Numbers 6:22-27 | A Benediction of God's Love

I'm gonna invite you to open up your scriptures to our scripture reading for this morning, which is found in the there's actually two parts to it.

The first part is found in the Old Testament Book of Numbers, Old Testament Book of Numbers, chapter six, verses twenty through two and following.

Numbers chapter six, beginning in verse twenty two.

The Lord spoke to Moses, saying, Speak to Aaron and his sons, saying, Thus you shall bless the people of Israel.

You shall say to them, The Lord bless you and keep you.

The Lord make his face to shine upon you and be gracious to you.

The Lord lift up his countenance upon you and give you peace.

So shall they put my name upon the people of Israel, and I will bless them.

And now if you can turn over to 2 Corinthians chapter 5, it's always been a favorite of mine to concatenate an old and new passage and to ponder how they merge together.

2 Corinthians 5 · chapter mention

Second Corinthians chapter 5, verses 14 and 15.

2 Corinthians 5:14

For the love of Christ constrains us or controls us.

Because we have concluded this that one has died for all, and therefore all have died.

And he died for all that those who live might no longer live for themselves, but for him who for their sake died and was raised.

The word of the Lord.

Kidding.

Well, not too long ago, I watched the very moving funeral of a pastor and seminary professor and scholar that I have learned much from in life, Eugene Peterson.

And I believe it was one of his sons that came up and was explaining that at some point, I think this is how the story went, or in this direction, that he had asked his dad, you know, how is it that you come up with a sermon every week to preach?

And he said, it's just all the same two sermons, just over and over in different ways.

And anyone who's a pastor would have laughed even bigger at that, because in many ways, over the course of your ministry, the Lord does put certain things on your heart and he forms you in certain ways.

And you do find yourself coming back again and again to a few of the really core things that are the most important in the Christian life and that God impresses on you deeper as you go on the journey.

Well, today I have especially picked this passage out of Numbers because this represents for me a passage that I want to leave us with, and um, it's a passage that centers on and focuses on the affections and character of God for his people, and uh we'll be discussing about that today.

But I want to warn you that you already have some difficulty to overcome just coming to this passage because it's familiar to many of you at least.

This is the benediction passage, the most well-known.

There are songs sung about this passage, and uh there are lullabies sung about this passage.

And I think if I started saying it out loud and you didn't have a Bible here, most of you could start finishing the sentences in it because it is so well known.

We're familiar with it, maybe along the lines of the Lord's Prayer.

But the weakness of that is that we can very easily, therefore, miss what this passage actually presents to us.

Maybe it's a little too familiar.

And in my own life, I remember coming across this not too long ago, fresh for the first time, and was absolutely blown away by what I could see in this passage.

And I thought, wow, never saw that coming.

And that's like the Word of God.

The Word of God is full of treasures that at different points in your life the Lord opens up to you and shines his light upon and encourages you with.

Like, what is the original setting of these words, and what impact do you think God wanted this blessing to have on his people, right?

That's what we really want to know when we look at this passage.

You can be sure that these words were spoken with great intentionality.

The Lord had something on his mind he wanted his people to hear.

This passage says something about God's own heart for his people, and he wanted them to hear it.

It's way more than a mere wish.

Sometimes when we read this benediction, may the Lord this, may the Lord that, may the Lord this, it kind of rolls off like just a sentimental wish, but it's way more than a wish.

This actually comes out as a promise of God's commitment to his people.

This is the heart of God that he promises to have toward his people.

This is the character of the God who is love, not just who practices loving things.

I want to say a few things about the background of this passage that's a little bit surprising.

First of all, that it's found in the book of Numbers.

Some of you might not have even known where Numbers was.

Like, where is numbers?

And uh I myself had to kind of go through the Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, first, get to the fourth book of the Old Testament, and it's a book that reminds us that this book begins with a census and counting, and it kind of moves in that direction and ends in that direction.

A lot of counting happening here.

But what you need to kind of have in mind here is a little bit of the history, and I'm just gonna give the briefest skeleton of it here today.

