Exodus 20:1-3: A Reflection on the First Commandment

First Things First

Exodus 20:1-3: A reflection on the First Commandment

My family and I are moving, so we're taking a break from our study of Hebrews. We will pick it back up on Nov 5th. 

In studying this week for my presentation of Hebrews 8 in a few weeks, I felt lead by God to spend some time meditating on the law, specifically on the decalogue. It didn't take long for God to show me what it was He wanted to deal with in my life.  Right away, at the top of the list, we're hit with the "main thing" for God.

"And God spoke all these words, saying,
'I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery.  You shall have no other gods before me.'" Exodus 20:1-3

Bam!  Conviction. 

Not that I have been bowing down to pagan idols or attending a church that worships a different deity, but the Holy Spirit began immediately parading through my mind a list of things that have recently been distracting me from simple obedience and worship.  

You see, I'm busy.  I know that it's a common statement, especially in modern America, but I'm busier now than I normally am. The school year is in full-swing, so I'm teaching, and I have a new prep this year to add to my already fairly "busy" load.  I teach the Bible study on Friday nights, which is a joy, but it is a thing for which I must get ready.  My wife is teaching school again for the first time in 9 years, which has shifted the dynamic of our home life.  We're moving to a bigger place, which is a blessing, but we have to pack.  I am the AWANA director for our church.  I play on the worship team Sunday mornings.  I am a husband and father of two, and I try to have time for "fun" with my family.  The list goes on.  Life is crazy.  Because of this craziness, I have to confess, my personal time of study and worship has suffered.  

I have in no way renounced Christ's Lordship in my life.  Most of why I'm "busy" is because I'm "serving." 

I was struck, though, by the difference between "service" and "worship."  The two are not the same.  Certainly, you will serve what you worship (If you're not serving the Body of Christ, you aren't really worshipping its Head), and you will worship what you serve.  While they are intertwined, they are not synonymous.  While serving, I must still purposefully make room for worship, and while worshipping, I must express that worship through my service.  If I'm not doing both, then I'm not doing either well. 

Recently, I've been guilty of worshiping my service, not the one I serve.  

I spend much of the week getting ready to serve, either in AWANAs, in the classroom, or on Friday nights, and much of that time involves digging into the Bible.  While Bible study as lesson prep is still instructive to my soul, it isn't really worship.  My heart is in a different posture when I "sermon prep" than when I worship.  

I spend time practicing worship songs for Sunday morning, but I'm not really worshipping then, I'm "getting it right."  God wants me to present my best to Him, so I believe He is honored when I practice, but my heart is focused on the technical aspects of what I'm doing, not on worshipping. 

When I spend so much time in activities around the Word and worship, I can easily tell myself that I've worshiped, but have I? Not really.  I've spent time on the "business" side of the altar, but I haven't really brought my own gift.  

Warren Wiersbe, in his wonderful work Real Worship, says, "An idol is simply a substitute for God or a supplement to God."  

While I will never substitute another deity for Yahweh, I think I've slid into supplementation.  I'm too busy to worship Him and Him alone, so I'll "get credit" for all the things I do for Him, all the ways I serve.  Unfortunately, God does not operate on a voucher system.  He demands the first and the best.  He will not take the leftovers.  This is still true when the "leftovers" of our lives are what we have left after we've served Him with all our strength.   I don't know if this resonates with you, if you can fall into a worship-service imbalance, but it was a clear message from the Holy Spirit to me this week, and I thought that I might share His admonition with you as well.  I need to repent of worshiping my service and instead renew my commitment to worship the Creator purely so that I can serve Him purely. 

Jesus, forgive me for my idolatry.  Renew in me a spirit that loves to worship you for your own sake, so that my service may be purely an outgrowth of my worship of your majesty, not a substitute for it. 

Trump vs. Clinton: How did we end up here?

Trump & Clinton:

How Did We End Up Here?

This blog is normally about Bible exposition. Excuse the brief foray into other, more temporal topics. I promise to keep it word-focused and Spirit-led.

I have been praying for quite a while now for the next President of the United States. I'm not thrilled with our current one, and I've been hoping that "next time" we'll get it right. Is it okay to be honest with you and say that I'm disappointed? Neither of the two candidates has been able to get me excited. I'm not "for" either of them. I simply am repulsed by one less than the other. In my prayers for our next President, I've been asking God why He's allowing America to suffer under such bad leadership. His answer was to direct me to scripture, which is how He always speaks to me.

