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Gentlemen, I say with the utmost sincerity that I have been greatly enriched by your company and fellowship these few fleeting days, and I take back home a glowing memory, and the thought of the riches of God's ways with you and what God is doing and will yet do through you will be a cheer throughout many a winter month in my far distant western rock in the middle of the Atlantic. It might be ungracious of me, when you have given so much, to ask for more, but if any of you do issue either prayer letters or occasional letters of information, I would be very grateful to have them from you.
You can get my address from Nigel here or Myrtlefield people. I would, uh, love to be able to follow what the Lord is doing through you. I cannot guarantee to answer those letters, and if you send them and I don't answer because of the multitude of letters I get to answer, don't give up. I am genuinely interested, and I read them and I pray about them. Some of my, uh, uh, very, very kind friends also send me photographs of themselves. I have what, uh, uh, uh, uh, is a kind of a rogues gallery in my home, you'll see.
I promise not necessarily to show them to the police, but I have, uh, array of photographs of me. Uh, they also enrich my life as I think of the many delightful people that God has brought to enrich me. And if you were ever disposed to do that, put on the back of the same your name and country and so forth, I would be very grateful indeed to be thus reminded of you, uh, from time to time as I go around my house. Moreover, any works that you think I ought to know about, written works, I mean, and studies and articles, and particularly any bearing on Exodus that you have found particularly, uh, helpful and important, and you say to yourself, that gooding man, it's a pity he hadn't known about that, uh, when he talked to us, uh, do see, uh, do please, if you can, find the time and the grace to do it.
Give me, uh, jot down the details, uh, uh, of name and author and so forth on a card and send it to me. This morning, I need not detain you very long. There are two whole sections of the book of Exodus remaining, but one way and another, we have already talked quite a bit about them, and I need not repeat all that here. All I wish to do now, therefore, is to run through briefly some of the main ideas in these two sections with the minimum of application, and to point out how the structure and the interrelationship between these two movements and the movements that have gone before point the way both to our understanding of them and also to the way that we could apply and preach them in our own ministry.
So now, movement seven, beginning, beginning in thirty two, is, as we have frequently seen, the false festival, the false chag. Stands opposite, of course, the orden- or- ordaining of the true festival, Exodus twelve, the true memorial festival of the Passover, aimed to remind all the consequent generations of Israel who it was that brought them out of Egypt and how he did it. Let's go over now the three main falsities in this false chag.
hag. First of all, they took the riches that were the byproducts of their redemption and set them up as the goal. That is always a danger. Sometimes it happens of people who've got their lives in a mess and poverty struck- stricken come to the Savior. The Lord cleans up their lives, they no longer spend money on drugs and tobacco and booze, and rightly become more wealthy and rightly use their wealth for the good of their wives and children and so forth.
It can happen that then, instead of this greater wealth and affluence being thankfully received as a byproduct of their redemption, they set up the wealth as the goal of redemption, and it becomes a false god. Secondly, they not only set up this fa- this wealth as a false, uh, goal, they set up this golden calf made out of their wealth as a false means of redemption.
They danced around it saying, these are thy gods that brought thee up out of the land of Egypt. That has happened, gentlemen, in my country, where first of all there was a great emphasis on the social benefits that come from redemption, and rightly so. But in some quarters, little by little, the gospel was abandoned, and we had preached to us that the way to save people is by education and social engineering and psychological advice. These good things became not merely a goal, but were advertised and preached as the means of redemption.
I remember when I first went to live in the northeast of England, I was tremendously impressed by the vast work that God did through Wesley and the Methodist movement. Great evangelical revival in that part of the world. With its emphasis subsequently on social justice, likewise, it proved of tremendous benefit to the downtrodden coal miners of that part of the world. When one realizes the sufferings that those miners went through at the hands of unscrupulous mine owners, it was a cause of great thanksgiving to God that along with the evangelical awakening, there went the sense of social justice and responsibility.
When I first arrived, I discovered that there was living across the street from me, uh, a gentleman. He was highly intelligent. He was in the Ministry of Education, and he had been brought up in Methodism, but soon abandoned it, and he went on the convoys to Russia during the war and came back from those terrible experiences at sea, a hard-boiled atheist. He told me, after being an atheist for many years, he was in his room one night when over the radio came Billy Graham preaching from Hebrews chapter two.
How shall we escape if we neglect so great salvation? He said, David, I was overwhelmed with a sense of God speaking to me, that God had something for me which if I neglected or rejected, I might lose forever, and there and then I bowed down and, uh, believed. He said, I went to bed, uh, wondering whether it would last till tomorrow, so was anxious to know as soon as he woke up, had it lasted? Apparently it had, you'll say, but he decided he could be a Christian without going to church. Much like churchianity. So he persevered, began to read the Bible, went on with the law, but not going to church.