The Lord had delivered his people, Israel, out of bondage in Egypt.

And he brought them to Mount Sinai, and he gave the law, and he began preparing this people to go to the land that he would show them.

He was going to begin the beginning of the fulfillment, at least one layer of the fulfillment of the promises he made to Abraham.

He promised he would give Abraham a land.

He would give him innumerable descendants, a seed, and he would give him a blessing.

And so God begins unfolding this.

And when you open the book of Numbers, the Israelites are staged at Sinai, or thereby, close by.

They're getting ready for a journey to head to the Promised Land.

They're staging, and there's a lot of preparation that has to be done.

There's counting of how many men of war do we have, and what about the priests, and who's going to do this and that.

So there's a lot of preparation that has to be done.

And sandwiched right in the middle of this prep for this long, rigorous journey that's about to come, is this statement of God's commitment to his people.

A statement that wasn't to be read just one time, but a statement that surely was to be read many times.

A statement that was to be reminded to the people about this God that they were serving, and it was going to cost them an awful lot as they trudged through the desert, now homeless, scared, terrified, following their leader and across this no man's land to enter a war and conquer a land and become a new nation under God.

Wow.

I'd like to take just a few minutes here and look at the words with you of this.

We literally could spend the whole time just kind of focusing word by word here, but I decided to really kind of think in terms of a snapshot.

It's best not to think of these only individually, but to think of them as one building on the other.

In fact, the very form in which this is given, it's in a poetical form.

Each line, there's three lines of two blessings, and each line is longer than the previous one, and there's a kind of crescendo effect.

So in modern language, it would be if uh if the worship team were back here when we're reading this and they're they're playing something soft on the first two words, and then they amped it up for the second two words, and as we came to the last two, you know, it all it all came home.

It has that kind of impact.

It was meant to have that, uh, as this is read.

So, what God says here, I want to just look at each of these six blessings that God has for his people.

First of all, the Lord bless you.

The Lord bless you.

We say that so much, I'm not sure we really have much sense of what's all behind that.

We know it means something good, something favorable, something positive.

In scriptural terms, it has to do with empowering to prosper.

It has to do with causing to be fruitful.

It has to be due with the goodness of God in action.

This isn't just a mere sentiment here or a mere wish.

The Lord alone has great power to bless, to cause to prosper, and to cause to fruition, to come to maturity, to build up his people, and that is his intention.

God's heart is always to build his people up and never to have them be where they are at any point in time.

This leads to the second one.

Not only the Lord bless you, but the Lord keep you.

The idea of keeping might be something like we think of Adam who kept the garden, or shepherds who carefully kept their flocks, or Yahweh who uh keeps his covenant, or people on the wall who kept watch.

It has to do with protecting.

It has to do with protecting.

The Lord is my shepherd, I shall fear nothing.

Your rod and your staff, they comfort me.

The Lord is our shepherd indeed, and he pledges to keep his people.

One of the most blessed verses in the New Testament, referring to the old I will never leave you nor forsake you.

That's really what's being said here.

The third blessing: the Lord make his face shine upon you.

This is an interesting one, and you can do a lot of work on what it means to have your face shine.

There's different ways in which this comes out in scripture, but this is maybe referred to as a body idiom.

So God's using something that we would be familiar with to capture something of his heart for us.

And the idea of face shining denotes the emotion of relational joy and pleasure.

Joy and pleasure on the face of God shining on his people.

I've been in the uh the birthing room six times over the years, thankfully, no time lately.

I have seen this face.

Michelle has seen it on me, and I've seen it on her.

When a new little one is presented.

You can rest assured the Todd Hunters and the Vienns.

If and when whenever that happens, maybe it's already happened when they lay their eyes on these new grandchildren.

Their face will shine.

You might think of it as somebody who takes your your face in their hands.

And they have pleasure because of you, because of who you are.

This is the Lord who wove us together in our mother's womb.

He knit us, he made us in his image.