God, why can't we have good leadership? Why do we have the current President? Why will the next one be one of these two?

The answer from scripture is that we are a people who have turned against the Lord. We have taken so many of the steps into sin that are recorded in Romans 1 that it may as well be addressed to America in particular. We have ignored the Creator God and have instead gotten so involved in the management of His creation that we have turned ecology and environmentalism into an idol (vs 18-23).

We've become so fascinated with our own sexuality that our bodies and their gratification have become not only a drive but a multi-billion dollar industry and a force that is strong enough to create bad laws and overturn good ones (vs 24-25).

Of course, the fascination with and widespread acceptance of open heterosexuality soon allowed homosexuality to come out of the shadows of sin and shame into which it had always previously been appropriately confined. Homosexuality went from a sin that less than 3% of the population practiced to one that some studies suggest up to 10% of Americans have at least experimented with (vs 26-27).

Along with an explosion of open sexual sin, all sorts of debauchery have also been paraded out into the light of "polite culture." People don't think anything of lying, cheating, abusing other people's trust, disregarding authority, and lauding the loss of the traditional family as normative and, in some articles, even healthy (vs 28-31).

All of this in a nation where 94% of Americans still own at least one Bible! We have access to the laws of God. We should know better. Most of us do. Still, we not only sin in our own private lives, but we "give approval to those who practice them" (vs 32).

Isa 3 was not written prophetically about America, but the God who declared it about Israel is the same God who rules the universe today.

"8 For Jerusalem has stumbled and Judah has fallen,
Because their speech and their actions are against the LORD,
To rebel against His glorious presence.

"9 The expression of their faces bears witness against them,
And they display their sin like Sodom;
They do not even conceal it.
Woe to them!
For they have brought evil on themselves."

Woe to us. This is what our nation has become. We have taken the whole ride down the slide of evil, and have landed squarely at the bottom. Is it any wonder that our government "of the people, by the people, and for the people" is also full of evil debauchery? You see, we set our national leadership's anchor in the will of the people (don't think I'm not a fan of democracy or am angling to get the government overthrown. I'm not.), and this is where it has taken us. Most of our founders were believers, and so they had faith in the Holy Spirit at work in the heart of American voters. Sadly, we have betrayed their trust. Instead of having a national heart, a national soul that can be trusted with the government of our nation, our national heart has just verified in a collection of nearly 400 million souls what God said through the prophet Jeremiah (17:9) about the hearts of all mankind, "The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick; who can understand it?"

We are sinners, personally, privately, nationally, publically, and as an entire race. That's why we are where we are as a political structure walking toward November 8th. God said it would happen. In Isiah 3, He declared the same situation over rebellious Israel,

"1For behold, the Lord GOD of hosts is going to remove from Jerusalem and Judah Both supply and support, the whole supply of bread
And the whole supply of water;

"2The mighty man and the warrior,
The judge and the prophet,
The diviner and the elder,

"3The captain of fifty and the honorable man,
The counselor and the expert artisan,
And the skillful enchanter.

"4And I will make mere lads their princes,
And capricious children will rule over them,

"5And the people will be oppressed,
Each one by another, and each one by his neighbor;
The youth will storm against the elder
And the inferior against the honorable.

"6When a man lays hold of his brother in his father’s house, saying,
“You have a cloak, you shall be our ruler,
And these ruins will be under your charge,”

and later

"12O My people! Their oppressors are children,
And women rule over them.
O My people! Those who guide you lead you astray
And confuse the direction of your paths."

We are easily oppressed. There are no leaders. We elect people completely unfit for the task to our highest offices because they look good on the outside, and it is these very leaders who are now the champions of our own national rebellion.

What are we to do?

Again, from Isiah, there is a call to repentance. God is able to save His people (and ours), but our sins stand in our way. In Isaiah 59, we are made to wear the responsibility for our wallowing in a broken society.

"1Behold, the LORD’S hand is not so short That it cannot save;
Nor is His ear so dull
That it cannot hear.

2But your iniquities have made a separation between you and your God,
And your sins have hidden His face from you so that He does not hear."

It is not that God cannot make the difference, it is that "we, the people," don't let Him. After describing the details of our rebellion, God steps in and tells us the source of the power that will make the difference in our society, that will invite the restoration of the Lord, in verses 20-21, he declares:

20“A Redeemer will come to Zion,
And to those who turn from transgression in Jacob,” declares the LORD.

