Dining With The Divine Series

In 2016, an anonymous bidder paid $3.46 million to have lunch with billionaire investor Warren Buffet. This individual spent on one lunch what it would cost to purchase nearly a million Happy Meals from McDonald’s! How many Happy Meals is lunch with Kyler Murphy or Taylor Swift worth to you? Would you dole out even $1,000 to grab a bite with a celebrity?

As we continue our sermon series, Moses: Made for More, we’ll see how a select number of Israelites got to eat with a celebrity of sorts. They ate with God! What made these men so special that they got to dine with the divine? Let’s find out so that one day we too can have lunch with the Almighty.

While the anonymous bidder met Buffet in a New York steak joint for their lunch, Moses and select elders from Israel had lunch with God on Mt. Sinai—the same mountain from which God issued the Ten Commandments. Upon hearing God speak there, the Israelites quickly promised to obey everything the Lord commanded. They made this promise not once, not twice, but three different times (Ex. 19:8; 24:3, 7).

What kind of preparations did the anonymous bidder make for his lunch with Buffet? Did he try on two or three different outfits? Whether he chose to wear a business suit or something more casual, you can bet that his clothes were spotless. He wasn’t going to show up to dinner with one of the richest and most famous people in the world with breakfast oatmeal caked on his blazer.

In the same way if you want to dine with the divine, you better dress appropriately, that is, you better dress to perfection. If, for example, you think you can stand in God’s presence after consistently abusing his gift of alcohol without remorse, you will be quickly removed the way a drunken heckler would be removed from a sports arena. Or if you think it’s too much of a hassle to curb a gossiping tongue, you run the risk of being denied entrance into heaven, the way someone ignoring the dress code at a fancy restaurant will be denied entrance.

God’s Word is not like the menu at Burger King. Burger King is a restaurant that encourages you to order meals to your liking. If you don’t want onions on your burger, just say so. It doesn’t work that way with God’s commands. You may not like the fact that God has commanded us to forgive those who have hurt us—to forgive them even before they ask for forgiveness. But ignore this command at your own peril. Only those who promise obedience to all of God’s commands will one day dine with the divine. If we don’t want to promise this kind of obedience, then let’s be honest. We want religion on our terms, not God’s. But that’s nothing less than self-worship, not worship of the one true God.

The reason God wants us to live on his terms is because it’s what’s best for us. If Buffet told his dining companion to wear a snowsuit to their lunch, the anonymous bidder might feel silly doing so. He’d probably even refuse unless he found out that their lunch was taking place near the South Pole. Friends, because we’ve never seen God, we don’t really know what it will be like to stand in his presence. Don’t you think it would be foolish to ignore what God tells us about how we should prepare for this meeting? It’s Satan who wants you to show up to this meeting underdressed. If you want to dine with the divine, then promise to obey every one of God’s commands—no matter how silly or how difficult those commands may seem to you.

But it’s one thing to promise obedience and quite another to actually be obedient, isn’t it? The Israelites knew that to be true. Just 40 days after they promised obedience to the Lord, they broke the First Commandment when they made an idol in the form of a golden calf and pranced around it in wild celebration (Exodus 32). We’ll hear more about that shocking event in our sermon next week.

But we already learned how the Israelites were guilty of sinning when they grumbled over the lack of food and water during the first days of their journey in spite of God’s promise to provide for them. So how could a holy God allow unholy people to dine with him? Because they had been sprinkled with cleansing blood. Here’s how that happened.

After receiving all the commands from God, Moses relayed them to the people. Moses then had young men offer animal sacrifices before the Lord. He proceeded to read again God’s commands which he had written down in the Book of the Covenant. After the people promised obedience, Moses took some of the blood from the sacrifices and dribbled it onto the Book of the Covenant (Heb. 9:19-20). He then spattered the people with the rest of the blood! As he did this, Moses said: “This is the blood of the covenant that the LORD has made with you in accordance with all these words.” (Exodus 24:8)