The Mosaic Covenant: Law, Worship, and the God Who Forms a People

The reading this evening is taken from Exodus chapter twenty four, verses one to eight.

And he, God, said unto Moses, Come up unto the Lord thou, and Aaron, Nadab, and Abhu, and seven to the elders of Israel, and worship ye afar off.

And Moses alone shall come near the Lord, but they shall not come nigh, neither shall the people go up with him.

And Moses came and told the people all the words of the Lord, and all the judgments, and all the people answered with one voice and said, All the words which the Lord hath said will we do.

And Moses wrote all the words of the Lord, and rose up early in the morning, and builded an altar under the hill, and twelve pillars according to the twelve tribes of Israel.

And he sent young men of the children of Israel, which offered burnt offerings and sacrificed peace offerings of oxen unto the Lord.

And Moses took half of the blood and put it in basins, and half of the blood he sprinkled on the altar.

And he took the booth of the covenant and read in the audience of the people, and they said, All that the Lord hath said 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.

May the Lord add his blessing to this reading.

So the Mosaic Covenant law, worship, and the God who forms people.

And in that, and in that reading, we had a great example of how a covenant is formed, and the sprinkling of blood.

My dear brethren and sisters in Christ, and I pray you are all in Christ.

We have walked with Adam and Eve in the garden, with Noah through the flood, with Abraham into the unknown.

We have even seen God's we have seen God's faithfulness, humanity's frailty, and the long road of promises that wind through Scripture.

And today we come to one of the most significant moments in that journey.

The covenant God makes with Moses and with Israel at Mount Sinai.

This covenant is foundational.

It shapes the identity of God's people.

It gives structure to their worship, their ethics, their community life.

It reveals God's holiness and his desire for a people to reflect his character.

And it exposes with such painful clarity the human heart's struggle to live faithfully.

And let us in our mind stand as with the people of Israel at the foot of the mountain and listen again in these words to the God who speaks.

The Mosaic covenant doesn't begin with law, it begins with liberation.

I am the Lord your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt and in and of the house of slavery.

Before God commands anything, he commands Israel of what he has already done for them.

He has heard their cries after such a long silence.

He has seen their oppression under the whips of the Egyptians, the people of the darkness.

He has broken the power of Pharaoh.

He has led them through the sea, and he has fed them in the wilderness.

And this is the first truth of the Mosaic covenant.

God's commands are always rooted in God's grace.

Israel is not asked to obey an order in order to be saved.

They are asked to obey because they have already been saved.

The law is not a ladder to climb into God's favor.

It is a way of living in the freedom God has already given them.

And this order matters.

It matters today as much as it mattered back then.

At Sinai, God does not simply give rules.

That's too simplistic a reading.

He forms a relationship.

Oh, living with God is about a relationship.

You hear it as a throwaway line with some evangelicals where they go, you must have a living relationship.

Well, God knew that before evangelicals came on the scene in the modern sense of the word.

God said that to the people of Israel at Sinai.

This is a relationship we're having.

He says to Israel, You shall be my treasured possession.

What wonderful words.

Could you imagine?

You shall be my treasure.

My version of the Bible actually goes in the version I read from, it goes, You shall be a people of my own.

You are a or in Hebrews, you are a chosen people.

You are a separated people.

You see, this is the thing that people don't get when we submit to God when we say we're Christians.

We become separated.

We're not them, which is the world, we're us, which is the church.

We're not them which are the tares, we are us which are the wheat.

Because we have that relationship with the living God.

You shall be for me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.

The priesthood of all believers, it gives us in Hebrews.

Every single one of us, we don't need a high priest in big hats and fancy dresses and a staff.

We have one great high priest who is the Lord Jesus Christ.

But all of us, as individuals, are fit to offer prayers and sacrifice to God because of what Jesus did on the cross.

We are a nation, a priesthood of all believers.

We are a nation separated unto God.

And that is what's going on here.

And if God is forming this relationship with Israel at the bottom of the mountain, just think of the relationship that Jesus Christ formed with you, with God on the cross.

