Unexpected?? Don’t Go Alone?? With or Without You??
Notes
Transcript
Intro
What a blessing it is to be here this morning and to be able to open God’s Word together
Let’s start off by addressing the elephant in the room right now - let’s get it over with
No, my wife does not like the mustache. But man do I love it so much…..
Pray for her
No, for real, without anyone raising their hands or saying anything, keep this answer to yourself, how many of you thought that when Pastor Eric announced that he was moving that I was going to take the Senior Pastor position here??
Me too!
What I know now is that the Lord had a much different plan
Some of you are saying, “Hallelujah! God has shown us mercy!”
But I stand before you today confident that I am walking in the Lord’s will, and confident that God was doing greater things than just what I wanted or what many people may have expected
This morning is going to be pretty personal as I want to share with you so many of the things that I have been learning as I’ve been seeking His will for my life.
And I believe the Lord has used this season to give me a message that’s for all of us as we as a church walk through this current season of change, and for when each one of us walk through different changes in the future
This will not be the last change in our lives. So we’re going to look at questions like how do we navigate seeking God’s will, how is He going to show that to me, or how do I know if I’m making the right decision or not?
I am grateful to have this morning to share with you the things the Lord has taught me over the past several months, and to share a chapter in scripture that I’ve been living in and God has used to minister to me greatly.
Lesson - Exodus 33.
Background
A little background to give us some context before we jump into our text today.
The chapter we pick up takes place about 4 or so months after the children of Israel left the land of Egypt after being freed from 400 years of slavery
They had seen the 10 plagues God sent on the Egyptians to humble Pharaoh and his people, they had seen the Red Sea parted and the Egyptian army destroyed. They were lead by God as a pillar of cloud by the day, and a pillar of fire at night. They had been given water and bread (manna) in the desert to sustain them.
They were on a mission to make it to the Promised Land - the land of Canaan that God had promised to His people starting with Abraham - modern day Israel
It was a land flowing with milk and honey we read, meaning it was a rich and fruitful land. A tremendous blessing considering much of the land in that area of the world is dry desert.
But God wanted to bless His people with this land, He is the one that ordained that the land of Israel belongs to the Jews
So then about 3 months after they left Egypt on this journey to the Promised Land, they make it to the base of Mount Sinai
There, Moses and the people meet with God. They see the Lord come down onto the top of the mountain in smoke and fire.
Moses, Aaron, Joshua, and the elders would go part way up the mountain, but God would call Moses all the way to the top.
There Moses would receive the 10 commands, the 2 stone tablets written by the finger of God which were to be the basis for all laws in this new nation he was leading
He’d receive the direction to make a tabernacle, or the tent of meeting, which would become their place of worship.
God would give Moses commands about the OT priesthood that was to serve Him and on some of the sacrifices and feasts the people were to participate in as part of their worship.
In all, Exodus 24 tells us that Moses would be up on the mountain for 40 days and nights with the Lord
Imagine how much of a spiritual high he would be on. The depths of the closeness and communion with God. The awe and wonder of who He is and all the plans He had for His people.
Later chapters in Exodus would tell us that Moses’ time with the Lord was so rich and fruitful that his face would literally glow as a reflection of the glory he had been spending time in
While Moses was having this incredible time with the Lord, there was trouble brewing in the camp
The rest of the people, a nation of probably around 2 million, had primarily relied on Moses for their spiritual leadership and communication with God
Their leader had been gone up on top of some mountain for 40 days and hadn’t come down yet
So just like 2 Timothy 4:3-4 describes, the people didn’t trust in the sound doctrine Moses had given them, and instead followed after their own lusts and created their own god
They came to Aaron, Moses’ brother and the chosen first chief priest of Israel, and they ask him to make them new gods to follow
So he tells them to give them their gold earrings, and he uses that gold to make a molded calf, and tells the people to bow down and worship the image of the calf
They build this altar there and they have this religious feast and spend the day engaged in gluttony, drinking, and sexual immorality
God tells Moses that he needed to get back to camp and deal with the sin of the people
So he heads down and sees the debauchery they were involved with and smashes the 10 commandments in his anger for what the people had done.
God tells Moses to stand back as He was going to wipe the nation of the face of the earth and start again with Moses as the father of a new nation, testing Moses’ leadership and humility
Moses has this incredible plea, begs the Lord to forgive the people, and tells God if He won’t forgive the people, to remove his own name from the Book of Life instead - being willing to trade his eternal salvation for his people
God of course wouldn’t accept that as salvation is a personal choice, but He does relent from destroying the nation of Israel
So that’s where we pick up here in Chapter 33. All of that has just taken place. I can only imagine the hurt and pain and shame the nation is feeling at this point. A wondering of what comes next for them
Verses 1-6
God tells Moses to take the people and continue their journey to the Promised Land
Even after the sin of the golden calf, God in His mercy was still going to allow the people to enter into the promise and the blessings of the land
He even promised that He would send an angel to drive out the nations who currently lived there
But there was one problem - God said He would not go with them
An interesting thing to note is that some Bible commentators think this is a different angel than described in Exodus 23:20-23
20 “Behold, I send an Angel before you to keep you in the way and to bring you into the place which I have prepared. 21 Beware of Him and obey His voice; do not provoke Him, for He will not pardon your transgressions; for My name is in Him. 22 But if you indeed obey His voice and do all that I speak, then I will be an enemy to your enemies and an adversary to your adversaries. 23 For My Angel will go before you and bring you in to the Amorites and the Hittites and the Perizzites and the Canaanites and the Hivites and the Jebusites; and I will cut them off.
Most Bible scholars us that verse as well as Isaiah 63:9 to show that this Angel God sent to lead the people wasn’t just an Angel, it was God Himself, Jesus come to lead them.
But the angel spoken of in Exodus 33:2 is just an angelic being, not God
The Lord said He would not be in the midst of the people going to the land
This announcement causes great sorrow among the people
They mourn, they take off any ornamental clothing or jewelry as a sign of their sorrow.
They sit at the base of Mt Horeb, another name for Mt Sinai, and mourn for what has happened
In the midst of this devastating news, I love how Moses responds
Verses 7-11
Moses response to all that happened was to seek the Lord.
He took his own tent and made it a tabernacle or place of meeting with the Lord
A little OT history, but the tabernacle was the first place of worship that God had the Jews put in place.
It was a tent that would house the ark of the covenant in the holy of holies, it would have the alter of incense, the table for the showbread, and the gold lampstand inside.
This tent would serve as the Jewish place of worship for hundreds of years before King Solomon would build the first temple in 957 BC
This tabernacle had not been constructed yet. God had been giving Moses the plans on how that would all look when he was up on Mt. Sinai, there hadn’t been time to implement that yet
That didn’t matter to Moses, he just took his own tent and started to diligently seek the Lord for what to do
We read here that