21“As for Me, this is My covenant with them,” says the LORD: “My Spirit which is upon you, and My words which I have put in your mouth shall not depart from your mouth, nor from the mouth of your offspring, nor from the mouth of your offspring’s offspring,” says the LORD, “from now and forever.”

The solution is threefold: Jesus, Repentance, and the Word of God!

Jesus.
He was once the figure that united Americans, the one nearly everyone could agree to listen to. Now, He stands and knocks at our national door and is largely left outside. We can't talk about him in our public discourse, can't mention his name in our professional language, can't invite him into our politics or use public money to act in accordance with His commands. He is worse than the elephant in the room nobody want's to mention. He's the elephant outside the room everyone's forgotten. Yet He alone has the power to change the course of our nation's trajectory. It's a shame we won't let Him do it.

But what if we changed? What if "we, the people" of America were to once again acknowledge the overarching supremacy of Jesus Christ higher than any elected official, higher than our idol of our own greatness, higher than our own prideful self-fascination? What would happen? Then He would come in and begin to set things right.

Repentance.
The word means to change your mind about something. In this context, it means to change your mind about your sin. My sin. Our nation's sin. We have to stop applauding our own brokenness and the twisted lives of our neighbors. Enough tolerance!  Life is not like little league where all that is needed for a trophy is for you to show up and try. No, there is a standard. No, you aren't making it. No, you aren't amazing. Yes, you are a horrible wretch. So am I. We need to see ourselves and our track record the way God does and agree with His appraisal of our condition, individually and nationally. We need to call our sin what it is. It's not an alternative lifestyle; it's sin. It's not my personal freedom; it's sin. It's not my version of the truth; it's sin. Naming it as such is the first step.

What would happen if we, as a nation, were to turn to God, change our minds about ourselves, and agree with Him about our sinfulness? He has promised on an individual basis in 1 Jn 1:9 and on a national level in 2 Chron 7:14 that forgiveness, healing, and restoration will follow.

The Word of God.
We have had the word of God, the revelation of His desires and love for His people, for thousands of years. It was the first book that our national budget published for the people. 94% of Americans own one. It is the best-selling book of all time worldwide and in America. The New York Times' bestseller list intentionally omits the Bible from consideration because, if it were included in the pack, it would win every week. We have them! We don't read them. We don't submit to them. We deny it's power.

What if we picked them up, blew the dust off the cover, and read them? Instead of forcing the interpretation of scripture to morph into a fit with our culture, what if we instead forced our culture to morph into a fit with the Word? What if we once again set the scriptures as the source of our instruction in righteousness and the force to which we must align or national compass? Look through history and you'll see the answer: Israel under good King Josiah or Nehemiah and Ezra, Geneva under Calvin, Danemark under the Christ-fearing King Christian IV, America in its nascent days or in the midst of our two great awakenings. All of these will paint a portrait of the outpoured blessing on a nation who sets its national laws in the context of God's law.

So how did we get here? "We, the people of the United States of America" slid into sin and willful rebellion, and our democratically-elected leaders reflected the will of the population. We are sinners. We elect sinners. We rejected God. We elect God-rejectors.

What do we do now? Repent. Follow the Word. Seek after Jesus. Tell others to do the same.

Hebrews 7:11-28, Jesus is Greater Than Aaron

Hebrews 7:11-28

Jesus is Greater Than Aaron

How do you describe God? Which three adjectives or pictures of Him come to mind first? Love? Holy? Merciful? Powerful?  Yes.  All of these and more, but we need to always hold in our minds that “our God is a consuming fire.” Deut 4:24 and Hebrews 12:29 both attest to this description of Him.  We are invited to approach this God boldly in Christ, but we dare not do so on our own.  For left on our own, we will be consumed before we get within a million miles of His holiness.  Our bold approach can only be done “in Christ.”  It is this crucial aspect of Christ’s ministry that will be in focus here in these passages. The video of the teaching is below, and my notes follow.