Then it's not a code legal term in what God's saying.

It's intimate, it's covenantal.

God is not forming a contract, He is forming a people for His own possession.

That's the best news I can give you.

That if you truly believe in the Lord Jesus Christ this day, you are part of the people that God has chosen for his own possession.

Doesn't matter what I said, it doesn't matter what any bishop, priest, whatever it says, you have that one-to-one relationship with God.

You may not know it, I don't know whether you believe it, but it's there.

And it's there because of what Jesus did on the cross.

A people who will bear his name.

Now that's a marker for, isn't it?

People who will bear.

If Jesus Christ is the second, uh is the Son of God, is a second person of the Trinity, we bear his name.

We're Christians.

We bear the name of God, we are of the Messiah.

Christus is just the Greek version of the Hebrew Messiah, Meshach.

We reflect his character.

That's a hard one, isn't it?

I get that one wrong very often.

That's why we need God.

And we show the world what it looks like to live under his reign.

Now, I'm gonna spend a couple of seconds on this bit because I was sitting there thinking, what does it look like to be a Christian?

And I was talking to George earlier on, and George was saying about um we were seeing persecution of Christians more and more.

You know, street preachers being arrested and um and um Christian preachers being thrown off the streets, dragged off the streets.

I was watching a uh a clip earlier on where, you know, uh um the religion of peace were dragging a Christian preacher away and they were telling him out of central London saying this is a religion of peace area, a Muslim area.

What does it mean to be it means to stand for Christ through all things.

It means that we are so beholden that we are so confident in what we stand for, that we stand for Christ.

The second truth of the Mosaic Covenant is this the law and Leviticus, the law is not about restriction.

Everybody loves to say, well, it says thou shalt not do, thou shalt not do.

That's quite true.

It's about identity.

Now I want you to understand this.

Israel is called to be different.

Israel, the nation I'm talking about here now, in in as opposed to Israel the state.

Israel is called to be different, not for the sake of being odd.

People call me odd, because I'm different, but not for the sake of being odd, but the sake of being holy, and holy simply means set apart for God's purpose, and the law shapes that set apartness.

Now, what does this mean?

People go, well, the Bible is terrible, it says you cannot have a same-sex relationship.

Why does it say that?

Well, if you think about the times of the day, the Israelites were surrounded by the Egyptians, the Babylonians, the Assyrians, all of those other tribes.

Temple prostitutes, male and female, same-sex relationships were pretty much the norm and they were allowed.

If Egyptian pharaohs married brother and sister, you know, they didn't see anything wrong in it.

Do what you want, basically.

What do they say about honor thy father and thy mother that they may live long and prosper?

That's because in some of those external bits, when you got old and couldn't actually supply anything useful to the community, you were taken out into the desert and left there to die.

Think about that, given the laws going through this country.

When you get old, no good.

You know, going through parliament.

I think it's been derailed because of time, but it's threatened to bring it back.

Because the old are seen as useless, they don't generate anything to the community.

Time to get rid of them, kick them out, kill them off.

Same goes for abortion.

Unborn child in the womb, no good to humanity.

Get rid of it.

See, for the people of God, everything matters.

And what God does with his commands is go, the rest of the world may act like this, but you are my people.

And therefore, you're not going to act like the rest of the world.

So these aren't restrictive rules.

We talked when we talked about the Nicene Creed about building the wall beyond which we are on doubtful ground, but with inside we could argue as much as we like because we're on safe ground to argue.

And we can talk and we can disagree, and I can learn from you, and you can learn from me, because we all know different things, we all have different interests.

That's the same with the commandments.

With the commandments, see it as another wall.

Within the commandments, we can do whatever we want.

We're free, we have liberty.

We are with God.

Outside of the commandments, we're in unknown territory and dangerous ground.

And the token of the commandments, I mean, we call it the Decalogue, the Jews refer to it, the Hebrews, sorry, refer to it as the Ten Words.

