Gooding, David: 1b - The Process and Goal of Liberation

There follow the directions to Moses and to Israel how their firstborn can be saved. By the sacrifice of the Passover lamb and the sprinkling of the blood upon the doorposts. The judgment falls. Pharaoh and his people urge the Israelites now to leave, and they do so. As they leave, look at the chapter thirteen, if you will. The Lord spoke unto Moses, saying, Sanctify unto me all the firstborn. Whatsoever openeth the womb among the children of Israel, both of man and of beast, it is mine. And having announced the theme of the sanctification of the firstborn, then in verse three, God goes on to talk about the institution of unleavened bread, verses three to ten. But then he comes back in verse eleven to this question of the firstborn. Verses eleven to verse sixteen. give the detailed requirements for the dealing with the firstborn. As a matter of interest, as we pass by rapidly, we could notice that this movement three, while certainly it is concerned with God's provision of the Passover celebration that should deliver Israel from God's judgment, is even more concerned that once Passover has taken place, Israel shall institute a memorial of it. Look at chapter twelve, verse fourteen. This day shall be unto you for a memorial. The judgment hasn't happened yet. The Passover lamb has not yet been killed. The angel hasn't come through. The people haven't been delivered. This is the initial instruction for keeping the Passover. Ah, but before the judgment even descends, God orders them that they are to keep this day permanently throughout their generations as a memorial. We come on, therefore, to verse forty two of chapter twelve. When Israel comes out of the land, the historian comments, it is a night to be much observed unto the Lord for bringing them out for the land of Egypt, to be much observed of all the children of Israel throughout their generation. Chapter thirteen repeats the idea with the keeping of the feast of unleavened bread, thirteen nine, and it shall be for a sign unto thee upon thine hand and for a memorial between thine eyes, that the law of the Lord may be in thy mouth. For with a strong hand hath the Lord brought thee out of Egypt. Thou shalt therefore keep this ordinance in its season from year to year. Memorial, memorial, memorials throughout this thing. Why that emphasis is there, we shall have to consider on another occasion. Israel are now out of Egypt. Let's follow the thought flow. Look at verse seventeen. And it came to pass, when Pharaoh had let the people go, that God led them not by the way of the land of the Philistines, although that was Nea, for God said, lest peradventure the people repent when they see war and they return to Egypt. But God let the people, led the people about by the way of the wilderness, by the Red Sea. So four begins with God deliberately avoiding war, less when these bunch of slaves see war and haven't the courage to face it, they turn round and go back. Yes. Lest they see war. So when Pharaoh and his host came following after, and the people panicked. Look at chapter fourteen, verse thirteen, fourteen. And Moses said unto the people, fear you not, stand still and see the salvation of the Lord, which he will work for you today. For the Egyptians whom you have seen today, you shall see them again no more. The Lord shall fight for you, and ye shall hold your peace. You won't have to fight. The Lord will do all the fighting, yeah? And that's what happened. The victory God there gave them is celebrated in a great song of praise in chapter fifteen, and Israel go on from the other side of the Red Sea on their journeys with their varied experiences. Come now, if you will, to chapter seventeen. Then comes Amalek. Then came Amalek and fought with Israel in Rephidim, 17:8. And now notice what God says. Choose out men and go and fight with Amalek. Now Israel must fight. And look, if you will, at verse fourteen. And the Lord said unto Moses, write this for a memorial in a book and rehearse it in the ears of Joshua, that I will utterly blot out the remembrance of Amalek from under heaven. And Moses built an altar and called the name of it Jehovah-Nissi, and he said, the Lord hath sworn, the Lord will have war. You are to fight now, you are to fight through all your days. Write it in a book so nobody forgets, the Lord will have war with Amalek from generation to generation. Uh, if section four begins with shielding Israel from war so they don't have to fight, notice that that section ends up with Israel being made to fight, trained to fight, and consigned to an everlasting war with Amalek. With the coming of, um, chapter nineteen, things change completely. There is a story that when they came into the wilderness Sinai and they pitched there before the mount, uh, you'll see, uh, Moses' father-in-law, Jethro, comes with his wife and his two children. When Moses tells Jethro all the wonderful things that God has done for them, Jethro says in verse eleven, now I know that the Lord is greater than all gods, yea, in the thing wherein they dealt proudly against them. And Jethro, Moses' father-in-law, took a burnt offering and sacrifices for God, and Aaron came and all the elders of the Is- of Israel to eat bread with Moses' father-in-law before God. You will notice how, therefore, chapter nineteen already begins to introduce the topic of the law and the administration of the law. Yes? Then comes the va- uh, famous chapter