1. Start with the key verse: Hebrews 7:25
1. Look at the passage and answer these questions:
1. How are we saved (on our part and on God’s)?
2. From what are we saved?
3. How is our salvation maintained?
2. Therefore, this is the result of what goes before.  We’ll get there.
3. He is able to save.
1. His very name, “God saves.”
2. There is none too sinful for Jesus’ power in salvation. Isa 59:1
4. ESV “Forever” not good. KJV “to the uttermost” is much better. παντελής pantelēs
1. Compound word: Pan, “all” and Teleos, “end, outcome, end result”
2. God can save through it all and guarantee the outcome, that those whom He has saved will be saved.
5. Those who draw near, προσερχομένους Present, middle, participle.
1. Middle voice is almost always reflexive.
2. “Those who are drawing themselves near”
3. This acknowledges the importance of our real choice to receive Christ.
6. Through Him
1. It is only when we draw ourselves near to God through Jesus that we are saved.  
2. If we try to draw ourselves near to God on our own basis or on the merits of some other intermediary, we will be consumed.
7. Since he always lives πάντοτε pantote lit “every when” there is never a time when Jesus is not doing this.
8. To make intercession ἐντυγχάνω entygchanō “to plead, to petition, to confer on behalf of”
1. We may “draw ourselves” near, but it is only safe to do so through Christ.
2. It is the active, ongoing forever ministry of Jesus to plead with the Father on our behalf.
3. Our salvation is secure because Jesus is continuously doing His job of intercession.
9. Piper: The “asbestos conduit” to the consuming fire.  
10. It is impossible to overstate the importance of Jesus’ ongoing ministry on behalf of his body.  If it were not for his continuing ministry, we would surely fall.
1. Deut 32:35
2. 2Tim 1:12
11. It is critical that we have the best ongoing ministry of intercession possible.  For only a perfect ministry can guarantee our ability to approach a perfect God.
2. Outline verses, 11-12
1. A perfect high priest is needed if we are to survive drawing near to the Father.  
1. Levitical is insufficient, hence the veil
2. The levitical system is characterised with distance, not intimacy
2. Under levitical priesthood, the law?
1. The decalogue first given Ex20. Priesthood Ex32
2. The people did not have the law, though until Ex34
3. Tied to the law in any case.  
4. Administered by the levitical priest
3. Another. Heteros, not allos.  
4. Change in priesthood, change in law
1. New high priest issued in a new judicial dispensation Num 35:25-28
2. The change of the system of High priest changes the system as well  
1. What guided the dispensation under Melchizedek at the time of Abraham? Grace and faith
2. Jas 2:23, Gen 15:26
3. After the priesthood of Melchizedek is instigated and Levi is done away with, the system of grace and faith returns.
5. The declaration of God in psalm 110 declared the levitical system and the law insufficient.
6. Why have the law then? Gal 3.  We needed a schoolmaster
3. Vs 13-17
1. Jesus, from Judah, which cannot produce priests (Ex32), Saul and Uzziah
2. Levi, the tribe of priests, is not to produce kings, which is the role of Judah (gen 49:10)
3. The tribal system passed tribal identity through patrilineal inheritance and national identity through the mother.  It is impossible to belong to both tribes.
4. The declaration that Messiah will be a king and a priest in psa 110:4 makes it impossible that their priesthood and kingship are both naturally inherited.
5. One or both must be supernaturally declared apart from heredity. Ps110:4 does this for the priesthood.
6. Arises is in the middle voice, reflexive. The priest arises himself.  Yet God declares it.  God must also be the priest. Isa 59
4. Vs 18-19 Making perfect, drawing near.
1. The Old Law makes nothing perfect
1. Every year, they still need to day of atonement
2. Every day, they need the daily sacrifices.
3. Every dead priest is replaced by younger ones.  
4. It never terminates.
2. Jesus died once for all
1. 1 Pe 3:18;
2. Rom 6:10
3. Heb 9:28
4. There is no need for a further sacrifice.
3. The old law was about separation.  In the new covenant, we dare to draw near.
5. Vs 20-22 the Oath and Guarantee
1. Significant in this sermon, God swears by Himself and will not change His mind.  Jesus’ priesthood will never end.
2. The Levitical priesthood did not enjoy such a guarantee.  
3. In fact, they could only serve for a few years, and their ministry ended in 70 AD.
4. Jesus as a “surety” of our covenant.  
1. First occurrence in scripture: Gen 43:8.  Judah pledges his own life as a guarantee for Benjamin’s safety.
2. A picture of Jesus.  He has pledged himself as a guarantee of our safety in drawing near.
6. Vs 23-24 Many priests vs. one.
1. Because the task could not be completed, many hands were needed and a constant flow of new ones are constantly being added to replace the ones aging out and dying.
2. Only ever one High Priest of Melchizedek, Jesus.
7. Vs 26-27 Sinful vs Holy
1. Levitical priests needed to sacrifice for their own sins. (Lev 16
2. Jesus did not