It's a framework for life.

At the heart of the Mosaic Covenant, these things, these rules apply.

I'm pointing to, we have copies on the church wall for those that hear this later.

Scripture actually calls them the ten words.

They are not arbitrary rules by any stretch of the imagination.

They are a framework for a flourishing life.

The first four shape Israel's relationship with God.

You are Israel.

It tells us how our relationship with God needs to be.

So we don't have other gods.

That is, we put God, the Father, in heaven, first.

We don't go chasing after earthly gods.

You know?

We don't put things for worship in the way.

That includes flags, images, banners, you name it, it's a we don't take his name in vain.

That's a hard one, isn't it?

What is it to take his name in vain?

Actually, if you read Ecclesiastes, it gives you a really good hint because in the A B it says vanity of vanity, all is vanity V classes one one.

It opens with those phrases.

Solomon uses those words.

To do something in vain is to use it outside of its proper meaning.

It's swearing, basically, in essence.

So you get the phrases today, don't you?

OMG.

Oh my god.

When somebody's surprised, that's taking his name in vain.

God knows taking his name in vain.

He does, but it's not taking his name in vain the way it's used.

And many others.

Yeah.

Keep holy the Sabbath.

I wonder how many of you have kept holy the Sabbath.

There's a whole set of rules behind that, but actually the main rule is just keep it holy.

Use it as a day to think about the things of God.

It doesn't actually say stop all work.

This is what the Hebrews put into it afterwards.

Yeah.

Where they said you mustn't do any work.

Because actually you're allowed to do work that matters, i.e., you know, if you burn yourself, it's not a pope you you you burn yourself on the fire.

It doesn't say, well, you can't go and put a tap on to put cold water on it.

It just says, use it as a Sabbath, use a Sabbath to think about the words of God.

Read His Word, talk to him a little bit, just contemplate it.

And then on this side, the last six shape, Israel's relationship.

This is the people's relationship with each other.

You know, what we got, honor thy father and thy mother.

You shall do no murder, and that's about that includes calling people names.

No, that's a horrible.

You shall not commit adultery.

Hmm.

That's an interesting one, isn't it?

You shall not have you committed adultery, right?

You know?

What does adultery mean?

Not necessarily not of necessity running off of somebody else's wife, although that's the plain simple reason for that.

It's also talking about chasing after other gods.

And I know people that use human beings for other gods.

You get it with a lot of theologians, they they seem to raise other men almost to the same level as God and go, well, you know, unless throw away line, uh, unless Calvin says it's not Christian, unless Ambrose says it's not Christian, unless uh Patrick says actually, no, that's wrong.

But that's adultery.

You shall not bear false witness.

I wonder how many of us have done that recently.

Said something about somebody else that isn't strictly true.

We all do it, but we're not meant to.

The commands protect life, family, property, truth, the heart, and they are found the foundation of justice in any community.

In other words, treat each other with the respect that God as the people of God and the image of God, because we are all in the image of God, that you would expect to be treated by, as my mother would have said, if you can't say anything nice, don't say anything at all.

You know.

Because if you break that, you break that.

And if you break both of them, you're a sinner.

We can't keep them.

If you look at Matthew 5, the Sermon on the Mount, there's uh it goes on after the Beatitudes where Jesus goes, and you have heard it said of men of old, thou shalt not, and then it quotes one of the commandments, that table as a general rule.

Um that's something worth reading.

The ten words are not burdens, they are not gifts.

Sorry, the ten words are not burdens, they are gifts.

They reveal what God values, and they show us what it means to be his people.

The Mosaic Covenant includes far more than the Ten Commandments zone.

It includes instructions for worship, sacrifice, festivals, purity and the building of the tabernacle, the portable sanctuary where God's presence would dwell among his people.

Now we've moved on a fair chunk since then.

We don't have a port or tabernacle anymore, we have a fixed building.

And for newcomers, some of these, for people new to faith, some of these details can feel strange or distant, but they have a profound purpose.

Sacrifices were not bribes.