nineteen, the revelation at Sinai, and the giving of the law. And eventually the, the covenant is proposed, and after rehearsing all the laws, then in chapter four, the new covenant is made, uh, sorry, the old covenant is made. uh twenty four one eight three, twenty four three, to eight, old covenant made on the basis of the laws. Look at verse three, twenty four three. and Moses came and told the people all the words of the law and all the judgments, and all the people answered with one voice and said, all the words which the Lord has spoken we will do. Moses wrote all the words of the Lord and rose up in the early in the morning and built an altar under the mountain, twelve pillars, according to the twelve tribes of Israel. The sacrifices were offered, the blood was taken and put it in basins. Half of the blood he sprinkled on the altar. Verse seven, he took the book of the covenant and read in the audience of the people, and they said, all that the Lord has spoken will we do and be obedient. And Moses took the blood and sprinkled it on the people and said, behold, the blood of the covenant which the Lord hath made with you concerning all these words. One could not overestimate the importance, therefore, of this great central thing. The revelation of God's glory on Sinai, the proposal of his covenant with Israel, and the role that he would give Israel on condition they kept that covenant, and the actual making of the covenant. This is a section heavily given over to the law, therefore, yes. And when the covenant had thus been made, now look at verses nine, ten, and eleven. Then went up Moses and Aaron, Nadab and Abihu, and seventy of the elders of Israel. They saw the God of Israel, and there was under his feet, as it were, a paved work of sapphire stone, and as it were, the very heaven for clearness. And upon the nobles of the children of Israel he laid not his hand, and they beheld God and did eat and drink. You will begin to recognize, I trust, the simple artfulness of this story. Look how this thing begins with names and ends with names. And this is about I am the Lord to the Egyptians. This is about making known the name of the Lord to the Egyptians. And this starts with the firstborn, and it ends with the firstborn, of course. And this starts with a question of war and ends with the question of war. And this starts with Jethro, the the Gentile now converted, joining in that special sacred meal with Aaron, Moses, and the Israelites before God, eating before God. And the covenant being made, the elders are invited to come up a certain way with Moses, and the historian records the remarkable fact that they saw God, but God did not lay his hands on them, that is to destroy them. They beheld God and did eat and drink. Simple devices, aren't they? But they begin and end the movements, and it becomes, uh, simpler still. Look at movement, uh, six, if we can put it up here for a moment. Movement six: And the Lord said unto Moses, come up to me into the mountain be there, and I will give thee the tables of stone, and the law and the commandment which I have written, uh, uh, which I have written that thou mayest teach them. Come, I will give two tables. Last sermon. Well, Moses goes up, and there God takes the occasion to give Moses the blueprint for the building of the tabernacle, and then for the making of the vestments, the clothes of the priests in which they are to minister before God. And the making of those parts of the tabernacle furniture that the priests would especially require in their priestly duties. And then in chapter thirty one, the Lord indicates to Moses who the workmen have got to be to make the tabernacle. Thirty one twelve, God reminds Moses that the workmen must still observe the Sabbath law even when they are making the tabernacle. And coming to the end of that section, thirty one verse eighteen, the Lord gave Moses the two tables. Chapter thirty two now begins a very different incident. This is said. When the people saw that Moses delayed to come down. To come down. They made the golden calf. Moses came down thereafter, uh, because God told him the people had corrupted themselves. Moses came down hot with anger, smashed the tables of stone, proceeded to discipline the people, and then to intercede with God on their behalf. What God eventually, uh, offered to do was to spare the people from further judgment. He said that they could, um, go to the promised land. Uh, he said he would give them the promised land so they could go if they wanted to. He wouldn't be coming with them at all. That wasn't come and dwell among their midst. They could go to the promised land. He promised them the grass. Well, grass wasn't much to him. They could have the grass and bees. He got thousands of bees if he wanted any. They could have this in Canaan. And honey, well, right, they could have the honey. So all right, says God to Moses, you take them and leave them, say, but I shall come among them. And what was in danger, of course, was this whole thing of the tabernacle. God had proposed that he would come down and dwell among them. Now, because of their sin, God is yielding to Moses' intercession and says, all right, I'll spare them and they can have the promised land, but what I shan't do is to come and dwell among them. Now, Moses persists in his intercession, and finally God grants that he will come and actually dwell among them. More of that on another occasion. But look now, if you please, how the