God's Character: Exodus 34:7

Call to Worship

Psalm 89:1-2 “I will sing of the steadfast love of the Lord, forever; with my mouth I will make known your faithfulness to all generations. For I said, Steadfast love will be built up forever; in the heavens you will establish your faithfulness… Righteousness and justice are the foundation of your throne; steadfast love and faithfulness go before you… Blessed be the Lord forever! Amen and Amen.”

Sermon

This week we finish up our series on the Character of God, and this time we’re finally looking at Exodus 34:7, I’m sure some of you have been wondering about that one for the past couple of weeks; because verse 6 has been pretty easy to track with, but verse 7 definitely seems a little bit more odd, and so after several weeks of looking at the important words of verse 6, we’re finally onto the last verse. And this will be our last week in this series. So let’s examine these verses one last time.

Exodus 34:6 “And the Lord passed before Moses and said: Yahweh, Yahweh, a God compassionate and gracious, slow to anger, overflowing with loyal-love and faithfulness.”

Exodus 34:7 “He maintains loyal-love for thousands, forgiving iniquity, transgression, and sin; yet He won’t declare innocent the guilty, He will bring the iniquities of the fathers upon the children and grandchildren, to the third and the fourth.”

At face value this verse seems kind of out of place with verse 6, like the connection is there with the phrase “maintains loyal-love for thousands, and then He’s forgiving, but what on earth is going on with the children part? We just saw that God is compassionate, gracious, overflowing with love, etc… but right after that we see this verse where it says that God punishes children for their parents sin… that seems at face value like the complete opposite of compassionate.

There’s a lot to unpack here, but hopefully by the end of it we have a better understanding of this verse and why it makes sense in the context of this passage.

There’s more or less 4 main ideas in this passage, and I have the verse arranged on the screen in a way that will make it easier for us to track with.

He Maintains Loyal Love for Thousands

First, He maintains loyal love for thousands. This part is really cool, it ties the two verses together but beyond that it’s acting as an even further emphasis on God’s loyal love.

As humans we have a limited number of people we can truly love in the way that we talked about love last week, God’s hesed, we can maybe show some of that to a few people, but to really love someone in this deep covenant based faithful way we really don’t have the capacity to do that for more than a handful of people.

There was actually a really interesting study done over the past couple of decades by a British anthropologist named Robin Dunbar and what he discovered was that the average person is only able to keep up with 150 people tops, we aren’t able to remember more than that many people in reality, we can maybe remember their name and a thing or two aout them, but we can’t keep up with them in terms of knowing what they’re doing in life, and their different likes and dislikes, those sort of things. Dunbar proposed the idea of 150 people in the 90’s but more recently, as in the past decade, he’s done more studies regarding the theory and how it works with social media platforms like facebook, and he discovered that he had been right, that people can only really keep track of about 150 friends on facebook. What I find even more interesting though, is that Dunbar let out research on two more numbers in a piece for the Financial Times in 2018. These were an inner core of about 5 people to whom we devote about 40 percent of our available social time and 10 more people to whom we devote another 20 percent. All in all, we devote about two-thirds of our time to just 15 people.

As we think about that we can see that for us to say we know 1000 is impossible, for us to say we maintain deep love for even 100 is also crazy, we can be kind and friendly to all sorts of people but to feel a deep sense of covenant loyal love for them… well the studies seem to think that we only do that with about 15 people.

On the otherhand this passage makes an insane claim about God, He’s able to maintain (as in actively upkeep and work on) a deep covenant loyal love for thousands, and what’s implied here by thousands is not some cap number, it’s an expression to refer to all people, God’s loyal love is for all people, He sees all people, He intricately created each person, and takes care of every need that they have, and He does it not just for humans but for all of creation. When we put that into perspective of what we’re capable of, it’s absolutely mind-boggling.

The other thing that’s incredible about this verse is how it balances the two numbers at the beginning and the end of the verse. Towards the end we see this part that makes us a little bit uncomfortable, where it says that God will punish generations… and we’ll get to what that means in just a minute, but the two numbers are really cool. God’s judgement is to the third and fourth but His love is for thousands. It’s not necessarily emphasizing those literal numbers what it’s saying is that His loyal love and forgiveness far outweigh His judgement. It’s almost like one of those old fashioned scales, I made a picture of one up on the screen, and you can just see how God’s loyal love far outweighs His judgement. It’s a beautiful thing that He’s that forgiving.