People go, oh, you have to give up something, sacrifice something to God.

They're not it's a type of bribe.

I'm if I sacrifice this sheep to you, God, will you do this for me?

People do with Lent, don't they?

I will give up chocolate for Lent.

But if you ask them why they're giving up the chocolate for Lent, they don't know.

But they're going to give up chocolate for Lent.

Because it's a bribe.

It's as though they're trying to appease an angry deity.

They're symbolic acts that express repentance, you see.

Gratitude, dependence.

They taught Israel that sin had consequences and that forgiveness required atonement.

And that's what many people forget, you know.

If you sin against somebody, those you say, somebody goes, I don't know.

If I was to say to Scott, he's a blithering idiot, you know, not that I ever would, but he has a right to expect from me an apology because that's a form of repentance.

It's not just going, sorry, but it's actually, I'm sorry I said that.

Because sometimes we say things in the heat of the moment that we don't really mean.

The purity laws are not about hygiene, they were about teaching Israel to distinguish between the holy and the ordinary, the clean and the unclean.

And they fall.

Habits of attentiveness to God's presence.

People laugh because if you go into a uh a Jewish person's kitchen now, some of them have very large kitchen because they don't do uh meat and milk together.

They keep separate utensils for certain types of food.

They'll actually have four, I've seen four sinks.

So they can wash separately.

But the idea is what's holy and what isn't holy, what is dedicated to God, what is not dedicated to God, what's clean and unclean.

See, you're unclean, or you were.

Before you accepted who Jesus was, you were unclean.

But when you turned to Christ, when you accepted his death and his resurrection and the washing of your sins from by his most precious blood, you stop being unclean and you become clean.

You become holy and you become separated, and you become acceptable to God's presence.

And that's what these purity laws do.

You know, if you talk to somebody in a same-sex relationship, they'll talk about things like, well, what about this about weaving two types of cloth together?

It's exactly the same thing.

You can't mix the earthly with the heavenly.

One is clean, one is unclean.

We need to pay attention to what we do, to our habits, especially when we come into the presence of God.

And the tabernacle, this was the beating heart of Israel's life.

God dwelt in the midst of his people.

Not far away, not like some Egyptian idol or some Assyrian idol or some Babylonian idol.

It wasn't just a piece of plaster nicely painted.

He wasn't distant, he wasn't far off, he was there.

When the Ark of the Covenant was built and it had on top what we call the Mercy Seat, and his uh the I think the word shekan, or I'm not sure, um, would descend onto the mercy seat and the presence of God was there.

And when Moses entered, he would see this and he would sprinkle the blood on the four edges.

Because God was among his people.

Best words I can think of to give this night.

God was amongst his people.

Just like when Christ Jesus walked, God was among people.

And Joseph is often said to me when two or three of us meet together, Christ is there.

In his name, Christ is there.

God is amongst his people.

And keep that in your mind and go through.

If you're with believers, Christ is always one of your number.

Whether there's one of you, there are two of you, or three of you, or four of you, there's always one more.

The one you can't see.

Christ Jesus.

The Holy Spirit.

All elements of God and Trinitarian doctrine.

And if you're by yourself and you come with the presence from the world, don't think you're alone.

God never leaves his people alone.

The third truth of the Mosaic Covenant God's holiness is not a barrier, it's an invitation.

God wants to dwell with his people.

And his presence shapes how we need to live to enable that to happen.

God wants to dwell with his people.

I was talking before about the second end of Revelation where John writes about a new heaven and a new earth, new Jerusalem.

And the lion and the lamb will be there.

And that's the ultimate God will be living with his people.

Because God will be there, and we will be his people.

But no sooner, and this is humanity for you, this is wonderful humanity, how great we are.

No sooner has God given the covenant than Israel breaks it.

Wow, that didn't last long, did it?

Moses is on the mountain receiving the law, and he's up there for a couple of days.

And the people grow impatient.

And they ask Aaron to make them a god.

So he fashions a golden calf and they worship it.