thing ends in chapter uh thirty four twenty nine. Moses came down from the mountain. Thirty four twenty nine, it came to pass when Moses came down from the Mount Sinai with the two tables of testimony in Moses' hands, when he came down from the mount, that Moses wist not that the skin of his face shone by reason of his speaking with him. The delayed coming here and the final coming there. In very different circumstances. That also forms one unit, as you can see. And finally, six chapters that deal with the actual building of the tabernacle. But notice how they start. Chapter thirty five begins with a reiteration of Sabbath. Then Then they they set about working and producing the tabernacle. Look at chapter forty and verse thirty three. So Moses finished. Work. You will remember, gentlemen, that the Sabbath was instituted on the pattern of God's work in creation. That God made all things in six days, and he rested on the Sabbath, for the work of creation was complete. And now this other thing of God's work in creation, the God's crowning work of redemption was finished. The finishing of the work was crowned with the glory of God as God descended to dwell in that tabernacle. Now I read, therefore, as you'll see, I read my, uh, for my own part, I read Exodus as being composed of eight major movements of thought. To be sure, I believe in the total inspiration of the book of Exodus, and I would seek grace if the occasion arose and it became necessary, I would seek grace to die at the stake for my faith in the inspiration of the book of Exodus. Gentlemen, I wouldn't die at the stake for this analysis. And you don't have to either, of course. It will make a scaffolding for our thinking in the coming days, however, and where it can be improved, pray tell me, and if you think it should be scrapped altogether, tell me that too. But now I want, in the second bit, we'll take a five-minute break now, but in the second bit, I want to, uh, examine these content, this- these contents and the eight major movements. And what I want to do is this. Let me borrow an analogy from good old Aristotle and company. We'll say, if you were going to describe a human hand, what is a human hand? You might be content with describing what a hand is composed of. There's a bit of square kind of thing in the middle here. It's got four fingers sticking up out of it, and one thumb coming at the right hand side. So that's a hand. I've now listed the contents of this part of my anatomy. Would scarce, um, satisfy you, would it, as a description of a hand? Oh. Merely to list the contents, the anatomical contents, will tell you something, but the really important things it wouldn't tell you. What is a hand? A hand is far more than a bit of square stuff here, four fingers out at the top and a thumb at the side. To understand what a hand is, you will have to understand what the relationship is between those four fingers and the palm, and what the relationship between the thumb and the other four fingers and the palm is, and what is the function of those various members in that hand? And if you have correctly described the content, so to speak, but you haven't described the interrelationship and the function of those members, then you really haven't described the hand. And here we have listed in some fashion the contents of the book of Exodus, eight sections. But then, what is their relationship? What are they doing? This is the book of redemption, if you please, liberation. If you've been writing it, would you have delayed the actual liberation to here? What are these preliminary movements doing in relation to the story of the liberation? And if you were going to describe the liberation, would you limit, limit yourself to, uh, movement three? Is liberation complete yet? Uh, or is this also a part of the liberation? What is the relationship between the movements? What is their particular functioning? It is along the level of asking that question, what is the function of those movements, that as preachers we're going to begin to see how to preach this book. Yes. Because if we come around to agree with the Holy Spirit, that in the end is mostly the general the good thing to do when you're studying scripture. Then if you're going to preach liberation and freedom, gentlemen, the way the Holy Spirit preaches it, you won't preach liberation to start with. You will preach these two movements, whatever they are about. Why? What are they? And what are all the other things about in these other movements, and how do they relate to the topic of liberation? Our first session, it seems to me that the book of Exodus is composed of eight major movements of thought, and on the piece of paper that I have just given you, I have listed those eight major movements. I have also made an attempt, a beginning at least, into trying to understand how those eight major movements relate one to another, and what is their function, each one in relation to the whole. What does each major movement contribute to the meaning of the whole? Now, if my analysis is anywhere near true, we shall notice an interesting device that divides these movements into two groups of for each. Notice at the top of the page the setting of the early chapters of the story. How that Israel was enslaved. In the good providences of God, Moses was preserved, taken into the court of Pharaoh, there educated, but when he grew up, he came to visit his brethren, tried to put right their wrongs, was rejected as a prince