoke His word, it
engendered in Moses incredible faith.
You remember how discouraged and how upset and really confused
Moses was last week when we first met him after the golden
calf experience. But now the Lord preaches a
wonderful sermon well orbed in theology, as you might expect
from the Lord to Moses, and engenders in his heart that
grace and mercy and shed abroad. In his heart is that love of
God, his understanding of who God is, And even though he has
begun to understand God since the days of the burning Bush, he
is now understanding and learning more and more about his
God. And as the Lord completes His
message to Moses on this occasion, we find there in verse
8, and Moses quickly bowed his head toward the earth and
worshipped. Now we'll see what the Lord said
here in just a moment, but I think it's important to to see
Moses response. And then Moses said, if now I
have found favor in your sight, Moses is feeling and knowing and
understanding the grace of God. The word favor in our text is
the word grace. Moses was finding grace in the
eyes of the Lord. He was beginning to see that as
sinful, and his stiff necked and rebellious as the people were,
as angry and confused and confound and ambivalent as Moses
was, God was still God, and he was still gracious and merciful
and loving, and He's still determined to carry out his
purpose. And since Moses had the
engendering of this faith in his heart by hearing the Word.
Of God and had this exposure and this experience of grace.
My word, God is going to stay with it.
He's not going to give up. He's going to be steadfast and
continuous in his love. He's going to actually save
Israel and bring us out of this wilderness and end to the
promised land and do great things beyond that.
In fact, the Lord says at the end, and all the people among
you, you shall see the work of the Lord.
And this is really what ought to be my topic and my theme this
morning, for it is an awesome thing that I will do with you,
says the Lord. And that's precisely what the
Lord's going to do. He's going to do an awesome
thing with Israel. He's going to actually save them
and protect them and bring them through the wilderness.
It's going to take about 30-8 more years to finally get them
into the promised land, but they're actually going to occupy
the promised land, and they're actually going to live there in
peace and prosperity for about 300 years.
And God is going to raise up a king.
And in the third generation of kings, we're going to have a
king by the name of Solomon, and Solomon is going to be the
greatest king in Israel. David's son Solomon's going to
build the temple. He's going to lead the people.
He's going to expand the borders of the Israeli empire from the
Euphrates River to the Nile Valley, which is exactly what
God had promised Abraham and during his days.
Now, admittedly, Assyria hadn't come on the scene yet.
We haven't heard anything about the Chaldeans, about the
Babylonians yet in human history at that point of Solomon's day.
And we really know that the Egyptians were in a period of
several centuries of decline during that period.
But never mind what the other nations are doing.
That was the time in which God brought everything to a literal
fulfillment of glory. In the days of King Solomon, the
Bible says everything that God promised, everything God had
promised Moses, everything God had promised Abraham came to
pass during the days, literally physically, of King Solomon.
Solomon was considered in his day the greatest king in the
known world. It didn't last long, but
actually there was an ascendancy to Solomon's reign that Israel
never saw before, never saw again.
And at the time, Solomon was the greatest, most powerful,
wealthiest, wisest, most benevolent king on the face of
the earth. It's interesting that when the
Lord came, he said, greater than Solomon is here.
Lord says I'm going to do awesome things.
You know, let 1000 years go by. And Jesus did come.
And in that work that he accomplishes in his first coming
is laying all the groundwork of justice in order to build a
righteous Kingdom. There's some things that need to
be done on the score and the side of justice in Jesus first
coming. One of the things a great king
will do according to scripture and even according to any kind
of geopolitical thought is a great ruler will establish
justice in the land. And there was a great need for
justice to be established. And this is this justice is the
justice. That is the Lord's justice sin.
The great rebellion had to be dealt with.
Sin had to be atoned, A price had to be paid, a penalty had to
be paid. A condemnation was going to work
its way out in a penalty. In order to have great justice,
in order for God to be just and the justifier of sinners, there
needed to be a judicial forensic transaction between God and man.
