[8:00 a.m.] The Curse That Cures (Numbers 21:4-9; John 3:9-15)

All right, you can resume. Please remain standing.

Please remain standing. As we read the word.

We're in the book of Exodus. We're going through there

looking at the life of Moses. We're in chapter 34.

And what's happened so far is the Lord's led his people out of

Egyptian bondage and into the wilderness, and he has taken

them to Sinai. And he's taken Moses up to the

mountain to give him the commandments and the

instructions on building the Tabernacle.

And while Moses is up there, they are worshipping the golden

calf. And then when Moses comes down,

before he ever gets down the mountain, he sees that they've

broken all the laws of God already, so he smashes the

tables of stone. He and the Lord engaged in a

conversation which we looked at last week.

And now we continue this conversation as Moses and the

Lord are talking, and Moses is going to be instructed by the

Lord to give it another shot, and he's going to tell him to

get two more tablets. And let's try this again.

So here now the word of the Lord, the Lord said to Moses,

cut for yourselves 2 tablets of stone like the 1st.

And I will write on the tablets the words that were on the first

tablets which you broke. Be ready by the morning, and

come up in the morning to Mount Sinai, and present yourself

there to me on top of the mountain.

No one shall come up with you, and let no one be seen

throughout all the mountain. Let no flocks or herds graze

opposite that mountain. So Moses cut 2 tablets of stone,

like the first rose early in the morning, and went up on Mount

Sinai. And as the Lord had commanded

him, and took in his hand 2 tablets of stone, the Lord

descended in the cloud, and stood with him there, and

proclaimed the name of the Lord. The Lord passed before him and

proclaimed the Lord the Lord a God, merciful and gracious, slow

to anger, abounding and steadfast love and faithfulness,

keeping steadfast love for thousands for giving iniquity

and transgression and sin. But who will by no means clear

the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the

children and the children's children to the third and 4th

generation? And Moses quickly bowed his head

toward the earth and worshipped. And he said, If now I have found

favor in your sight, O Lord, please let the Lord go in the

midst of us, for it is a stiff necked people, and pardon our

iniquity and our sin, and take us for your inheritance.

And the Lord said, Behold, I am making a covenant before all

your people. I will do marvels, such as not

have been created in all the earth or in any nation, and all

the people among them who you shall see the work of the Lord.

For it is an awesome thing that I do with you, the word of the

Lord. You may be seated, and so the

Lord summons mountain top experience for Moses.

And this is precisely what it is.

Did you detect in the text that Moses didn't know?

It may be at first, but he was attending a worship service.

First thing the Lord came out and did was preached to him.

He says the Lord proclaimed, the Lord proclaimed.

It's the Lord preaching to Moses and faith comes by hearing and

hearing by the word of God. And as God spoke His word, it

engendered in Moses incredible faith.

You remember how discouraged and how upset and really confused

Moses was last week when we first met him after the golden

calf experience. But now the Lord preaches a

wonderful sermon well orbed in theology, as you might expect

from the Lord to Moses, and engenders in his heart that

grace and mercy and shed abroad. In his heart is that love of

God, his understanding of who God is, And even though he has

begun to understand God since the days of the burning Bush, he

is now understanding and learning more and more about his

God. And as the Lord completes His

message to Moses on this occasion, we find there in verse

8, and Moses quickly bowed his head toward the earth and

worshipped. Now we'll see what the Lord said

here in just a moment, but I think it's important to to see

Moses response. And then Moses said, if now I

have found favor in your sight, Moses is feeling and knowing and

understanding the grace of God. The word favor in our text is

the word grace. Moses was finding grace in the

eyes of the Lord. He was beginning to see that as

sinful, and his stiff necked and rebellious as the people were,

as angry and confused and confound and ambivalent as Moses

was, God was still God, and he was still gracious and merciful

and loving, and He's still determined to carry out his

purpose. And since Moses had the

engendering of this faith in his heart by hearing the Word.

Of God and had this exposure and this experience of grace.

My word, God is going to stay with it.

He's not going to give up. He's going to be steadfast and

continuous in his love. He's going to actually save

Israel and bring us out of this wilderness and end to the

promised land and do great things beyond that.

In fact, the Lord says at the end, and all the people among

you, you shall see the work of the Lord.

And this is really what ought to be my topic and my theme this

morning, for it is an awesome thing that I will do with you,

says the Lord. And that's precisely what the

Lord's going to do. He's going to do an awesome

thing with Israel. He's going to actually save them

and protect them and bring them through the wilderness.

It's going to take about 30-8 more years to finally get them

into the promised land, but they're actually going to occupy

the promised land, and they're actually going to live there in

peace and prosperity for about 300 years.

And God is going to raise up a king.

And in the third generation of kings, we're going to have a

king by the name of Solomon, and Solomon is going to be the

greatest king in Israel. David's son Solomon's going to

build the temple. He's going to lead the people.