and judge, and fled to Midian. That is the setting and context of the first half of the book. Now let us notice, there are indeed eight movements of thought, how the second group of four movements begins, begins with a kind of reverse process. Now it is Jethro who comes to Moses. Israel by this time is free and out into the wilderness, and Jethro comes to Moses, and Moses, on Jethro's advice, organizes Israel's judges. You may say that's a very slight matter. Well, so it is by itself. It can, however, serve as the proverbial straw in the wind. But even there, the preachers amongst us will see a thing that has to be preached, won't they? Israel were a lot of slaves, you'll see, under the Egyptian bondage. Moses came to deliver his people. It grieved him at his heart to find his own people so unjustly oppressed by these wicked capitalists, or whatever they were in Egypt or so. And he stood up for his brethren and, uh, protected them and avenged them against the Egyptian oppressor. Coming out next day, somewhat to his dismay and alarm, he found two Hebrews striving with each other. Tut, tut, my good men, he said. You oughtn't to do that, you're Hebrews. Only to find that they rounded on him and rejected him as just. It is a melancholy fact, gentlemen, that sometimes the oppressed are as unjust as the oppressors. These These oppressed oppressed. Israelites were not for having Moses interfere in their lives, not even if he came as a champion of justice. God delivered them, liberated them, redeemed them, and brought them out into the wilderness. One of the marks that the redemption and the liberation was genuine was this. They would have to submit to Moses as lawgiver and judge. In that simple literary device and structure, there is, of course, a tremendous practical lesson on what is involved in redemption. Now let's take the first four movements. As we were saying in the first session, the actual liberation is not affected until movement three. So obviously, movement one and two uh are, whatever else you call them, prelude to the actual liberation. Why do you need in the book a prelude of two whole movements to liberation? Well, I want to suggest to you that in, uh, movement one, we will be given the ground upon which God demands Israel's liberation. Moses is instructed to go to Pharaoh. The particular verse is chapter four, verses twenty two and twenty three. Moses is instructed to go to Pharaoh and to announce to Pharaoh the ground upon which God demands the liberation of Israel. Now let us pray, notice what the ground is. Is it that Moses comes to Pharaoh and says, Pharaoh, your majesty, God has had enough of your injustice, your oppression of the poor, the awful inequality, i- the awful inequality in economic wealth and prosperity in the people under your control. Look at the wealth of the Egyptians. Look at the poverty of the Israelites. Look at this unjust oppression, the taskmasters and their whipping of their slaves. In the name of justice and equality for all mankind, I bid you let the Israelites go. Not so, gentlemen. God does not demand their liberation in the name of justice and equality. The very opposite. He demands their liberation in the name of privilege. Doesn't he? Let's read it again. Verse twenty two of chapter four. thus shalt thou say unto Pharaoh, thus saith the Lord, Israel is my son, my firstborn. Israel is the firstborn carrying all the rights and privileges of the firstborn among the nations. In the name of privilege and privileged role. God demands that Pharaoh let Israel go. That, it seems to me, flies straight in the face of much liberation theology. Now, I am not denying that God of heaven i- uh, is a God who is concerned with the poor. There are multitudes of verses in the Old Testament as well as in the New that proclaim God's interest in the poor. He that oppresses the poor reproaches his maker, and so forth and so on. And Israel's own legislation is full of laws and, uh, uh, ordinances that are concerned with protecting the poor. I'm not concerned to deny that, of course, not one little bit, but I am observing that in the book of Exodus, the ground on which Moses is to demand Israel's liberation is not justice or equality, but privilege and privilege wrong. Shall we read any further, gentlemen, or give it up in discussion? After all, would we not have preferred the book to have begun at least with a tremendous demand for justice and equality? Well, this much is to be observed. The pursuit of justice among the nations of the world, both within nations and between nations, has been a very noble cause, has it not? Let me say nothing against it. But gentlemen, if sitting here this afternoon, our sole hope for the liberation of mankind from injustice and oppression was the effort of human beings to seek justice and equality, then we surely would be sitting here in dire pessimism and melancholy. The pursuit of justice has been like the stone of Sisyphus, as men have with great effort rolled up the stone to the top of the hill and seem to have secured justice for their nation or the world, the stone has slipped through tired fingers and rolled down to the bottom again. How often has it been in history that people have suffered oppression, evil oppression, and deliverers of one kind and another have risen up to deliver them? Fifty years later, the once time oppressed have become the unjust oppressors of others. Master Marx and Lenin and his friends got rid of the Tsars and all their