Forgiving Iniquity, Transgression, and Sin

The next part in the verse is about that forgiveness, it says “forgiving iniquity, transgression, and sin”. If you’ve been in church for a while you’ve probably heard these words before, but I at least have found that I don’t always know exactly what they mean, in my mind before I looked into them they were really more like synonyms than they were their own words and ideas, but I think it’s important for us to understand these words if we’re going to properly understand this line in the verse.

First, Sin. It’s a word we use all the time, and I think most Christian’s have a pretty good general sense of what it implies, but sometimes it’s been so long since we clearly defined it that it’s more like an abstract concept than something we can explain. And often times we also end up relying more on what we were told along time ago than on actually looking at it in scripture for ourselves. So let’s try and find what the bible has to say about sin. The Hebrew word for sin is khata which means to fail or to miss the mark, and sometimes it means to fail morally, but other times it just means to miss something, a common analogy for this is of an archer. In Judges 20:16 it says: “Among all these were 700 chosen men who were left-handed; every one could sling a stone at a hair and not miss.” The word miss here is khata, so to not miss a target is to not khata, the apostle Paul applies it in this way Romans 3:23 “For everyone has sinned; we all fall short of God’s glorious standard.” If the word were in Hebrew here it would say we all have khataed or we all have missed the mark; we all fall short of God’s glorious standard. So sin is anything that we say, think, or do that misses the mark of following God. Any form of disobedience to God’s standard for holiness is sin.

The second word is iniquity. Like sin I think we often have heard this word but maybe only have an abstract idea of it, like I said before, more often than not I think of iniquity and transgression as synonyms of sin. When they’re not quite synonyms, they actually add their own slightly different ideas. The word iniquity in Hebrew is avon and it means that something is twisted or crooked. The word is used in Lamentations 3:9 to describe a road, or in Psalm 38:6 it’s used to describe someone’s back. But when it’s translated as iniquity or sin what it refers to is crooked behaviour, like murder or adultery, something that was once good but now has been distorted and isn’t what it should be anymore.

The third word is trasgression. Like the other two, maybe we’ve heard it before but it’s pretty abstract. The Hebrew word here is pesha, and it refers to a violation of trust. In Exodus 22 theres a set of rules about theft. And one scenario they give is if you’ve given some valuables for your neighbour to safe keep while you’re away and they get stolen then it’s theft, but if your neighbour is the theif, then it’s pesha, because you should have been able to trust them but they broke your trust. Our transgressions against God are all of the times that we as humanity have broken His trust by choosing to follow other things, or by breaking the covenant terms that He has set.

As we consider all of these words together we begin to see the bigger picture that God is forgiving every time they miss the mark of following Him, every time that their behaviour is crooked and distorted from what it should be, every time that they violate His trust and turn from Him. And notice what tense the word forgiving is in, it’s not in the past that He forgave, or in the future that He will forgive, it’s in the present, part of His character is that He is actively forgiving people all of the time, even in the very moment that they’re missing the mark and acting crookedly and violating trust, He in that same moment is forgiving.

Yet He Won’t Declare Innocent the Guilty

That’s an insane thought that He would be that forgiving, and yet His forgiveness is also in balance with His justice. Let’s read the next line. “Yet He won’t declare innocent the guilty.” God is unbelievably forgiving, but He’s also a God of justice, He doesn’t say people are innocent when they’re not, just because someone is forgiven doesn’t mean that there aren’t any consequences. If you remember a couple weeks ago when we talked about Him being slow to anger, in His anger God gives people over to the consequences of their actions. When they miss the mark, He allows them to, when their behaviour is crooked and it leads to all sorts of problems God allows those to happen to them, when they violate other’s trust and their relationship fall apart God allows it. His forgiveness doesn’t get rid of the immediate consequences of sin, but it does get rid of the lasting ones.

On earth we’ll have plenty of times where our sins, iniquities and transgressions end with consequences that extend maybe even until the day we die. If someone’s unfaithful to their spouse, then more than likely that trust is broken for the rest of their marriage, and sometimes their marriage even ends. On top of that they likely lose the respect of their children and their community. And if the person is in a spiritual leadership role they’ll likely be asked to step down. These all are consequences. And yet as a Christian the person who does these things doesn’t have to worry about death or hell because even in the moment that they’re sinning, God is ready and willing to forgive them when they repent, and in His forgiveness He gives them eternal life.

