Sermon Tone Analysis

Introduction:

We believe that the bible is extremely important for our faith in Christ—all of the bible—the approximately 77% that makes up the Old Testament and the 23% that makes up the New Testament.

We believe that the entire bible tells one cohesive/unified story that leads us to Jesus.

So you'll notice as you attend most of what we do, that we look at and study together and work to practically apply the bible to our real daily lives.

We want to practically live out the reality of what the scriptures teach in our real lives.

So last week we gave Bibles to our 3rd graders!

We want to encourage them to begin reading the bible on their own, for themselves, at this pivotal point in their development.

I want to encourage us all to read, to personally interact with the scriptures daily.

Here's a text I received from a parent this week… It came with this picture…

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…and they wrote, "We are encouraging him to highlight what he likes… apparently chapter 4 is really good."

Well done!

All of it is really good!

Let’s keep reading it!

Today, we are continuing our study through the the Old Testament book of Exodus…

Israel had been enslaved in Egypt for many generations, nearly four hundred years.

There were the old stories of how God had led their ancestors—Abraham, Issac and Jacob—generations ago.

But for the past few centuries Israel had lived under the rule of the Egyptian leaders and their gods.

They had very little insight into God's character, very little knowledge of how he interacted in the world of humanity.

The relationship between God and Israel had mostly gone silent.

In Exodus we see a move from the absence to the presence of God among the community of Israel.

Throughout these well known stories God is revealing himself, teaching them his name, giving clear guidelines about how to live with one another and with their neighboring communities.

He reminding them how they got to where they are and giving vision for a flourishing future.

All along the way God stresses the vital importance of aligning their lives and priorities around himself.

Today, we have the need to learn the same lessons.

In our current cultural context, we need the God of the scriptures to reveal himself to us.

It's so easy to confuse the God of the scriptures with the gods of our age.

It's tempting to allow our lives to be shaped by the cultural norms we live in, rather than allowing our lives to be shaped by the one we claim to worship.

Last week John introduced us to the plagues God brought on the Egyptians… we looked at the plagues through the lens of de-creation, how God is allowing their leader's hardness of heart to undo the order, safety and provision of original creation.

Today I want us to look at those same plagues through the lens of idolatry—God is confronting the idolatry of the Egyptians, and honestly, of all of us.

And why does God confront our idolatry so strongly?

Because he loves us dearly and he wants us to see how our idolatry, our worship of anything other than him, actually destroys our lives.

When you read through the gospels, and the rest of the New Testament, you'll notice that Jesus is living, and inviting his followers into, a completely different way of life.

The apostle John wrote it like this…

John 1:4–5 (NIV) 4 In him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind.

5 The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.

In Jesus was a kind of life that it lights the way for all of humanity

John 10:10 (NIV) 10 The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy; I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full.

Here's the ultimate contrast—there is one who is intent stealing, killing and destroying; but Christ comes to give the fullest life imaginable.

John 20:31 (NIV) 31 But these are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name.

The life of Jesus is available to you and I through faith in Christ.

The entire reason the Vineyard church exists is that you would discover the kind of LIFE Jesus, and the apostle John, are talking about.

And in reorienting your life around Jesus, you would begin to actually experience the kind of life God invites us all into.

The biggest thing that gets in the way of this LIFE is all of the other things we cling to for life instead of God himself—things that we think will make us happy, fulfilled, successful, and secure—the bible calls all the other things IDOLS.

Now, the word idolatry may bring up thoughts of primitive people bowing before statues or totems.

Let me suggest that each culture, every family is dominated by its own set of idols.

Every society has its own shrines (places of worship) where sacrifices must be made in order to procure the blessings of the good life and to ward off disaster—whether office towers, our university campuses, or shopping centers, or sports stadiums, or gyms or studios.

We may not kneel before the statue of Aphrodite, but many young women, and men, today are driven into depression and eating disorders by an obsessive concern over body image.

We may not actually burn incense to Artemis, but when money and career are raised to out-of-whack proportions, we definitely perform a kind of child sacrifice, neglecting family to achieve more wealth, prestige.

Colossians 3:5 “5 Put to death, therefore, whatever belongs to your earthly nature: sexual immorality, impurity, lust, evil desires and greed, which is idolatry.”

The Apostle Paul wrote "greed is idolatry" (Colossians 3:5).

Today I want to look at the "plagues" as God confronting the idolatry of Egypt and its Pharaoh, and I want to allow God to confront the idolatry in each of our lives.