He said, in my reading, David, I eventually came across a verse that said, not forsaking the assembling of yourselves together, as the manner of some is. So I said, well, oh, I said to myself, then you do have to go to church. So he better obey it. Ah. So what church? What church other than to go back to the church of his boyhood? One Sunday morning, dressed like a respectable citizen, he he went to church, we'll say, and the elders on the door nearly had a a a, a heart stoppage when they saw what they thought was this towering atheist coming along. And politely they said, what brings you here?
He said, I've been saved. No, no, they said, there's nothing in that. That's a flash in the pan. And he said, David, would you come with me to our class meeting? All they want to talk about is not prayer and the Bible. They want to have little talks on the general post office and... How sad. The movement that had now made social justice and all that kind of thing. The means of redemption, and lost their hold upon the true means of redemption.
And finally, it is to be noticed how deceptive was their terminology. When they built their calf and danced around it, they said, tomorrow is a festival of Yahweh. But while they retained the same name, it no longer meant the same thing. What a lot of double talk there is in modern theology. You can ask some leaders and teachers, do you believe in the virgin birth? And they will say yes. If you know enough to ask them, but do you believe in the virgin birth as an historical event, they'll say no.
They hope you don't ask them. Uh, but if you do, they'll say, no, it's not an historical event. It's a myth that the church made up to express the church's view that Jesus Christ is somehow special. You ask them, do you believe in the resurrection? Yes. Do you believe in the resurrection as a physical and historical thing? No. They use the same terminology, but what they mean by it is something completely different. So now we come to the reaction of God and the reaction of Moses.
Let us notice the seriousness of God's reaction. For he said to Moses, leave me alone, this is a stiff-necked people, that my wrath may wax hot against them and that I may consume them, and I will make of thee a great nation. From this reaction of God, we see God's interpretation of what they had done. If you read some Jewish commentaries, and there are some exceedingly fine Jewish commentaries on the book of Exodus, as you might expect. I personally find very helpful the commentary by the late Umberto Cassuto.
Yet, when they come to this, they will play down the gravity of what Aaron did. It goes against the evidence of God's reaction. He threatened forthwith and immediately to consume them. They had not only broken the covenant that they had so som- solemnly promised to keep, before God himself had had time to write it down, so to speak. But what in particular in that covenant they had broken was its chiefest point, thou shalt have no other gods but me. It was a personal affront to God, a desecration and perversion of the very name of God.
And God threatened to consume. What follows is a delightful story of Moses' intercession. I am amazed that God condescended thus to speak to Moses, and speaks to us in terms obviously geared to our ability as humans to understand it. That God should allow himself to be argued with and persuaded and turned from his original statement, and in the end to grant all that Moses pleaded for. It's a demonstration of the name of God that leaves me a gasp with God's condescension.
Intercession. Moses' first intercession before he went down to the people was very spiritually, I nearly said clever, but that's not quite the word, is it? He pleaded God's own name and reputation. If you will do it, he said. Then what will the Egyptians say? They were very astute, wasn't it?
And its implication is staggering. God had committed his reputation, having put his hand to bring Israel out of Egypt and to bring that nation into their inheritance. God had committed his own reputation to that project. And if now you destroy it, what will the Egyptians say? What a magnificent insight, isn't it? For I think of us. That God, who has begun a good work in you, gentlemen, has committed his name before heaven, earth, and hell to this project.
For he began the work. Says Moses, if you now don't complete it, pray consider your reputation. And what the Egyptians will say is not merely that you must be a tupni hepni god, you couldn't achieve what you set out to do. They will also get the impression that you are a malevolent god, and the reason why you brought them out of Egypt was to destroy them. The Egyptians will say, this powerful God that nearly wrecked our country and destroyed our firstborn carries on being malevolent, and now he's got the people out, he destroys them as well.
Moses pleads the name of God and the character of God, and we surely may be emboldened to plead with God on that same ground. The gentlemen consider also at this juncture Moses being faithful, said, God, get out of the way, Moses, leave me alone, and I'll destroy them. I will make of thee a great nation. If I would have been Moses, that would have been a colossal temptation to me. I think of all the murmurings of the Israelites, the way they came near to stoning him, their gross ingratitude.
I would have said, God, well, yes, I, I, I, I, I take your point, yes. And in a sense, I mean, I can understand your frustration. I felt like it myself, and I tried to overcome it, but now, Lord, I mean, they've gone too far. I think it is a hopeless job, actually. And, uh, well, I'm not self-seeking altogether, but, um, uh, considering your name and you like to carry on the project, uh, perhaps that is a good idea. Start with me. And God would have still been fulfilling his promise, wouldn't he, to Abraham of his seed to raise up a nation. And there was that extra bit of temptation that I should have yielded to.
