ENGAGE
I’d like to begin this morning by taking a poll on a matter of critical importance in many households. In fact, it is so critical that the Wikipedia article on this topic has 91 notes, over 100 references and 13 suggestions for further reading. Of course I’m referring to the correct way to put the toilet paper on the holder. [Show pictures of over/under methods]. I know that many of you may not think this is an important issue, but let me assure you it is a matter of great debate in many households.
So how many of you think the under method is correct? And how many think the over method is correct? And how many of you really don’t care?
Well, in my exhaustive research on this topic this week, I discovered that there a number of ways that people try to support their opinions on this topic. For instance, some of you may have seen a post on Facebook with a diagram of the original patent for a roll of toilet paper from 1891 that appears to support the over method. [Show photo] But if you have a cat, this photo seems to suggest that perhaps the under method is better [Show photo]. But if you can’t come to an agreement in your house, then I suggest this might be your best solution [Show photo of roll sitting on top of holder].
TENSION
While our choice of how to hang the toilet paper is not a life or death issue, the choice of how we choose to approach God certainly is. And as we’ll see this morning, that is a choice that even a great hero of the faith like Moses got wrong before he got it right. So undoubtedly that is something that we’re likely to struggle with as well.
TRUTH
This morning we’ll embark on the second leg of our journey through the Old Testament as we explore the idea of deliverance in the book of Exodus. In the first leg of our journey, we worked our way through the book of Genesis – a book of beginnings. And at the close of that book Joseph, who had been brought to Egypt by God in order to save both the Egyptians and his own family, dies. But before he dies, he made his family swear that they would one day return his bones to the land God had promised to him and his fathers.
As the book of Exodus opens, the people of Israel have multiplied and prospered in Egypt. But a new king, who did not know Joseph, came to power and because he was fearful of the increasing population of the Israelites, he subjected them to harsh slavery. But when that failed to keep them in line, the king gave orders to kill all the Hebrew babies. During that time, a baby is born to a Hebrew couple who is not even named until later in Exodus. When the baby is three months old, his mother puts him in a basket, which she hides on the banks of the river.
When Pharaoh’s daughter comes to bathe in the river, she finds the baby and, in a series of circumstances that could have only been orchestrated by God, ends up employing the baby’s own mother to be his nurse. She names the baby Moses, which means “drawn out” because she had drawn him out of the river. So Moses grow up in the household of Pharaoh.
When he is 40 years old, he sees an Egyptian beating a fellow Hebrew and he takes things in to his own hands and kills the Egyptian. So Moses has to flee from Egypt and he settles in Midian where he marries Zipporah and for the next 40 years, he lives as a shepherd, caring for his father-in-law’s flocks. At the end of Exodus 2, we learn that God’s people cry out for help and God hears their cries and prepares to act.
Let’s pick up the account at the beginning of Exodus 3:
[Read Exodus 3:1-22]
This passage is so rich that there is so much we could take away this morning, but since our time is limited, here is the truth that I want us to focus our attention on:
God delights in delivering His people
when they come to Him on His terms
I’ll explain how Moses’ encounter with God here reveals this truth in just a moment. But before I do that, I want to point out that throughout the remainder of the Old Testament, as well as in the New Testament, this truth is constantly the source of the tension that we see between God and man, both as an individual and as part of a covenant community.
In spite of what man knows about God’s sovereignty, goodness, love and power, he seems to constantly fall back into the trap of trying to approach God on his own terms rather than on God’s terms. We see this later in the book of Exodus. Even after God miraculously delivers His people from slavery in Egypt, just as He promises He will do in this passage, it isn’t long until the people ignore God and try to approach Him on their own terms by making a golden calf while Moses is away receiving the law from God. But they repent and return to God on His terms, only to go their own way again shortly thereafter. And that same pattern continues to characterize the people of Israel throughout their history. And, I would suggest, it is the same pattern that we tend to get caught up even today.
Fortunately, the account of Moses here in Exodus 3 gives us some good guidance on how we can make sure that we come to God on His terms and not our own.
At the age of 40 years old, Moses begins with some very good intentions. The writer of Hebrews provides us with some further insight into his mindset at that time:
By faith Moses, when he was grown up, refused to be called the son of Pharaoh's daughter, choosing rather to be mistreated with the people of God than to enjoy the fleeting pleasures of sin.
(Hebrews 11:24-25 ESV)
At that point, Moses could have very easily kept on living a pretty comfortable life there in Pharaoh’s household. It appears that while he was certainly aware of his Hebrew heritage, which he had undoubtedly learned from his mother, Pharaoh didn’t seem to be aware of that. But when Moses saw his fellow Hebrews being mistreated, he made the decision that he would rather suffer with people of God than be a part of causing their suffering. And Moses is certainly to be commended for that.
