Glory of God Filling Temple
Notes
Transcript
Handout
The Lord communicates and completes His promises
The Lord communicates and completes His promises
As we finish the book of Exodus, lets’ go back to the beginning, to the first time we hear God’s heart for His people.
Because we don’t want to forget what God has done and what He has promised. Though it can be easy to. In the ins and outs of life we can easily grow dim or forget or our perspective shift on how we see God’s promises.
Augustine in the City of God writes that if an eye gets infected, or think about the modern practice of dialating your pupils, that when you are in the light of the sun that would normally be warm and embracing, becomes harsh and blinding. The sun hasn’t changed, the eye has.
We react to God’s promises in similar ways. What used to be warm and embracing is now easily forgotten or passed by.
This morning we are going to track the gracious event of God communicating what He is going to do and then fulfilling those promises.
It’s helpful to talk about this because there is distance between what was said and the fulfillment of that promise.
And that distance can be marked by many things that make us question those promises. Make us question whether or not God has left us to our own making.
We see this morning that God’s glory fills the temple. And this is a part of a completion of what God has done in the lives of the israelites.
It’s helpful to look at the bookends of this book to see what God has done. To see what He has said and to see what happened.
We will find that what begins in suffering ends in glory.
God speaks, creates, remakes, reworks, renews, making room for His glory.
The time in between is not wasted. People are formed and shaped and grow in that time to be better equipped for God’s work in thier lives.
Let’s go back to Exodus 2 to see where God enters the picture in this book.
During those many days the king of Egypt died, and the people of Israel groaned because of their slavery and cried out for help. Their cry for rescue from slavery came up to God. And God heard their groaning, and God remembered his covenant with Abraham, with Isaac, and with Jacob. God saw the people of Israel—and God knew.
God heard and God remembered. God knew. God knew He was going to act. The beginning of that happens in chapter 3 when He calls Moses.
This is where we first make contact with the idea of God communicating with a people, that with one swoop He would redeem and save a people.
God is always looking to redeem. We may not always understand how or when or why, but we can know His Heart.
When we can’t know God’s timeline, we can absolutely trust His heart.
We don’t always know the when of everything. We don’t always even know why, but we trust the who.
And in the end of the day, where would you rather place your trust?
In a person in relationship?
Or in a circumstance?
While we hear God’s heart in chapter 2 we see His work starting in Chapter 3.
God makes promise
Then the Lord said, “I have surely seen the affliction of my people who are in Egypt and have heard their cry because of their taskmasters. I know their sufferings, and I have come down to deliver them out of the hand of the Egyptians and to bring them up out of that land to a good and broad land, a land flowing with milk and honey, to the place of the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Amorites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites.
But then things get worse.
But God still continues to let Moses know He will make good on His promises.
God promises to deliver.
To free.
to take people to a good and broad land
We have to understand that current circumstances are not the compass for God’s promises. That is the direction that we normally go. Things look back. Things are bad. God has forgotten us. But that is not how God works.
HE makes promises.
And HE delivers on them
Circumstances are passing. Our circumstances are never good indicators of what God is doing.
Why?
Because we forget how limited our perspectives are. We think we understand everything all the time but that is a trick of the brain to keep us from going insane.
When my kids were very small we vacationed in Vancouver Canada for 2 weeks. We had borrowed a friends house while they were on vacation. Vancouver is a city of about 700000 people. So it is rather urban. We took a walk one day, following a trail and found ourselves right in the middle of a walking path. It was winding through some neighborhoods when what felt like almost immediately, it transitioned into a a nature trail. We rounded this trail and looked off into the distance, and we came upon this mountain range. IT was a narnia like experience, where off in the distance, that parralled the city, was the coastal range. We were in awe not only of the mountains but also of that fact that we had not even expected the range. You think you miss a body of water, or a building or something in the landscape but you wouldn’t think you would miss an entire mountain range.
We have to realize how limited our understanding is. We easily miss mountain ranges.
God doesn’t.
The longer we go with seeing promises unfulfilled the more likely we are to think that God is like us. That He has forgotten us and will not do what He said. It becomes easier and easier to diminish God, slowly mistaking Him for our caprice. We have to remind ourselves of God’s faithfulness, of His goodness, of His promises. That what God started He will complete.
He doesn’t miss the mountain ranges.
Because of that when HE promises, He knows all the ins and outs. He knows what is at stake. God isn’t missing anything.
And because of that He delivers.
We can trust He is not bent or broken over any current circumstances.
Do you need to know that God is not troubled by your circumstances?
He is not wondering how things got the way they are.
God has not gotten lost or is missing.
What He promised He will deliver on.
God Cannot Lie
God Cannot Lie
There are certain things we have to keep in mind when looking at God’s work in the span of human history.
We read these accounts and because we can complete them in one sitting we often forget that these happened over great distances and time.