I should have been ashamed to argue that down on the plain among the people, but Moses was up the mountain, and the people would never have heard what he said. And by the time he got down, they'd have all been destroyed, so nobody would ever have known anyway. But up there, unseen by the people, he remained faithful to them. I don't know how you are disposed to translate Hebrews chapter three and its early verses. Hebrews chapter three exhorts us to consider the apostle and high priest of our confession, even Jesus, and older English vers- versions translate it who was faithful to him that appointed him, as also was Moses in all his house.
As you probably know, the Greek is an indirect statement construction, and the verb is a participle, and it is a present participle. It is open, therefore, to a trans- to a translator, if he wishes to, to translate it into English as a present participle, participle, though, oh, or he can translate it as a past if he likes in English idiom. And I get very tempted to translate it as a present participle. Consider the high priest, apostle and high priest of our confession, not who was faithful, but consider him at this moment, up in the mountain, interceding with us, for us with God.
And though we cannot see him, consider him this very moment being faithful to you. That is the something, isn't it, in our quieter moments, to sink back into our armchairs and to consider the blessed Lord, considering all my faults and failings on the journey towards my destiny. Consider him being faithful, like Moses was. And so Moses pleads the covenant, and the Lord repented, it says.
That's a condescension, I presume, to our way of thinking. Where had Moses learned these things? Why, in movement two— uh, movement one, hadn't he, when God had announced he was going to deliver. Even when Moses had despaired of it all, God had said, I have amended my covenant with Abraham, and I will deliver. But now, if, uh, Moses has gained God's remission of his punishment, and Moses comes down to the mountains, there's no soft, flabby sentimentality in his dealing with the people.
No, this doesn't matter. And we're now treated to what Moses did to bring home to the people the seriousness of their fault. He first smashes the covenant completely. The covenant is broken. If ever they are to be restored, it will be by utterly by the unmerited grace of God. This is not some little aberration. This is smash the covenant completely. Secondly, he took their golden calf and he ground it to pieces, and he strewed it on the water, and he made the people drink it.
That must have been bitter stuff, bitter medicine. It has to be done sometimes, doesn't it? When you are faced with incipient apostasy, gentlemen, there is no use being sentimental. If people are thinking to be emerging towards incipient apostasy, you must make them taste the bitterness of what they have done. How will they repent if they never realize the seriousness of their attitude and action?
There came something sterner, then Moses stood in the gate of the camp and said, whoso is on the Lord's side, let him come to me. We have an hymn in English, old fashioned now, but it can be sung with great gusto. Who is on, well, I won't sing it to you, this is a, this is meant to be a decent Christian meeting. Ah, but it runs like, who is on the Lord's side, who will serve the king? It's often used at the end of a, a devotional appeal to get young people to devote themselves to the Lord or missionaries to go out to the heathen. It's not often pointed out that the first opening lines of the hymn were written as a challenge to deal with apostasy.
Who is on the Lord's side as distinct from this idolatry of the golden calf? Who is on the side of Jehovah against this newfangled idolatrous reinterpretation of the great fundamental fact of the faith. This is a challenge that needs to be preached in our university comp- departments of theology, in our Bible school. I was in an ordnance college recently, and I won't tell you where it was.
Many of the believers came to me and said, you know, David, it's a hard job to survive here in this college. It's a hard job to maintain your faith, particularly in the Old Testament. And sometimes people don't manage to maintain their faith. Oh, what a sorry thing. This is a challenge that needs to be preached preeminently in theological circles. Who is on the Lord's side? Aaron doesn't come out of it very well, does he, the great high priest, but what a weak-kneed chap he was.
Well, Moses, he said, you know, it wasn't really, uh, uh, uh, my fault. I, I just got this stuff, and I, I, I, I put it in a mold, and well, I couldn't really help it, and out came a golden calf, you see. And then I said to myself, well, with Moses gone up the mountain and and the people are so clamorous that if we don't give in to them, we stand in danger of losing all the people. So you keep the people by indulging and permitting a little bit of, uh, idolatry. What good is that?
Called who is on the Lord's side, and the Levites girded on their swords and executed the disciplines of God. This is a part of scripture where we shall see and feel most keenly the discontinuity between the Old Testament and the New. For failure to see that discontinuity has brought a scandal on the centuries of Christendom, hasn't it? As Christendom imagined that it was the continuation of Israel, as Christendom set itself up as a sacral state, as Israel was a sacral state, and therefore used the political power to persecute heretics, and that literally with the sword.
What scandals there were perpetrated in the name of Christ. The Christ who forbade his followers to either defend him or to propagate his gospel by the use of the sword. Gentlemen, it is very dangerous for people, Christian people, to get it into their head that they are a continuation of Israel and that nowadays our countries ought to be theocracies, theocracies. They're not. This is not that old covenant. We live under the new.