And that was accomplished in the man, Christ Jesus, who himself,
God and man took upon himself the burden of God's salvation,
the enterprise of God's saving work, and also took upon himself
the sinfulness, the lostness, the condemnation, the burden of
the penalty of the sins of his people.
No sin goes unpunished. That's God's justice.
The sin will either be punished in the person of the Sinner or
it will be punished in the person of Christ, the sinner's
substitute. Yes, it is an awesome thing that
I will do with you and this gospel of saving grace,
redeeming grace, justifying grace, will be preached to the
world. And so, in around 30 AD, and
following the life of our Lord's earthly ministry, a small group
of apostles begin to preach this gospel of saving grace.
They begin to proclaim this righteousness and this justice
of God in the cross of Christ. And how that Christ had died in
order that you and I might be exonerated, acquitted, that we
may live under a sentence of There is therefore now no
condemnation to those that are in Christ Jesus.
And if we come to him by faith, we receive that which he has,
and that is a perfect life to bestow upon us, and all of our
sin to take away from us. And that gospel has been
proclaimed now for about two millennia, and there are little
flocks of men. That's the way they're referred
to in the book of Ezekiel. Little flocks of men, little
churches all over the world. The world is the Church is
Apostolic. That is, it holds to those
doctrines that Christ taught the apostles and that they preach to
the world, fulfilling the Great Commission.
The Church is orthodox in that they hold to core truths of the
Deity of Christ, the existence of God, the Deity of Christ, his
atoning work, and his righteous Kingdom.
The Church is Catholic, meaning it's universal.
It's everywhere, and that's what we preach from this pulpit in
all Protestant pulpits. The Roman Church will tell you
they're the only branch of the church that's the real church.
So they're not Catholic. They like the name, but they're
not really Catholic, which means universal worldwide, including
all the unity of the faith, all the Saints of all the ages.
The Eastern Church claims they're the only true church.
That doesn't make them very Orthodox, even though they call
themselves Eastern Orthodox. It is only those that reject
those provincial labels and those boundaries and those that
have come to Christ freely and having him and in his salvation,
the unity of Christ. So there's a huge, multibillion
person flock on the face of the earth.
We're a long way from a few 100,000 at the foot of Mount
Sinai, sitting there worrying about what they're going to eat
for their next meal, a band of slaves.
We're now men and women all over the world of all time and of all
centuries, free and beloved and united in the gospel of Jesus
Christ. We've all heard the voice of the
shepherd saying, come, follow me.
And we are living in a wonderful time.
And I'm here to tell you that we're actually living just in a
time of tribulation and a time of anticipation, a time of
incompleteness, a time in which we still have great hope.
And that is, there will be a time when the kingdoms of this
world will become the Kingdom of the Lord.
It is Christ. There'll come a time when Christ
will return in reigning glory. There'll be a time when there'll
be a new heaven and a new earth. And I will make all things new.
And the Creator who created in the 1st place will now create
more gloriously than ever. It is an awesome thing that I
will do with you. That's where worldwide Christian
Catholic Orthodox faith is. It came way back there in those
days when God was making himself known to the patriarchs, to
Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and others, and then here with
Moses. And this presents itself as
straightforward history. This is didactic pros.
Those that find a mythological interpretation in these things
exclusively miss a lot, because this is God working in human
history with human beings, using human language and accommodating
himself and letting himself be known to his peaceful this is
the self revelatory, God revealing himself, pulling back
the curtain, giving, as it were, a a, a, an apocalypse, an
unveiling of himself. And what does he say about
himself? Well, let me point out the
particulars, the outline that the sermon, the proclamation
that God preached to Moses, and we see it there in the middle of
our chapter. It says the Lord passed before
he went in front of Moses and he proclaimed the Lord the Lord.
That's God's subject matter. God is preaching about God, but
He's preaching about God in personal terms.
This is Yahweh. This is the.
Personal God. The True God, the One True God,
the Living God, the God of heaven and earth, the God that
created everything, The God to whom there are no other rivals.
There is no other God like him. In fact, there are no gods but
him, supreme and superior in all way the source of all things.
And this is the one that is making himself known in a
personal way to a personal people.