He's going to expand the borders of the Israeli empire from the

Euphrates River to the Nile Valley, which is exactly what

God had promised Abraham and during his days.

Now, admittedly, Assyria hadn't come on the scene yet.

We haven't heard anything about the Chaldeans, about the

Babylonians yet in human history at that point of Solomon's day.

And we really know that the Egyptians were in a period of

several centuries of decline during that period.

But never mind what the other nations are doing.

That was the time in which God brought everything to a literal

fulfillment of glory. In the days of King Solomon, the

Bible says everything that God promised, everything God had

promised Moses, everything God had promised Abraham came to

pass during the days, literally physically, of King Solomon.

Solomon was considered in his day the greatest king in the

known world. It didn't last long, but

actually there was an ascendancy to Solomon's reign that Israel

never saw before, never saw again.

And at the time, Solomon was the greatest, most powerful,

wealthiest, wisest, most benevolent king on the face of

the earth. It's interesting that when the

Lord came, he said, greater than Solomon is here.

Lord says I'm going to do awesome things.

You know, let 1000 years go by. And Jesus did come.

And in that work that he accomplishes in his first coming

is laying all the groundwork of justice in order to build a

righteous Kingdom. There's some things that need to

be done on the score and the side of justice in Jesus first

coming. One of the things a great king

will do according to scripture and even according to any kind

of geopolitical thought is a great ruler will establish

justice in the land. And there was a great need for

justice to be established. And this is this justice is the

justice. That is the Lord's justice sin.

The great rebellion had to be dealt with.

Sin had to be atoned, A price had to be paid, a penalty had to

be paid. A condemnation was going to work

its way out in a penalty. In order to have great justice,

in order for God to be just and the justifier of sinners, there

needed to be a judicial forensic transaction between God and man.

And that was accomplished in the man, Christ Jesus, who himself,

God and man took upon himself the burden of God's salvation,

the enterprise of God's saving work, and also took upon himself

the sinfulness, the lostness, the condemnation, the burden of

the penalty of the sins of his people.

No sin goes unpunished. That's God's justice.

The sin will either be punished in the person of the Sinner or

it will be punished in the person of Christ, the sinner's

substitute. Yes, it is an awesome thing that

I will do with you and this gospel of saving grace,

redeeming grace, justifying grace, will be preached to the

world. And so, in around 30 AD, and

following the life of our Lord's earthly ministry, a small group

of apostles begin to preach this gospel of saving grace.

They begin to proclaim this righteousness and this justice

of God in the cross of Christ. And how that Christ had died in

order that you and I might be exonerated, acquitted, that we

may live under a sentence of There is therefore now no

condemnation to those that are in Christ Jesus.

And if we come to him by faith, we receive that which he has,

and that is a perfect life to bestow upon us, and all of our

sin to take away from us. And that gospel has been

proclaimed now for about two millennia, and there are little

flocks of men. That's the way they're referred

to in the book of Ezekiel. Little flocks of men, little

churches all over the world. The world is the Church is

Apostolic. That is, it holds to those

doctrines that Christ taught the apostles and that they preach to

the world, fulfilling the Great Commission.

The Church is orthodox in that they hold to core truths of the

Deity of Christ, the existence of God, the Deity of Christ, his

atoning work, and his righteous Kingdom.

The Church is Catholic, meaning it's universal.

It's everywhere, and that's what we preach from this pulpit in

all Protestant pulpits. The Roman Church will tell you

they're the only branch of the church that's the real church.

So they're not Catholic. They like the name, but they're

not really Catholic, which means universal worldwide, including

all the unity of the faith, all the Saints of all the ages.

The Eastern Church claims they're the only true church.

That doesn't make them very Orthodox, even though they call

themselves Eastern Orthodox. It is only those that reject

those provincial labels and those boundaries and those that

have come to Christ freely and having him and in his salvation,

the unity of Christ. So there's a huge, multibillion

person flock on the face of the earth.

We're a long way from a few 100,000 at the foot of Mount

Sinai, sitting there worrying about what they're going to eat

for their next meal, a band of slaves.

We're now men and women all over the world of all time and of all

centuries, free and beloved and united in the gospel of Jesus

Christ. We've all heard the voice of the

shepherd saying, come, follow me.

And we are living in a wonderful time.

And I'm here to tell you that we're actually living just in a

time of tribulation and a time of anticipation, a time of

incompleteness, a time in which we still have great hope.

And that is, there will be a time when the kingdoms of this

world will become the Kingdom of the Lord.

It is Christ. There'll come a time when Christ

will return in reigning glory. There'll be a time when there'll

be a new heaven and a new earth. And I will make all things new.

And the Creator who created in the 1st place will now create

more gloriously than ever. It is an awesome thing that I

will do with you. That's where worldwide Christian

Catholic Orthodox faith is. It came way back there in those

days when God was making himself known to the patriarchs, to

Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and others, and then here with

Moses. And this presents itself as

straightforward history. This is didactic pros.