See how easy it is to be dragged away from the worship of God.

Just have something pretty made of a shiny metal.

People go after it.

This is not a minor slip.

It's a covenant betrayal.

It's a spiritual adultery of the worst type.

It is a rejection of the God who saved them.

And yet, and yet God does not totally abandon them.

He could do.

He could have just don't want to know.

Walked away.

But he doesn't.

Moses intercedes God relents.

The covenant is renewed.

The journey continues.

But there is a payment that has to be made.

The fourth truth of the Mosaic covenant is human unfaithfulness does not cancel God's purchase.

Israel's story is full of rebellion.

Our story is full of rebellion.

We grumble.

Israel grumbled in the wilderness.

Idolatry, we have loads of it.

Israel had idols in the wilderness.

Fear, we suffer from it.

So did Israel.

Disobedience.

All of these things.

And yet God remains faithful.

For some unknown reason, God remains faithful.

He disciplines.

He punishes the Israelites for having a calf.

Moses calls them to him and says, Those who stand for God come to me, and then the rest of them are put outside the tribal area, and lots are killed.

It's best displayed in the Cecil B.

DeMill film of the Ten Commandments, which actually shows them falling into a pit of fire, indicating that they were actually going into hell for disobeying God.

But there is a remnant that remains.

He judges.

Yes.

But he doesn't give up.

The covenant reveals both the depth of human sin, human depravity, total depravity, and the depth of divine mercy.

People talk about total depravity, Julie.

But they never talk about divine mercy.

The Mosaic covenant can feel distant.

Ancient laws, strong rituals, strange rituals, wilderness wanderings, but it does speak to our lives.

Firstly, it chose God's holiness.

God is not a vague spiritual force.

He is holy, pure, just radiant.

His holiness is not frightening.

It's beautiful.

It causes to live very differently.

Second, it choses God's desire for a relationship.

The law is not about earning God's love.

It's about living in the love that God has already given.

Third, it chose the seriousness of sin.

Sin is not a mistake or a slip.

It is a rupture of the relationship with God.

The Mosaic covenant teaches us to take sin seriously, not to shame us, but to lead us to grace.

Fourth, it choses our need for a mediator.

Moses stands between God and the people, interceding, pleading, guiding, which is the role that Christ ultimately takes up for us, the true mediator, the only mediator between God and man.

And the Lord is about justice, care for the poor, protect the vulnerable.

These reveal God's heart for a community marked by compassion and initiative.

For those of us who have walked with Christ for many years, the Mosaic covenant is a reminder that obedience is not optional.

Grace does not make holiness irrelevant.

Grace makes holiness possible.

It's also a reminder that we like Israel are prone to wonder.

We need the Spirit to write God's law on our hearts, the promise of the new covenant, which we will reach at the end of this series.

But for those new believers, for those who are new to faith, the Mosaic Covenant helps you understand why Christians talk about sin, holiness, and obedience.

They are not heavy words, they are words of life.

The Mosaic covenant is not the end of the story though.

It points beyond that.

The sacrifice points to Christ's sacrifice.

The priesthood points to Christ our high priest.

The tabernacle points to Christ dwelling amongst us.

The law points to Christ fulfilling it, and the mediator points to Christ interceding for us.

Christ does not abolish the law, as it's written in Matthew.

He fulfills it.

He embodies it.

He writes it in our hearts through the Spirit.

The Mosaic Covenant shows us what holiness looks like.

Christ makes holiness possible.

The Mosaic Covenant is the story of a God who forms people then.

Not perfect people, people like you and me, not powerful people, people like you and me, but ordinary people, people like you and me, shaped by his presence, his command, and his mercy.

And as we continue our journey through the covenants, may we hear again the God who speaks from the mountain.

I am the Lord your God.

And may we remember that his commands are rooted in his grace.

May we embrace the identity he gives us.

May we walk in holiness and of fear but out of love.

And may we look to Christ, the fulfillment of the law and the mediator of a better covenant.

Amen.