Ready‽

Setting the stage: A few weeks ago I read a portion of the story from chapter 5

Exodus 5:1–2 (NIV) 1 Afterward Moses and Aaron went to Pharaoh and said, “This is what the LORD, the God of Israel, says: ‘Let my people go, so that they may hold a festival to me in the wilderness.’

” 2 Pharaoh said, “Who is the LORD, that I should obey him and let Israel go?

I do not know the LORD and I will not let Israel go.”

Pharaoh is saying, “I don’t give a rip about who this Yahweh is.”

He refuses to acknowledge the God of these immigrants he's enslaved.

And as a result of this request, he increase the pressure of their slavery.

The plagues are God's way of introducing himself to Pharaoh, to encourage him to pay attention to Yahweh’s request to quit mistreating Israel.

And today we're going to pay close attention to two different things going on at the same time…

God is going to confront everything Pharaoh, and the Egyptians hold onto for security

And, watch how Pharaoh seems to soften just enough to allow the difficulty to pass, and then immediately reverts right back to his destructive ways.

He walks on the edge of repentance, but never crosses over.

Turns out, if you want the kind of LIFE God offers, real repentance is key.

Let's begin with the first miraculous act that Moses and Aaron do in front of Pharaoh… we talk about the ten plagues, but there were actually eleven miraculous acts… [PAGE #]

Exodus 7:10–12 (NIV) 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.

In this first miraculous sign, the staff changing into a snake and swallowing up all the other snakes, we see the beginning of one of the greatest confrontations of all history: the reigning human power on earth, Egypt—and its autocratic leader, Pharaoh—versus the God who promised to rescue his people from that power and the miseries that leader had imposed on them.

Pharaoh was often depicted with a shepherd’s staff and a snake headdress… Moses arrives on the scene with a shepherd's staff the becomes a snake.

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Snakes in Egypt were associated with royal authority.

Right at the very beginning of this confrontation, God confronts the gods of Egypt.

And, remember that Genesis and Exodus are a form of Hebrew meditational literature, there's meant to be links to what's come before and what coming after…

We're meant to reflect back on another snake… the deceiver in the original garden from Genesis chapter 3.

The first snake is the one who leads humanity to believe we don't need God's wisdom to decide what’s good and bad—we can make our own decisions, apart from God, about what's good and what evil.

As God confronts Pharaoh, he’s also confronting our desire to be completely in charge of our own lives.

God is using ten plagues to teach the Egyptians that he is sovereign and that their gods are of no account—to hammer home to the Egyptians that he is firmly in control of the entire process, and of them and their nation, to the extent of controlling their environment, which they so completely admired and worshiped in their pantheism.

God turned the things they believed to be the specialty of their gods, against them, and showed himself in control of all events and powers.

The 1st Plague: The Nile river turns to blood… (7:14–24)

It's a demonstration of God’s sovereignty over the river that was Egypt’s greatest landmark, their special source of life…the river was a god.

In their pantheistic view of the universe, the divine lived in everything, and things that moved, like water were the essence of the divine.

The only true God, Yahweh, begins with the humiliation of the Nile.

The great waterway and source of life was made into a source of death (7:18), demonstrating Yahweh’s the sovereign power.

Plagues 1,4,7 all begin in the morning – 3 groupings of 3…and this lasts for seven days… the destruction is planned and going to be thorough—the idols of Egypt are going to be crushed.

The 2nd Plague: Lots of Frogs (7:25–8:15)

The frogs get into everything!

…no person, place, or thing is immune from the frog infestation.

Even kneading troughs and the bake ovens were infested

It’s interesting that the Egyptian magicians are able to replicate by some sort of magic, on a small scale, what God had done on a nationwide scale in both the first two plagues.

In their magic they provide a way out for anyone, like Pharaoh, who already wants to doubt the exclusive power of Yahweh.

If you're looking for a way to not have faith in God, you can easily find it.

You don't have to look far.

A little trickery will get you there.

But eventually, the trickery fades away when you can't even cook your food or turn over in bed without finding more frogs!

Pharaoh's reaction in 8:8 – he begged for relief.

Exodus 8:8 (NIV) 8 Pharaoh summoned Moses and Aaron and said, “Pray to the LORD to take the frogs away from me and my people, and I will let your people go to offer sacrifices to the LORD.”

An interesting focus of this story is that Yahweh allows Pharaoh to choose the time of the frogs’ removal.

Think about it, its kind of brilliant: if the king could say when the frogs would go away, he personally knows that the timing was not due to some natural force, or that the Egyptian god's stepped in, but asking the sovereign God of Israel to step in.