God’s work was not instant or necessarily quick. IT was not on the israelites timeline.
But that doesn’t discredit God’s work.
The issue of God’s time and humanities timeframe cannot be oversold. Tim Keller says that the biggest discipleship issue for the Christian is simply the difference between how we see time and how God sees time.
We look and see if something is or is not happening and make judgement on it.
God looks and becasue His word is final and sovereign authority, all of history and all of our lives are built around that.
What God says determines what happens not the other way around.
So when God speaks we know He will act. We know He will work. And time and human history bends around that.
We are prone to look and ask why isn’t God working? Why hasn’t God acted yet?
But do not overlook this one fact, beloved, that with the Lord one day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day. The Lord is not slow to fulfill his promise as some count slowness, but is patient toward you, not wishing that any should perish, but that all should reach repentance.
We need to align with what God has said He will do not just on what has or has not happened.
And God is not One to keep forestalling promises. He is not fickle in His promises. Everything He has said He will do He has done or has left us with a significant promise that He will do it.
Because God cannot lie
What God began He will complete
What God began He will complete
If God has done a work at all, He will keep working at it until completed.
That is good news for us this morning.
Because I can imagine that we don’t always have the same sentiment. We get so far and don’t want to continue. We get far into a project or something and we want to give up. We are not in much of anything for the long haul.
A couple days ago a tweet from a psychiatrist came out about marital vows. In it she said,
“Instead of “till death do us part” how about “for as long as this feels healthy, safe, and meaningful for both of us.”
This is a temporary statement.
This is not a promise
This is not a vow.
Not even a hope.
We easily run out of gas and justify why we give up.
When we feel this way we need to go back to what God has given us in His promises and that is enough to know He will fulfill them.
In the 16th century there was a monk who we call St. John of the Cross. He was a writer and famously authored a book called The Dark night of the Soul. Christians have been using it for centuries now to explain the phenomena called just that the dark night of the soul.
There is a point in every Christian life when nothing seems to work. That pray loses joy, that Scripture reading is hard. Relationships become difficult. Life just becomes constant drudgery.
And in these moments we are tempted with thoughts of just giving up.
We are conditioned by our culture to give up. If it is not doing exactly what you want it to do at the time you want it done, walk away.
I can prove that to you by asking you to wait for more than 10 seconds for a webpage to load.
JOhn of the Cross spoke of the necessity of the Dark night. It is where we learn trust because it is where we find that the things we have been using no longer work.
He writes: spiritual persons suffer great trials, by reason not so much of the aridities which they suffer, as of the fear which they have of being lost on the road, thinking that all spiritual blessing is over for them and that God has abandoned them since they find no help or pleasure in good things
We easily think in these times that God is distant or gone. But in fact it’s the opposite. In these moments, the distance between promise and fulfillment, God is working. When we don’t have the tools to work, He does. Even when we can’t seem to find Him, He is showing us who He is.
God works when we can’t
Allow God’s promises to be enough for you today. There is enough grace in God’s promises for you today
And I am sure of this, that he who began a good work in you will bring it to completion at the day of Jesus Christ.
God rebuilds and renews along the way
God rebuilds and renews along the way
Look at what happens here.
Moses and his team finish the work.
God calls us to be a part of what He is doing.
And when He finishes the work. When Moses is done with what He was told to do, God filled that space.
And he erected the court around the tabernacle and the altar, and set up the screen of the gate of the court. So Moses finished the work.
Then the cloud covered the tent of meeting, and the glory of the Lord filled the tabernacle.
- God calls us into the work, when it is within His desire and will, He fulfills the work.
We are both invited to be a part of the work and to realize we are the work.
In between promise and fulfillment, God is changing and renewing and transforming us to be more and more like Christ.
This time between promise and fulfillment is sometimes called the already and not yet.
This is the space where God is renewing His promises, reminding His people.
We see this as the ministry of Jesus begins.
Jesus one morning is called on to read the Scriptures. He lands on the prophet Isaiah.
The passage states:
And the scroll of the prophet Isaiah was given to him. He unrolled the scroll and found the place where it was written,
“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,
because he has anointed me
to proclaim good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim liberty to the captives
and recovering of sight to the blind,
to set at liberty those who are oppressed,
to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”
Jesus is the renewal of God’s promises in the world.
Trusting Christ is living out God’s promise in the world.
When we worship we are remembering God’s promises. We are formed
When we gather we are remembering God’s promises. We are formed.
When we serve. We are formed.
When the distance between the promise and the fulfillment seems too far.
We always have an opportunity to remember Christ’s promises.
Gather with someone
Read God’s promises in Scripture
Ask God through His Spirit to Remind you of who He is.
It is in remembering His promises and His work that we are renewed.
The glory of the Lord will fill the tabernacle. All of God’s promises will become reality.
We will get to experience that.
Allow Him to show and remind you of it.