And in the context of this passage, this is the God who has called us to be his people, and he loves us, and his face is shining upon us.

Which leads to the next idea of to be gracious to you.

It gets at the idea of having a disposition of being kind.

Being kind.

Our world is so full of harshness.

Our relationships everywhere have roughness and harshness to them.

But when there is kindness, a disposition, a bent to be kind and gracious, wow, that is a blessing indeed.

And to think that this is coming from a condescending love of God on his part, coming down to us.

The fourth blessing returns to the idea of God's face.

And there's different translations that kind of have it some different ways.

Some say the Lord turned his face toward you.

Older translations, maybe a little more literal, could say something like, May he lift up his countenance upon you.

Right?

Some of you have memorized it maybe in that way.

I think this is getting at the idea of looking upon or paying a special attention to in love.

And maybe one of the great pictures from the New Testament that we could bring into service here to help us see this would be the parable of the two lost sons.

And you have the prodigal son, and he's out squandering his wealth, and he decides to come back to his father.

And where's his father?

Where's his father?

Well, we're humans.

We know how family systems work.

We know how shame cultures worked, especially in that kind of shame culture.

We know how easily what we might have expected would have been for the father to have made it a little hard on his son when he came back.

Make him pay a little bit for what he'd done and the harm and hurt that he had caused his dad.

But no, this father was looking for him.

And from a long way off, he saw him.

He turned his gaze toward him, saw him, and ran to him.

All of this comes to a great crescendo in and give you peace.

Peace in the scripture is one of those words like life and death.

It is packed with richness.

It's like the best cup of coffee you've ever had, just layers of flavor in it.

There's layers of meaning and richness and flavor in the idea of well-being and wholeness and completeness that God wants for his people.

He doesn't just want them to grow, he wants well-being and wholeness and completeness, prosperity in the highest way.

And finally, he says, So will I put my name on the Israelites and I will bless them.

The Israelites are mine.

They're mine.

They're my people.

I'm marking them with my name.

Well, now I want to move us to a second passage, our second question for today.

Is this a passage that is for us as New Testament believers?

How do you navigate your Bible when you read it?

Carefully, right?

I hope so.

I hope so.

I hope you don't just read and just think, not really think about how you apply what's said in different portions of Scripture to different people and how that is meant to be taken to you.

Well, how about a passage like this?

This is such a great passage.

Maybe we always want to take the great passages and think of them as ours, right?

Well, there's a couple of lines of thought that I just want to uh briefly lay out here in Romans chapter 15.

Romans 15 · chapter mention

We have a verse here.

Let's see, Romans 15, 4.

It would help if I was in Romans and not 1 Corinthians.

There we go.

For whatever was written in former days was written for our instruction, that through endurance and through the encouragement of the scriptures, we might have hope.

So there are these kinds of passages, and there are others, another one I'm going to read in just a few minutes here, that kind of signal to us that God has written things at different times in history, and these are meant to be applied.

And to be taken in and to help us have hope and encouragement in who God is and who we are and how we're to live our life before Him.

One of the things that will help you as you think about this kind of thing is to remember something about the Bible as a whole.

The Bible isn't just a conglomeration of small stories.

There is an overarching story in Scripture.

It's the story of God saving a fallen creation.

A story of God rescuing, at great cost to himself, fallen humanity who had been made in his image.

I love how this children's Jesus Children's Bible or something along those lines puts it in the opening paragraphs of this really neat picture book for little kids.

It says really plainly, the author says, you know, some people think the Bible is just a book of rules.

And other people look at the Bible as just a book of heroes.

But the Bible does have rules, and it does have heroes, fallen heroes, except for one, but that's not really where the Bible is going.

The Bible is everywhere, from cover to cover, from the very beginning.

It is anticipating.

It is anticipating and pointing forward to the coming one, to Jesus, the Messiah, coming to rescue his people and do for us what we could never do for ourselves.

And so when we read Old Testament passages, we need to have some kind of thought about how are these passages anticipating, how are they filled out as Revelation progresses on, and we got closer to that day and even beyond that day.