evil oppression of the poor, and substituted themselves, along with Mr. Honecker and Shesku. That's not the fault of Marxist doctrine, is it? It's the fault of the ineradicable evil of the human heart. I say again, if our total hope for the liberation of our world and men and nations from injustice and oppression was merely human effort to bring in a world of justice and equality, we might almost give up hope right now. There is a bigger hope. And that hope is to be found not at the first level in the question of equality, but in the special privileged role that God gave to Abraham and his seed. That unique movement in history, beginning with Abraham, coming at last to Abram's seed, which is the Messiah. Here is hope, indeed, for the world. So then, the prelude to r- liberation, movement one, was not to encourage Israel to engage in political activism, to start a movement among the brick kilns, if need be subversion, to break the structures of society and set themselves free. It was the announcement to Israel, as to Pharaoh, that God had chosen Abraham and the patriarchs, had made a covenant with them, and God was now about to honor that covenant and put it into effect. We come to movement two. Why are there two movements before the great story of liberation? First of all, we have seen in movement one God's message largely to Israel regarding the covenant that he made with their fathers, and his promise that he has now remembered that covenant and come down to put it into effect. Movement two will put the other side of the story. God's revealing of himself to Pharaoh. To put it another way then, in movement one, at the burning bush, and then subsequently on another occasion, God reveals his name to, uh, Moses and thus to the Israelites. He is the I am. He is the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. But in movement two, expressly so said, God sends Moses to Pharaoh to make Pharaoh know the name of Jehovah and what it stands for. The ground, therefore, once more, upon which God will demand from Pharaoh the release of the Israelites. Now notice the message so many times repeated in movement two is not simply Pharaoh, you have been a monster of injustice in enslaving the Israelites. Man has a birthright. He has the right to be free, to make up his own mind, to settle his own destiny. It is not simply let the people go free. The message to Pharaoh many times repeated is this: Let my people go that they may serve me. The difference is not between service and no service, service and freedom. The difference is between service to Pharaoh and service to God. One of the leading words, and therefore ideas in the book of Exodus, is going to be abodah, uh, and its related verb avaz, and so forth and so on. The term for service. In the English Bibles, it is, tends to be translated by different words from time to time as is suitable. So sometimes in the English versions it's service, and sometimes even it's worship. It is one of the most frequent words in Exodus, and certainly one of the leading ideas. In case you didn't get it, and God repeated it enough times anyway, the historian did, let's look back to chapter one, verse thirteen. and the Egyptians made the children of Israel to serve with rigor, and they made their lives bitter with hard service in mortar and in brick and in all manner of service in the field, all their service wherein they made them serve. How many more times will the historian repeat the word, dear man? But then he has to take into account blockheads like me, who can't take anything unless they're told about seven times. The book is about service, and the question is, is it to be service under Pharaoh or service under God? Now, when God comes to Pharaoh in movement two and begins to demonstrate his name, it is not, naturally it is not God saying, I'm the God of your fathers, Abram, and so forth. That would be irrelevant talking to Pharaoh, wouldn't it? To Pharaoh it is that he's the God of creation. He is the God of the whole world. He is the Lord unique among the gods. He is the owner of the planet. The earth is the Lord's. Nor is he some absentee landlord who made the world and has run away and left it. He demonstrates to Pharaoh that he is the Lord in the midst of the earth. It is his earth, this material creation. Now, this is an interesting thing, and at once shows us that movements one and two are balanced, aren't they? Movement one, the God of redemption, the God who began with Abraham, the whole story of redemption that will lead to Messiah. But movement number two is the God of creation. Shall we notice it is in that order? Movement two says that the God of redemption is in fact the God of creation. That is the order of events that you will meet in Colossians chapter one in the New Testament. We have redemption through the blood of Christ, says Paul. So here is redemption, and who is Christ? He is the one through whom all things were made and for whom they exist. The God of redemption is the God of creation. And what God is protesting against Pharaoh is this: Pharaoh's complete perversion of the material aspects of life, to grind his people down with rigorous service in the material things of life, so they are not free to worship and serve God in the spiritual things of life. That's number one. It is an utter perversion, I repeat, of the creation around us, of all its glorious things material. It is a perversion of the organization of life and its necessary engagement in