The weapons of our warfare are not material weapons, but for all that we have to fight. Fight the good fight of the faith, says Paul to Timothy, and Timothy was surrounded likewise by all kinds of false doctrines that were in danger of perverting the truth. Let me point out once more that this is movement, uh, uh, uh, 7. It stands opposite in the symmetry to movement three, the Great Passover.
One of the strong emphases of that Passover movement was this, that since the firstborn of Israel had been spared by the blood of the sacrificial lamb, the firstborn must be consecrated to God. Now we read of another consecration, demonstration of devotion to God that are men that are prepared to stand and be on the Lord's side. And not for the sake of narrow-minded little things of indifference, but for the fundamental doctrines pertaining to the person of God, and the deity of our Lord, and the very foundations of the gospel are prepared to bring godly discipline into the church.
How can we permit false doctrines that deny the deity of the Lord Jesus and his resurrection, and insult the divine majesty of God, to carry on unrebuked in our churches. Who is on the side of Yahweh? Let them show their consecration to the Lord by standing like men on the Lord's side.
This cannot be a matter of compromise. Having done that, Moses returned up the mountain for his second intercession. Moses returned and said, oh, this people have sinned a great sin and have made them gods of gold, yet now if thou wilt forgive their sin. But it was an apociaposis, wasn't it? And he never finished the sentence. It was almost impossible thing to ask of God, wouldn't it?
The sin was so great. But then says he, if not, blot me, I pray thee, out of thy book which thou hast written. I suppose two interpretations are possible of that. The one I myself, uh, uh, feel better, may not for that reason be right, is that what Moses was saying, oh God, if you, if it's so grievous that you can't forgive them, then I don't want to survive them. Block me out of thy book. He's talking about the physical book of life, isn't he? If you're now going to destroy this nation physically, pray destroy me as well. Block my name out of your, the book of the physically living.
I don't want a survivor. At refusal of Moses to be separated from his people, sinful though they were, puts the other side of the story, doesn't it? He stands with the people of God in his heart. And once more, I say Moses was never more like our blessed Lord when thus he stood identified with his people. And God said, Moses, I will judge whom I will judge.
Yet, in general, he granted Moses' point and said, now go lead the people unto the place which I have spoken unto thee. Behold, mine angels will go before thee. Nevertheless, in the day when I visit, I will visit their sin upon them. And the Lord smote them. So the Lord said to Moses, depart, go up hence, thou and the people which thou hast brought up out of the land of Egypt, unto the land of which I swear unto Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob, saying, unto thy seed will I give it, uh, and I will send an angel before thee, and uh, he shall take them to this land flowing with milk and honey. But I will not go up in the midst of thee, for thou art a stiff-necked people, lest I consume thee in the way.
And the people took off their ornaments and mourned. And the Lord said unto Moses, say unto the children of Israel, you are a stiff-necked people. If I go up in the midst of thee for one moment, I shall consume thee. Therefore now put off thy ornaments from thee, that I may know what to do unto thee. So they did. Moses would later up take, take, Moses would later take up, wouldn't he, the very words that God had used and question God's phraseology. But meanwhile, what first steps could be taken to repair the damage?
So Moses used to take the tent and to pitch it without the camp, far off from the camp. Source critics have found this a difficult thing, apparently. They feel that this is a, a, a, a survival of some other earlier source, you know, perhaps a source more like the historical thing, when the tabernacle was a little thing, really, that Moses and his one-man assistant Joshua could take and pitch outside the camp, you'll see, and that this other story of this elaborate tabernacle full of furniture and gold and silver and whatnot that took a young army of Levites to cart around and put up and take down is a later imaginary exaggeration of the original story.
And they have said, ho, ho, and ha, ha, and uh, this proves our evolutionary theory and so forth and so on. Perverse as usual. Or this tent of meeting, real though it was, was never meant to be the same thing as the tabernacle. You will see it from the function. In the tabernacle, the Lord came down into the tabernacle and the people stood outside or came into the holy place. In this little tent, the thing was, uh, the other way round. The tent was pitched, Moses got into the tent, and the Lord came down and stood outside the door. This tent was similar in function to the cave that Elijah got into on Mount Horeb, isn't it?
And Elijah got into the cave, and the Lord came and passed by the front door of the cave, and Elijah came out to the mouth of the cave, and, uh, the glory of God was revealed to him there. The tabernacle was a completely different thing, with a different conception. Here was an individual tent for Moses and his assistant, and he used to pitch it outside the camp. I remember the people are not yet under un- uh, free from the terrible, uh, sentence that God has put upon.