Iniquities of the Fathers on the Children...

Finally we’re at the last part of the verse, and it’s arguably the most confusing part of the whole passage we’ve been in for the past few weeks. What does it mean that God “will bring the iniquities of the fathers upon the children and grandchildren to the third and the fourth”?

Over the past number of years there’s been an ideology going around in our culture that talks about generational sin. It may not use those exact words but it’s what it refers to. When people talk about systemic racism against people of colour, or the need for Canadian citizens to atone for the attrocities in the residential schools, they’re talking about generational sin, and the need for children to atone for the sins of their fathers. And at face value it seems like this verse may be connected, and in a way it is, but there’s also some very important differences.

And to understand them we need to look at two other verses, one that quotes this verse, and one where Moses later expands on the idea.

First is Jeremiah 32:18-19 “You show unfailing love to thousands, but you also bring the consequences of one generation’s sin upon the next… You see the conduct of all people, and you give them what they deserve.”

Second, Deuteronomy 24:16 ““Parents must not be put to death for the sins of their children, nor children for the sins of their parents. Those deserving to die must be put to death for their own crimes.”

What we see from these two verses is an interesting dichotomy, on the one hand it seems like God punishes children for their Father’s sin, on the other hand, it seems like God gives each person exactly what they have deserved themselves. It seems like it contradicts, but it doesn’t.

God’s word never contradicts itself, and so when we’re faced by passages like this where we feel like things aren’t completely adding up. One of two things is normally happening, either a, there’s a deeper idea at play and the bible is using some form of nuaced or poetic language to explain it, or b, there’s some form of Hebrew phrase or idiom that when translated literally is a little more confusing in English. In this case, both are true.

I don’t speak Hebrew, and I don’t imagine any of you do either, so we’re not going to be able to see the idiom in it’s original form, but what we can do is go deeper into a couple of different layers, and hopefully by unpeeling each one we’ll be able to make sense of this odd phrase, and understand how it works.

The first layer is that parents’ sin has consequences for the children’s future. And when we think about the idea that the punishment for sin is almost always God giving people to their own desires and allowing them to experience the natural consequences, it makes sense. Let me show it in a story.

My great-grandfather fought in WWI, when he came home from the war he turned to alcohol to get rid of the memories that haunted him, he became a very intense alcoholic and in his drunkeness did some terrible things, and there was some of my grandfather’s childhood where he and his siblings were essentially living on the streets of Halifax because their father was unable to care for them. Even today at the age of 88 my grandfather has still never once touched alcohol because of the actions of his father. However, even though my grandfather didn’t sin, he still felt the consequences of his father’s sins.

The second layer of the passage is compounded on top of this idea, that idea is that sin can sometimes be a pattern, the sins of your parents or grandparents can often be copied by you. So for example, if my grandfather had become an alcoholic as well what you would see is that another generation followed in the same pattern of sin. It’s like in the time of the kings in Israel’s history, if you track through the books of 1st and 2nd Kings what you see is the sin of idolatry often passed on to the next generation.

In our verse when God says that He visits “the iniquities of the fathers upon the children and grandchildren”, first He’s saying that He will give people over to their sin, and in their sin He will allow for both them to face the consequences of it, and their children and their grandchildren for generations. The second thing He’s saying is that He will judge each according to their sin, if your father was an alcoholic and faced the consequences for it, that doesn’t mean that you won’t also face consequences for being an alcoholic too.

John Mark Comer says this about it:

“Put another way, don't think that because God punished your [father] for idolatry, you're off the hook for your own idolatry. God will punish you, the same way he punished your father. The same way he punished your grandfather. The same way he punished vour great-grandfather. Because his end goal is a world free from evil, and he won't stop until the eradication of sin in vour familv line is complete.”

If we continue in, and repeat the sins of those who have come before us we will face the same consequences, because God is just. It’s the same idea as the systemic racism concept that we talk has been an important conversation topic lately for our culture.