But the problem is that Moses decided to take the deliverance of his people into his own hands. So after killing an Egyptian, he is forced to flee for his life. And God uses his next 40 years of working as a shepherd for his father-in-law to prepare Moses for the task that He is about to call Moses to do.
When the events of chapter 3 take place, Moses is now 80 years old and he is just about to begin his ministry, which will take up the last 40 years of his life. That fact alone ought to encourage us that none of us are too old to be used by God.
This time, instead of Moses’ taking things into his own hands, God initiates His plan. One day Moses is out taking care of the flocks near Mt. Horeb. That mountain is also better known to us as Mt. Sinai, and before the end of the book of Exodus, Moses will return there to receive the law from God. And God grabs Moses’ attention in a rather unusual way. Moses had probably often seen bushes on fire as he tended the sheep, but there was something different about this one. Although it was on fire, the bush wasn’t burning up. So Moses’ curiosity leads him to take a closer look.
When he gets there, the angel of the Lord appears to him. Since I don’t have time to go into this in detail in this message, we’re going to explore this idea further in the Bible Roundtable later, but I’m convinced that this is a pre-incarnate appearance of Jesus, who is the only person of the triune God who has a physical form.
When God calls out to Moses from the bush, he responds the same way that everyone who ever comes face to face with the holiness of God in the Bible does – he hides his face from God.
Now that God has Moses’ attention, He reveals His plan for delivering His people from bondage in Egypt. While it is 100% God’s plan and God’s work, He is going to use Moses to carry out that plan. He is going to send Moses to confront Pharaoh and demand that he release God’s people. Once again we see that an all-powerful God who certainly didn’t require man’s help to carry out His plans chooses to work through weak, imperfect human beings. Again, that is a pattern that we see consistently repeated throughout history and one which still operates in the world today. So in that sense, Moses is really not all that different than any of us.
Moses is no longer the brash young man who tried to deliver God’s people through his own devices 40 years earlier. In fact, he has now gone to the other extreme and is extremely reluctant to do what God is calling him to do. But while we might tend to think that reluctance was a flaw in Moses’ character, I’d suggest that it was actually quite wise. After all, Jesus Himself said that a man ought to consider the cost before making a commitment to God.
Exodus chapter 3 is one of the key chapters in the entire Bible because there Moses asks the two question which are most crucial in coming to God on His terms. So, not surprisingly these are the two key questions that the Bible addresses from Genesis to Revelation.
Two crucial questions:
1. Who am I? (v. 11)
When God reveals the task that He is going to entrust to Moses, Moses’ first response is to ask this question:
“Who am I that I should go to Pharaoh and bring the children of Israel out of Egypt?”
This is obviously not the same Moses that 40 years earlier thought it was his place to kill an Egyptian who was mistreating one of his fellow Hebrews. God had used the last 40 years of tending sheep to develop humility in his life. Moses now recognized his own inadequacies. But that just meant that God has Moses right where He wanted him.
The first step in coming to God on His terms for any of us is to recognize that there is nothing in us that deserves His favor and that there is nothing that we can do on our own to enter into a relationship with a holy God. That is a truth that we find revealed consistently throughout the Bible.
Paul’s words to the church at Corinth certainly express that truth quite well:
For consider your calling, brothers: not many of you were wise according to worldly standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth. But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; God chose what is low and despised in the world, even things that are not, to bring to nothing things that are, so that no human being might boast in the presence of God.
(1 Corinthians 1:26-29 ESV)
God was going to use a man like Moses to lead His people out of slavery in Egypt because there was no way that he could boast about what he had done. Unlike the way he is often portrayed in movies, Moses was not this larger than life hero, but merely a shepherd that God chose to use to carry out His purposes. And because of that, God is the one who is going to get the glory.
After Moses asks “Who am I?”, God doesn’t directly answer that question, but He does respond in a way that communicated something far more important:
“But I will be with you, and this shall be the sign for you, that I have sent you: when you have brought the people out of Egypt, you shall serve God on this mountain.” (v. 12)
God reveals two important things here. First, He is going to be with Moses. So therefore, it doesn’t really matter that Moses is incapable of the task that God is giving to him.
Second, God promises to give Moses a sign to confirm that He is the one who is sending Moses. But what is really interesting about that sign is that God won’t provide it until after Moses has been obedient to God. So Moses is going to have to take God at His word and act out of faith and trust that God will do what He has promised to do.