Moses deliberately takes this tent and places it outside the camp. The tabernacle would one day be constructed right in the center of the camp. Now, for the moment, Moses takes his personal tent outside the camp, the tent of meeting, and gets inside the tent, and the glory of the Lord would come down to him, to Moses personally. And as that dear man of God and faithful servant of God would stand in the door of his tent, and God came down to speak with him, it says that the Israelites looked round the pathway there and stood awe-stricken by the sight of a man of God holding converse with his God.
The sight of the glory moved this man and that man and the other man to come out and seek the Lord. God raised up more men amongst his people ever, who are known to be men to whom God manifests his glory. For the issue at stake, isn't it, is, is are we going to serve God or a false God? God, the real Jehovah, or the golden calf? And in the end, the way you will attract people to the true God is when you help them to see the glory of the true God.
Very often that can have to be the people seeing the very glory of God in the spiritual experience of one man, one servant, and beginning to perceive the difference between the glory of the true God and the miserable fake glory of that golden calf. It's not just in the denunciation of heresy that people are brought to repentance. It is by the attractiveness of the exceeding glory of God.
God help us all, that in our varied ministries, this is predominant. Doesn't merely have to be the preachers, does it? How many washerwomen there have been, walking in close fellowship with God, and it has been visible to all who have known them that the glory of God has filled their lives. And then, uh, as Moses was visited by God from time to time, Moses began to speak to the Lord and picked up what God said.
Thou sayest unto me, bring up this people, that thou hast not let me know whom exactly thou wilt send with me. Yet thou hast said, I know thee by name, and thou hast also found grace in thy sight. So, um, show me thy ways, Lord. God had said, I'll send an angel before thee, but Moses was being a little bit crafty. He said, you're not exactly explained to me, um, who, uh, who, who, who is this that you're going to send in, uh, you see? And anyway, God, you say to me, take this people up. Well, you haven't told me your ways. How on earth does anybody, I mean, what's the method to use, Lord, if you don't mind my inquiring in a little bit more detail?
How do you get, uh, people from the wilderness up to the promised land? H- h- how is it? I mean, would you might not mind showing me your ways a little bit more extensively? Uh, where would you suggest, Lord? Oh, said the Lord, uh, now defining further what he'd meant by the angel. My presence will go with thee and give thee rest. Ah, marvelous, says Moses, for to tell you the truth, if your presence didn't go with us, we wouldn't want to go anyway. We were thinking about it the other night, weren't we?
Suppose God promised you heaven and all its glories and five or six archangels to be your personal servants and attendants, and an endless fleet of heavenly Mercedes-Benz and all that you could wish for, but said, uh, when you get there, I shall be there. Would you want to go, gentlemen? And it's not only i- if we, if you're not there when we arrive, but if your presence doesn't go with us now, we don't want to go anyway. God forbid that we should ever be like Mary and Joseph, and they weren't really to blame, were they?
When they returned from the festival at the temple and went on their journey and supposed the Lord Jesus was among them, and he wasn't. So, righto, says Moses, do say in God, I- I'm so, that's so marvelous if your presence goes with us, because you see, that is, that is the thing that distinguishes us from all else. If we don't have your presence, we... we're just like the old Egyptians, you know. And if our churches know nothing of the presence of God and his glory in them, pray, what difference are they from any other religion under the sun? And then Moses was emboldened, and he said, Lord, show me not only your ways, but show me your glory.
Well, there's no other way, ultimately, of getting people to their promised inheritance, is there? How our little hearts are deflected, like children, as we journey, going off after this attraction and that attraction, and being tempted to love the world and the things that are in the world, and by path meadows galore. The only thing that will get us to glory at last is the sight of the glory of God now, in such radiance that will overpower all other attractions. God took him up the mountain, put him in the cleft of the rock, and pronounced the name of the Lord.
All the more deeper and more profound and moving, because it was the name of the Lord, compassionate still, even after such a dreadful, incipient apostasy. Thus does God's mercy over our mistakes in our Christian life come to be an added motivation for moving on to glory. And then Moses, forgive the terminology, played his last card. Lord, he said, if you're compassionate, if now I have found grace in thy sight, O Lord, let the Lord, I pray thee, go in the midst of us.
Not content to have the Lord go with them in advance, leading the way, but go in the midst of us. Now notice the next astounding thing he said. For it is a stiff-necked people. God had originally said, Moses, my angels will go in front of you and protect you and lead you, but I will not go in the midst of you, for you are a stiff-necked people, and if I went in the midst of you, I would destroy you. And Moses says, oh Lord, if I found grace in thy sight, uh, go in the midst of us, for it is a stiff-necked people.
And what's the logic behind that bit of argumentation? Or can it be but double? Stiff-necked people, how will you get them home to glory? There's only one power on earth can do it, if the Lord, uh, uh, uh, and that is that the Lord should come and dwell in the very midst of them. That would have been dangerous, except this, that God had just declared his name to be a God of compassion and forgiveness. But John chapter eight is a reminiscent of this very scene.