And now he has continued that all through the centuries God is
making himself known as a personal God, personally to
persons. And that's what the Lord does to
us in the gospel and in the Scripture and in the So he says
something about himself, not only His Majesty and his
authority, his supremacy, his his full deity.
But God says in this sermon that he is merciful, gracious, slow
to anger, abounding and steadfast love and faithfulness
and keeping steadfast love for thousands.
That's our God. Have you come to realize that
that our God, that we serve, is a God of love and mercy and
grace? I love this phrase here.
That said, the Lord says about himself He's slow to anger.
The Lord knows his long temperament.
He knows what gets him wrathful, and he does get wrathful, but
for good cause and righteously so.
But He's slow to anger. The Lord's waiting on you to
just get sick of your sin, to repent of your sin, to forsake
your sin, and to come to Christ and turn to him for mercy and
grace and salvation. If it wasn't for the Lord's
mercy, you would already be consumed, every one of us.
But the Lord is slowed. Anger.
The Bible says that He is forbearing.
He puts up with it. He allows it.
Way back in the days of Abraham there was a filthy, filthy
tribe. They did everything wrong,
ungodly, sinful. They were the most corrupt
people on earth since the days of Noah.
It was called the Amorites and the Lord looked at him and said,
you know, the iniquity of the amber right, is not full.
He was waiting on them to turn and if they didn't repent, they
were just going to get worse and worse.
And they did. And finally, hundreds of years
later, hundreds of years later, almost 1000 years later, not
quite about 700 years later, the Lord finally says you know those
filthy vile anti God Amorites. It's time to judge them.
And so he sends at that time in the fullness of God stuff Joshua
and the armies of Israel in to defeat the Amorites and take
over their land. People are all upset when they
read the Bible about how Joshua went in and fought off the
Canaanites. Well, the Canaanites were were
disobeying God and mocking God and living like the.
Antediluvian civilization, the peoples before Noah, where their
wickedness was immeasurable, and the Lord finally slow in his
after 7 centuries dropped the hammer.
And I'll tell you, here's the other side of the story, and the
Lord puts it in the very next phrase, forgiving iniquity,
transgression, and sin. Lord in His great grace and
mercy and in his provision of Christ, will forgive our sins
for the sake of Christ. And our sins are there's three
terms that are used. They're slightly different.
They're all have to do with sin. But iniquity has to do with that
certain perverseness and twistedness that's in us, that
certain warp that's upon our soul that keeps us from being
what we ought to be. That depravity, that downward
pull, that tendency to do evil, transgression speaks of things
having to do with God's order in God's law.
God created things a certain way.
He wants things to operate a certain way, and when we violate
that, we are transgressing. And the transgression is not
just merely the disobedience to the law, but it is an affront to
the person and the righteousness and the holiness of all powerful
holy God. That's our transgres and our sin
are those things that are measured by the law.
Sin is lawlessness. Sometimes we fall a little short
of the law, Sometime we step outside the law, outside the
balance. Sometime we kind of oppose the
law, sometime we kind of twist the law.
A lot of times, most of the time we just kind of ignore the law.
And all of those are different words in the Bible.
Having to do with sin is the way you treat the righteous and holy
law of God. Not just the 10 commandments,
but all that He set out. And let me tell you what God
says about that Who Speaking of himself, the Lord says who will
by no means clear the guilty. God's wrath abides upon you if
you're not in Christ. There's a justice issue that
needs to be handled and that is you need your sins forgiven.
You need to come to Christ, come to God for forgiveness.
God's not going to let the guilty get away with anything,
and if you're still living under the guilt and condemnation of
your sin, you just wait. I don't know if the Lord will
give you 700 years like He gave the Amorites or whether He'll
give you 7 days, but be sure your sin will find you out and
come to this gracious, loving, forgiving, justifying
righteousness, establishing God and his Christ, Jesus of
Nazareth, who came not to condemn the world the world's
already condemned, but to save the world, to save the world.
It's an awesome thing that I'm going to do, says the Lord to
Moses.