We’re not to blame for the actions of those who came before us. However, we do live in a world that’s filled with the consequences of their sin, and we need to do our best to recognize where those consequences are at play, and try and make things better, because God is a God of justice and as His hands and feet in the world it is our job to seek to help others, and to create equality for all people, and to pick up the pieces of those who feel broken.

We also need to watch that we don’t repeat the sins of those who came before us, because just like they will have to give an account for the ways that they acted unjustly, we too will have to give one for the ways that we have acted unjustly. If we continue in the sins of those before us, there will continue to be consequences for us just as there was for them, whether or not they faced those consequences on earth or they’ll have to account for them once they’ve passed.

Conclusion

To wrap it all up, here’s the verse one more time all together. “And the Lord passed before Moses and said: Yahweh, Yahweh, a God compassionate and gracious, slow to anger, overflowing with loyal-love and faithfulness. He maintains loyal-love for thousands, forgiving iniquity, transgression, and sin; yet He won’t declare innocent the guilty, He will bring the iniquities of the fathers upon the children and grandchildren, to the third and the fourth.”

God’s name is YHWH, because He’s consistent, to translate it literally: He always is, who He will always be.

God is consitently compassionate. Like a Mother’s love, God is willing to enter into our suffering, to suffer with us, to empathize with us and to love us deeper than we deserve.

God is consistently gracious. He shows favour to us even when we don’t deserve it, because Jesus took our place, God looks at us and sees beauty, despite our ugly messes of sin.

God is consistently slow to anger. He’s quick to forgive, when He gets angry He isn’t rash, He doesn’t have a quick temper, God is patient and rational and the times He acts with anger it’s to get rid of the evil in the world, and to make it better for us.

God is consistently full of covenant based faithful lovingkindness. When He promises to love us, He does it no matter what, His love endures forever, it runs deeper than we could ever imagine, and He acts on it for our behalf, providing for us, protecting us, and redeeming us in ways that we could never deserve, in ways that go beyond our wildest dreams.

God’s loyal love extends to thousands upon thousands, it’s deeper and vaster than anything we could picture and His forgiveness outweighs His judgement by thousands.

Yet God is also very just, He eradicates evil in the world, and He will hold us accountable when we’ve done wrong, but in the end when we repent and turn back to Him. He’s quick to forgive every time we’ve missed the mark, every time we’ve acted crookedly, every time we’ve betrayed His trust, because that’s what He is, and that’s what He does. He loves and forgives beyond measure, and all we’re left with is the ability to fall down in awe and worship God for who He is.

And then as we reflect on who God is, we can start to ask ourselves, who do we want to be? If we’re to be His followers then we need to emulate these traits.

We need to be compassionate, willing to step into other’s suffering, even when they haven’t deserved it.

We need to be gracious, willing to extend favour even when other’s haven’t deserved it.

We need to be slow to anger, patient, not quick to have our noses burn, but quick to wait and listen and try to see someone else’s pain before we react.

We need to abound with loyal love and faithfulness, to be stable for people, not breaking their trust, but fulfilling the oaths that we’ve made, and loving them even when they don’t deserve it.

We need to be people that balance justice and forgiveness, who are quick to forgive, and quick to stand up for what is right. Who are willing to change the patterns of sin we see around us, and who are quick to pick up the pieces of the consequences of those who came before us.

That’s a tall order, but the good news is that we’re not alone in trying to shape our character like this. The way we become more like Jesus is by opening ourselves to the Holy Spirit, by praying and asking that God would shape our character to be like His, because we can’t achieve that on our own, but through spending time in prayer and by asking for it, God will shape our character slowly but surely. And we’ll still mess up, we’ll do it all of the time, and we may feel like we don’t see progress day by day, but after a while as we’ve looked back on who we were and who we are now, we’ll see where God has brought us, how He’s made us into people who truly follow Him, because in our character and in our actions it will be apparent that we understand God’s character and that we’ve truly begin to emulate it.

So let’s close there, we’ll pray and thank God for His character, and ask that He would begin to continue to shape our character in these ways. Let’s pray.

Benediction

Jude 24-25 “Now to him who is able to keep you from stumbling and to present you blameless before the presence of his glory with great joy, to the only God, our Savior, through Jesus Christ our Lord, be glory, majesty, dominion, and authority, before all time and now and forever. Amen.”