For when the evil men came to our Lord and quoted, uh, Moses and said Moses commanded that this adulterous woman should be stoned, he bent and wrote with his finger on the ground. The very same finger that had originally written the first tables of the law. Moses. Then he lifted himself up. And he said, whosoever is without sin among you, let him cast the first stone. And they stood a second or two, and then they turned around and went out, for they had found a light that was more powerful to expose than ever the law of Moses was.
They could stand there quoting Moses and themselves feel safe, exposing this poor wretch and feeling themselves very righteous. But in our blessed Lord, they had found the lawgiver incarnate, able to expose more profoundly than Moses has ever done. So that he said, cast the first stone, gentlemen. And as they were making their minds up and bowing, uh, and going out, he bowed down again, and for the second time he wrote. And when he lifted himself up, he said, has no one condemned thee, woman?
She said, no, Lord. And he said, neither do I condemn thee. He wasn't saying that from now on adultery was okay, and that adultery in our more enlightened Christian age is not to be regarded as a sin, but only a falling short of the ideal or something. But he was saying that here was a guilty woman in her desperation, unable to flee, there was nowhere to flee to. Self-confessed and self-condemned sinner shall the sentence of Moses' law be carried out upon her? And the second writing said that God, the lawgiver, was the God of infinite compassion.
The sentence shall be not carried out on her. But you say, how was that just? How did that honor Moses' law? Because presently he went to Calvary and paid the penalty that Moses' law, that he himself, in other words, had imposed. It is as we stand also in the cleft of the rock, hidden by the hand of God from the danger of the glory of his holiness. As we stand there as wretched sinners, who have not only sinned before we converted, but wretchedly failed the Lord since we have converted.
It is there that we see the extreme glory of God's name, and have a gospel to preach thereafter that ought to make our faces veritably shine. And when Moses came down from the mountain, his face was all aglow, and the people got scared. It was so aglow, that he called them to him. There was, in that sense, nothing for them to fear in the glow of the glory of God mediated through the face of Moses. And they came and heard the marvelous message of their forgiveness and the reinauguration of the project of having the Almighty God dwell among them.
But when he had finished, he put a veil on his face until he then returned to the glory, uh, uh, to to God to speak to God. And when he returned to God, he took the veil off his face, and his face, so to speak, the batteries were recharged. When he came out and talked to the people, they saw the glow, but when he'd finished speaking, he always put a veil on his face until the next time he went into the Lord's presence. And you'll remember what Paul makes of that as he takes the story and applies it in two Corinthians three. He did it, says Paul, you'll see, so that the Israelites should not perceive that the glory of the old covenant was fading.
One day, of course, the glory of the old covenant would fade away completely. To be replaced by the glory of the new covenant. But it wouldn't have done for Israel to have seen in that very moment when that old covenant was now being offered to them again. It wouldn't have done for them at that very moment to see that their old covenant was only a temporary thing, was it? It was glorious, but it was a glory that would fade. So he hid from the fact, hid from them the fact, says Paul, that the glory was fading. And to this day, he says, when I, my Jewish fellow nationals read the law, that same veil remains untaken away.
Here the Greek becomes difficult. It means something like, uh, because it hasn't been revealed to them that a veil is done away in Christ, or that the old covenant is done away in Christ. I prefer the second reading. And you can see that with your God-fearing Jews as you read with them the Old Testament. They read it. But the veil lies there still. They do not see, do they, that the glory of that old covenant was destined to pass away and to give place to the glory of the new. They think that Old Testament, all the ritual of the laws and whatnot and have you, is still in force.
The veil lies untaken away. What a tremendous mercy it is to have seen the glory of God, not in the face of the law, but in the face of Jesus Christ. For the law was given by Moses, but grace and truth came by Jesus Christ. And then says Paul, commenting on the second uh item, when Moses returned to the Lord, he took the veil off and his face was recharged. And he said that also could be applied to our situation. For when Israel turns to the Lord, and they shall see him with unveiled face, the veil shall be taken off their hearts.
Because it, it is not only true that it was veiled from Israel that the old covenant was temporary and passing, but now there lies a veil on their hearts that obscures the true revelation of God. How can that be removed? Why, if they will return to the Lord, as Moses returned to the Lord, and in this instance, says Paul, I'm thinking that the Lord is the Spirit. He too is Lord, is he not? And it is as Israel will turn themselves to the Holy Spirit given by the risen Christ, that they shall see the true significance both of Old Testament and the greater glory of the new.
And then Paul adds, and we all with open face, oh, the Greek is difficult again, bothersome language, Greek. Uh, uh, beholding as in a mirror or reflecting as in a mirror, the glory of the Lord are changed from glory to glory, even as by the Lord the Spirit. I don't know what ver- uh, what translation you, uh, uh, you prefer. When I'm placed, uh, confronted with a choice like that, I'm greedy and take both. Because I've observed it is the, is the manner of mirrors, isn't it? Um, you want to, you put a mirror to that light there, it, the mirror beholds the light, but being the mirror, it also reflects the light.