Those that find a mythological interpretation in these things

exclusively miss a lot, because this is God working in human

history with human beings, using human language and accommodating

himself and letting himself be known to his peaceful this is

the self revelatory, God revealing himself, pulling back

the curtain, giving, as it were, a a, a, an apocalypse, an

unveiling of himself. And what does he say about

himself? Well, let me point out the

particulars, the outline that the sermon, the proclamation

that God preached to Moses, and we see it there in the middle of

our chapter. It says the Lord passed before

he went in front of Moses and he proclaimed the Lord the Lord.

That's God's subject matter. God is preaching about God, but

He's preaching about God in personal terms.

This is Yahweh. This is the.

Personal God. The True God, the One True God,

the Living God, the God of heaven and earth, the God that

created everything, The God to whom there are no other rivals.

There is no other God like him. In fact, there are no gods but

him, supreme and superior in all way the source of all things.

And this is the one that is making himself known in a

personal way to a personal people.

And now he has continued that all through the centuries God is

making himself known as a personal God, personally to

persons. And that's what the Lord does to

us in the gospel and in the Scripture and in the So he says

something about himself, not only His Majesty and his

authority, his supremacy, his his full deity.

But God says in this sermon that he is merciful, gracious, slow

to anger, abounding and steadfast love and faithfulness

and keeping steadfast love for thousands.

That's our God. Have you come to realize that

that our God, that we serve, is a God of love and mercy and

grace? I love this phrase here.

That said, the Lord says about himself He's slow to anger.

The Lord knows his long temperament.

He knows what gets him wrathful, and he does get wrathful, but

for good cause and righteously so.

But He's slow to anger. The Lord's waiting on you to

just get sick of your sin, to repent of your sin, to forsake

your sin, and to come to Christ and turn to him for mercy and

grace and salvation. If it wasn't for the Lord's

mercy, you would already be consumed, every one of us.

But the Lord is slowed. Anger.

The Bible says that He is forbearing.

He puts up with it. He allows it.

Way back in the days of Abraham there was a filthy, filthy

tribe. They did everything wrong,

ungodly, sinful. They were the most corrupt

people on earth since the days of Noah.

It was called the Amorites and the Lord looked at him and said,

you know, the iniquity of the amber right, is not full.

He was waiting on them to turn and if they didn't repent, they

were just going to get worse and worse.

And they did. And finally, hundreds of years

later, hundreds of years later, almost 1000 years later, not

quite about 700 years later, the Lord finally says you know those

filthy vile anti God Amorites. It's time to judge them.

And so he sends at that time in the fullness of God stuff Joshua

and the armies of Israel in to defeat the Amorites and take

over their land. People are all upset when they

read the Bible about how Joshua went in and fought off the

Canaanites. Well, the Canaanites were were

disobeying God and mocking God and living like the.

Antediluvian civilization, the peoples before Noah, where their

wickedness was immeasurable, and the Lord finally slow in his

after 7 centuries dropped the hammer.

And I'll tell you, here's the other side of the story, and the

Lord puts it in the very next phrase, forgiving iniquity,

transgression, and sin. Lord in His great grace and

mercy and in his provision of Christ, will forgive our sins

for the sake of Christ. And our sins are there's three

terms that are used. They're slightly different.

They're all have to do with sin. But iniquity has to do with that

certain perverseness and twistedness that's in us, that

certain warp that's upon our soul that keeps us from being

what we ought to be. That depravity, that downward

pull, that tendency to do evil, transgression speaks of things

having to do with God's order in God's law.

God created things a certain way.

He wants things to operate a certain way, and when we violate

that, we are transgressing. And the transgression is not

just merely the disobedience to the law, but it is an affront to

the person and the righteousness and the holiness of all powerful

holy God. That's our transgres and our sin

are those things that are measured by the law.

Sin is lawlessness. Sometimes we fall a little short

of the law, Sometime we step outside the law, outside the

balance. Sometime we kind of oppose the

law, sometime we kind of twist the law.

A lot of times, most of the time we just kind of ignore the law.

And all of those are different words in the Bible.

Having to do with sin is the way you treat the righteous and holy

law of God. Not just the 10 commandments,

but all that He set out. And let me tell you what God

says about that Who Speaking of himself, the Lord says who will

by no means clear the guilty. God's wrath abides upon you if

you're not in Christ. There's a justice issue that

needs to be handled and that is you need your sins forgiven.

You need to come to Christ, come to God for forgiveness.

God's not going to let the guilty get away with anything,

and if you're still living under the guilt and condemnation of

your sin, you just wait. I don't know if the Lord will

give you 700 years like He gave the Amorites or whether He'll

give you 7 days, but be sure your sin will find you out and

come to this gracious, loving, forgiving, justifying

righteousness, establishing God and his Christ, Jesus of

Nazareth, who came not to condemn the world the world's

already condemned, but to save the world, to save the world.

It's an awesome thing that I'm going to do, says the Lord to

Moses.