God’s answer leads Moses to ask the second crucial question:
2. Who are you God? (v. 13)
God has already revealed several aspects of His character to Moses:
• He is holy. God had commanded Moses to take off his sandals because the ground on which he stood was holy because God was there. And as we already pointed out, the moment Moses saw a glimpse of the holiness of God, he hid his face.
• He is the covenant making, covenant keeping God of Moses’ ancestors. He is the very same God who had made and constantly reaffirmed his covenant with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.
• He is compassionate. God had seen the suffering of His people and was moved with compassion to intervene in their lives to deliver them.
But Moses isn’t satisfied with what God has already revealed. So he poses another question to God:
“If I come to the people of Israel and say to them, ‘The God of your fathers has sent me to you,’ and they ask me, ‘What is his name?’ what shall I say to them?” (v. 13)
As we’ve talked about many times, names were much more significant in Biblical times than they are in our culture today. Today people, especially celebrities, often choose names just because they are unique:
• Not too surprisingly, Gweneth Paltrow and Chris Martin named their baby girl Apple.
• Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie named their kids Maddo, Pax, Zahara, Shiloh, Knox and Vivienne
• Frank Zappa named his kids Moon Unit and Dweezil
• My favorite is probably Rob Morrow, who named his daughter Tu.
But the Egyptians worshipped a number of gods, so Moses knew when he went back to his fellow Hebrews, he was going to need to tell them what separated their one true God from all those other Gods. And he knew that God’s name would reveal what it was about His character that separated Him from all those Egyptian gods.
So let’s use God’s answer to Moses’ question to summarize the…
Names of God in the Old Testament
In the Old Testament, there are three primary Hebrew words that are used to refer to God:
• YHWH – LORD or GOD
This is the most common name for God in the Old Testament and occurs over 6,000 times.
Sometimes you’ll also see this referred to as the tetragrammaton since in Hebrew this name consists of four letters – all consonants. While no one knows for sure the exact pronunciation of this word, it is most commonly believed to have been pronounced Yahweh, or possibly Yehowah.
Because the Jews considered that name to be so holy, when they came across it in reading the Scriptures, they did not pronounce it out of fear that they might accidently profane the name of God. So they would usually replace it with the word “adonai”, which we’ll look at in a moment.
In most modern English translations, the Hebrew word “YHWH” is usually translated “LORD” in all upper case letters, as it is in verse 15 here in Exodus 3. But there are a few places where it is combined with the word “adonai” and is translated “Lord GOD”, where YHWH is translated as “GOD” in all upper case letters,
There is an interesting play on words that occurs here in Exodus 3, when God responds “I AM WHO I AM” since YHWH is related to the Hebrew verb “hayah”, which means “to be”. When God says “I AM WHO I AM” that communicates so much more than what we see on the surface. It reveals that God is self-existent. No one or nothing created Him. And it also reveals that He is eternal, as it could also be translated “I will be what I will be”.
This is also where our English word “Jehovah” is derived from. Originally Hebrew had no vowels but later a group known as the Masoretes added the vowels from “adonai”:
YeHoWaH
This was later “Latlinzed” sometime in the 13th century by replacing the “Y” with a “J” and the “W” with a “V”:
JeHoVaH
That later carried over into some of the earlier English translations.
• Adonai – Lord or lord
As I pointed out earlier the Jews often substituted this word for YHWH when reading the Scriptures out of respect for God’s name. The word literally means “my lords” and it is used in the Bible to refer to both God and to human masters. It occurs over 400 times in the Old Testament. When referring to God, it is rendered “Lord”, with an upper case “L” and the rest of the word in lower case. When referring to a human, it is rendered “lord” – all lower case. In the places where it is combined with YHWH, it is translated “Lord GOD”.
• El or Elohim – God or god
El is the singular form and Elohim is the plural form. This word is first used in Genesis 1:1 and appears in the Old Testament over 2,000 times. It can also refer to deities other than YHWH in which case it is translated “god” or “gods” – all lower case.
Many of us are probably familiar with the rest of the events in the book of Exodus. It is a story of God’s deliverance and redemption for His people. It is the story of how God chooses to save a people, not because they deserve it, but merely because He has chosen them and loves them.
Through Moses, God brings a series of ten plagues against Egypt culminating with the last one in which God passes over the households of the Israelites who had obediently acted in faith by putting the blood of a slain lamb on the lintel and doorposts of their home, and then kills the firstborn of the Egyptians. That becomes the basis for the Feast of Unleavened Bread and Passover, which we will observe here at TFC next week with a Seder meal.