What a delightful, uh, little illustration of our ministry as servants of the Lord. We stand with our faces to the Lord, and we behold his glory. Whether we know it or not, the glory is reflecting so that others may see. Servants of God have one advantage over mirrors, that if the mirror is looking at the light, you'll see, it reflects it, but take it away and you'll find the mirror isn't changed. We, beholding the glory of the Lord and transmitting it and reflecting it to others, are in fact ourselves being changed.
Oh my brothers, let's give ourselves to the ministry ever more diligently. For not, we not only save others in doing it, we save ourselves. In your seeking God and his glory, in your reflecting it to the world, God is doing a marvelous thing with you. He's changing you. What a glorious encouragement that is in all the hard work of our Christian ministry. So the tabernacle was built.
That is the story of the final section. We needn't repeat all the detail, and perhaps you say to me, why on earth is all that detail there? Isn't that a waste of space in Holy Scripture? I mean, having given the directions for the building of the tabernacle in chapters twenty five following, why didn't these chapters just say, and so the tabernacle was built according to the specifications laid down in chapters twenty five to thirty one? Saved us reading the whole thing through, wouldn't it? Perhaps that's how you treat it anyway. You don't bother to read it through. You say, oh, well, this is going to be the same again. It's enough to know that they did it. Why does God's Holy Spirit spell it all out at length in great detail that they actually made all the details that they were told to make.
Well, I suppose one literary reason is this, you know. This is not cold literature, is it? If you've any, any sense of the magnitude of the emotions that were involved when God threatened to, uh, destroy the people and to dis- ditch the whole scheme of building the tabernacle, and you have come through that flood tide of emotion to the point where Moses intercession has gained a point with God, and God is going to come amongst us. You can't just put a full stop and go home, can you? Turn on the TV. Your heart will be absolutely leaping, and the inspired writer has got to give some sense, some proportion to the wonder of.
It's like a Greek tragedy in that, isn't it? I don't know if you're a connoisseur of Greek tragedies, you'll see, but if you open the book and just read it calmly, sitting in your seat, you'll come to the end when some great disaster has happened and Oedipus has put his eyes out or some other such dramatic gesture, and then you say, well, that's the end of the event, but not in the theatre, it can't be. So Oedipus blinded his eyes, end of the play. Well, no, no, no, the audience must be helped to feel the tremendous emotion of it. And so there is the comos, as they say, the dirge, and somebody says, oh, otto toy, otto toy, otto tar, oh, what a terrorism.
Somebody else says, otto toy, otto tar, otto toy, or whatever, and pulls their hair, and the chorus all come in and they say, otto toy, otto toy. It goes on forever, curious words, and all sorts of lamentings and dirges and what have you. And on the stage, of course, they would be dancing it, wouldn't they, what ho? Conveying the emotion of the situation. You've got to have it long enough and proportionate enough in length in the play when it's put on the stage to get across the point. Oh, gentlemen, I hope you don't find the end chapters of Exodus dull. God yielded to the intercession. It was made, and made down to every tiny detail as it was originally proposed.
What a magnificence. How else should we come across it? Well, remember in, uh, movement six, the details were given as to how it should be done. What is different here? Well, here is the emphasis on the fact that it was done and the work people who did it. And it shall be to their eternal credit that in gratitude for God, to God for what, for having spared them the judgment they deserved, they did it in all its detail until when they brought it to Moses, it had been done as the Lord commanded, down to the very last tiny detail.
What else would be an appropriate response to the mercies of God than carrying out his work in faithfulness to his word, down to the very last detail? The final section is introduced by a paragraph on the Sabbath. Let us notice that it is, is of great importance. In Movement four, there was a long chapter about the institution of the Sabbath in relation to their daily work of gathering the manna and eating their food, yes? Now, once more, the Sabbath is given prominence as it begins the section on the actual making of the tabernacle.
The Sabbath in relation, so to speak, to the work of the Lord in its spiritual sense. And it seems to me to be nothing else than sanity itself that the Sabbath regulation should be stated afresh at the beginning of working for the Lord. First of all, it's practical, gentlemen. If we have any sense of gratitude in our hearts for the Lord's mercy and the wonder of our call to lead God's people in their spiritual work in building the very tabernacle of God, there could come a danger that we forget to take Sabbath. And we allow ourselves to be so head over heel into the work, that in the end, if we're not careful, we shall destroy ourselves and end up with nervous breakdowns, and I don't know what have you.