So for example, in 2 Corinthians, in 2 Corinthians chapter 1, in verse 20, we read this funny statement.

2 Corinthians 1 · chapter mention

This says, For all the promises of God find their yes in Christ.

There's a little indication there that whatever promises God has made in the Old Testament and throughout the Bible, they find their resounding yes in Christ.

They're filled out in Him.

They might have had a smaller layer of fulfillment back in the day, but there are new levels and new layers that will come to an absolute crescendo in the new creation.

In the new creation to come.

And so, for example, it doesn't surprise us to read a passage in Revelation about the new heaven and the new earth.

And listen to some of the words of this and hear something of an echo maybe from our own passage.

No longer will there be anything accursed, but the throne of God and of the Lamb will be in it, and his servants will worship him.

They will see his face, and his name will be on their foreheads, and night will be no more.

They will need no light of a lamp or the sun, for the Lord God will be their light, and they will reign forever and ever.

May the Lord's face shine upon you, has a day of fulfillment that is coming that blows the boundaries off of anything that we can find in Scripture and is held out to us to hope and to hold out to.

And we lived our life as though it were all about us and it was all bent in on us from start to finish.

And however much religion we might have laid over top of that at different places, it was not really about coming to the living God with nothing in our hands to receive the great promise and the great gift of His unspeakable love for us in Christ.

The sad reality is that many have and will continue to walk away from this mind-blowing offer of love and relational closeness to be made by adoption, a son and daughter of the living God.

And they'll do so because they won't see the beauty and the worth that is there.

If you're here today and you're hearing this blessing and you've known it, or maybe you haven't known it, my encouragement to you today, our encouragement as a church, as we speak to one another, is to come to Christ.

Come to this blessing.

Lay down your pride.

It will be the most courageous thing you'll ever do to lay down your pride, that somehow you could add or earn some piece of your standing with God.

You come empty-handed, you come as honest as you can come, owning your great need, owning that you haven't worshipped the Lord as your creator and who made you for that reason, owning that you haven't known him, and that in fact you've turned away from him many times in your life, perhaps.

But today is the day.

Today is a new day, and our great hope for you today is that if you hear his word today and his great promise of love in Christ, that you will run to him.

You'll run to him.

Well, now our final question: how important is it for us, for you and me, to traffic in the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord?

I use that word very intentionally to traffic.

I don't merely mean how important is it for you to believe that God is a loving God, or how important is it for you to believe that God has a love for his people, or that the sacrifice of Christ on the cross was an amazing act of love for the people of God.

It doesn't take us long and we can come into those things.

But that is different than trafficking in the love of God in Christ, and how I'm using the term.

Trafficking in the love of God requires several things.

It requires you, first of all, to come before God with a kind of naked soul.

It requires you to come before God as you really are, honest, as honest as you can possibly be, as honest as God has shown you and made you aware.

And you come before Him to receive this love as you are.

You come before Him to receive that love as you are, not as you should be.

Because in the Christian church, okay, now I'm kind of, I'm gonna speak to Christians here, okay?

To me and to you, professing Christians, there is something in our hearts, and people are made differently, I get that.

But there is something in all of our hearts that is like hardwired that we want to perform for God.

We even read passages that kind of push us in that direction.

You know, live our lives in order to please the Lord.

Yes, be like children who please their father.

Yes, we you know, we get that, or please their mother kind of thing, and you're you know, your parents.

And um, but there is a great danger.

There's truths in that, and I'm not diminishing those words, but there is a danger that is so subtle and that lurks right in those places that causes us to want to earn God's pleasure.

What we despised when we came to Christ because we laid it all down and we acknowledged, I bring nothing, right?

We bring right in the back door, and it's right back in the house again.

It's like a dog you let out in the backyard and he wants in, and the garage door is open, and the kid's coming in, and next thing you know, he's behind you.

I thought I put you out.

He'll find a way.

And this impulse that we have to somehow want to perform for God is oh so present.