things material. If some tyrant so forces our noses to the grindstone, so forces us to be occupied with things material, that we have no time for the worship of God. And God now insists upon his right. In movement one, it was Israel's right. Israel is my firstborn. Immune to it's God's right. I made the world, Pharaoh, thank you very much. And these are my people. And I demand that my people be free to serve me. Two sides. On the prelude to redemption. Let us embroider that just a moment in the dying moments of this session. When God demanded of Pharaoh that he let the people go, that they should worship him, some commentators have felt that God was being a little bit less than complete. That God's intention was to have Israel leave Egypt and never come back again. But not, uh, being honest and telling Pharaoh that straight to start with, he made out that all they needed to do was to go outside and have a little fe- festival outside and then come back again, we'll say. Well, we shall have to deal with that when it comes. Let us look down the sheet a moment and see what in actual fact Exodus tells us that the goal of liberation was. For the second half of the book is concerned with the goal of liberation. In movement five, at the great revelation of God on Mount Sinai, he says to Moses, go and speak to the people and say unto them, you have seen what I did to the Egyptians, how I brought you on eagle's wings and brought you to myself. Now, if you will obey my voice and keep my covenant, you shall be a kingdom of priests to me. The goal from the start was genuine, and God would be satisfied with nothing else. Israel were chosen for this privileged role of being priests on the behalf of mankind to God, and to minister to God in that capacity. And in furtherance of that objective, of course, Movement Chapter six and Movement eight tells how God commanded the Israelites that they build a tabernacle, which they eventually built, that there God might dwell among them, and there they might serve God. It is an essential part of the structure of the book that the liberation affected in the first half has as its goal this freedom to serve. And that will percolate through down to detail, will it not? In chapter one, the beginning of the first movement, we are told how the Pharaohs used Israel to build store cities. Here was the collection of wealth for Egypt. When Israel came out of Egypt, many times over it is said that they had to ask the Egyptians, and the Egyptians would give them considerable wealth in the form of gold and gems and clothing. These, if nothing else, were the wages that were owing to the Israelites, and which the Egyptians had kept back unjustly, so that when God freed the Israelites, he insisted that the Egyptians paid up, and all the back arrear ba- arrears were settled, and Israel were con- given considerable wealth. Well, what is the aim of wealth? And how, in the end, would you define wealth? What is wealth? See now how the second part of the book is related to the first. When Israel are brought out, God now invites them to bring their wealth as an offering that they may make a tabernacle so that he may dwell among them. For that purpose, they used their gold and their gems and their silver. And what is a delightful little touch in this book of Exodus? We are told that they took their gems and gave them for the making of the jewels on the high priest's vestment. He had one great jewel on the shoulder and another great jewel on that, and on each jewel, six names of the children of Israel. On his breast, he had a breastplate with seven jewels, and on each jewel one name of a tribe of Israel. So that as the high priest in his stately vestments entered the holy place as the representative of his people before God, he carried the names of Israel upon his breast before Almighty God as a memorial before God of his people. Mark how, eh, Exodus is weaving its themes together. For in many of the movements, the leading idea is the revelation of the name of God to men, the revelation of God's name to Israel, the revelation of God's name to Egypt. But in other movements, the movement is in reverse. It is the taking of men's names and presenting them to God. Each name on a jewel. Gentlemen, what better description of wealth could you have? That God has revealed his name to us. And we, in turn, are names presented before God. What gives me significance? Who are you anyway? Are you Tom, Maximilian, or Arbuthnot? Or Hans, or Dieter, or something? What's in a name, as Shakespeare said? What is our significance? Wherein lies our worth? Wherein lies our value? Not ultimately, gentlemen, in how much money we have piled up in our store cities, but in the fact that we are creatures of God, that God has made known the glory of his name, that is of his person, to us, and in response, our names are known to him, and we mean something to God. That's wealth. See the difference then between old Pharaoh taking Israel, their energies, their time, their talents, and grinding them down in mere materialism. And Israel's great high priest appointed to God to take Israel and lead them and all their activities in the service of God. Yes. But we've covered movements one and two, haven't we? And in spite of all I've said about materialism, there's enough materialist in me to say that dinner calls. Let's interrupt our studies there, and we'll come back to this topic of the relation of the movements to each other in our session this.