If in our daily work there needs to be a Sabbath, not legalistically held every day, certain day of the week, but there needs to be a Sabbath that our energies might be replaced. So there does in the work of the Lord. In our daily work, when we take a Sabbath, we think of God the Creator. He started the whole thing going, you know. It's He that sustains us. Yes, as His creatures, He allows us to work with Him in producing the crops and what have you, or producing the computers, but it is he that started it all, and he that gives us the, the materials and the abilities, and he never designed work to be such a crushing burden that would grind us into the ground.
If we find work is grinding into the ground, it must be that we have goals different from what the creator designed, isn't that so? And now we're redeemed, and it's given into our hands to do the work of the Lord, sacred work. Well, here we a mean man and or woman that didn't want to give himself and herself utterly to it. But Sabbath again. Ultimately, it's not our work, is it? And what is more, Sabbath is a time for contemplating God and his great work.
I like the emphasis in the end of Isaiah, don't you? Israel had stood for centuries for this truth. This has distinguished them among the nations, the one true God, and they were God's witnesses. And they kept the literal Sabbath. They found the task of their witness too great, and they compromised the truth, and when they went down into the darkness of exile. When God brings them back out of exile and supports them with glowing promises, he reveals himself to them as a creator, who not only created the world, but now is going to create them as his witnesses. And in their work of witness for the Lord, they are to experience as witnesses for the Lord the very doctrine of the Creator that they had propounded theologically before.
And when it comes to the work of the Lord, and we preach salvation to men, created in Christ Jesus unto goodness. Yes, but if we're going to do it effectively, we shall need to sit back and ponder the wonder of the God Creator who creates us as his witnesses. Lest in our devotion we forget his creative power and using our mere human energies drive ourselves into the dust. So they made it out of gratitude, and when they'd made it all according to the commandment, they brought it to Moses, and Moses, I don't know whether they feared him as being a little bit pernickety and insistent on too many small details, but, uh, so the record says they brought it to Moses, and Moses surveyed it, and behold, they had done it as the Lord commanded.
So the work was finished. As the Lord commanded Moses, so they had done. I suspect Moses heaved the biggest sigh of relief that he'd ever heaved in all his days. They'd actually done it. What a thing these Israelites say. Goodness me, for once, they've actually done it as the Lord command. What a tremendous achievement. You're not a pastor if you don't sympathize with Moses at that stage. Done it as the Lord commanded Moses, and it passed Moses' review, and he blessed it. And then Moses erected their work, and the glory of God came down and filled it.
And thereafter the glory of God led them through the wilderness. And at that point we pick up the emphasis of yesterday. In movement four, when they stood on the banks of the Red Sea and celebrated God's victory, they began to talk of the time when God would bring them into his permanent dwelling place in his holy mountain in the land. See them now setting off from Mount Sinai with the glory of God in the tabernacle leading them, and ask them where they're going. They're going to the land and the great sanctuary of God that shall be built in the mountain of his holiness.
That's us, isn't it? You'll see the Lord sends us out now to build, invites us to bring the material, the wood, the precious gems, the cloth to work it, and the material is built together even now for a dwelling place of God through the Spirit. Even now in the desert, we may have that dimension of life as the unconverted to convert, the lost are saved, the sinners are justified, and the saints are carved and polished. Mm-hmm. And assembled, and you know the Lord's presence.
Even in this, the time of our pilgrimage. And where are we going to, gentlemen? We're going to the great habitation, God's eternal tabernacle. One day we shall bring the wood and the gold that we have prepared and quarried and shaped and worked on and polished, and we shall bring it to the greater than Moses. We shall stand before the judgment seat of Christ. And the fire of that day shall test every man's work, of what kind it is. And if man's work abide, he shall receive a reward.
Two rewards, in fact, because for all eternity he will see by the results lasting that by God's grace he was able to achieve here on earth for God his contribution to the great eternal tabernacle, lasting eternally. If any man's work is burned up as being shoddy and unsatisfactory, he shall suffer loss. Who can measure it? A loss irreplaceable for all eternity. Though he himself shall be saved, because his salvation was never dependent on his works.
He himself shall be saved, yet so as by fire. God help us so to work that in the coming day we shall be able to say like Paul, of the people that God has used us to lead to himself or to help upon the Christian pathway, you are my crown, my joy of rejoicing in the day of the Lord Jesus. And as certainly, gentlemen, as we have sat here these few days, and we have reviewed the work that God is doing in our hands all around Europe and Africa and other places in the world, as certain as we have thought of it, one day we shall stand together, we shall see the blessed Lord erect the eternal tabernacle of God.
How shall we contain our joy to think that he allowed us to take part in its construction? Thank you then for your patience. That sheer, determined, deliberate resistance of the pain of sitting on hard seats so long and listening to such a preacher is clear evidence of your Christian grace, and that has been a great encouragement to me. God's blessing be on you all.
