[8:00 a.m.] The Face of God (Exodus 34:1-10)

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 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, oh 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? Maybe 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. And I'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 is.

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, in 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 into 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 solemn. He'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 in a lot of 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 sinners 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. A D 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 have

in 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, 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 that. 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 own

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 staff 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 at

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.