I want to read a little passage about this.

This is from a writer.

He's talking to Christians, and he says, think for a moment about how Christ's following develops if you assume that God looks at you with disgust, disappointment, frustration, or anger.

How often do you think that?

How often do you wake up feeling, wow, don't feel very lovable today?

How often do you wake up aware of the kinds of failures that we have based on what we should be, what God has called us to be?

How often do we wake up and just scroll through things we know we're supposed to be and we're not?

And so our natural disposition might be to just go into hiding with God.

Maybe confess a few things, but it's easy to just kind of go into hiding with Him.

I've had people actually tell me as a pastor that they gave up on praying.

They gave up on praying because they felt like God was so disappointed in them in their life.

So it's a very common thing to have happen pastorally.

People don't often talk about it, they just live with it in silence.

He goes on to say the central feature of any spiritual response to such a God will be an effort to earn his approval.

Far from daring to relax in his presence, meaning to come honestly and to not be fearful to be honest, because you're covered in the blood of Christ.

Far from coming that way, you will be vigilant to perform as well as you possibly can.

The motive for any obedience you might offer will be fear rather than love, and there will be little genuine surrender.

Do motives count in the Christian life?

Does why we do what we do count in the Christian life?

It counts tremendously.

Does this mean all this trafficking in the love of God, that this means that then you become light on sin?

Because that is sometimes what we might think.

Well, I remember thinking this.

Oh, I don't want to think much about the love of God.

I really want to focus on sin and the commandments.

No, far from that, far from that.

In fact, I think the more you understand and traffic in the love of God, the more free you will be to be sincere and honest and name your sin and be willing to enter it with the living God.

You'll be willing to enter it with Him.

You'll be willing to see the energy that's inside of you and the impulse and the desire, and you'll be willing to name it.

And sit and say, Oh Lord, there it is again.

There it is again.

No, I think the only way we are ever going to honor the sincerity and the truthfulness that we're called to as Christians, and to enter in below the icebergs of our lives, into our heart, where all the cookies are in the Christian life, right?

That's where they are.

And um and to be serious about sin is to traffic in the love of God.

You'll never go there if you don't traffic deeply in the love of God.

If you do, it'll be shallow and cursory.

I really just want to kind of say today, over the past 18 years here, I become more convinced of this than anything.

This has been big in God's leading me in my own spiritual journey.

To traffic in the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord is central to how we love God.

And it is central to how we attempt to love people.

We won't do either of those things very well if we don't traffic in the love of God.

We won't love God very well because, as I just read a few minutes ago, we're going to want to go into hiding with Him.

And we're not going to be able to acknowledge fully and clearly what Christ has saved us from.

But when you begin to see the depths of rebellion and the depths of missing the mark that is in all of our hearts, whether we're brand new or whether we've been walking with Christ for 25 or 30 years, it's the same.

Yes, there's growth.

But we need to traffic in the love of God in order to be a lover of God back.

We have to be willing to receive his love right as we are and not as we should be.

How about loving others?

This one is a relatively newer lesson for me.

It's taken a while, but it's just kind of moving in this direction.

I began thinking, wow, you know, it's not until I really began to see and rest, rest in the love of Christ for me, that all of my righteousness is in what he did for me.

It's it's that's it, it's a hundred percent.

And as I try to love people, I can rest in that.

I don't need to gain something from other people.

Now my fallen heart thinks I do.

My fallen heart always thinks I need something back, right?

If you're aware of yourself, you know this.

You know how we manipulate in love.

Sometimes I, you know, you see this at the in the greeting cards.

Uh, you know, I've seen anniversary cards I wanted to throw up on.

For husbands, I thought, who wrote this?

Fire them.

Dear honey, happy anniversary.

You know, you just make my world um the best.

I've had such a good time since I've been married to you, and uh I I feel fulfilled in life, you know, blah, blah.

Just, you know, sentiments that are all about benefit that I've gotten out of this relationship, and nothing about how you love this woman who has pledged herself to be married to you for all these years.