After that Pharaoh finally lets the Israelites go and God miraculously takes over 1 million of His people through the Red Sea and then causes that same sea to drown their pursuers. God leads His people as a cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night. He provides food and drinkable water for that entire people each day. He brings them back to Mt. Sinai, where Moses had first seen God in the burning bush, and gives them the Law and provides instructions for the Tabernacle. Over the next few weeks, we’ll take a closer look at several of those important events.
The story of Exodus reveals that…
God delights in delivering His people
when they come to Him on His terms
The book of Exodus is so much more than just the account of a life-changing incident in the life of one man – Moses. It is a crucial turning point in the history of the nation of Israel as the burning bush marks the beginning of God’s direct intervention into their affairs.
It is also a picture of what God will do thousands of years later when spiritual deliverance for His people comes down to earth in the person of Jesus. Just as the fire burned the bush but did not consume it, God poured out His wrath, the wrath we all deserved, on Jesus, but that wrath did not consume Him and he arose from the grave three days after He died on the cross for our sins.
And God has declared that is the only way to come to Him on His terms. The same Jesus who appeared to Moses said:
I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.
(John 14:6 ESV)
So even today…
God delights in delivering His people
when they come to Him on His terms
He delights in delivering those who will come to Him through faith in His Son Jesus.
APPLICATION
There are so many ways that we can apply what we’ve learned today in our lives, but let me leave you with just two implications for our lives.
IMPLICATIONS FOR ME
1. If I haven’t already done it, I need to come to God on His terms by placing my faith in Jesus alone
As I pointed out earlier, how you choose to put your toilet paper roll on the holder is not going to have a life changing impact for you. But how you choose to come to God, as we’ve clearly seen this morning, is. While I’m confident that most of you this morning have already made this decision to come to God on His terms through faith in Jesus, I would be remiss if I didn’t invite anyone who has not yet done so to make that choice this morning.
So if you have been trusting in your own goodness, or in your religion, or in anything else other than what Jesus has done for you on the cross as your basis for coming to God, then my prayer for you this morning is that God will use this message to help you to realize that you’ve been attempting to come to God on your terms and that you need to stop doing that and place your faith in Jesus alone. If you don’t totally understand what that means or how to do that, we’re here to help and there are several ways you can let us know you’d like that help:
• Talk to me after the service
• Fill out the Connection Card on your bulletin and give it to me or to a greeter after the service
• Contact any of our Elders. Their contact information is in your bulletin and on the website.
2. Look for where God is already at work and join Him there
Far too many times, we are like the 40-year-old Moses and we decide what we’re going to do for God and then ask God to bless what we’ve decided to do. But Moses, as well as the rest of Scripture, demonstrates that what we need to do instead is to wait to see where God is at work already and then join in His work.
Right around 2000, the church planter I had been working with on a volunteer basis, moved to Florida and by default, I became the pastor of that fledgling church plant. For the next several years, a number of people worked really hard to make a go of that church plant, with mixed results. Finally, in the summer of 2003, we decided to just meet in our house and seek God’s direction for our church plant. For me personally, I was frustrated and about ready to get out of vocational ministry altogether and just go find a secular job.
As we met together that summer, we did the “Experiencing God” study by Henry Blackaby. The main premise of that study was that instead of deciding what we want to do for God and asking Him to bless it, we need to look for where God is already at work and join Him there, which is essentially what Moses did in the book of Exodus. It was during that study that out of the blue I got a call from Denny Howard, who was the pastor here at TFC, asking if our church plant might be interested in merging with the church. Today, as I look back on that time over a decade later, it is clear to me that God was already at work and when I slowed down enough to wait on Him and allow Him to reveal that to me, and I chose to join in His work rather than ask Him to bless my own, that I was finally coming to God on His terms and not my own.
INSPIRATION
God delights in delivering His people
when they come to Him on His terms
ACTION
Discussion Questions for the Bible Roundtable
Today we will be exploring the appearances of “the angel of the Lord” in the Old Testament using the following passages:
• Genesis 16:9-13
• Genesis 22:11-15
• Genesis 32:11-13 (the angel of God)
• Numbers 22:22-35
• Judges 2:1
• Judges 6:11-18
• 1 Chronicles 21:7-17
Questions to consider in each passage:
1. What is there in the passage to suggest that “the angel of the Lord” is God?
2. If “the angel of the Lord” is God, what is there that would suggest that this is the second person of the triune God, Jesus?
Read John 1:14-18. How might this help us to understand the identity of “the angel of the Lord”?