We don't love well each other if we don't traffic in the love of God.

Because you need something from other people, you need affirmation, and you just this hole inside of you that needs to be filled, and you can't fill it with people, but you try.

God gives us the school of love, he brings us into marriages, he brings us into families, some of us, and gives us children.

And oh boy, marriage and children, two of the great schools of love.

What do you learn in those schools?

What do you learn?

After 25, 30 years in those schools, what you learn is you learn a lot about yourself.

You learn a lot about how the way you loved early on, hopefully early on, if there's been growth and progress, was very self-centered, was very much about you.

And you couldn't hardly lay yourself to the side.

But when you have the king of the universe, when you have your creator who loves you and wants to prosper you, and whose face is shining upon you each day, and who sees you, and whose heart it is to give you peace in Christ, you already have what you need.

You don't need to have anything from someone else.

You can give.

You can love like God lives and move in that direction.

You can begin to expand yourself, you can die.

Because you already have it all.

That's a slow lesson.

It's a really slow lesson.

It is interesting that in scripture, so oftentimes, the idea of God's love for us is linked with our acting, right?

I read this in our text this morning in Second Corinthians.

The love of Christ constrains us because we're convinced that Christ died for all.

And therefore they all died with him.

And they have been made pure, and all of Christ's righteousness is now theirs.

And this is then linked to living our lives no longer for ourselves, but for him who died for us.

And living it in a way where we don't need anything from people to give us something back.

We can truly give in love, be self-giving, because we already have everything.

You don't have to come up with this energy on your own.

This is another great news of the scriptures.

For those of us who believe in Christ, he has poured his Holy Spirit into our hearts, right?

We know this verse in Romans.

God's love is poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that he gave us.

We have the very presence of God.

We don't have like a blue stone like Iron Man or whatever that thing's called.

When he has it, he's strong and has the energy, right?

We have a person.

We have God Himself whose own tastes and his own desires and his own will lives inside of us and merges with our person and begins to teach us and gives us the right energy to love other people and to receive his love.

This is the hardest thing to do in the Christian life.

You'll read it in many books of people who wrestle deeply with the Christian life.

I want to end with this.

Israel needed a word of God's love before their great journey through the desert into the promised land.

And brothers and sisters, we too are on a journey.

In fact, a journey that was foreshadowed by their journey.

We're heading to the promised land, the new heavens and the new earth.

And we will cross many deserts.

And this is a time of God forming us.

And we need to traffic in the love of God richly to be sustained in the desert.

I don't want you to leave without at least a first step.

Maybe some of this is not very, it's pretty new to you, or you haven't thought much about it in the past.

I'm going to tell you if your Christian life is mostly thinking about how to not do this and not do that and do this and do that, and you don't think much about God's love, you are five miles wide.

You're sinking in the desert.

You are thirsty and parched in the desert.

And many passages in Scripture are calling you to the water.

The water that you need.

And a very practical thing that you can do is you can begin to let the word of Christ dwell in you richly.

You can grab some of these passages and you can memorize them or have them close at hand.

And when you wake up in the morning, you can preach to yourself the love of Christ for you.

John Newton preached this.

John Newton, slave trader, pastor, author of Amazing Grace, this is what he preached to himself.

The everlasting love of God, the unspeakable merits of Christ's righteousness, and the absolute freeness of the gospel promises, these form the threefold cord by which my soul maintains a hold of God Himself.

And he says everything else is trying to pull me away from that.

But this is the cable that holds me to God.

The everlasting love of God, the unspeakable merits of Christ's righteousness, and the absolute freeness of gospel promises.

Learn some passages and preach to yourself each morning of the love of Christ.

The Lord bless you and keep you.

The Lord make his face to shine upon you and be gracious to you.

The Lord lift up his countenance upon you and give you peace.

Amen.

Thank you.

That concludes this sermon from Faith Evangelical Free Church.

Our mission is to declare the Word of God and disciple believers into mature, devoted followers of Jesus.

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